I am sitting on the porch of my father’s house in Connecticut, in stifling heat, thunder rumbling in the distance, with a pile of papers on my lap. The topmost paper is my kindergarten report card from 1968, carefully filled out in my teacher Miss Sherman’s tidy hand. “Timmy is easily upset,” she writes. “If he has trouble with a zipper he cries quietly rather than seeking help.”
I look up at my sister, who is sitting in the chair opposite. “I didn’t realise there was so much of it,” I say.
“There’s more,” she says.
My sisters have taken a stand regarding my share of the stuff in the attic – schoolwork preserved by my mother, old letters, photo albums, drawings, newspaper clippings. I must either get rid of it or take it with me. In the piles I find my diploma, my coin collection, a high-school yearbook, some third-place swimming ribbons and copies of magazines I worked for. But also: a dozen blurry snaps of hedges, all my payslips from 1985, five teabags and a B+ history paper written by someone else.
“What a fascinating life I have led thus far,” I say, looking over at the middle one, who is opening envelopes from a separate pile.
“All these letters are just girls pleading with you to write back,” he says.
“I’m sure I did write back,” I say.
“That’s not the impression I’m getting,” he says.
My brother has had a skip installed on the driveway for building work, so every half hour or so I go out and heave anything disintegrating, incriminating or mortifying over the side.
At lunchtime we go down to the beach as a group: my three sons, my three nephews, my brother, his wife, my sister, her husband, my other sister and my father, who is three weeks away from his 102nd birthday. He’s deaf and he walks haltingly with a cane, but he still swims most days.
My brother and I lead my father down to the water’s edge. Once his hearing aids are out, communication is restricted to basic hand signals. We wade out up to our knees, where the bottom becomes a little uneven.
“Get ready for the scream,” my brother says.
“The what?” I say. A wave rolls in, bringing the water up over our waists.
“Aghhh!” my father shrieks, as if one of us had just slapped him. All eyes on the beach turn in our direction.
“Every time,” my brother says.
“You can let go!” my father shouts. I say: thumbs up.
“Once he’s in, he’s good,” my brother says.
My father swims the length of the beach, and declares he’s had enough. We lead him across the sand to the shower and then pilot him into a deck chair. Sunglasses are placed on his nose, and a hat on his head.
“What a project,” he says.
That evening at dinner, my father begins one of his stories from the distant past. Some are familiar to us, some new, all of them wholly unverifiable. Who are we gonna ask?
Tonight, however, he is contending with a mountain of ancient paperwork recently retrieved from the attic. He is cross-examined about his role in the Korean war, when the army, which had trained him as a dentist during the second world war, called him back for further service.
“Were you in Virginia?” my sister says.
“I don’t think so,” he says.
“But we have a 1952 letter from your insurance company,” I say, “which gives your address as Fort Belvoir.”
“What?” he says.
“Did you own a Studebaker?” I say.
“Yeah,” he says.
“The insurers want to know if it’s the coupe or the sedan,” I say.
“I can’t remember,” he says.
He is asked about another story, where he’s on firmer ground, at least in the sense that there is no written evidence to contradict his account. In this telling, a recently divorced woman flirts with him at a party, upsetting her jealous ex-husband.
“He tried to start something,” my father says. “I hit him so hard I knocked his fillings out.”
“Who is the hero of this?” I ask my sister. “I can’t tell.”
“Sometimes it’s his teeth,” she says. “Today it’s his fillings.”
“He called me up the next day and asked me to put them back in for him,” my dad says. “And I did. I did a nice job.”
“Teeth or fillings?” I say. “Can you put teeth back in? Do they stay?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “They stay.”
