The Man My Father Was

Three weeks after her husband's funeral, Eleanor Marsh begins reading his journals. What she finds is not what she expected: for twenty years, Daniel had been using the time machine in his workshop to visit his dead father - not to change anything, just to watch him live.

A companion story to The Corrections, told from a different angle. Works as a standalone.

 You're listening to Quiet Horizons - a podcast of original science fiction stories written for the hours when the day is done. From here, there are no interruptions. Just one complete story, beginning to end. Literary, unhurried, and best experienced with your eyes closed. Tonight's story begins now. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 0:21

So Part 1. Eleanor Marsh found the journals in a shoebox. This was not unusual. Her husband, Daniel, had kept journals in shoeboxes for forty years, the boxes stacked in the back of his study closet behind the winter coats he never wore, and she had always known they were there, and had always understood, in the way of long marriages, that they were not for her. She had not read them while he was alive. She began reading them three weeks after his funeral, because she was seventy four years old and alone in a house full of his things, and she had reached the point in grief where sentiment gives way to inventory, where you need to know what you are living with. The first several boxes were what she expected, the careful, slightly formal prose of a man writing for an imagined future reader rather than for himself, observations about the school where he had taught for 31 years, notes on books he was reading, thoughts about his students that ranged from fond to exasperated to quietly worried, some entries about her, warm and specific, which she read and set aside because they were too much, some entries about their son Thomas, who lived in Vermont now and called on Sundays. The seventh box was different. She pulled it from the back of the closet on a rainy November afternoon and carried it to the kitchen table and made a cup of tea before opening it. The way you made a cup of tea before opening anything that felt like it required steadiness. The journals inside were the same composition notebooks Daniel had used his whole life, but these were older. The covers soft and bent with handling, the pages yellowed at the edges. The earliest one was dated 1987. Daniel would have been thirty-one. She read the first entry. I have been to see him again. He was sitting on the back steps of the house on Clement Street, whittling something. He whittled constantly in those years. I remember that now, though I had forgotten until I saw him doing it. He looked young. He always looks young to me, which is disorienting because I am twenty years older than he ever got to be. He had a cigarette behind his ear. He had the same way of sitting that Thomas has, one foot flat, one knee up, very still. I watched for forty minutes from the corner of the yard. He never knew I was there. His name was Patrick. My father's name was Patrick. He died in 1979 when I was twenty three, and I have been going back to watch him live for four years. Eleanor set down her tea. She read the entry twice, then she turned to the next page. Daniel's father had died of a sudden cardiac event on a Sunday morning in April 1979. Eleanor had known this. She had known Daniel for 38 years, had heard him speak of his father perhaps a dozen times in total, always briefly, always with the particular care people used around losses that had not been fully processed. He had been twenty-three when Patrick died, just finished with his first year of teaching. They had not yet met. By the time she knew him, the loss was already a closed country. The grief converted into the characteristic quiet that she had always taken for personality. She had apparently been wrong about that, or not wrong exactly, but incomplete. She read through the seventh box over three days, stopping frequently, making more tea than she drank. What emerged was a portrait she had not expected of the man she had been married to for thirty-eight years, a portrait not of the grief, which she had always known was there, but of what he had done with it. The machine was described in the journals in technical language she could not fully follow, built in the small workshop off the garage over a period of years, tested incrementally, a project that had apparently occupied the margins of his life for as long as she had known him. He had never mentioned it, not once. She read this with something that was not quite anger and not quite hurt, but lived in the neighborhood of both. But mostly she read about Patrick. Patrick James Marsh had been born in Cork in 1935 and had come to San Francisco in 1958 with $40 and a trade. He was a plumber and good enough at it that by 1965 he had his own small company. He had married Daniel's mother, a woman named Frances, in 1960, and they had lived in the Clement Street House in the Richmond district, and they had two sons, Daniel in 1956, before the emigration, in Cork, born to a young couple who had not yet decided anything about their lives, and a second son, Michael, in 1963. Daniel would have been four when they came to San Francisco. He remembered nothing of Cork. He remembered the Clement Street House well. He remembered his father as a large, quiet presence, a man who smelled of pipe tobacco and joint compound, and who came home tired and ate dinner in near silence and fell asleep in the armchair watching television, and who died without warning of a heart that had apparently been failing quietly for years while everyone looked at other things. What Daniel had not remembered, what the journals made clear he had not remembered until he began going back, was everything else. The way Patrick whittled, the fact that he read voraciously, detective novels and history in equal measure, stacks of them from the library on Seventh Avenue that he carried home under his arm, and left on the kitchen table and the nightstand and the bathroom shelf. The particular way he had with the neighbors, a formal warmth that was Irish in character, the handshake and the eye contact and the absolute attention given to whatever was being said to him, even the minor things, the way he was with Daniel's mother on Saturday evenings when he had been paid and they had money, and they would sit together at the kitchen table and plan the following week with a seriousness that was also pleasure, the pleasure of two people managing a life together and doing it well. Daniel had been watching his father for four years by the time of the first journal entry. He had accumulated, he wrote, approximately two hundred hours of observation, distributed across Patrick's life from 1958 to 1978, selected to capture ordinary time rather than significant events. He was not interested in the significant events. He had not gone to see Patrick's death, could not make himself. He was interested in the Tuesdays, the February mornings, the unwitnessed hours of a man going about the work of his life. He was building a portrait, he was filling in what absence had taken.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Part two. She called Thomas on a Sunday earlier than their usual time.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

