I’m not sure she would.
I get Sabrina’s email address from my dad. I write to her and ask if we can agree on something. I wait, but no reply comes. Nothing, not even an auto-reply. I write to Carissa, the eldest, the one I was close to as a child.
She writes back: Don’t worry, we won’t forget you, Mathilde.
Just a hasty note in passing. No Dear, no Love. But more importantly, no: Yes, of course, here is my number. Let’s test if this works.
Just those seven windswept words.
Don’t worry, we won’t forget you, Mathilde.
Nothing else.
since i was in my twenties I have known that one day I would have to write about my father. Maybe I’ve known longer than that, maybe I’ve known since the first time I visited him and his family in St. Louis. But I only realized I knew after reading Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude. That book begins with just such a phone call as the one I now worry about not receiving.
Paul Auster is up country with his wife and their little son. It’s early one Sunday morning and the phone rings, and as always with that kind of call he knows instantly that something is wrong. His father has died, without warning, just like that.
As soon as Auster puts the phone down, he knows he will need to write about his father. It’s as if his father had never existed, an extreme example of ‘the distant father,’ an invisible man, an enigma.
Auster feels a very powerful sense of urgency about this. Not writing about it will cause it all to disappear, the memories, the traces, the possibility of finding out who exactly his father was.
“If I do not act quickly,” he writes, “his entire life will vanish along with him.”
The distant father. In my own father’s case, the English is very precise. Not only is he a distant father in the sense of being preoccupied, he is also a distant father in the sense of being physically far away. A bit like looking the wrong way down a telescope and perhaps picking out a figure in the distance. A tiny figure with his head projecting turtle-like from his shoulders and one hand buried in a jangling pocket. Kind, well-meaning, and with no sense whatsoever of the real world. If something does happen to me, Sabrina will surely contact you.
The father as a distant planet.
“If I do not act quickly, his entire life will vanish along with him.”
I’m reminded of that sentence during one of my sleepless nights. Again, I’ve woken up with a feeling of having come up against something dreadful in a dream, something to which I cannot return. Afterward I lie awake for hours, still dreaming. I drift through a labyrinth of corridors, haunting them, chasing down figures clad in white, fleeting, fleeing. At some point, death occurs behind what for me is an impenetrable wall.
I realize that during the course of these recurring nocturnal circulations a mythical confusion occurs. By some breakdown of logic, father has taken the place of stepfather. I’m trying to recover my father from Frederiksberg Hospital. I’m trying to save one from the fate of another.
But it helps not, every night they die, my fathers, without me being able to do a thing about it. It feels like running through water, like reading a book through a nylon stocking.
A pressing sense of time running out. I think of my dad’s hands at the keyboard of the computer in his room in Belgium.
If I do not act quickly …
One of the scenes still vivid to me from The Invention of Solitude is about clearing out his father’s house.
“There is nothing more terrible,” Auster discovers, “than having to face the objects of a dead man.” The house had become too much for him. It was a big house, the same one Auster grew up in. The horror of going through the brimming drawers and discovering stray packets of condoms among the underwear and socks, or a dozen empty tubes of hair coloring hidden away in a leather traveling case in a bathroom cupboard.
Paul Auster clears out the house in the hope that his father will reveal himself to him in the traces he has left behind. But his father’s objects provide no deeper understanding. On the contrary, they merely reinforce the sense of impenetrable mystery, of something irremediable and meaningless. The house contains all the signs of unmoored existence. His father’s inscrutable life has been conducted independently of his objects. They reveal nothing.
The single worst moment for Auster is walking over the front lawn in pouring rain with an armful of his father’s ties to dump in the back of a thrift store truck. By then he has given away most of the contents and has called the truck to come for what is left. And then there he is, with his father’s ties, and all of a sudden he can remember each and every one. The patterns, the colors, the shapes of them all are as clear in his memory as his father’s own face. Tears well in his eyes as he tosses them into the truck.
The worst moment is also the most tender, and the most necessary.
In the same instant he lets go of his father’s ties, he understands that his father is dead.
It was the clearing-out scene that affected me the most. I have since discovered that just such a clearing-out scene comes in every book I have read about fathers dying. Clearing out a house (in whatever form) belongs to the drama of a father’s death in much the same way as the phone call. In Linn Ullman’s book Unquiet, each of the father’s nine children is allowed to choose one of his things to keep, the rest of the house being left intact with all its objects, exactly as it stood, like a gigantic archive, an open memory.
In the Haitian writer Dany Laferrière’s book The Enigma of the Return, Laferrière is given the key to a safe-deposit box on his father’s death. It turns out that the box cannot be opened without the code his father took with him to the grave. And that’s exactly it. When fathers die, the code goes with them, resigning us to guesswork about what is in the box. But he is given the key. That’s what I note. His father left him a key, the way Auster’s father left him a house. By the end of his book, Auster has taken possession of some of the objects that were left, he wears his father’s sweater and drives his father’s car. Switches on his father’s lamp. He concludes that they have become objects like any others, and that his father is still as inaccessible as ever. “I doubt that it will ever matter,” he says.
