Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  Mom’s Air France travel stories were like Season Two of her Paris series, and with a bigger budget. She’d take me vicariously on three-day propeller flights to Vietnam, where people sewed coins into their coats, “so if they died, at least they’d have enough money to be buried.” There were rickety bus trips through the Sudan, where she was the only woman, and, she’d add, “the only clothed person to boot.” She described landing in a Karachi airfield in the middle of the night and jumping onto another plane not one hundred percent sure it was the right one. She showed me the leopard-skin slippers she’d bought in Khartoum and a heavy-as-lead machete she’d hauled back in the overhead from Haiti.

  Probably what made these adventures so real for me (and why I never questioned Mom’s veracity) was that Mom never once played up the fearless adventurer persona. And she could have, considering it wasn’t every day single women traveled solo in the fifties. Instead, she portrayed herself as a naïve debutante in white dresses and espadrilles whose real motive for the trips was to “hopefully meet a husband.”

  “I don’t know,” she’d start in that singsongy voice of hers that made her sound like a violinist tuning her strings. “I pictured myself meeting some hunter in Rhodesia,” she’d say, “or a professor in Cairo, I guess,” as if both were items sold in stores that just weren’t on the shelves when she was there.

  She did have boyfriends, a good bunch apparently, men who were intrigued by a woman who didn’t need their money or want to play house for them the way her Vassar classmates did. There was Raymond Burr, an actor who’d played the character Perry Mason, and who picked her up for a date once in his private plane. Jerry Cummings, a yachtsman, who died tragically at sea. There was Warren van Kirk, a fellow artist, and Tim Flood, a blue blood from Baltimore who’d gone to Princeton. Each name seemed straight out of Social Register central casting. But for whatever reason, none of them were husband material.

  The subtext was that Mom couldn’t settle down. She longed to travel and paint too much, and yet after each trip ended, she’d dutifully return home, keeping her day job at Air France, visiting her brother every other day at the hospital, crossing off the weeks on the calendar until the next free trip to Timbuktu (literally) came around.

  * * *

  Along the way, Mom made sketches of the people and places she encountered, drawings she called “her charcoals,” which she’d later transform into acrylic and oil canvases that numbered into the hundreds, something she said was both a blessing and a curse.

  “I had tons of paintings to hang, but no walls!”

  The solution would come in the form of my father, a perennial bachelor in his midforties who’d recently purchased a decrepit brownstone in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington where he worked for the NBC affiliate WRC. Dad called himself a newsman, and for decades, he was on the radio and TV, hosting a political roundtable show called Dimension Washington or, as he liked to call it, Dementia Washington. He’d go on to win Emmy Awards for his work, one for a film titled The Last Out, a documentary about Griffith Stadium, the famed ballpark of the Washington Senators, which Dad argued was one of the last points of common ground for a city gradually becoming splintered.

  While many of his friends begged him to move to the suburbs in the sixties after the riots, Dad doubled down on the city, buying his four-story fixer-upper, which was weird, considering he lived alone. Weirder, my mother said, was when she visited the house for the first time and saw he’d only renovated a kitchen, a bathroom, and part of a bedroom. The rest of the house was vacant.

  My mother met my father through his friend Mac McGarry, who in addition to probably having the best name for TV, also hosted a weekly show at WRC called It’s Academic, a sort of Jeopardy! for high school students, which now resides in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest-running quiz program in TV history. Mac and his wife, Babette, had been trying unsuccessfully for years to set my father up. One New Year’s Eve, a neighbor mentioned in passing that a young woman named Annie-Lou from Pittsburgh had just arrived and needed a last-minute date. They seized the opportunity, and Dad stepped in. The two “hit it off,” as they say, and soon began dating.

