Father Knows Less

by Lee Kalcheim

  “Mommy, it’s beautiful. It was worth it.”

  After that moment, if ever I hesitate to try something that scares me, even just a bit, I see Gabe in the blue grotto, filled with wonder, and I forge ahead.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SKETCHES

  Whenever I travel, I take my sketchbook, my watercolors, and my drawing pen. As we wander around cities filled with architectural surprises, I can stop and paint. My family tolerantly stops with me or walks slowly ahead as I sketch. Or the boys take leaves from my pad, extra brushes, and pens and go at it themselves. And often, they have their own sketch pads which double for playing tic tac toe or hangman while on a long train ride. We tend to cram a lot into our days. Seeing as much as we can, and sketching not only slows us down, but encourages us to really see what we’re seeing, whether it’s the twin sixteenth-century churches at the south end of the Piazza di Popolo in Rome or a row of Hausman-era houses in Paris, with their rounded mansard roofs and huge shuttered windows.

  We would sit in the Piazza, on the fountain, dipping our brushes in the water, looking at the churches, painting, drawing, dipping, listening to the water swooshing out of the fountain, and smelling the pastry and coffee from a nearby café. Sometimes, after a frantic sightseeing morning, I’d go off by myself to sketch alone. Or Julia would take an afternoon run, and I’d take the boys back to a favorite spot we’d missed earlier, and now that we had time, we’d do our little paintings. One afternoon in Paris, while we sat picnicking in the Place De Voges, we made drawings of the houses on the lovely brick square where Victor Hugo lived and wrote Les Miserables.

  Sitting in front of the Pantheon in Rome, sketching it, chatting about how oddly this Roman building sits in this Renaissance square, makes just the looking at it an experience. As you sketch, you marvel at its dome, because you realize how hard it is to get the shape of the dome, just right.

  “It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just give a wash of color where the dome is and draw half the dome. It’s just an impression.”

  “Like this?”

  “Yes. And you don’t have to draw every column completely. Three or four and just a dark stroke of, light brown or gray, and then a line or two to indicate the rest. See?”

  “Neat.”

  Looking through the sketchbook when you get home reminds you not only of the thing itself, but of the time you spent sketching it. Drawing it cements it in your mind and recycles the experience of that drawing over and over again.

  Our last trip was to Venice. In November. It can be quite chilly. And we were advised to take boots for the boys, because it was the time of year of the “aqua alta”—the exceptionally high tides that flood many of the streets and squares. This magical city was, because of the weather, devoid of tourists, and it had a somewhat spooky feeling about it. The glorious piazzas, the usually heavily trafficked canals, were empty. Venice in the last decade or so had lost much of its permanent population. Modern Italians found it just too confining to live there.

  The younger generation wanted to be able to drive their fast cars and motorinos down the streets of Rome and Milan and crush together on weekend nights at the grand Piazza Narvona in Rome, or even the smallest town square in Puglia, and smoke and drink and party. Venice was almost too intimidating for that kind of thing. Oh, there were kids. And there were parties, but the old palazzos on the grand canal were the part-time homes of wealthy American and European retirees. The once crowded little apartments in the winding back alleys had seen their occupants off to kitchen staffs in Trieste or the auto plants in Turin. This magnificent city had become a museum. A living museum. The water was high. St Marks square was flooded, and to get around it or across you had had to walk on wooden boardwalks that had been erected. Julia and I had to use them—we didn’t have boots. But we’d gotten the boys shiny yellow ones, and they gleefully walked in the shin-high water, splashing along with many of the other students. The idea that people actually lived in a city where there were no cars and that the taxis were water taxis blew them away.

  “Here comes our bus. Here comes the vaporetta!”

  “Get on the front, so we can see everything.”

  “And get wet from the spray.”

  After a long day of museums and churches under Livio’s guidance, we wandered over to the Piazza St. Marco to have an evening cappuchino. The tide had ebbed, and we could sit at a café without getting our feet wet. The boys zipped up their “up” coats as opposed to their down coats against the evening chill. The warm coffee felt good. A violinist came by serenading.

  “Here, Gabey, give him a few lire.”

  “He’s not that good.”

  “He’s an old man working hard. Give him this.”

  Gabey gave him the lire and thanked him.

  “Grazie.”

  Sam stuck out his hand. “He’s working really hard. Can I give him some too?”

