Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

by Maureen Corrigan

  Parker, with his assemblage of “others,” certainly wasn’t my father’s political soul mate. Yet it speaks to the power of evocative writing—in Parker’s case, the strong presence of Spenser and that wonderful rat-a-tat dialogue, especially in the earlier novels—that my father was transported beyond the boundaries of his own personal tastes and political inclinations to become a fan of the series. Literature doesn’t work on readers in predictable ways. Sometimes we readers put up with views we don’t like in a novel or any other kind of art in exchange for other compensations. That’s certainly true for me whenever I read Hammett and Chandler, or Philip Roth, for that matter—and have to tolerate their disturbed depictions of women. Sometimes, works of literature forever alter the way we see ourselves, our world. And sometimes they just give us the sense that we’re not alone in our confusion or yearnings.

  Sayers’s progressive fantasy, Gaudy Night, along with the Spenser series and the other contemporary detective fiction I was reading at the time, made me feel less lonely. Over the years that I was first reading those mysteries, I was trying to put together my adult identity without the transformative marker of marriage and also trying to figure out what kind of meaningful work I could do, what kind of relationships I could hope for. The Spenser books investigate that same terrain of work and family, and so they kept me company in my thoughts, maybe gave some inspiration—as, in its different way, Gaudy Night did. The hero and heroine of those stories were, like me at least in this regard, not so eccentric or defiant that they didn’t want to somehow stake out a place for themselves on a tributary of the mainstream. I wrestled during my twenties and early thirties with feelings that there was “something wrong with me” because I wasn’t married and, thus, hadn’t fully become an adult. That’s the way the collective eyes of the Irish Catholic world I grew up in viewed me, and I was still, and always, a daughter of that world, so I saw myself, disparagingly, as odd—an “odd woman.” At the same time, I felt a dim sense of entitlement to my own life’s adventure, apart from whatever husband and children might be floating in what Shelley nicely called “the clouds of futurity.” The books I read helped give me the courage to keep on flying blind.

  This period of my reading/real life closes, as many youngish women’s stories do, with a wedding. “Reader, I married him.” That, of course, is Jane Eyre’s famous announcement of her marriage to Mr. Rochester. I felt a little like Jane Eyre in that my path to marriage, too, was long and hesitant. I had found a man who loved me and, most times, understood me, a man who didn’t threaten to overwhelm me. Rich also valued his solitude; a much more talkative person than I, he is also an insatiable reader, so he likes to have time to himself, too. It now seems quaint, but one of the big obstacles to matrimony, apart from the personal mishigas each of us brought to the union, was that Rich is an atheist Jew and I am a Catholic, sort of. My parents were upset. (I can still hear my father’s hollow voice on the phone saying: “He’s not of our faith.”) Rich’s parents were also unhappy, especially because they heard my parents were unhappy. It was very hard for me, even as an adult, to go ahead and buck their disapproval; but I did. My reading gave me a shove; so many of the novels and plays about marriage that I had read featured lovers who had tensions to resolve.

  After spending years in the company of characters whose ethnic, religious, racial, and class backgrounds differed from mine, I didn’t regard it as such a big deal to step outside my own context and be with someone “not of our faith.” My reading, and the life it helped create for me, put me more and more in contact with folks, fictive and real, who would have stuck out in Sunnyside. As evidence, consider the framed sketch of a frowning Buddha, floating above a skull with a flower dangling out of its mouth, that hangs above my desk these days. Not pretty, but precious. The haphazard inscription on the drawing reads “Allen Ginsberg, D.C. 1/28/93; For Maureen Corrigan.” A wonderful student of mine at Georgetown, named Sean Burns, went to hear Ginsberg read on that date at a revival movie house in Washington. After the reading, Sean, who was goofy and very smart and very friendly, went up to Ginsberg and told him that he had read “Howl” in the freshman poetry course I was then teaching at Georgetown. Sean also mentioned to Ginsberg that poetry was a hard sell at Georgetown, where pragmatic careerist subjects usually trump those whose payoff is not as tangible. That’s why the Buddha is unhappy: because, as Ginsberg told Sean, “teaching is hard.” As Sean talked Ginsberg began drawing and eventually handed him the sketch to give to me. I love a lot of Ginsberg’s poetry and his courageous Whitman-esque embrace of his unique self, so that drawing on my wall is a treasure. Every so often, though, the wondrous improbability of this connection between me and the “nearsighted, psychopathic” Beat poet who resolutely “put [his] queer shoulder to the wheel”9 hits me. All because of books.