I've been reading your father's journals, she said. Oh? His voice was careful in the way it got when he was managing expectations. Thomas was careful by disposition, a quality he had from Daniel, the same measured distance between feeling and expression. Not the old ones, there's a set I hadn't seen, from the eighties through, she checked the last date she had read. Through about 2010. Mom? A pause. Are you alright? I'm fine. I want you to come visit. Not an emergency. Just come when you can. There's something I want to talk about in person. He came the following weekend. He was forty six, her son, and he looked like both of them in the particular way that children did, the specific negotiation of parental genetics showing up differently in different lights. He sat at the kitchen table and she put the journals in front of him, and he read for two hours while she made dinner and did not rush him. When he came to the kitchen doorway, he had the expression she associated with his father's harder news, not distressed exactly, processing. How much of this did you read? he said. All of it. And you didn't know. I didn't know, she said. Did you? He sat down at the counter. He was quiet for a moment. Then, when I was about fifteen, I found something in the workshop, something that looked like I didn't know what it looked like. I asked him what it was, and he said it was a project he was working on. He said it wasn't finished. He paused. I went back to look at it a few times over the years. It kept getting more finished. You never asked him about it again? I asked him once more, when I was maybe twenty five. He was quiet again. He said it worked, but he hadn't decided what to do with it yet. I asked him what it was supposed to do, and he said it was he stopped, looked at his hands. He said it was for visiting someone he missed. Eleanor looked at her son for a long moment. He told you that much, she said. I thought he meant something figurative. I thought he meant the workshop itself was the visiting, the building of it, the work. I thought that was how he was grieving, in the way he had. Thomas looked up. I didn't think he meant it literally. He meant it literally. I know that now. He reached out and touched the cover of the nearest journal without opening it. Do you know if it's still in the workshop? I haven't been out there yet, she said. I wasn't ready. He nodded. They ate dinner. They talked about the journals and about Patrick, whom Thomas had never met, and about the particular enclosed quality of Daniel's silences, which they had both known all their lives and which made, in retrospect, a different kind of sense. After dinner they went out to the workshop together in the dark, carrying flashlights. The workshop was exactly as Daniel had always kept it. Orderly without being sterile, the tools on their hooks, the surface of the workbench clear. It smelled of oil and sawdust and the faint metallic coolness of the machines. Thomas found the light switch and they stood in the fluorescent glare and looked. It was built into the workbench. This was apparently something the marshmen did, Eleanor thought. They built their impossible machines into furniture. It looked like a workbench. It looked exactly like a workbench, except that when you looked carefully, the way Thomas was looking, you could see the concealed instrumentation in the cabinet along the back, the interface that was not the interface of a standard power tool, the particular configuration of what appeared to be gauges, but were not measuring anything she recognized. It's the same, Thomas said quietly. It looks the same as when I was fifteen, except finished. He stopped using it in 2010, Eleanor said. The journals stopped there. Why? Did he say? He said he felt he had enough. She had thought about this sentence for three days. I feel I have enough of him now. I know who he was. I can stop going and start keeping what I found. He said he had what he needed. Thomas was quiet for a long time, his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the workbench. I want to use it, he said. Eleanor looked at him. I know how that sounds, he said. But he built it, he used it, and I he stopped. I have things I'd like to see. The journals have everything he found, she said. Everything he observed. I know I want to see for myself. He looked at her. Is that strange? No, she said. She thought about it.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

