When my mother was dying, my father proposed to her again. My aunt Marie told me this coming from my mother’s room where she lay struggling for breath. My aunt blew her nose in a tissue and smiled through tears: “Your mother said yes.” I have no business dismissing that as sentimentality, nor is it any of my business what either of my parents said. And yet, if my mother had had no choice years earlier, she certainly didn’t have one then. And there is always, intrusively and insistently, the thought that she had in fact already made her choice, moving smoke by smoke, pack by pack of Chesterfields, toward the only escape available to her. And even if she were still hurt and angry, wounded and furious, she could not have refused my father the consolation he was seeking; she didn’t have it in her.
And neither do I. I am also my mother’s son.
“It’s a great relief,” my father says, rising from the table and reaching for his footed aluminum cane, “a great relief to me to get that off my chest.” The meeting is over. Joe and I sit there at the table and watch him make his way slowly into the living room to his recliner. He reaches for the remote and in a moment the TV comes on, loud enough to feel it through the floor.
I have a memory of a particular evening that has been with me so long it’s become a little story. I would have been about six, I believe, having just started school. I think that’s right because closely associated with this memory is the image of a flat, sheet-metal mannequin of a traffic cop that was rolled on its round base into the middle of the crosswalk outside St. Francis of Assisi School. Janus-like, he was painted on both sides with a whistle in his mouth and a white-gloved hand raised in the gesture STOP. Just after the final bell in the morning, two eighth-grade boys would fetch him and roll him back to the curb until the afternoon. But it is my father’s hand I recall, abruptly raised in that gesture: STOP.
Bedtime was ritualized, a snack of little saltine peanut-butter sandwiches washed down with milk under my mother’s supervision, my brother Bobby and I poking and stalling, never tired, never ready for bed, and brushing our teeth at the kitchen sink before we ran into the living room to say good night to our father.
I can’t remember whether Bobby ran ahead of me to kiss our father good night or if I was first. My mother isn’t part of this memory, either. In the little story, self-enclosed and still radiating bewilderment more than half a century later, I ran into the room as always to kiss my father’s rough and stubbled cheek and say, “I love you. Good night, Daddy!” the words themselves a ritual, when suddenly his hand comes up: STOP. I can still see that hand, big as my whole face, in the timeless moment before it shifts and invites, requires, a handshake instead of a kiss, a quick pump up and down and a little squeeze before letting go. “Good night, son.”
The memory ends there; everything else is outside its frame. I don’t understand. I’m stunned by this break in the routine and by something more that I have not fully plumbed even now, a father and grandfather, a son orphaned in my sixtieth year.
My father cursed at just about everything he couldn’t get to do his will: nails he couldn’t pull with a claw hammer, screws and nuts too small for his fingers, lugnuts the garage had tightened with an air gun, all were “this fuckin’ thing!” Goddamnits abounded. An occasional “cocksucker” for emphasis. There was nothing cool about my father, a man of many exasperations with a vocabulary to match. He wanted life to be otherwise, but he knew full well that life would never change. I suspect he wished that he were different, better, gentler; he seemed to blame himself for being the man he was: suffering, shattered, at a loss, and insufficient.
If I were to portray my father solely as a man who struggled to stretch the few dollars he could make in order to meet his family’s needs, that would be a true, as well as familiar, story told in tribute to a steadfast and quietly heroic man. But if I also include his parallel struggle, to stretch the few inadequate ideas he was given, as a working man, with which to meet his family’s needs for love, meaning, and justice, it is less comfortable, but no less true, no less crucial to an accurate portrayal of his life.
My brothers’ illnesses, their hopelessness and progressive debilitation, required some metaphysical context; if not an explanation, then significance at least, and I think the Catholic focus—at least in those days—on the redemptive nature of suffering, may be the key to understanding my parents’ inner life. My mother’s conversion, at first mere convenience, allowing my parents to marry at Sacred Heart Church, no doubt became deeper and more real as life dealt the cards, the unholy cards, one by one, and mercilessly. It seems proof, at least to me, of the utility of her faith, its assistance in keeping some kind of hope alive in order to get through the days. Her faith, however, the practice of it, anyway, died with my brothers. It was no longer necessary. The same was true for my father, who had had a lifetime of Catholic understandings to slough.