But a key, a house, is still a lot. Some patterned neckties. Everything that lies embedded in them and which has no language. Without the objects, no memory, and without memory, no reconciliation. The connection between the ties and his father’s face, the beauty of the moment he tosses them away. The fact that he can even toss those ties, the extravagance of grief that lies in that toss.
Now he leaves his own trace. It started long before him. His father’s trace merges seamlessly into his own, and in that way, for all his father’s shortcomings, he is or becomes incontestably his father’s son.
The self-evident moral right of entering his father’s house and clearing out. The right to do that, of free and unhindered access. That was what I noted, that having a house to clear out is a start.
That the horror of clearing out a house can never surpass the horror of not having the right to enter it.
I am to inherit my dad’s old comic books, the superhero and science-fiction comics he collected as a child. I suppose they still occupy the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard in the house my siblings grew up in, which they never referred to as anything else but my mother’s house. The same house that has stood empty since she bought the one in Belgium, still for sale after five or maybe seven years.
My dad showed them to me when I was thirteen. I was sitting on my own watching tv in the room they called the solarium, an enormous conservatory with a marble floor and Colonial-style windows from floor to ceiling (I have no recollection of where everyone else was, it was one of those rare quiet moments alone), and then my dad appeared and said: I want to show you something.
I stood up and went with him out into the butler’s pantry, a long and narrow and very high-ceilinged annex to the kitchen, with marble counters and glass-fronted mahogany cupboards al
ong the walls. The fronts of the cupboards on the top row were solid wood and my dad pointed up at one of them. There, packed away in boxes, were his comic books.
I want you to remember this, he said. He reached up and opened the cupboard so I could see the boxes and what they contained. Things get so easily lost around this house, he said.
That was all he said. I made no comment. We both knew what it meant, what he was trying to say. It meant that someday he would be dead. It meant they were for me. That terrified me. What did he imagine? Did he think that I, a thirteen-year-old girl, could fly in from Denmark and walk into his house, their house, his wife’s house, and announce that my inheritance was in the cupboard up there?
When he pointed to the cupboard, he was pointing to something else without knowing. Things cannot be taken for granted. There will be no tossing of ties into trucks. My dad is mine while he is here. There are only so many moments. And then none.
Writing about dead fathers is a luxury reserved for sons and daughters with a right to walk into the houses those fathers leave behind.
In my notebook, I’ve written the word paper-thin. Paper-thin what? Paper-thin memory. Paper-thin image. My paper-thin idea of what it all means. What people in general mean when they say father. Airmail-paper-thin, crackling and twice folded. My ten-day-delayed image of my dad. I’ll write it down. I’ll make it paper. I’ll make it an object. I’ll build a house of it, a house of memory, a house of reflection, a house I can walk into some time in the future, and that house will be my ties.
his childhood, or my impression of his childhood, is an idyllic concentration of the collective memory of 1940s America. It looks like Woody Allen’s Radio Days. Apart from the fact that it doesn’t take place in a Jewish family, or in New York City, but in a white Anglo-Saxon family in the South, a family who had already lived in the same small town in Texas for generations. Radio is part of that, a spine running through it. I imagine a boy lying on a carpeted floor in short pants, listening to programs about heroes with names like Captain Midnight and The Shadow.
And I imagine him too cutting the top off cardboard cereal packets to send off for some small plastic prize that in some way connects to those radio programs. My dad, little Johnny, standing by the mailbox waiting for his glow-in-the-dark decoder badge. Hair combed and parted, short pants, bare feet. His mother kept a meticulous record of his achievements in a baby book. At the age of six, he proposed marriage to a girl named Patty Pope. He wore no shoes in school. He had a dog called Poochie Scabbie. When I hear about his childhood, I think: Was the world really that innocent?
The way I think of it, my father’s mother is the family’s invigorative focal point, at once bossy and warm-hearted, and with the wry humor I came to experience many years later in the kitchen of her small white wooden house on West San Antonio Street. She was the daughter of the town’s saddlemaker, August Walter. He ran his business from a premises on the town square which, the way my dad described it, looked like something I knew from The Little House on the Prairie, a store with a wooden floor covered in wood shavings, which besides saddles and harnesses also sold gunpowder and pistols and fishing rods, and other things necessary to life in those parts. A hardware store with a comforting smell of tarred rope and leather.
August Walter was the only one of my dad’s grandparents not to have grown up in Lockhart. According to what my dad has told me, August’s parents ran away to America from Austria when they were still young in order to get married (his family were poor, hers were wealthy). That would make August a first-generation American, but there are indications that the young elopers were actually his grandparents. At any rate, his parents lived a day’s journey by wagon from Austin, where they secured him an apprencticeship as a saddlemaker when he turned thirteen, so he took care of himself from an early age. When his apprenticeship was completed, he found the premises on the square in Lockhart and set up his saddlemaking business there. He died many years before I was born, so obviously I never knew him, and yet he has always stood out in my mind, because I knew something about him that lifted him up from the ranks of ordinary mortals: he once made a white saddle for Buffalo Bill.