  Before accepting my father’s proposal, Mom insisted they visit her psychiatrist first, just to make sure he was on board with her getting married and she wasn’t imagining the whole thing. Like her brother, Mom suffered breakdowns (two actually) and had even been admitted to Saint Elizabeths, a local psychiatric hospital, which she oddly made sound like the Aspen Institute. “I met the most interesting people in the world there, dear; mathematicians, writers, you name it.” Knowing her brother’s story and how mental illness was part of the family tapestry, Mom feared how she’d fare as a mother. What sold her, and what sold her doctor, was my father—sturdy German stock, whose ancestors “had all died late in life, mostly out of boredom.” For my mother, the stability my dad offered (“He was the first boyfriend who had a real job!”) was exotic, and, for once, she didn’t see it as an impediment to her art.

  Soon she married this man and moved into his lonely cobwebbed mansion, immediately hanging her paintings and commandeering the top floor for her studio. She built a patio out back, a bar in the basement with a dance floor, and installed a piano and zebra-skin couches so they could “properly receive.” The house would also feature a guest room with a canopy bed and a study and eventually a tiny room for one child who came very late for two people who’d never thought they’d be married, let alone parents.

  * * *

  On the days my mother and I painted together, we’d both grow oblivious of the time. And it was only after my whining that Mom would notice 7:00 p.m. flashing on the clock and realize that maybe she should start preparing dinner. My mother was not a very good cook. She was, however, adept at searching cupboards for food. She’d fling their doors open like the captain of a boat looking for a flare, scouring their insides as if she’d never been in her own kitchen before.

  “I guess we’ll have to make do with what we have,” she’d say with a shrug, which I always found a bit out of place, since it made it seem as if we were a struggling Depression-era family, when in fact she’d simply forgotten to hit the Safeway.

  “Look, sweetie,” she’d say, disappearing farther into the depths of the pantry. “We have some sage, and a can of baked beans”—all of this, mind you, with a whispered but impressed voice, the one you’d normally hear in a jewelry store from someone standing over a case of bracelets. She’d then root through the bin of ugly vegetables in the fridge. “And here we have a half-pepper, and, oh, look, some turnips.”

  Mom’s approach to cuisine came from her art school days, inspiration hitting her on the spot. The ingredients she chose were paints you’d throw at a canvas, each chosen for its color and texture rather than its taste. If your fava beans didn’t click with the polenta? All you had to do was toss in a kilo of shrimp, and the pink would bring out the dull off-white. Dinners were simply her natures mortes, to be assembled first and painted second. If you wanted to eat them, fine, but you could easily just take them home and set them on your mantelpiece.

  * * *

  It was behavior like this that convinced me my parents weren’t my parents. So much so, I’d roam the house searching for the real ones while their stand-ins eventually got around to cooking or watched TV or talked on the phone. Not wanting to draw suspicion, I’d tiptoe up the stairs and comb through each closet expecting to find real Mom and Dad bound and gagged motioning with their noses to untie them. Other times, I’d look out onto the porch to see if there was a briefcase of ransom paid or under the couch for a scribbled message: “John—call the police now!”

  The parents I saw each morning had done a noble job of blending in, but just as any good kidnappers or space aliens would. And they treated me fine, that’s for sure. They never hit me. They tucked me into bed. But still there was something off that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Ma
ybe it was their age that threw me. None of the other parents had gray hair or liked Nixon. None of the other kids ate dinner at 8:00 p.m. And nobody named their dog Dr Pepper.

  As I grew older, I felt less like a milk bottle missing child and more like a grad student living in a rooming house. My parents’ approach to eating started with a nightly cocktail before dinner, sometimes three, while I remained upstairs doing my homework. I would know dinner was ready not because they’d call me, but because I’d see smoke sneaking under my bedroom door. When I’d venture down to see how the meal was coming along, I’d find the dining room transformed into a saloon, my father on the piano playing Fats Waller, and my mother singing midverse, both oblivious to the pot boiling over. For a long time, I simply assumed this is how one cooked. Put the oven on, open every window of the house, serve drinks, turn your back, play the piano, and within no time, you, too, could have a charred clarinet for a steak.