Not long before he died, we were sitting in the living room talking about my mother. I said that I thought she had always felt guilty despite herself because the muscular dystrophy that killed my brothers is a genetic disease that travels in the maternal bloodline. My father was silent for a long time. Sometimes in our conversations he would fall silent like this. I’d come to expect and accommodate it. If I pressed on he might become agitated. Sometimes he would fall asleep, his chin on his chest, somewhere midway in the conversation. Other times he would bite his lower lip, a thoughtful glower on his features, then point the remote and turn on the TV. So I stood and went into the kitchen for a snack.
When I returned a few minutes later, I could see he was struggling, unsuccessfully, to hide his tears. “You know for a long time I believed it was my fault. It was punishment.” I wanted to ask for what, but that’s not how our give-and-take ever went; if he was going to tell me, he would. So I said it wasn’t anybody’s fault. “I don’t believe it anymore. Not really. I don’t really believe it. But they always said it was a mortal sin. So I believed I must have done something to damage my sperm. I jerked off too much. When I was a kid. And when I was in the army. My seed was no good. It was punishment.”
It was hard to know how to react to his tears because I didn’t know if he was feeling punished still, or if he was crying for himself for having ever been oppressed by such absurdity. I sat there with my bag of chips and can of soda, attending him.
“Still, you can’t help it,” my father said, his thumb and forefinger wiping tears from both eyes. “You feel responsible. You’re the parent. You can’t help it.”
It’s January 2007 and I’m in bed with pneumonia. Or maybe it was a back injury I sustained stupidly shoveling snow after weeks in bed with pneumonia. There was a knock at the bedroom door, and I looked up from my reading at a tall, handsome young man, Jamaican, black, with dreadlocks and a gentle but frightened look on his face. Although I already knew who he was, had been told he was coming, he introduced himself: Damion Smith. I beckoned him in, shook his hand, and gestured for him to sit at the foot of the bed, the only place available. I propped myself up on my pillows and tried to convey a sense of ease I wasn’t feeling. I admired him. It took courage for a twenty-four-year-old black man to place himself in this scene. I don’t recall precisely how the conversation unfolded, but he told me that he wanted me to know that he wasn’t going to run away, that he wanted to do the right thing. (Later, I’d find out that several members of his family wanted to spirit him back to Jamaica, afraid that “that white girl’s father” would kill him.)
I asked questions to try to get to know him and put him at ease. He told me about growing up in Jamaica with his father’s family and being sent here to live with his mother when he was thirteen. I found out he wanted to write songs—hip-hop, reggae—and perform. We talked about how important it is to have an art in your life, an art that sustains you, that you continually work to perfect, no matter what else you have to do to get by. I probably defaulted to the professor talking to one of his students with the intention of being encouraging. “That’s how you keep you
r soul alive,” I said. I wince when I think of that now, my bedridden Polonius act.
At the same time, it was impossible not to grasp the clichéd nature of the situation: young man meeting his beloved’s father, hoping for his blessing (though not exactly asking for her hand—absurdly late for that!). That may even be why the conversation ranged so far, touching upon his music, my writing, basketball, food. It’s amazing to think back on it: I can only conclude we were terrified of each other.
Resisting the script seems also to have meant refusing to ask certain questions, like “Do you have a job? How exactly do you see yourself involved? Have you and Veronica talked about marriage?” (I certainly hoped not. They barely knew each other. There would be a time for that if their hearts took them there.)
