Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  One more thing about that extracurricular rehearsing.

  There was a night in the front seat of my ’53 Chevy. As I often did, I talked about my heroics as a high school basketball player, for I was a point guard before the term was invented. Our Atlanta Redwings were undefeated en route to twenty-nine victories.

  At last Cheryl had heard enough. “I play basketball too,” she said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “For our church team.”

  I made my first mistake. “Were you a good player?”

  “I scored all our points the other night.”

  For my second mistake, I asked how many points.

  “Fourteen.”

  My third mistake came in asking a future sportswriter’s natural question. How many points did the other team score?

  “Seventy-two,” she said.

  I laughed out loud, which was my fourth mistake, and it was a very bad mistake. It was such a bad mistake that it was my last mistake of the night because the atmosphere in the car turned chilly and by her actions Cheryl notified me that it was time for me to take her home, like right now, please.

  Three years later, in the greatest comeback of my career, we got married.

  Workaholic, did I say? Always writing? For $5 at an auction, my mother had bought a portable Royal typewriter for my fifteenth birthday. I sat with the magical machine at our kitchen table, waiting, and waiting more, waiting to make my first typed words memorable. Finally, hunting and pecking, I spelled out the name of my baseball hero, the great St. Louis Cardinals hitter, S-t-a-n-l-e-y F-r-a-n-k M-u-s-i-a-l.

  The writing became a blessing and a curse. A newspaper promotion ad showed me in a tuxedo with a foot on a suitcase. The ad asked, “Who Writes His Way Around the World?” I was out there so often, gone from my wife, my son, and my home, that I mailed back postcards signed “The Phantom.”

  From the 1960s to the mid-’90s, flush with monopolistic profits, newspapers spent money on the editorial product. A sports columnist was always on the road for the next big event: Super Bowls, college football bowl games, World Series, heavyweight championship fights (I did ten of Muhammad Ali’s), Final Fours, Olympics (summer and winter), Wimbledon, the four major golf tournaments, America’s Cups, the Goodwill Games in Moscow (3:00 a.m. changing of the guard at the Kremlin), NASCAR, Indianapolis 500, the Triple Crown horse races (Secretariat at Belmont, beauty in flight). I did all those along with the everyday columns on local teams and subjects. Not to mention nine books.

  On our fiftieth wedding anniversary, someone asked how Cheryl and I had made marriage work.

  She laughed. “I think it’s because he was home only ten of those years.”

  Our Newnan home soon became Jared’s and Jacob’s, filled with their toddler energy and chatter. On arrival in Georgia, they were a year old. Soon they moved from walking to running, from babbling to talking, from infancy to childhood. They crawled under our kitchen chopping block and rode tricycles along College Street. We walked with them to the candy store on the court square, where Jacob said, “Peppermint patties, please.” At the fire station two blocks away, Jared explored every corner every day, always remembering when he left to say, “Bye-bye, fireman… bye-bye, fire truck… bye-bye, fire boots.”

  Jacob liked to “cook.” He’d sit on the kitchen floor and extract a dozen pots and pans from the cabinets. Then he’d make “pancakes” by dropping ice cubes onto a skillet and sliding the skillet into an “oven” that to lesser chefs appeared to be the open space between the four legs of the chopping block. There is a photograph of the boys in diapers, standing in front of our Wurlitzer 800 jukebox. Jacob is inspecting the bubble tubes. Jared is spread-eagled on the floor to peer under the machine; we entitled that picture “Elvis, are you in there?” Jacob once sat on my lap through fifteen songs. “He didn’t want to quit,” I wrote in a journal of that year. “And every time I relaxed my hands on his sides, he reached for them and put them back. He liked the solid feel, the safety. He loved to be lifted high every time Little Richard sang, ‘Tutti-frutti’ and howled ‘Wowwww!’”

  Both boys loved to sit with Cheryl as she read to them. When she finished a story, Jared would say, “Read again.” He had heard the Peter Pan story so many times that he recognized the plot. When “Maw-Maw” asked him, “Now what happens?” he’d tell her and say, “Read, Maw-Maw.”