No, it isn't strange at all. Part 3.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Thomas had not told his mother the full truth of what he wanted. The full truth was that he did not, primarily, want to see his grandfather. He had read the journals, he had received a generous and complete portrait of Patrick James Marsh, complete enough that he felt he knew the man in the way you could know someone from a biography, with accuracy and sympathy and the persistent flat quality of second-hand knowledge, the slight thinness of a life you have been told rather than encountered. What Thomas wanted was to see his father, not his father old, not the father he had known for forty-six years, the careful, quiet man at the kitchen table, the man who built things in the workshop and went to bed early and loved his family with a steady, slightly inarticulate devotion. He wanted to see his father young, he wanted to see the twenty-three-year-old who had lost Patrick in 1979, and had stood in some room somewhere with the knowledge of it, the new heavy fact of it, and had decided something about grief. Had decided to do what he did with it. He wanted to see who his father had been before he became his father. He spent the night in his old bedroom. His mother had kept it roughly as it was, the desk and the bookshelves, the particular blue of the walls that had been his choice at thirteen, and that seemed from forty-six almost unbearably young. He lay awake for a while thinking about the machine and the workshop and what his father had done with it for twenty years and then stopped doing with it, and whether the stopping had been resolution or something else. He had the journals on the bedside table. He picked up the last one, 2010, and read the final entry again. I feel I have enough of him now. I know who he was. I can stop going and start keeping what I found. The portrait is done, or as done as it can be. What I know now is that he was ordinary in the best possible sense. Not small, not uninteresting, but human in scale. He had dimensions I couldn't have guessed at four. He was funny in a dry sideways way that doesn't survive in any of my memories of him, because four-year-olds don't have the equipment to catch that register. He was afraid of things I don't know and brave about things I couldn't see. He loved my mother in the practical daily way that is harder and less visible than the other kinds, but lasts longer. He was a plumber from Cork who read detective novels and carved small animals out of scrap wood, and came home tired every evening and did it again the next morning, and this is not a small thing to have been. I spent twenty-three years thinking I had lost something enormous and irreplaceable. I had. He arrived in the small park four blocks from the Clement Street House, which had been his father's consistent arrival point. The displacement field, apparently, required open space, and the park was reliable. The fog was in, which meant it was San Francisco in the morning or the evening, which in his father's notes meant it was nearly always the morning. He had aimed for October, a Thursday, and he had arrived in October, a Thursday, and the city around him was recognizable and wrong in the way that the past was always recognizably wrong. The cars, the store signs, the clothes of the two women walking past with a stroller, the specific texture of a world in an earlier version of itself. He was forty-six years old. His father in 1987 would have been thirty-one. He walked to the Clement Street House. It looked the same and smaller than he remembered, which was the normal geometry of revisiting the places of childhood. The paint was different, a pale yellow he didn't remember, which meant it had been repainted somewhere in the intervening years. The roses along the front fence were younger, less established, still finding their shape. He stood across the street for a while, not sure what he was doing, which was perhaps the correct condition for a first visit. Then the front door opened and his father came out. Thirty-one years old, Thomas had photographs from this era, there were albums somewhere in the house, but photographs had not prepared him for the fact of his father in motion. Daniel at thirty-one was lean in a way he hadn't been in Thomas' lifetime, with the angular quality of a man who was still metabolically young and who worked physically in ways that would diminish as his career settled into teaching. He was wearing a flannel shirt and carrying a bag that appeared to contain student papers. His hair was darker than Thomas had ever seen it, and he wore it differently, longer at the back, in the style of the period. He walked quickly with a forward-leaning purpose, and Thomas stood across the street and watched him go. He had seen perhaps twenty seconds of the man. He went back to the park and returned to 2024. He went back eleven more times over the following month. He was, he recognized, doing exactly what his father had done, building a portrait from selected ordinary moments, approaching the subject at an angle, never directly. He watched his father teach, once through the window of a classroom at the school where he had worked, and was struck by a quality he had not expected in the Daniel Marsh of his childhood, which was looseness. His father in the classroom was easy in a way he rarely was at home, quick to laugh, physical in his gestures, given to perching on the edge of desks and asking questions in a way that suggested he was genuinely interested in the answers. He taught with the transparent pleasure of a man doing something he was well suited to. At home he was quieter. Thomas had always known this, and had always understood it as simply his father's way, the introversion of a private man who loved his family but did his real living inside. But watching it from outside, watching the transition from school to home, from the loose, generous man in the classroom to the careful contained man at the dinner table, Thomas began to understand it differently. The containment was not introversion, it was management. His father was managing something, had always been managing something. And the workshop and the machine and the twenty years of going back to watch Patrick on the Clement Street steps, this was what the management looked like from the inside, the ongoing private work of carrying a loss that he had never put down. He went back to see his father the night of his grandmother Frances' death, which had been in 1991. He did not know if this was right, felt it might be intrusive, voyeuristic, the crossing of some line. He went anyway because he needed to see it, because the rest of the portrait required it. His father was in the kitchen of the Clement Street House, which they had kept after Francis moved into assisted living, and then kept again after her death, because Daniel had not been ready to sell it, had held on to it for three more years before finally letting it go. He was sitting at the kitchen table at two in the morning with a glass of whiskey, not drinking it, just holding it, looking at something Thomas couldn't see from the window. Thomas stood outside in the cold and watched his father sit with his grief for fifteen minutes. Then he walked back to the park and came home. He was back in Vermont by mid-November, and he called his mother one Sunday evening and they talked for two hours. He told her what he'd done, he was thorough about it, the way the marshmen were thorough, the way they described things with precision as a form of intimacy. She was quiet for most of it. When he finished, she said, What did you find? I found out he was managing something all his life that he never talked about, Thomas said, and that the machine was the way he managed it. I knew he was managing something, she said. I always knew that. You weren't angry that he didn't tell you about it? She was quiet for a moment. I was a little the first day. Another pause. But then I thought about the way I know him, and the machine was entirely consistent with it. The way he handled hard things was to find a project. To work. He couldn't go to therapy and talk about his father. That wasn't the instrument he had. The machine was the instrument he had, so he built it and used it, and eventually he was done. She paused. I just wish I had known. I would have asked more questions. About Patrick? About all of it. About what he found. Thomas looked out his window at the dark Vermont field behind his house. The first serious snow of the season was two or three days away. He could feel it in the quality of the air. He found that Patrick was ordinary, Thomas said. Just a man. He wrote about it like it was a relief. It would have been, Eleanor said. He'd been carrying a myth. You can't hold a myth, it doesn't have edges. Thomas thought about this. Dad had edges, he said. More than I knew. Yes. I watched him teach. I never watched him teach before. I mean, I knew he was a teacher, I knew he was good at it, but I had never actually seen him do it. He was he stopped. He was not prone to this kind of struggle with words. He was lit up, he said. The way some people are in the thing they're made for. Eleanor made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He was always like that about teaching. That's where he lived. I know that now. He paused. I should have known it then. You were his child, she said. Children see a version of their parents, the version that was built for them. That's not a failure, it's just how it works. The rest fills in with time. A pause. Or apparently with machinery. Thomas laughed and she laughed, and it was the particular laughter of people who were grieving and needed the interruption of it. Are you going to use it again? she asked. I don't know, he said. I feel like I have what I needed. That's what your father said. I know. Is that strange? That you arrived at the same place? He thought about it. I don't think it's strange, he said. I think we needed the same thing. Just from different angles.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Part 5. He used it one more time.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