On the immediate question of whether Veronica should go on and have the baby, Damion was clear: “I don’t go for that. For abortion. I don’t go for that.” It was a position I could respect, but I didn’t know what lay behind it. His mother and stepfather were Seventh-Day Adventists, I knew; was he complying with religious doctrine? Was he trying, as I was, to fathom some new radiance already dawning, unexpectedly, in his life? I only hoped that he wasn’t trying to pressure Veronica into having the baby. “I can respect that,” I said. “Just remember it’s up to her. It’s her decision.” And I respected him as well for neither agreeing with me nor arguing, although his sigh and frown suggested he not only disagreed but was disappointed since we seemed to agree on so much else. He seemed unable to understand why I would offer up such liberal nonsense when I had the chance to become a grandfather, although, very possibly, that was my puzzlement, not his.
Kathi and I had of course been talking about the whole situation. I knew that it was different for her; she grasped it from a different angle. Veronica’s first guess about her reaction was mainly correct, but Kathi had also felt an unexpected thrill, and she is a woman honest enough, emotionally true to herself, to admit it. “It wouldn’t be so bad, you know, having a little baby in the house again!” Hokey or not, when we embraced then, I felt a bright convergence of some sort, a physical thrill that passed from chest to chest, augmenting what each of us felt with the other’s unexpected delight, a commingling that created a new emotional reality that was not to be denied. For Kathi, a feminist professor at a women’s college as well as Veronica’s mother, pregnancy seemed to threaten our promising daughter’s ascent, her ambitions, satisfactions, the contributions she would make in her profession. It was an old and tragic story, a societal trap that birth control had mostly rendered obsolete and in which the right to an abortion would ensure that a young woman remained in control of her destiny.
As for me, I have to admit to some resentment. I couldn’t imagine how we could accommodate a child in our household. We had been thinking of moving. I had been looking forward to time with just Kathi, our parenting days over, the house our own.
And yet there was this undeniable excitement; maybe it was merely the exhilaration that comes when a well-ordered life suddenly goes off the rails, the feeling that accompanies the knowledge that life is about to change. It was hard not to see it in binary terms, two opposing forces that could be assigned the hero or villain role depending on your point of view. As Veronica said sometime not long after that, “There’s no point in talking about it anymore. All your friends think I should get an abortion, and all my girlfriends want me to have the baby. I don’t need any more talking with or talking to!”
Our ambivalence didn’t make it easy for her while she tried to decide. On one occasion, after a conversation with a friend who conjured a vision I had suppressed until then, a specter I had sealed away, of Veronica alone in a housing project with several babies by different fathers, subsisting on welfare checks, I completely went to pieces.
We had fallen into a kind of pattern in which, on a daily basis, Kathi and I would try to assess where Veronica was in her decision process, then talk about it at night in bed before sleep, with books neither of us could concentrate on tented on our chests. I believed that if Veronica chose to have the baby, we would welcome the child, lovingly and joyfully, and help her, and Damion if he remained involved, and I kept telling her that, even as I pointed out that she could always have a baby later, when she was better prepared for it, when her studies were finished, when she was in a stable relationship, when it would cost her less. She was the first to get angry: “No! You can’t have it both ways, Daddy! You can’t say this and then say that. At least be honest about what you want. You’re making me crazy!”
That night our tense arguing ended with my raging and roaring at her that she was not facing up to reality, that she was about to ruin her life. Even as I destroyed the image of the warm, calm paternal advisor I had wanted to be, I knew that I’d allowed my worst fears to assume control of my behavior. It took several days for Veronica to accept my apology.
“But why didn’t she call me? I mean, I’m very happy for her, but what I can’t figure out is why you’re the one telling me this. Is everything all right?” Veronica was his only granddaughter and he doted on her.
“Well, I guess she wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it.”
“Why should she care what I feel about it? I just want her to be happy. Is she happy?”
“I think so.”
“You think so? She’s having a baby and you think she’s happy?”
“It’s complicated. I think she didn’t know if you’d approve. I mean, first of all, she’s not married.”
“Oh hell, that don’t matter no more. Not these days.”
“And I guess because the father is Jamaican. He’s black.”
“Well, what difference does that make? For God’s sake, you were never raised like that!”
I almost dropped the phone.