  We finally had a chance to be a real family. Early in our marriage, with both of us working, we’d missed parts of our son’s childhood that we could never recover. Now we hoped to make up some for our absences.

  On December 7, 1991, the day before the twins’ third birthday, we dressed them for a formal photograph taken by our friend and neighbor Bob Shapiro. Bob’s camera loved the boys. They were impossibly adorable, both smiling, both with their blond hair in mullets, both in white-on-white tuxedoes, white shoes, purple cummerbunds, and purple bow ties, each more dashing and with greater swagger than the other. Jared, so cool. Hands in his pockets. Weight on his right foot, his left side loose. The beginnings of a smile. Moves his head forward, eyes inviting you in.

  In one run of Shapiro’s film, the boys share a stool. In another, Jacob sits at his brother’s feet. In a third, Jared whispers into his brother’s ear. For two hours, the boys struck whatever poses the photographer asked. They shimmered under the studio’s soft white lights. In white shoes against a white floor, they seemed to float above the surface, lifted by happiness. However they changed, for however long they both would live, Jared and Jacob were golden boys in those shutter-click moments.

  With Jeff and Lynn our neighbors, sharing the boys with us, those Newnan years were the happiest of our lives.

  THREE

  Two months after that photo shoot, Jeff asked us over for dinner. If we had dinner, I have no memory of it. Some memories break your heart into so many pieces that those pieces float in the bloodstream to your brain and force everything else out. All I remember of that night is recorded in a sentence scratched into my journal: “Jeff said, ‘The real reason we asked you over tonight is to tell you we’re moving back to Virginia.’”

  To be fair about it—and I have no more desire to be fair about it now than I did then—but to be fair about it, my son’s announcement should have been no surprise. Jeff had complained about his job, and Lynn so often found our lovely little town beneath her level of big-city sophistication that she enlisted a neighbor for girls-night-out trips to Atlanta, the center of the southern universe. She once said, “Newnan doesn’t even have a bowling alley.”

  Cheryl and I had considered Newnan our last stop in life. Now our son and his wife wanted to ditch it in favor of a return to suburban northern Virginia. At once furious and brokenhearted, I could not say what I thought, which was, Fine. Go back to Virginia and don’t let the state line hit you in the ass. Go. Send us a postcard for Christmas. Go. Go bowling twice a night. Go. Just leave Jared and Jacob here.

  Losing the boys was the dagger in our hearts. My favorite picture was not the Shapiro portrait. It’s one Cheryl made with a Kodak disposable camera. Jared, Jacob, and I are at the breakfast table. I’m reading a newspaper. The boys are in blue pajamas. Jared sits on my lap, Jacob sits on the table. I wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my life reading the newspaper with them. That night, after a dinner I didn’t eat, I was maybe five beers deep into pouting before falling asleep. Cheryl cried all night.

  On a morning two weeks later, as Jeff and Lynn dealt with movers, Jared came to me and said, “Upstairs.” I thought he was confused—did he want to go back to bed? Cheryl whispered, “M&Ms.” I had a gumball machine in my office filled with the candy. So we took him upstairs, with Jacob hurrying to catch up. But instead of M&Ms, the boys wanted to sit on my lap at my desk, as they’d done so many times. “Paw-Paw, turn on ’puter,” Jared said, and we typed together one last time.

  By then Lynn had come upstairs. “C’mon, boys,” she said. “We’re going to Virginia.”

  Jared
turned to Cheryl. “You come with me?”

  Cheryl said, “I can’t, honey. I’m going to miss you boys.”

  Jared might have seen a tear. He asked his grandmother, “Are you going to cwy?”

  She said yes, and Jared said, “I cwy too.”

  I can see the boys still, in our driveway, sitting in their van, ready to leave Newnan. Lynn hugged me and said, “I love you, Paw-Paw.” That infuriated me. She was so oblivious to my pain that she could go for affection by using the boys’ nickname for me. I pulled away and went into the house, where Jeff was waiting.