He had told himself he wouldn't, but he was not surprised when he found himself in the workshop on a Sunday morning in December, the snow finally having arrived, heavy and steady outside the high workshop window, he stood at the workbench for a long time before he engaged the controls. He wanted to go to 1979. He wanted to go to the day his father got the call about Patrick. He told himself he shouldn't. He had seen his father at Francis' kitchen table at two in the morning in 1991, had witnessed something private and unrepeatable, and perhaps not meant for him, and this was more than that. This was the wound at the center of everything. The whole machine existed because of this one day and what it had made of his father, and Thomas understood clearly that he had no right to it. He set the coordinates anyway. He arrived in April 1979 in the usual park, fog in, morning light trying to find a way through. He walked to the apartment on Vicente Street where his father had lived before he met his mother, a small place in the sunset that Thomas had seen in photographs but never visited. He stood on the sidewalk across the street. His father was not there. Thomas stood for an hour, and his father did not emerge. He thought, perhaps he is at the school. Perhaps he is somewhere else entirely, somewhere I cannot reach, in the specific private geography of that day. He was about to leave when a man came around the corner of the building and stopped to check his mailbox. He was forty-three years old, broad-shouldered, with the weathered look of a man who had worked outside for twenty years. He had Daniel's hands. Thomas recognized this with a slight shock, the specific wide square build of them, the hands his father had had and that Thomas had partly inherited. He had a paperback book tucked under one arm and a cigarette behind his ear that he had not yet lit. Patrick Marsh stood at his son's mailbox and checked his son's mail with the preoccupied attentiveness of someone doing a favor, and Thomas stood on the sidewalk in April 1979 and looked at the man his father had spent twenty years trying to recover, and felt something loosen in his chest that he hadn't known was tight. He was just a man. Thomas could see it immediately, not small, not unimpressive, but human in scale. A plumber from Cork with wide hands and a paperback novel, fifty years old in five years without knowing it, standing in the morning fog of a city that had given him a life he had not expected, checking his son's mail. He looked up from the mailbox, and his eyes went to Thomas across the street, the instinctive scan of a man who had learned to notice his surroundings. He did not know Thomas. He could not. But he held the look for a moment before returning to the mailbox, the polite acknowledgement of one stranger to another, and Thomas thought, You're in there, the shape of it, in the hands and the attentiveness and the particular quality of noticing. You've been in us this whole time, and we didn't have the vocabulary.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