  In life, as opposed to literature, almost none of the couples I then knew well were different from each other in significant ways, so I felt like something of a pathbreaker. In my weaker moments, I would have preferred the safety of sameness: the church wedding at St. Raphael’s, the reception marked by the music of the Clancy Brothers intermixed with a few token polkas, where everyone would dance and drink too much and have fun because everyone, in a cultural sense, knew everyone else. It would have been easier and I would have felt a lot less of an oddity. My wish for normality would have made my hero, Ginsberg, howl.

  Our wedding was less like the final section of Jane Eyre and more like the last frantic hitch-up scene in The Taming of the Shrew. My old friend Mary Ellen came to the rescue. She had just moved with her husband and two kids to a big new house in rural Pennsylvania, and they offered us their backyard, with a view of rolling hills, for the summer ceremony, which was to be pagan. I dithered about the feminist politics of buying a white wedding dress. (Harriet Vane, I remembered, dressed for her Big Day in an eye-catching golden ensemble, no white for the soon-to-be-Lady Wimsey, a public fallen woman.) A few months before the ceremony, I felt a rush of defiance. Why shouldn’t I assert my right to be a bride? So Mary Ellen and I went off to Brooklyn one weekend in search of an inexpensive but classy bridal gown. At the Mona Lisa Bridal Shoppe in Bay Ridge I found a bargain off-the-shoulder number that I thought looked a little like those evening costumes Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard slunk around in. Wedding photos suggest that the dress looked more flamenco dancer than Hollywood glamour.

  My parents and Rich’s parents met, for the first time, at the rehearsal dinner and made awkward but well-meaning conversation: Rich’s parents mentioned having met a Catholic cardinal once, and my parents volunteered that they liked lox and bagels. The dads were both World War II veterans, which helped. The day of the ceremony I had teal blue flowers stuck into my hair at the local beauty parlor, shimmied into my dress with the help of friends, and stood with Rich in Mary Ellen’s backyard, under a sweltering July sun, as the local traffic-court judge married us in a five-minute boilerplate ceremony (both of us far too self-ironic to express “personal vows”). The guests gathered around us in a circle and wisecracked when the judge asked “if anyone here has any objections . . .” Afterward, people made toasts that played on the theme of the two of us melding our mammoth book collections. It felt good to have everyone—our parents, the rest of our families, friends—there that day to see us together, to be happy for us, even despite themselves. The wedding photos don’t show a Spenserian alternative family—for one thing, everyone is white—but it was an alternative-enough gathering by old Sunnyside standards: Jews, Catholics, a few lesbians, one nun, a token WASP, a “best man” who was a woman—even a few Republicans.

  The reception, during which most of the guests changed into shorts and ate and danced far into the night, was a blur. Afterward, I heard of funny moments that I missed: my mother swaying to Motown with my new husband; Rich’s mother trying to get the deejay to stop playing polkas and substitute the hora; the out-of-town guests (including my parents), who stayed at the local top-of-the-line hotel, being woken
up by telephone calls from prostitutes soliciting customers. I do clearly remember us getting into our rental car late at night, preparing to embark on the first leg of our trip to Vermont. I remember my dad standing in the dark beside the car saying, “I hope you’ll both be very happy.” Not original, but words I cherished. I didn’t want to be normative, but much as I might admire renegades, neither was I, say, a defiant heroine out of a Marge Piercy novel. I wanted to follow my heart and to have my father’s man-of-few-words blessing. Packed in my suitcase was a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, to read as a kind of literary talisman for my new life as part of a twosome. It was the only novel I could think of at the time that featured a married couple of equals who were both witty and as fascinated by each other as they were by the world outside. I chose to overlook the fact that Hammett, no troubadour of wedding ballads he, kept Nick and Nora drunk throughout most of the book. Like the lovers at the end of Chekhov’s great short story “Lady with a Lapdog,” I knew that nothing had been, could ever be, entirely resolved—the hardest part was yet to come. So, I put my “queer” shoulder to the wheel, and we drove off.

