NY FATHER WOULD DO, any one but the one I supposedly had.  I chose Dudley Beaker; by that I mean that, one afternoon late in June when I returned home from school full of thoughts of Patti Fiorenza and found my mother sitting at the dining room table alone, weeping, I chose to believe that my mother had chosen Dudley Beaker. 
    “Why is she crying?” I asked myself.
    I crept up to my room and tried putting two and two together.  Deaths make people cry.  How about the death of Dudley Beaker?  He had been interred in the Babbington municipal cemetery without benefit of clergy just two weeks earlier.  Dudley’s death and my mother’s weeping were sequentially appropriate—his death having preceded her weeping—and sufficiently proximate to suggest a relationship of cause and effect.  (A little logic is a dangerous thing.)
    Not many other people would have been weeping for Dudley. He had in his final years become embittered and snappish.  He told anyone who would listen that he had wasted his life and had produced “not one single thing of value in the time allotted to me,” and insisted that his grave be marked with only the simplest and cheapest of headstones, bearing the epitaph de nihilo nihil.  Even Eliza Foote, who had married him, hadn’t wept at his funeral, but, my mother had, and now she was downstairs sitting alone with her thoughts or her memories, and she was weeping again, which surely proved something.
    In the interest of objectivity, I should say that there might have been another explanation for my mother’s weeping: she had a few days earlier failed at an attempt to make ribbon candy on a commercial scale, working in the kitchen of our suburban house.  That failure didn’t seem to me to be a sufficient cause for weeping, but, while I was recalling her attempt to make the ribbon candy and assessing it as a possible cause of her weeping, I remembered that I had observed something that lent support for the theory that Dudley Beaker was my actual father, because for a brief time while she was involved in the effort to make ribbon candy she had seemed to become someone different from the woman I knew, knew as “my mother.”  I think I had seen some remnant of the girl she had been,  someone easier in her attitudes toward life and toward herself, someone who nursed expectations of a better future, who allowed herself to hope.  Most of the time, there was a deadness in my mother’s eyes, the blankness that comes with the expectation that nothing will make today different from yesterday or tomorrow different from today, but while she was working on the ribbon candy she had a twinkle in her eye, like the twinkle in the eye of a girl in love.
    I began looking for that girl in old family photographs.  I was immediately struck by how often Dudley appeared in those photographs.  The fact that he had lived next door didn’t seem a sufficient explanation for his presence at so many of the Piper family occasions.  I began examining the images of Dudley with as much interest as I examined those of the girl who was to become my mother.
    To be able to imagine Dudley as my father, I had first to imagine that my mother found him sexually attractive.  This wasn’t easy.  I tried to see Dudley as my mother might have seen him, but it proved impossible.  I stared at the Dudley Beaker I found in those creased photographs slipping their moorings in an old album, barely held in place by black corner anchors coming loose as the glue aged and dried, decaying into gripless dust, and I found a youngish man, not a bad looking man, who was usually wearing a tweed jacket or a cardigan sweater and nearly always puffing a pipe, but I couldn’t see him as my mother might have seen him, couldn’t feel for him what she might have felt for him.
    Instead, I began to be able to feel what he might have felt for her.  I began to discover a private Dudley Beaker, a man who wore a mask of aloof sophistication to hide the ardor he felt for the dark-haired bobbysoxer who lived next door, a man who sat at home alone most evenings, wishing, wishing, wishing that the girl next door would come tripping gaily over to his house to ask for help with her homework.  He must have wondered why she didn’t find him more attractive than high school boys, or at least more interesting, since they hadn’t his advantages of tweed suits and a college education.
    I also discovered in those photographs an attractive young woman whom I had never met.  (Imagine here the embarrassment of a boy of thirteen who has never thought of his mother in any but maternal terms, discovering that she was once an attractive young woman, and discovering that finding her attractive meant that she had joined the group of girls he found attractive, the group that included Patti Fiorenza.)
    Had the twinkle that twinkles in the eye of a girl in love been in my mother’s eyes when Dudley Beaker was around?  I couldn’t be sure.  Had there been a twinkle in Dudley’s eyes when my mother was around?  Yes.  I saw it in those old photographs, and I seemed to remember it from personal observation, and that twinkle made Dudley a likely father.
 

I should like to see the custom introduced of readers who are pleased with a book sending the author some small cash token: anything between half-a-crown and a hundred pounds.  Authors would then receive what their publishers give them as a flat rate and their “tips” from grateful readers in addition, in the same way that waiters receive a wage from their employers and also get what the customer leaves on the plate.  Not more than a few hundred pounds—that would be bad for my character—not less than half-a-crown—that would do no good to yours.

Copyright © 2001 by Eric Kraft

Inflating a Dog is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. 

Picador USA will publish Inflating a Dog in the summer of 2002.

For information about publication rights outside the U. S. A., audio rights, serial rights, screen rights, and so on, e-mail the author.

LITTLE FOLLIES
HERB ’N’ LORNA
RESERVATIONS RECOMMENDED
WHERE DO YOU STOP?
WHAT A PIECE OF WORK I AM
AT HOME WITH THE GLYNNS
LEAVING SMALL’S HOTEL
INFLATING A DOG
PASSIONATE SPECTATOR
MAKING MY SELF
A TOPICAL GUIDE

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