Getting into the car—a late model Lexus with every possible gadget, button, and light––with his Dad, Julian felt the awkwardness.
When they had greeted one another in the station, there had been the usual hug, somewhat reserved and grudging on Julian’s part, somewhat overenthusiastic on his Dad’s part. Julian had wondered about this for a moment, but didn’t make much of it. Now that they were driving away from the station and crawling through the jammed streets of Washington, the atmosphere in the car seemed oppressive. It was as if there were something hovering, some doom that threatened them, undeclared. The feeling matched the late afternoon weather: oppressively cloudy and gray, and warm for October.
They chatted listlessly about small things: his teachers, his classes, his sport (rowing), whether he had been studying. To his father’s questions, Julian gave typical responses: “They’re OK . . . Nothing . . . I don’t know.” Gradually the conversation faded away to nothing. Julian was aching inside to ask about the impending marriage. When would it be? What would it mean for him? But he could not bring himself to speak. If Dad wasn’t going to tell him, he wasn’t going to ask. Silence consumed the last half of the drive. They clawed their way in fits and starts through the traffic lights, out into the suburbs of Maryland. Approaching their neighborhood, Julian was surprised to feel his heartbeat quickening. He was both anxious to get home and anxious about what he would find. As they turned down the street the house was on, the feeling of nervous tension increased. Instead of pulling into the driveway, Julian’s father allowed the car to drift to a halt at the curb in front of the house. Trees growing along the edge of the front lawn obscured the house itself. Planted when Julian was a baby, when the family had first moved into the subdivision, the trees had grown with him, ’til now they provided a screen that effectively blocked the house from the neighboring ones and from the street.
“Why are you stopping here?” Julian asked.
“Julian, there is something I have to tell you.”
Julian didn’t respond. The anxiety he had been feeling became stronger. His stomach was clenched, tied up tightly, and he felt that if he said a word he would explode.
“Julian . . .” His Dad paused, obviously uncertain of how to say whatever it was.
Julian just waited.
“Julian, I have sold the house. Rachel and I are moving to a new house next week. We will be getting married when you come home for Winter Break.
Julian, I know this will be upsetting for you, but you have to understand the practicalities of the situation. . . . “
But Julian wasn’t interested in, wasn’t even hearing, the practicalities. He opened the car door, heaved himself out, slammed the door, and ran through the trees up to the house. Stacks of unassembled moving boxes sat here and there on the walk and front porch, along with a few packed boxes. Ignoring these, ignoring the calls of his father, who by now had pulled the car into the drive, Julian let himself in the unlocked front door. A strange man crouched in the den, across the foyer, packing books into boxes. Julian turned right to enter the kitchen, to find an equally strange woman wrapping glasses in butcher paper and packing them into a box.
“Who are you?” Julian asked.
“We’re from the moving company, honey. Are you just getting home from school?”
“Yes. No. Well, I mean, I live here.”
Julian wanted to shout, “Get out of my house!” but his voice failed him. Instead of speaking further, he ran from the kitchen, across the foyer and up the stairs to his room.
He found his room mostly packed. This wasn’t a complete surprise, as many of his possessions, his laptop, his clothes, and some of his books, were in his dorm room at school. But the rest was already in boxes. This affected him more than he realized was possible. It’s the books, he thought. They had been on the crude bookshelf that he had cobbled together from cinder blocks and boards, for years, since he really began to read in third or fourth grade. They had been his constant companions, fellow occupants of the room. Now they were packed up in boxes. He felt that it was no longer his room, his place.
Julian threw himself on the bed, one of the few things not packed. Lying there face down, he heard his dad climbing the stairs, heard him pause in the doorway.
“Julian . . .”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to upset you. I didn’t want to distract you from your school work . . . I guess I just didn’t want to fight over it.”
Julian realized suddenly that like school, it just didn’t seem worth fighting over. The decision was made; it was done. He didn’t live here anymore. He just wanted to retreat inside himself, to be unnoticed, left alone. He forced himself to ask the obvious question.
“Where are you moving?”
“To northern Virginia. We’ll be closer to you there than here in Maryland, and you’ll have a big room in the house. I’ll take you over to see it tonight.”
“Fine.”
Clearly his dad didn’t know what to make of Julian’s listlessness, but he seemed relieved that the fight he had dreaded had not occurred.
“OK, then. I’ll leave you to pack up anything you want to take back to school. We will be having dinner with Rachel at 7.”
The awkwardness continued at dinner that evening. Julian had met his dad’s girlfriend, Rachel, several times before, but he had never thought of her as a potential stepmother. The very idea of any stepmother was too weird for him to grasp. She was nice enough, but no substitute for what he considered to be his family, the family that would not return. After dinner they drove across the American Legion Bridge into the newer suburbs of northern Virginia. Getting off the beltway, Dad drove his Lexus into a new neighborhood of enormous houses, all of brick and stone, each sitting close to the next on tiny treeless lots. To Julian, the effect was bizarre. Jammed together, they looked like imitations of real houses. It reminded him of the toys he had gotten at fast food places as a small child; imitations of the real toys you wanted, they were not the real thing, and they never lasted long, always breaking and disappointing. Julian hoped that would not be what this house held in store.
After seeing the house, Julian realized that his Dad was right about one thing. His new room was large, and it had a dormer window seat where you could read or play a computer game. Hie thought that his dad would probably ask him to set up wireless access for the house. He thought vaguely that he should feel happy about moving here. But he also felt that he didn’t care.
Back at the old house, Julian spent the rest of the long weekend reading and playing games on his tablet. After a few tries, his dad gave up asking him if he wanted to see his old friends. Julian just had no interest. He and his friends from middle school were in such different places, particularly now that Julian had gone away to school. He felt strange being the only one sent away to school, and he didn’t want to have to answer questions about it.