  Looking for a Ship/Looking for My Dad

  About a decade ago, John McPhee wrote a wonderful book called Looking for a Ship about the history of the United States Merchant Marine and its current debilitated state. I passed it on to my dad to read because he had served in the Merchant Marine before joining the Navy right after Pearl Harbor. I always gave him any books I read or received as review copies that had anything to do with the sea; I also sent him any promising thrillers and detective novels and, of course, any book, even the dryest-looking histories, that had anything to do with World War II. Sometimes there were surprises. When I gave him a review copy of the first volume of Clay Blair’s history of U-boat warfare—a book filled with pages and pages of eye-straining statistics—he was delighted. Magnifying glass in hand, he would sit at the kitchen table and read for hours, finding the names of merchant ships he had served on. One of those ships had been torpedoed, all the men lost. My dad was supposed to have boarded it at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, but when he reported for duty he found that he had left his seaman’s papers behind at his sister’s house, where there had been a boozy send-off the night before. By the time he raced back, got the papers, and returned to the Navy yard, the ship had left. My dad always said he felt like the rest of his life was bonus time after that brush with death.

  My dad, like me, thought I had stumbled into one of the best jobs imaginable—a book reviewer! Someone who got new books for free and got paid to read them and, especially, talk about them on the radio! But, he often qualified his wonderment with the warning that there was no future in radio—it was a thing of the past. Whenever I tear open boxes of review copies and spot a book with a ship or swastika on the cover, I still think to myself, for a second, “Oh, great, I’ll send that to Dad.” Then there’s the moment of correction, experienced as a faint, internal bodily jerk. He’s gone.

  I was especially missing him that summer day in my office at Georgetown (and I was certainly avoiding work) when I decided to do an Internet search for his ship, a destroyer escort called the USS Schmitt. It was always somewhat awkward, my dad recalled, to serve on a ship with a German name during World War II, but the Schmitt was named after a genuine hero. Father Aloysius Schmitt was a Catholic chaplain serving on the USS Oklahoma when it was bombed during the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He helped some sailors trapped with him belowdecks to escape through a hatchway. He himself drowned.

  As I quickly found out, the Schmitt crew had had a few reunions in the 1950s. Then there was a thirty-year break and the reunions started up again, this time yearly. Clearly, the sense of time running out had galvanized some old members of the crew. My dad had told me that he had been all set to attend a reunion when I was a small child, but that I came down with chicken pox and he decided to stay home. The other version of that story—the one my mother tells—is that my dad didn’t want to go to any reunions. He didn’t like that sort of thing. Chicken pox and loner tendencies aside, I think that my dad stayed away from reunions because his time on the Schmitt was so important, certainly the most crucial time of his life, and he wanted to remember his shipmates as they were, not as the old men they turned into.

  I e-mailed Alton Blanks, the crewman now living in North Carolina who was listed as having been in charge of the most recent reunion, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1999. Later that same day, Alton’s wife, Sylvia, e-mailed back. (As I eventually learned, Sylvia is the computer-savvy half of the couple.) Her note was gracious and welcoming. She said that many of the family members felt as I did, “that they had served on the Schmitt too.” We began exchanging information. For my part, I sent her copies of my dad’s list of the crewmen; Sylvia sent me information on recent reunions, including a roster of known crew members who had died. That’s how I found myself, on Columbus Day weekend 2000, checking in to a Hampton Inn in Crestwood, Illinois, along with my magnanimous husband, eighty-one-year-old mother, and two-year-old daughter—a strangely assorted crew in search of any word about our missing member at that year’s reunion of the USS Schmitt.

