Dresser Altmont leaned toward the base of the fountain and glimpsed his reflection in the pool of water. A slight breeze blew across the surface, disturbing his reflected image and filling his nostrils with the faint redolence of stale whiskey. Strange, that, he thought. It was an intimate smell and immediately recalled his childhood and the ghost of his father. The smell was the imprint of his father called back to life. His father’s life was governed by spirits, by alcohol. Dresser’s most intimate memories of being held by his father, being near him in their home, in his bed, kissing his father at night before bedtime, were memories infused by the smell of whiskey. It was emblematic of the man, as much as the fedora hat and breast pocket handkerchief that were his sartorial trademarks. The fleeting moments of his father’s show of affection were mixed with the redolence of whiskey that escaped from his mouth and nostrils. The memory didn’t sadden him. Quite the contrary. The whiskey smell and his father together were a fond mix of impressions, as though one could not exist without the other. And that may have been so. One thing Dresser had never done, and wished he had, was to get drunk with the old man. His father died relatively young, when Dresser was barely out of college. There was so much he didn’t know about the man and never would. A person had to accept and live with so many gaps in his knowledge about others, about the past. And those gaps became gaps in ones self-knowledge. If Dresser could know more about what his father was, perhaps it would have shed some light on the things in himself about which he was still uncertain, even at the advanced age of 77.
The wind skimmed the surface of the fountain, scattering spray until his picture broke apart and became small fragments of the color of his dark suit, as if he were nothing more than the rumpling of clear film over a large rock at the bottom of the pool, the clay cup of this civic cenotaph to the dead. The traces that he himself would leave behind were nothing more than the aroma of smoke from a cigar, the inks from his presses cured in his clothing or the furniture of his grand home, and whiskey, too, which he was fond of, or a wood fire drenched in the sizzle of fried trout or small mouth bass, the fish oils that must by now be part of his blood. People looked at what was around them, not what came before. The ones who remembered him would remember him reflexively, not intentionally, when they heard the squeak of wheels that might have come from his brougham desk chair, or that wood fire, or the peat smell of malt scotch whiskey. They would not remember him for saving the marsh, or his brand of brash and irreverent journalism that was non-partisan and independent. When his grandchildren were dead, no one would remember him at all, and that’s what it came down to. He felt it was all for naught when looked at like that. And this did not bother him in the least. In fact, it consoled him to think that the less thought about the dead, the more peaceful their repose or extinction, whatever the case might be. His outlook was not Chinese, nor that of the ancient Romans, whose dead seemed to require lots of posthumous attention and pampering. He never used to think this way, like an Epicurean, his life’s essence dissolved into bits of atoms. It pleased him to consider that outcome as a final one.
He was putting himself into a mood, as his wife called it; too pensive and reflective for a man of action, the kind of man who couldn’t afford the paralysis those attitudes inspired. It wasn’t by choice. The world had its own way of setting off the chemicals in each man’s body that exploded in his brain. His brew was different from the next fellow’s. He was not a poet or a philosopher, but from time to time he felt himself sinking into the torpor of their ontological doubts.
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