  If my father had shown even the slightest smidgen of talent in cuisine, perhaps he could have picked up some of the slack. Unfortunately, he’d been a bachelor for so long, his needs before my mother consisted of press booth lunches at the Washington Senators’ baseball games or BLTs at the National Press Club or dinner at the Kenwood Country Club, where he had a reverse reservation, meaning he’d call when he wasn’t coming. Dad never participated in dinner, but he never critiqued it, either. He just assumed home-cooked meals were poor to start with and were nothing a carafe of wine and a positive frame of mind couldn’t overcome.

  Once we sat down at the table, he’d play with his food like a cat would a ball, moving it around his plate, craning his head, trying to find the right way to attack it. He’d be so smitten by my mother’s singing, he wouldn’t realize he was eating something inedible, and eventually he’d grow frustrated and misdirect the attention to me, probably as a way to hand the food off to Dr Pepper.

  * * *

  Mom’s dishes for me were in line with her paintings, giant renderings of green heads or armless cats, or jackhammers with peaches in the foreground, meaning I didn’t understand them.

  Her “process,” she’d explain, “usually starts with an unfortunate event.” For her, things going off-script fostered art, and she seized on these moments as if they were divine sources of inspiration instead of annoyances that normal people simply chalk up to bad fortune. When things rolled without a hitch, that was when Mom was miserable—there was no drama, no chance to wrest something from the jaws of defeat.

  Yet it wasn’t until a Thanksgiving trip to North Carolina that Mom had what artists call a breakthrough. Somewhere near the Virginia/North Carolina border, our car’s fan belt broke. A garage at Elizabeth City could fix it, but had to order a replacement part, which would arrive the next morning, meaning we’d have to stay the night. Mom wasn’t disappointed by this news. She was giddy, actually. And looking back on it, when I saw that squint of hers, the same squint she’d make in her studio, I should have known she was up to something.

  Although it was an inconvenience, our overnight stay in Elizabeth City wouldn’t have killed our Thanksgiving at all. Sure it might have pushed dinner back a few hours, but who cared anyway? There wasn’t a party of twelve waiting for us to dig in at 5:00 p.m. on the dot. For Mom, though, it would have been too humdrum to just get back in the car the next morning and arrive on time to put a turkey in the oven Thursday afternoon.

  She was convinced that the car breaking down in Elizabeth City was an omen, that we had our backs to the wall, and only something audacious could save us. The next day, when the mechanic told us proudly that the car was ready, Mom launched her insidious plan.

  “Are you sure?” she asked the mechanic. “Because I’m not sure we are ready.” She pulled out her notebook, then huddled with him in private. He examined with confusion the sketches she’d drawn up.

  I tried to listen in on their conversation, but Mom’s voice tailed off. “I was thinking right here,” and then her head dove deep into the car’s engine well, leaving me curious as to when she’d found such interest in popular mechanics. Before the garage attendant could close the hood, my mother scurried around the back of the car, and while my father and I expected her to reappear with a checkbook, she waddled out instead with our thawing Butterball turkey.

  Mom didn’t explain to us what she was doing as she passed us by. I always need to explain to people everything I’m doing. “I’m going to hook my dog to this table here because I have to run across the street to the ATM, but I’ll be back in forty-five seconds. I’m not leaving without paying.” This I’ll tell to a passing café waiter as he looks through me with indifference, as he should.

  But our blank faces meant nothing to my mother as she continued to ask the mechanic in a hushed tone where she could find some aluminum foil and a bungee cord and maybe some plastic tie-offs. While Mom moved her hands and arms and the mechanic shrugged his shoulders, taking off his hat from time to time to wipe his brow, she shot us a guilty smile.

  “Jerry here says if we loosen the hoses that link the radiator to the engine, it’ll give us the extra space we need to wedge it onto the block. That way it won’t likely fall.”