  He said, “I’m just so sorry, Dad.” Crying, he hugged Cheryl and me. “I’m sorrier than you know. One of the crazy things was Lynn got upset over the garage.” We had built a garage for his mechanic’s tools and equipment. “She was afraid that you, me, and the boys would do things together and leave her out.” What the fuck? Jealous of a garage? Jeff said, “We’ll get back to Virginia, and I’m going to make it better—or it’s going to get worse.” I didn’t know then what that meant, and I didn’t care. I knew only that it couldn’t get much worse for us.

  In the van, Jared was strapped into his car seat. He stared out a window, forlorn. Jacob was alongside him. As Jeff backed the van down the driveway, Lynn waved from the passenger-side window. She was all smiles.

  Five years later.

  It got worse. Jeff and Lynn went through a nasty divorce. The only consolation for Cheryl and me was that Lynn conceded custody of the boys to Jeff. At the time, I wondered how a mother could give up her only children. And I wondered about what damage, if any, it would do to them. Jeff soon remarried and started a second family with his wife, Lisa, who gave birth to a son, Kaleb, and a daughter, Josie.

  And what did Cheryl and I do? We bought a farm in Locust Grove, Virginia, fifty miles south of Jeff’s home. Then we built him a house on our land. Again, we had persuaded our son and his family to live next door. Yes, we had replicated the Newnan conditions that had led to sadness. But I was brilliant in creating rationalizations for doing what pleased me. I thought we represented an island of stability in their shipwrecked lives. That, and we simply loved being around Jared and Jacob.

  Jared often stayed overnight with us. I talked him to sleep with stories about boys who grew up to be heroes. My nightly cast of a sportswriter’s characters included Pee Wee Reese, Muhammad Ali, and Pelé. Jared practiced his knuckle-down shooting after hearing that Pee Wee had been a marbles champion before becoming the Dodgers’ shortstop. I told him I once climbed into bed and interviewed Ali under the sheets to get away from a crowd in his hotel room. “Muhammad took my notebook,” I said, “and wrote down the names of people in his entourage and how much he paid them a week.” Jared, learning to play soccer, liked the story about the poor boy who kicked a ball made of rags. “Tell me Pelé,” he said, and we went in our imagination first to Brazil and finally to the Meadowlands stadium, where I heard the greatest soccer player ever, in the last game of his career, shout to the 75,646 spectators, “Repeat after me: Love… Love… Love.”

  There was a night in Virginia when Jared sat on my lap and said, “Grandpa, you ever seen that commercial? Y’know, the hair-grow one?”

  Grandpa arched an eyebrow. “No, why?”

  Jared rubbed his hand across my head in a place once covered by hair.

  He said, “Ohhhh, gee, I dunno.”

  The imp was seven years old.

  Jared was eleven in the summer of 2000. I was in Montana on a Missouri River canoe trip with my sister, Sandra. Off the river, I called Jeff late one night, just to check in.

  He said Jared and Jacob had been fighting and it was awful, what the brothers did to each other on an everyday basis.

  “We can’t take any more of this,” Jeff said. “They won’t quit.”

  “Jeff, do you know the golfer Curtis Strange?” I asked. Strange had won the US Open golf championship twice. He fit into this conversation because he was an identical twin. “Curtis told me that his biggest fight with his brother, Allan, was at the dinner table, and it wound up with food splattered against the ceiling. Jeff, they were sixteen years old. The boys are eleven. They’ll figure it out. Give them time.”

  “No, damn it,” Jeff said. “They’re just out of control, and they’re scaring Lisa too, with what they’re doing.”

  “Like how?”

  Jeff said, “Jacob the other day hung Jared by his ankles over the loft railing. Jared wasn’t scared. He thinks it’s fun, like a kid would. But it could be bad, and Lisa’s worried.”

  Then Jeff cut to the chase. “We’re splitting them up. It’s Jared who’s scaring Lisa the most. He’s going to go live with Lynn.”

