It is only in the course of this final appointment that my composure breaks.
“Heel, toe! Heel, toe!” has been the household refrain ever since I began walking. My parents, who love me (maybe even best), have never reconciled themselves to my tiptoeing ways, which are the family consternation. Here I am at twelve, still hearing “Heel, toe!” When I was five and six they’d put me in orthopedic clodhoppers with metal plates in the soles and steel braces running up the legs. To this day when I see a photo of Franklin Roosevelt that shows braces peeking from under the cuffs of his trousers, I feel sorry for myself instead of him.
Dad and I make ourselves comfortable in the podiatric surgeon’s office. Dad starts in with his usual palaver about how well I do in school. Meanwhile the doctor, who’s all business, is drawing a picture of my feet on his chalkboard.
“This boy has quite a vocabulary,” Dad tells him, “and is a lover of grand opera and can name the kings of England going way back.”
The surgeon nods and explains, without trimmings, how a simple slicing of the Achilles tendons will allow me to walk like other boys.
Or never walk again? As I rise from my chair I think I hear, through a mental roaring, Dad go on about “this boy’s ability to identify the constellations.” There I stand with mouth agape, but no big vocabulary coming out. Is my father so busy with parental pride that he’s not heard the stupefying thing this white-coated divinity just said? “And we’ve got a historical atlas you can’t keep him out of. His mother says—”
I pick up my chair and hurl it at the surgeon.
A blur of noise and motion follows. What I know next is that my father is on top of me. In despair. But in tenderness, I feel. In pity.
In fear. It is the moment he knows I am not his invention but something unaccountable. What I am trying to say with that chair, I think he understands:
That I am correct as nature made me.
Pinned beneath his two hundred twenty pounds, I know I’ve won—I have the proof that I can frighten him. When we do get up it is to make a hasty exit. From Dad the doctor gets a profuse apology and assurances that we’ll be in touch. From me he gets a homicidal stare. Obeying my adulterated nature, trusting to what comes handiest, I have defeated family and clinic at one go. No “heel, toe, heel, toe” about it as we left. I must have pranced, feeling good as Huck when he decided to go to hell.
• • •
My mother died less than eight weeks after my father in 2008. I wanted certain of her belongings to go to my women friends. Frances Kiernan occasionally carries a little evening bag with garnets on the clasp. Patricia Volk can be seen in an Hermès scarf she wears as an ascot. Molly Haskell looks terrific in a black knit party dress trimmed in gold thread. Amy Hempel sports an ivory-colored Bottega Veneta shoulder bag. Alison West has the gown of shot beads over chiffon that Mom wore on her and Dad’s forty-fifth wedding anniversary.
To see these relics out and about is a great solace. I’d hoped also to pass along Mom’s many pairs of shoes, a lot of them unacquainted with the pavement, but could find nobody who wore size 6 triple A. The dress size too—which was 2—made most of her dozens of dresses, an abecedarium of postwar fashion, hard to give worthily away. Only one woman I knew was small enough to fit into most of them: Junie Fischbein. A notable clotheshorse in her own right, Junie is notable for other things, too, chief among them broken friendships. Violent disdain after early fascination is her trademark. Borderline personality, the doctors call this. We were briefly cordial before I joined (for reasons never clear to me and about which I’m not curious) the ranks of her ex-friends.
Yet I believe that several of Mom’s dresses hang to this day in Junie’s closet. Our paths cross only four or five times a year, but she makes the most of these occasions, snubbing me brutally if I try to say hello or casting a theatrical glance my way as she whispers some calumny into the ear of a not yet ex-friend. Peace to her. She’s seen a lot of trouble: visits to the loony bin, collapsed facelifts and more. But if I were to come upon Junie Fischbein in my sainted mother’s clothes, I’d tell her off and feel newborn.
• • •
Nothing experienced is ever gone, only submerged. The least detail waits upon unprompted recollection. New pieces of the shipwreck surface even as I relinquish this book. Here is a photo of Mom at some sort of Fort Worth cotillion. The year is 1936. She’s a senior in high school like the other girls in the picture, all of whom I will know later as middle-aged ladies of the community. That movie star–like creature to Mom’s right is Shirley Ginsburg, who’ll be Robby Anton’s mother. On the far left is Charlotte Miller, looking angelic under a veil. (She was anything but angelic.) My mother has the best smile of them all. The following year she’ll go to Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, where Robert Penn Warren will be one of her teachers; he must have been writing All the King’s Men at the time. Then on to the University of Texas at Austin.