  And he did. And we sat back and enjoyed his old Italian tunes and his grizzly face and his dancing eyes in the fading light of a storied square. I pulled out my sketch pad and paints to catch the Cathedral in that light and realized that, though I had sketched in my travels before, I was not nearly as prolific, nor was it as much fun, as doing it with the boys.

  SCENE: THE APARTMENT IN ROME.

  (Julia is checking her e-mail as the boys and Lee are preparing a big Saturday night dinner)

  JULIA

  Honey, the Kramers are going to be in Rome. They’d like to stay with us.

  LEE

  Who are the Kramers?

  JULIA

  They said they met us at a party last summer at the Borkawitzes.

  LEE

  Who are the Borkawitzes?

  JULIA

  Friends of Nick and Jenny.

  LEE

  People we don’t know, whom we met at a party of other people we don’t know, want to stay with us? Nick and Jenny aren’t coming. And we know them.

  JULIA

  Uh … actually they are.

  LEE

  When are they coming? How come I didn’t know that? Do we have room for them?

  JULIA

  Sure! The kids’ll sleep on the floor.

  SAM

  With their kids. It’ll be fun!

  LEE

  Right.

  (He exits quickly to the kitchen)

  GABE

  Is Dadoo okay?

  JULIA

  Sure, he just needs time to get used to the idea.

  SAM

  When are they coming?

  JULIA

  Tomorrow.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DIECI MINUTI

  When you live in a beautiful city like Rome, which has great food and pretty good weather, people are going to visit you. “Oh we just happen to be coming to Rome in two weeks.” And add to that the fact that you want people to share the place with you. And the boys loved being tour guides. By the time we’d been there a month we’d seen most of the major attractions. Inhaled them in fact. Going to Augustus’s palace, which was our neighborhood palace, was like going to movies. We bought the books with photos of the ruined monuments and the clear plastic opposing pages that had them reconstructed as they were. You folded the plastic page over the photo and eureka—you got to see the Palace, or the Forum or the Coliseum as it had been two thousand years ago.

  Standing on the hill atop Augustus’s palace, the boys imagined themselves rulers of the empire, as they waved their cardboard swords and delighted in the arcane facts about their second home.

  “I’m Augustus. I rule over a Roman Empire that is larger than it will ever be!”

  “I’m Tiberius. I’m living in my villa in Capri, eating fresh figs and prosciutto!”

  Then the two of them ran down the crumbling steps at the top of the outlook and into the oval-shaped garden below that had once been Augustus’s private race track. They pretended to mount their horses and then chased each other around the two millennium-old track, the capes from their costumes f
lying in back of them.

  When visitors came, the boys were the tour guides supreme.

  “This is the only protestant cemetery in Rome. Keats, the poet is buried here. He died in his apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps.”

  “We’ve been there. They burned the bed he died in cause he was contagious. So they replaced it with a fake one. It’s got a great view. Wanna go?”

  Nick and Jenny came with their two girls. And when Julia was out walking one day with their two girls and our two boys, a pair of nuns approached. We’d heard that the population of Italy was decreasing, because, despite the papal edict against it, birth control (and the higher cost of living) had reduced the size of the average Italian family to one and a half children. And here comes Julia walking toward the nuns with four kids. As the Nuns approached, they burst into applause and shouted “Brava!”

  My sister and brother-in-law, Anne and Jerry, arrived about half-way through our stay. One Saturday morning, while Anne went to find an Italian beauty parlor to have her hair done, Jerry volunteered to join us as we set out on a new adventure. We were going to walk out the Apian way to the catacombs. We were going to walk out the famous Apian Way! It almost gave us the giggles. To be casually saying, “… Well, you take the Apian way to Broadway and hang a left.” The idea that a street with this famously ancient moniker was still being used was thrilling. Sure there was a bus to take us out to the catacombs, but we were going to walk the Apian way! Ta taaaaa! So the four of us and undaunted Jerry, an ex-marathoner past his seventieth year, set out. We walked through the gate in the old Roman wall and on out “the way.” The road begins with cobblestones underfoot and peach-colored little villas flanking it, but soon it no more looks like the Apian Way than any typical road to suburbia. It was a lovely day, and as we now began to see more and more open fields and farmhouses, we wondered, just how far this walk was going to be. The guidebook said it was walking distance. A police car was parked along the road. Two polizia were smoking and talking on their cell phones. We’d better hurry. In a moment they’d put on their flashing light, hold up their signal emergency flag, put on their sirens and zoom off … to lunch. You could always tell when the polizia were on a serious mission like … going to lunch. That’s when the emergency flags were held out the window. We approached. “Che distanza il catacombs?” “Ah … non tropo … dieci minuti.” Oh great…only ten more minutes. No problem. Off we went. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes later, no catacombs! I was beginning to be annoyed. Well, in truth, I was already annoyed, but I now had the courage, or the bad grace, to voice it. “Can’t the damned guide books tell you the truth?” or a little more personal, “Who told you this was a short walk from town?” Or real pain in the ass guilt-making, “I never liked graveyards, why do I want to go to one underground? I told you we should have gone to the beach!” Saved—another police car. We waved. He stopped. We approached. “Dove’ il catacombs?” The policeman, munching on his roast pepper and eggplant sandwich, (It looked delicious. Where do we get one of those?) pointed the direction we were going, “Diretto. Dieci Minuti!”