~~~~~
On Monday morning, a few hours before he was due to catch the train back to St. Eligius, Julian went into the den to flop with his tablet on the couch. The den used to be his favorite rioom in the house, a comfortable, dark room with the old couch, bookshelves, books, a fireplace, and an antique desk. Julian had loved to just be in the room, browsing through books, or, more recently, using it as a place to relax and surf the web. Entering the room, he noticed something odd. The old mantel clock, the one that had sat on a bookshelf in the den since Julian could remember, was out on the desk. Beside it sat a few other odds and ends: a few books, some packs of playing cards, old board games, some photos in metal frames. Roughly two feet high, it was an old fashioned clock, made of dark wood with Roman numerals on a gold face to mark the hours, long ornate hands, a pendulum and a key. You had to put the key into a hole in the face of the clock and turn a shaft to wind up the clock once a week. Once the clock was wound, you gently pushed the pendulum to set it going, and then it would rock back and forth on its own. The clock had no power cord or switch. In a way, it was a very strange thing to be in the house at all. Julian’s dad tended to like modern things, and except for this room, there was a lot of chrome and glass in the house. The clock didn’t really fit in. But it had come from Julian’s great-grandfather on his father’s side, as had the desk, and his dad probably just kept it around out of guilt.
Looking at the clock now, Julian remembered his distant childhood impression of this clock. Then the clock had seemed almost magic, the way it ran by itself. He used to sit, mesmerized by its simple motion, waiting to see if he could actually see the hands move. For some reason he found himself wanting to see that motion again, wanting to be mesmerized by the simple, regular and reliable swing of the pendulum. He set his tablet down and walked over to the table where the clock sat. The clock was covered in dust, looking like it had not been touched in ages, except for the smudge marks showing where it had been picked up from the shelf. Without knowing why, Julian hesitated to touch it, but thinking himself silly, he undid the stiff clasp on the left edge and swung the glass door open. Was it still there? Yes, sitting in the dust at the bottom of the clock cabinet was a silver-gray, T-shaped metal key. It was shaped oddly, with two-inch long, ornately carved handles and a short, hollow barrel. Julian picked up the key and fitted it into the one of the two holes in the clock face. He remembered now his dad explaining to him how the clock worked, that one of the shafts was for winding the hour and minute hands, and one was for winding the chimes. He turned the key slowly. The hidden spring in the clock, long undisturbed, offered a lot of resistance to the key. Julian turned the key around five or six times, until he felt the resistance reach the point that to turn it farther would be to risk breaking something. He withdrew the key, slowly placing it back in the bottom of the cabinet, and reached for the pendulum. The pendulum was an oblong cylinder, about four inches tall, made of long-tarnished brass. It hung from a wooden arm that reached up into the mechanical innards of the clock, hidden behind the face. With a breath, Julian gave the pendulum a gentle push, and let it go.
Just as he remembered, the pendulum continued moving on its own, and the clock began its steady, measured ticking, marking off the seconds of each minute. It was very odd, but listening to the ticking and watching the predictable swing of the pendulum, Julian felt transported out of the room, out of the house, out of this whole world and its cares. He felt confronted neither by the certified correct time that he could check on the official U.S. Government time website, nor by any nagging force that compelled him to get up on time lest he get in trouble with his parents or with the St. Eligius faculty, but rather by a strange sense of stillness. It wasn’t time he felt, or any attempt to use time to control events. What he felt was not something under his control, not something that would help him organize his world or get things done. Instead, he felt something immensely comforting. He felt all the anxiety that had been eating at him melt away. Somehow in the motion of the clock his troubles seemed to dissolve. All that existed was that steady, reliable motion. It made him feel at home, and that nothing would change, at least not for the worse.
It was such a strange feeling that Julian turned away from the clock, looking around the room for he did not know what. For a few moments he watched the dust floating in the shafts of sunlight coming in through the two windows, and then he shook his head. Though he could still hear the clock ticking, the feeling was passing. But it had been there; he couldn’t deny the intensity of the experience.
Just then his Dad came in, and noticed that the clock was ticking. He smiled, and said,
“That old thing still working? If I had known, I would have tried to auction it on e-Bay.”
“E-Bay?” Julian gasped, strangely affected by the experience he had just had. “Why do you want to sell it? We’ve had it for ages.”
“Exactly. I’m trying to clear out stuff we don’t need. That thing just gathers dust, and I never have wound it. It’s in the pile to take to Goodwill. I don’t really have time to start an auction now.”
Julian thought of a time when his dad did wind the clock. “You used to wind it. I used to like to watch it when I was little.”
“That was a long time ago, Julian. Like I said, I want to clear some of the old junk out.”
“Dad, it’s not junk!”
“OK, Julian, it’s not junk. But I still want to get rid of it.”
What he said next surprised him as much as it did Dad. But it just came from inside himself.
“I want the clock. I want to take it back to school with me.” For the first time in months, Julian didn’t feel listless or apathetic. This was something he really wanted, something he cared about. He braced himself to fight until he got his way on this.
“Julian, that would be a very odd thing to bring back to school. Kids will make fun of you.”
Julian found himself not caring about any reasons his father could present. He wanted desperately to save the clock from being thrown out.
“Dad, as long as it’s gone, what do you care where it goes? I want to take it with me.”
“Julian, this is weird . . . but I guess you’re right. I really don’t care. Take the clock. I just don’t want you to get hassled.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”
“All right, son. Take it, then. Now, don’t we need to get ready to take you to the train station?”
It had been too easy. Given what he had just felt, Julian thought his father should have argued more, should have cared more. But then he realized the accuracy of their words: his dad really didn’t care about the clock, as long as it was gone.
Copyright 2021, Alfred Reeves Wissen