Imagine that, a white saddle for Buffalo Bill.
If I had a penny for all the times I’ve uttered that sentence to people, I’d be wealthy.
As a young man, August Walter was small and dapper. Later he gained more stature, but no one was ever in the slightest doubt that he was his family’s supreme authority. Once a week he brought a bag of delights home to his wife, Pearl, whom he spoiled as much as he spoiled his five children. Everyone wanted Poppa’s favor. August Walter was never August Walter to anyone in the family, to them he was Poppa, the same way his wife was always Momma, not only to their children, but later their grandchildren too. And so to my dad, his own mother was just Gussie. Or rather not just, for Gussie was never just anything. Other kids only have a mother, my dad used to say when he was still a small boy, but we have a Gussie! My grandmother’s unusual moniker was attributed to her being meant to have been a boy. In Texas, people attach as much importance to having boy children as they do elsewhere in the world, if not more, and after two girls Poppa decided it was high time for a boy, and his name was going to be Gus. So when the child turned out to be a girl, there was only one thing for it, and that was to call her Gussie.
Maybe it was apparent from an early age that there was a lot more toughness in my grandmother than so many boys put together, but whatever the reason, it was Gussie whom Poppa chose to take with him when his parents lay at death’s door. That was in 1910, my grandmother was five years old, and the trip south to the town where her father’s parents lived was a long one. Poppa had been given two sons in the meantime, but he took only one of his children with him, and that one was Gussie, his third daughter. Gussie herself remembered nothing from the journey, and little at all of her grandparents, only two very old people lying in a bed, two crackling ancients who stared at her and spoke to her father in German. What made the biggest impression on her was that Poppa had chosen her. Of all his children, I was the one he picked, she said.
I was eleven years old when I first met Gussie. Like Poppa, my grandfather had already been dead a long time before I was born, and unlike the others my mind holds no image of him. No matter who I ask, they tell me the same thing, that he was a kind and quiet man, decent and loyal, adjectives that in their different ways seem to testify to a good and stable marriage, happy even, albeit perhaps not the stuff of novels. The pictures I’ve seen of him are all in black and white and tiny, no bigger than a matchbox, with narrow white borders. One shows him as a young man leaning up against the railing of a porch in sunshine, his figure no larger than a paper clip, his face indistinguishable from that of his brother Hugh, who is standing next to him and with whom my grandmother had dallied a bit before Preston. Not that it had any bearing on anything, dating was a rather innocent pastime for young Americans of the 1920s and 1930s, so when Hugh and my grandmother had been out together a few times and acknowledged that a spark was missing, Hugh suggested to his brother that he ask her out instead. She’s smart, he told him, and good fun. Preston heeded the advice, and after that, as she later wrote to my father, they were hooked.
My grandmother had already had lots of boyfriends. She kept them in a box. They lie there still, envelopes in chronological order, each with a photograph stuck to the back. Beneath the photos, she has written their names in the elegant handwriting I know so well from her letters, George Schlother, Floyd Langford, Dendy O’Neal, and one referred to only as ‘Mrs. Harris’ son’ (in brackets afterward are the words: ‘next door’), besides, most notably, a Murray Denman, his hair parted neatly down the middle, hands buried in his pockets, his photograph bearing the designation ‘Main Boy Friend.’
She left their letters to my dad, who has passed them on to me.
In the note that came with them she has written:
John, somehow I want someone to hold on to this part of my
life. It was fulfilling and interesting. I was happy. But real lasting love came to me in 1929—when Preston came along. We “hooked” from the first!
Love, Gussie
Gussie, who was a schoolteacher and taught fourth grade, taught my father the alphabet, and Preston, who was a cashier in the local bank, taught him numbers. The story of how they found out he could read is one I have from my mother, who in turn has it from Gussie. It says that when he was three years old, he’d been sitting in the kitchen turning the pages of a National Geographic. Gussie took it that he was looking at the pictures, until he looked up and asked her a question relating to the text of one of the articles. He was three.
When I asked him about it one time, whether it was possible that he’d taught himself to read, he replied: Certainly not. He had no recollection of learning to read, nor of that day in the kitchen, only that he must have learned the alphabet from his mother and that his desire to crack the code, as he calls it, and be admitted into the secret world of the reader must have driven him to discover how to combine the letters of the alphabet into words and sentences. In other words, what the rest of us normally mean by ‘teaching yourself to read.’
Arithmetic was much the same story. His father had taught him to count, and something of how numbers could combine, so when occasionally he stayed for dinner at the homes of other children, and their fathers tested their older brothers and sisters in arithmetic, it was little Johnny, who had not yet started school, who sat and chirped the answers as they sat at the table.
I stayed clear of dating, he said once, during college and graduate school. Even if it was tempting, he knew that girls would only distract and frustrate him, and he’d sworn he would earn his PhD in seven years.
Lone Star Page 2