He walked back to the park and went home. Epilogue. He wrote his mother a letter.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

He did this by hand on actual paper because some things required that weight. Mom, I went to see him. Patrick. Once, briefly. I understand now what Dad wrote in the last entry, just a man, the best possible kind of ordinary. I saw the hands. I saw where the hands came from. It was enough. I've been thinking about what the machine was for. I thought at first it was about grief, and it was, but I think it was also about something quieter. I think Dad needed to know the dimensions of what he'd lost. Not to make it bigger, to make it real, to make it holdable. The myth of a lost father is shapeless. It's enormous. It fills all the space you give it. The truth of one is a man at a mailbox in morning fog with a book under his arm. That's what you can actually carry. I think he carried it well. I think I see that now in a way I didn't when he was alive, which is the standard human failure. We understand people better after the fact, when we have the whole shape of their life to read. I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry I couldn't see it while he was here. He was lit up when he taught. I wanted you to know that I saw it, that the thing he loved most about his life was the thing he shared with the most people, every day, for thirty years. There's something right about that. The machine is still in the workshop. I covered it with a sheet. I don't know what you want to do with it. I think he'd say leave it. I think he'd say you've got enough. Love, Thomas. Eleanor read the letter at the kitchen table on a Tuesday morning in December, the snow coming down in the yard beyond the window, the pothos on the counter that she had kept watered out of obscure loyalty to whoever had given it to them, the ordinary furniture of the day around her. She read it twice. Then she folded it and put it in the shoe box with the journals. She made a cup of tea and carried it to the window and looked out at the snow. The rose bush along the back fence was dormant, its canes bare, the specific beautiful gray of a plant between seasons. Daniel had planted it. It would come back in March. She thought about Patrick at the mailbox, wide hands, paperback novel, cigarette behind the ear, a man her husband had loved from a distance for forty years, and then finally allowed himself to know. She had been married to the outcome of that love without knowing it, the careful, deliberate man, the early riser, the one who sat with his losses privately and processed them in the workshop and came to the table every evening and was present in the full attention way that she had always taken as personality rather than practice. She thought, I knew you. I knew you well. She thought, I knew the parts you showed me, and they were the best parts, and you chose them carefully, and that is not nothing. That is, in fact, nearly everything. She drank her tea. She looked at the snow. Later in the morning she put on her coat and went out to the workshop and stood for a while looking at the sheeted workbench. She did not remove the sheet. She stood in the cold and the smell of oil and the particular quality of silence that workshops had, the silence of tools at rest. She had not told Thomas, but she had thought about using it herself, had thought about where she would go, what she would ask to see. She had made a short list and examined it, and found that it was not really a list of destinations, but a list of feelings she wanted to recover, specific ordinary moments that she missed the way you missed weather after a long time indoors. A particular Sunday in 1993, when they had done nothing of consequence but done it together, the way Daniel laughed at bad jokes, which was ungracefully, a sudden bark that embarrassed him, the specific quality of an ordinary Tuesday. But she found, standing in the workshop, that she could have these without the machine, that they were available to her in the ordinary way, through the imprecise but functional technology of memory, and that the imprecision was not a flaw but a feature, the way memory softened and simplified and kept the essential thing while releasing the rest, which was its own kind of mercy, she had enough of him. She had always had enough of him. She turned off the workshop light and went back inside. The snow was still falling. She made a second cup of tea, and she sat at the kitchen table, and the house was very quiet, and she thought about the man at the mailbox with the book under his arm, carrying all those futures in his hands without knowing it, and she felt for no reason she could name, briefly and completely at peace. End