The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (acx book reading txt) 📕

“Is that your father?” said a passing Swede.

His father had walked to the edge of the plateau, to the sheer drop that overlooked the bouldered beach. He leaned over on one foot, windmill-limbed.

The day was lovely, till Dad fell off the cliff.

“Come back!” called David. His father had once been afraid of heights (one thing they had in common). Now he leaned farther out. David knew he should go retrieve him; he didn’t think he could. “Dad!”

His father folded his limbs together and pointed behind David, to the island’s peak. “Let’s go up.”

“Well, I think—”

But his father was already heading toward the upward path, and David had to follow. He slipped the cheese back in the bag and left everything behind.

The ground was mud-shifty. You had to use your whole body to ascend. How was Louis moving so quickly? It was not, David thought, that he was acrophobic. He had acrophobia by proxy, which was just as bad. He felt everyone else was about to fall off the mountain: the old English people, the Swedes, above all his father, who seemed to have been bitten by one of the cliff-walking sheep on the Isle of Mull. David cursed his worn-out running shoes. He could not see his father. He hoped that their shipmates—there were several different boatloads of tourists on the uninhabited island—would look after him. The path was narrow. The mud persisted. He tried to keep his father safe with the force of his mind.

When he got to the top, his father was absolutely fine, not even out of breath, and peering into a little grotto.

“Nesting cormorants,” said Louis. “Look. Mother and chick.”

The cormorants were waist-high, with elongated mechanical heads. They looked as though they could nip your hands off like shears. David backed away. Even as a teenager he had understood his father’s love of birds as a kind of religious belief: so deep a longing to see a winged creature it could not be satiated by a single sighting, you had to keep going, you knew you would never reach perfection, you strove for it even so, red-throated, yellow-tailed, lesser, greater. David was like any child of a zealot: he could not compete; he would not be comforted.

The voice of God was right: the view was astonishing. Boggling. Better than the view below? Yes. All right, David told himself. The walk was worth it. The day was saved. He felt some rigging in his soul relax. He could use some water, but he’d left it below.

“Beautiful!” said Louis, looking at the cormorants.

“Let’s go down,” said David, though he was frightened at the thought. Down was always worse.

Years before, when they were young—not young people, but a young family—they had gone to Plimoth Plantation, where you went to look at so-called pilgrims in their habitat, actors refusing to acknowledge the modern world while they went about their duties. This incensed Arlene, as did nearly anything that involved grown-ups pretending: children’s television, or playing charades. She and David narrowed their eyes at the phonies. What a despicable way to earn your living! But Louis had loved it. The pilgrims’ calmness as they dipped their candles, ground their corn. They reminded him of the Levine brothers. There was always something to do, back in the long ago. His brothers had started to die almost the moment Louis had left the house: he had turned out to be a load-bearing wall.

It was a pleasure to be among the puffins, who reminded him of the pilgrims, who reminded him of his brothers.

“Lunch among the little brothers,” said Louis, once they got back to their bag. He had not read about puffins in years. Everything was there. “What their Latin name means. Fratercula: little brother. Because they look like monks, I guess, in robes. Myself I think puffins are Jewish.”

“Because of the beaks.”

“Not only. I’m Jewish myself, you know. They’re pelagic. They fish at sea.”

“Of course.” David opened the box of crackers, which turned out to be charcoal black, like dog biscuits. The picnic tote even had a cheese board and knife, as well as plastic champagne flutes, cutlery, and plates for four, unnecessary and now comic. He cut a wedge of cheddar. “The company of puffins,” he said.

Louis said, regarding one, “Arlene’s trying to get rid of me.”

“What—”

“She’d deny it.”

“Dad. She died.”

“I know that,” said Louis, irritated. “Nevertheless.”

Yes. She was dead. That didn’t change things. Arlene had not trusted him to live alone. “We have to plan for the future,” she’d said. Who wanted to? Let the future itself do the planning. Louis thought of his brother Sidney, who sometimes bothered the customers by simply existing, his beaming smile, his joy over strangers. “Why don’t you put him in a home?” people asked. “He could be with other people like him.” What they meant was: I am different from him and do not wish to be near. Why don’t you get rid of him?

Because I want him near. Because he is with people like him, his family. Oh, Louis had never really wanted to leave his brothers, enter the world of ordinary people, life with a woman and all her, what were they, accoutrements. His brothers would have looked after him forever.

“The feeling persists,” said Louis.

“Dad.”

“I’ve lost your name,” Louis said gently.

“Daddy!” said David.

Louis realized he’d said the wrong thing. “Of course I haven’t. Don’t be daft,” he said, as though he’d become the Scotsman he’d wanted to be.

“Why did you say that?” said David, aware of the anger in his own voice. He understood what was happening, in a way; he knew it was an occasion for sympathy, not fury, but the sympathy he had—inexhaustible!—was buried beneath a layer of fury, and he had to tunnel through, he had to scrabble to get at it. He had to go back in time to before his father had forgotten his name, when he was saying unforgivable things. “Dad,” he said