The first blow to my father’s assurance that he still had what he called “a long ways to go” came with the news of his brother Francis’s death in his early eighties. My father said, perhaps looking for an explanation, since their three older siblings were all healthy and strong and well into their nineties, “He was a bitter man. I don’t know what happened to him, but he became a bitter man. I don’t know. Did he strike you that way?”
“Well, he was a POW, after all. I don’t think the Nazis treated their prisoners very well. Who knows what happened to him?” I also didn’t think that his bitterness, whatever its source, accounted for his dying; there were plenty of bitter nonagenarians in the world.
“The only thing he ever told me about that was how, whenever a new commander took over the camp, he had to kneel down and pray in front of him. He had to say the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be, with the translator there, I guess, to prove he wasn’t Jewish. Francis had the Hoffman hair and he was pretty dark and Hoffman is a Jewish name. Except for that, I never heard him complain about it. But I guess that’s not the kind of thing you talk about.”
That’s always been a long list in my family: “Not the Kind of Thing You Talk About.” On it is the disappearance of Francis’s daughter, Joanne. My cousin Joanne was my first love. Our babysitter, she made my brother Bobby and me laugh, think, wonder, and question. When we were small, before Bobby weakened and needed braces and then a wheelchair, she babysat when my parents went out to play pinochle or canasta with the neighbors. She always brought her portable record player that looked like a plaid suitcase and the latest 45s, and she danced and sang along with the Platters, Fats Domino, and Elvis. Soon we were doing it too, not dancing exactly but throwing ourselves around, goofy, laughing, just between imitation and mockery, weirdly uncomfortable but deeply pleasurable. We kept catching each other’s eye as if to say we knew how weird this was but it was fun so who cares? I was too young to have a name for the charged erotic atmosphere of my cousin’s innocent sixteen-year-old rapture, but I’m sure that even as a seven-year-old I took more than aesthetic pleasure in Joanne’s thrilling femininity. Especially the night we sat at the kitchen table with her while she painted her f
ingernails: I had only ever seen my mother perform this ritual, with its alarming but pleasant smell, its fierce concentration, its thorough transformation of utility to beauty. If she was not already, or not quite, my cousin Joanne was becoming, joyously and giddily, a woman.
We each got a pinky, Bobby first. As she finished painting her thumb, Joanne showed us how to use the lip of the tiny bottle to remove extra paint and how to smoothly apply the bright red polish evenly, starting at the cuticle. I watched Bobby and I thought I could do better. I wanted to be better than Bobby at everything; I think that as his older brother I thought it was my job. Until soon after, when he began falling down, too weak to get up again, and I tried not to be.
I took a lesson here, I believe, from my father, who played card games and board games with us and only sometimes won. I began to suspect that if my love for my brother meant anything more than sleeping under the same roof (and in different rooms now that he was ill and in a wheelchair), then the exuberance of boyhood and adolescence would have to be tamped down somewhat, just as I would have to sit or kneel to talk to him.
But of course Joanne wouldn’t set us against each other by playing favorite. I don’t recall which of us had the idea to paint her toes, but she nixed that. I imagine we’d already done a sloppy job on her pinkies.
My mother called Joanne a tomboy, a word that I couldn’t quite grasp because it seemed like a compound, and even if it meant a girl who was like a boy, I couldn’t figure how the “tom” got in there. Joanne was no stranger to a baseball glove, and liked to play catch with us in the backyard, bringing her own mitt. Still, “like a boy” she wasn’t.
And then she just stopped coming. If our parents were going out—usually to a neighbor’s house or to my Aunt Kitty and Uncle Forrest’s house for pinochle and beer— Bobby and I would jump up and down and yell, “Joanne! Joanne!” but it was always one of my other cousins, one of Aunt Kitty’s daughters, who came to babysit. It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy our cousins Annmarie or Maryann, it’s more that we missed Joanne, and no one gave us any reason why she no longer came over to “mind” us or even visit. Our other cousins, Aunt Kitty’s daughters, were sweet enough but would never wrestle or play catch with us.
Love and Fury Page 3