  There was, of course, a pause in silence, my father and me looking at each other to see who’d delicately follow up.

  “What? The fan belt?” Dad asked.

  “No, silly, the turkey!”

  I love the way Mom started her retort with silly. Because in her mind it was silly to think we were talking about car parts when here we were in a garage and the hood of the car was open. Any normal person with a brain could see she was referring to the pebble-skinned turkey she was going to shove onto the engine block to cook.

  Poor Jerry the mechanic. He’d probably rushed the fan belt order and worked early that morning so he could cook his own turkey. Now here he was under the car trying to rig a contraption that would hold a bird carcass while a Yankee sketched ideas of how maybe she could baste it en route.

  Pulling out of the Elizabeth City Autobody should be a generic affair. You put the car in drive and look for Route 12 and head south. But when there’s a turkey under the hood, it changes the dynamic somewhat.

  “Watch the bumps now, Dave!” my normally passive passenger mother screamed.

  “How long are we going to be on this gravel road anyway?” She’d lurch back in the seat and pound her moleskin against the dash. “The turkey will be covered all in cinders!”

  My father simply stared ahead and drove. The broken-down car had already frayed his nerves enough. He would have preferred to eat at the Channel Bass that night, where he would have given thanks to his hush puppies and tall beer while we watched the Cowboys-Redskins game at the bar. Now, all of sudden, he was jointly responsible for a dinner he didn’t understand, part of some hazing ritual gone awry.

  “Gun the gas now!” Mom yelled as we hurtled down Route 12, the snakelike corridor that cuts between Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. The fact we were passing through oddly named small towns like Coinjock and Moyock, towns with crosswalks and people, didn’t faze Mom. For her, these were small impediments to her ongoing installation.

  Before we left Elizabeth City, she’d rubbed the turkey with butter and wrapped it in aluminum. She’d calculated a sort of turkey-cooking algorithm, one that theorized if we revved the engine for 3.5 hours at over 60 mph, the heat would be the equivalent to 2.5 hours of cooking in an oven at 350 degrees. Rest stops and tolls would have to be factored in, of course.

  When we took a break two hours later, Dad ran into the bathroom while Mom took his place, gunning the motor with the transmission in neutral. Passersby squinted through the windshield, thinking perhaps a child was unattended behind the wheel.

  An hour after that, we stopped for gas at Nags Head.

  “Fill it up with regular, please,” Mom ordered, then popped the hood. “And I want you to help me check something else.”

&nbs
p; She asked the attendant for a rag, as if he were a medical intern, fetching the turkey from under the hood and smelling it like a newborn baby. Before the attendant could respond, Mom put the turkey back into place and addressed herself to my father, through the windshield.

  “Dave, sweetie, we’re going to have to really pick it up. I’m not sure it’s getting cooked past the skin.”

  Mom could have just paid and left, but she loved bringing strangers up to speed with her various projects. Dale at the Gulf station might have been just an innocent bystander along the way, but to Mom, he was part of a press corps that needed briefing.

  “You see, Dale, we’re cooking a turkey.”

  “I see.”

  Mom went on to explain her process much as the sculptor Richard Serra would one of his massive bronze mazes. “Now I’ve left two ports of air here and here, to give it flow through there. What do you think?”

  Dale answered in that typical North Carolinian fashion—“I’m not going to argue with you”—then waved us on our way, wondering perhaps if he’d been too long in the sun. Somewhere near Rodanthe, Mom turned the radio station to country music, flipped off her shoes, and rolled down the window, her fearful outlook gradually turning positive.

  “Oh, smell that sea air, the salt water’s going to give extra touch I’m sure.”

  When we arrived at the house my father offered to whisk the turkey into the house in order to put it in the oven.

  “If you insist,” Mom casually responded. “Not that it needs to, but fine. Maybe just five minutes so it will crisp the skin.”