But it was marriage and motherhood she was after, not higher learning. Back in Fort Worth in the summer of 1940, she got a call from a boy from Tyler up on a visit—very dashing and impetuous, a storyteller, a showboat and braggart, a diamond in the rough—and fifteen minutes into their first date, before they even got where they were going, he clapped his hands together at the steering wheel and said, “I got an idea! Let’s you and me get married!” She went home and phoned Shirley: “That boy is completely out of his mind.” But six months later she was on her father’s arm, walking down the aisle in the Hotel Texas ballroom. With a hundred-and-two-degree fever, very evident in surviving photos. Look at her, she’s a wreck. Dad, on the other hand, looks like the guy who’s caught the brass ring.
Annette Bockstein and friends, November 1936.
Which he has.
Once Mom was over her flu they drove to New Orleans for a belated honeymoon. The bridal suite of the Roosevelt was what she had in mind. Dad booked them into a little motor court instead. “You’re father’s not paying for this honeymoon, I am,” he explained. But there were dinners at Antoine’s and Galatoire’s, strolls along Bourbon Street and in Jackson Park. I don’t think they knew each other very well yet.
Back to Fort Worth they came, but with no bun in the oven. The clock ticked. No bun. Spring, summer, fall. Nothing. Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and within four weeks Mom was pregnant. This must have occurred the world over—young marrieds determined to make hay while the sun shone.
Dad joined the Navy. Tight-lipped afterward about his wartime experience, like so many of those men, he left me only a few bones from which to reconstruct the dinosaur:
Petty Officer Taylor.
He could not swim, this able-bodied seaman, and had a terrible fear of all bodies of water, even swimming pools. My own love of swimming (the only athletic skill I had other than the fifty- and the hundred-yard dash) was a source of pride to him. Among the few Navy stories he did tell was how one day, on calm seas, a patch of water was set alight with kerosene and the enlisted men forced to swim under the flames. It was the only time Dad swam in his life and may have contributed to the hydrophobia that Mom—another natural swimmer—and I laughed about freely when the old man was out of earshot.
I lose track of him for a couple of years, then pick him up again in the Philippines campaign of 1944–1945, by which time he held the rating of Petty Officer First Class, with storekeeping duties, on a destroyer escort. I have in an old trunk his dress-blue service uniform, scratchy as a horse blanket. Dad’s convoy was anchored off Mindanao and saw action in the battle of Leyte Gulf, Japan’s last naval stand. He was somewhere in the South China Sea on April 13, 1945, when his CO came onto the public address to announce FDR’s death. The new commander in chief was a failed haberdasher from Missouri. Strong men wept with fear.
A month after the end of the war he celebrated Rosh Hashanah in Manila. In one of those astounding wartime coincidences, my uncle Fred Schwar
tz, an Army man, Aunt Sylvia’s husband, heard Dad’s unmistakable East Texas burr amid the observant throng. Though they couldn’t abide each other, soldier and sailor fell into—what else?—a tearful hug.
By any measure, Mom and Dad and Tommy had an excellent war. When Petty Officer First Class Taylor got a stateside leave to Los Angeles, the three kept house in what was then called the Beverly Wilshire Apartment Hotel—two kids with a kid and a whole Pacific of luck on their side.
What is this joy I get from thinking of them without me? All are dead now and a statute of limitations applies. No more misunderstanding, recrimination, rage, blame—or grief. I am a sixty-four-year-old smiling man on a bench at the Central Park Zoo, making of the bones what I can. If you need to find me, here’s where to look, whatever the season. It’s a fifteen-minute walk from the apartment where I live. Should I happen to die here, that’ll be all right.
The three of them, winter 1942–43.
Parents and children gather round the Delacorte Clock. When monkeys ring the hour, a horn-playing kangaroo, snare-drummer penguin, tambourine-shaking bear, violinist hippo, concertina-playing elephant and panpiper goat go round and round and make the children squeal with pleasure.
All I want is to be gathered into this sudden bliss of solitude. Chance, imponderable chance! I could as easily be another sort of park-bench man. The one I am is grateful to the full: to be still an undiseased mind in an undiseased body; to be at last without remorse (which will gnaw you good if you let it); to have loved and labored, and under no curse; to have watched the happiness of others.
• • •
In my mother’s last lucid episode, about nine months before her death, she said some things I hurriedly wrote down: “This is a hard sickness to take. I just want a regular happy home, each in his own family and back to normal. What’s the reason for this? Can’t you get me out? I don’t think I can hold up for much more.” And after a pause: “Do you see any settlement in sight?”
What has happened cannot be made not to have happened. What has happened cannot happen again. My mother was born fifty days after my father in the summer of 1919 and died fifty-four days after him in the spring of 2008.
Their having been here defies all undoing.
December 26, 1940.
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The Hue and Cry at Our House Page 10