  We got to the hotel late Thursday night, but Alton, undeterred, had been waiting up for us in the lobby. He was a lean man, still in shape, and he hurried over to the check-in desk and introduced himself: “Welcome, welcome. You must be the Corrigans.” He turned to me and shook my hand. “I didn’t know your father—I joined the ship in California right after he was discharged. I went to the library and checked his dates. But we’ll ask the other men tomorrow at breakfast. Did you bring any pictures?”

  Oh, yes, we had brought pictures. There were snapshots of my dad and his buddies in their white sailor uniforms, all smiling, all looking impossibly young and handsome. (My Aunt Peggy, my father’s sister, always maintained that my dad resembled the movie star Dana Andrews. He sort of did. When young, Aunt Peggy herself looked like Myrna Loy. Their dashing black-Irish looks became diluted in my generation. People have told me I look a little like Margaret Atwood. Swell.) In some shots my dad is grinning behind bars, holding a liquor bottle— obviously a prop setting in some photographer’s studio. In others, taken when the Schmitt was in Hawaii, steaming toward the South Pacific, he and the guys are wearing grass skirts. Some shots feature other crew members manning five-inch guns; a few are of the ship seen from a distance. It looks so small; it was so small, this ship that dodged U-boats and submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific; convoyed men and equipment to Europe in preparation for D Day; shot down two kamikaze planes; sailed into Tokyo Bay to check for booby traps (the second American ship to do so after the Japanese surrender); and, much of the time, braved the dangers of the sea alone, as most destroyer escorts did.

  Alton’s words that first night were fateful because they were repeated, with some variation, the next morning at breakfast. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t know your father,” said one old salt after another as the thirteen crew members at the reunion stopped by our table to say hello and look at the pictures. They tried. They were kind men and they squinted through the fog of fifty-some-odd years trying to remember. Some claimed to recognize his face; others managed a snippet of information about one of the other guys in the photos. (“He worked in the engine room, didn’t he?”) One old crew member looked at a snapshot of my dad and Uncle Paul—who had also served in the Navy, but not on the Schmitt—and said, pointing to Uncle Paul: “No, I didn’t know your dad, but this guy I remember.”

  “Okay, nobody here knew your father,” said Rich later that day. “Can we go home now?” He was only semi-kidding. We were holed up in our hotel room watching a cartoon channel we had located for Molly. Hours earlier, we had taken the hotel minivan to the Crestwood train station and traveled into Chicago, where we piled into a cab and rode to Marshall Field’s. It was too cold to walk around the city, and with my slow-moving mother and antsy toddler in tow, together with the stroller, diaper bag, and packages we
picked up along the way, the trip was exhausting. Now we were marooned back in our room at the Hampton Inn next to a suburban strip mall. The temperature outside was dipping into the thirties, light snow was predicted, and none of us had brought warm coats. And nobody here remembered my dad.

  I’m not going to say that the rest of the weekend wasn’t without its awkward moments, but of course, we stayed for the whole reunion, and I’m glad we did. Those old crewmen and their wives were so good to us. They bought Molly stuffed animals and puzzles and tried to entertain her—one man played the harmonica; another showed her his trick finger that popped out of its socket. They treated us to dinner and wouldn’t hear of us contributing to the reunion fund. The men were all elderly, and some were frail, some sickly—shades of what they once were. But in spirit most of them retained the cheerful, self-deprecating attitude that characterized their generation, the generation that had lived through the Depression and won the War.

  I felt as though I had been made an honorary member of a rapidly dwindling alternative family. My mom and I stay in touch via phone calls and Christmas cards with some of the Schmitt crew. We—all four of us—might go back to another reunion or two if they’re held nearby, until, inevitably, they end. Those men may not have known my dad, but they knew the Schmitt, and from my earliest years, that ship loomed large in my life, too. Like so many of my aging boomer cohorts, I grew up with World War II as almost a felt memory—dressing up in my dad’s old sailor suit to mug for home movies; studying the enlarged picture of the Schmitt that always hung above my dad’s dresser; singing “We Gotta Sink the Bismarck to the Bottom of the Sea” with my dad as he and I walked along Queens Boulevard, lugging a Christmas tree home one year. I must have been about five years old, and I still remember the smiles on the faces of passersby as they looked at us. Back then, they all would have known that song, too.