  I didn’t believe it was happening again. Eight years before, our son had blindsided us with an announcement that he would leave Georgia and take his family to Virginia. Now this? This was crazy. This time, rather than burning in furious silence as I had so long ago, I said, “Jeff, you can’t be serious.”

  The idea was beyond understanding. Following their divorce, Jeff and Lynn had been at war. And now he was sending a boy he said he loved to live with a woman he said he hated? I said, “You can’t do that, Jeff. Come on, you can’t split ’em up. You can’t split up brothers, let alone twins.”

  “That’s what we gotta do,” Jeff said.

  “Jeff…”

  He cut me off with a guttural shout. “I’m the parent here!”

  What son speaks to his father that way? Mom and Dad had survived a depression and a world war and knew the rest of life was the time to smile. They made my childhood warm, comfortable, and safe. About five o’clock, I’d stand at a kitchen window waiting to see Dad’s truck coming home from work. We’d sit together to watch television—baseball, boxing, wrestling, Gunsmoke. But we didn’t talk much. He was Dad! If he spoke, I said maybe a word in reply. Shouting at him was unthinkable. Where had I failed that my son could attack me—those words were an attack—with such vehemence?

  I slammed down the phone. For years after that moment, Jeff and I never had a meaningful conversation about the boys. The silence was a mistake then, and a mistake later. During the years when Jared had disappeared into the dangers of the road, a father and grandfather might have teamed up to help him; instead, we shared nothing.

  As frustrating and maddening as all that was for a grandfather, it had to be confusing for Jared, eleven years old and ordered to live away from his father and brother. It was one of several unsettling circumstances in his preadolescent years. Following his parents’ divorce, Jared lived with one parent or the other but never with both. He was moved from our property in rural Virginia to Lynn’s high-rise apartment in suburban Washington. Then, when Jared was seventeen, Lynn left for South Carolina. Jared wanted to stay at his familiar high school rather than become a stranger in South Carolina. Reluctantly, he returned to Jeff’s place in Locust Grove and there finished his senior year in school.

  Jacob remembered the uncertainty of living with his mother in three different apartments and with his father in two cities. “As soon as Jared and I made friends somewhere,” he said, “we moved again.”

  During those years, the boys began drinking.

  “We went to Key West for an uncle’s funeral,” Jacob said. “Jared and I drank a pitcher of beer by ourselves.” They were thirteen years old. “And we drank all through junior high. One night, I remember, we were drunk as shit on beer, but as soon as we walked in the house we snapped right to sober for the five minutes until we got out of sight. Ninth, tenth grade, we did a handle of Captain Morgan.” A “handle” is what drinkers call the jug handle on a half-gallon of the captain’s rum.

  Cheryl and I knew nothing of that, nor did we have any reason to suspect the boys were drinking until one day Jared said, “Grandma, I’m an alcoholic.” Cheryl was startled and told me what Jared had said. We let it pass, though, because what could a fifteen-year-old know about being an alcoholic? Maybe a beer now and then, what teenager hasn’t done that
? But an alcoholic? No way.

  We were happy to see Jared on the weekends when he came from the city to the Virginia countryside and his father’s house, next door to ours. Jeff had become a Civil War reenactor, one of thousands of men who re-create the war’s lives and times. Jared loved the costumes. From time to time, he went to war with his dad, first as a drummer boy and later as a cook.

  One of Jared’s favorite reenactments involved trains. It took place in Gordonsville, Virginia. During the war, a house there had been converted to a hospital. Jeff and Jared slept in the yard of that house, along railroad tracks that once brought soldiers to the hospital. Jeff said he never got any sleep by those tracks, but somehow Jared slept well.

  At best, the boys’ senior year was the usual test of teenagers pushing against a father’s boundaries. At worst, it was a year of unrest that put them in a home where they felt unwelcome. Jacob’s memory of that time was harsh. “Dad said we couldn’t live with him after graduation, after we turned eighteen,” he said. “He told me to get my shit out of the house, and if I didn’t, I’d be picking it up out of the front yard. He said, ‘Go join the Marines.’”