  “Well, we are going the right direction. It’s a shame we didn’t bring our sleeping bags.” Cold stare from wife. Pitiful looks from children. Positive vibes from Jerry, “Hey it’s a nice day. Let’s go!” Ok, at least we were going the right direction. Unless … don’t even think it. But, it was still ten minutes away. Okay, we can do that. I can do that. Ten minutes later. More fields. Farms. A little village. We stopped for some water. A lemonade. We asked the bar owner the same question. “Ah! Si. Dieci Minuti.”

  I flipped. The damned catacombs couldn’t be ten minutes from everywhere! Let’s take a cab. Anybody seen a cab? There are buses. I’ve seen buses. I haven’t seen any bus stops but … Everyone just started walking as I stood there in front of the bar protesting. It’s no fun protesting if everyone is walking away. Someone has to listen. I looked at the bar owner and asked in my worst Italian, “Ami il catacombs?” (Do you like the catacombs?) He cocked his head, and said “Non so. Non les vedo” (I don’t know. I haven’t seen them.) The man lived ten minutes away and he’d never seen them. What was I doing schlepping to them? I ran after the group to inform them that one of the natives hadn’t been interested enough to visit his neighborhood catacomb and out of the dust, a police car came hurtling by and we waved and shouted. He stopped. “Si?” “Il Catacombs?” “Dieci Minuti!” We all repeated in unison with him.

  A half hour later we arrived. The walk had taken us over two hours. Each time we stopped it was only ten minutes from where we were. How was that possible? Boing! Of course, we realized … we were talking to Italian policeman. They didn’t walk! They didn’t walk anywhere! The drove. And they drove like bats out of hell. It took them ten minutes! It would take them ten minutes to drive to Venice for God’s sake!

  The boys laughed uncontrollably. Jerry, whose infectious laugh is gigantic, joined in. My wife too. And then … I could not help myself. I could crab no longer. It was absurd. It was hysterically absurd. My seven-year-old sons had walked for two hours without one complaint. While the boys were laughing at the idiosyncrasies of the Italian cops, I was moaning and bitching. They had found a way to make the journey work, not only in spite of the messed up instructions, but because of them.

  Ever after, when we asked directions and the reply stated that where we were going was not very far. we’d all nod our heads and intone, “Dieci minuti!”

  “Dieci Minuti” has now become a kind of code phrase in the family for “always see the information you get in the context of who is giving it!” and a punch line whenever someone tells us something we don’t quite believe. When George W. Bush was asked at a press conference how long he expected we would be in Iraq and replied, “Until we’ve won” we shouted back … “Dieci Minuti!”

  SCENE: STREET, GREENWICH VILLAGE, NEW YORK

  (Samuel, Gabriel, and Lee are walking back to the apartment after violin class.)

  LEE

  Y’know, I loved living in Rome, but what I love about New York? It’s still a melting pot. Korean fruit stands. Pakistani news stands. Greek coffee shops. Russian cab drivers.

  SAM

  And us! Natives.

  LEE

  That’s right. You were born here. In Roosevelt hospital. Know what they say is the rarest form of life?

  SAM, GABE

  What?

  LEE

  A native in Florida.

  SAM

  Florida is ugly. It’s all new. And boring. Remember when we visited Aunt Anna in Florida?

  GABE

  She was born in Czechoslovakia.

  SAM

  Right.

  GABE

  She survived the holocaust.

  SAM

  She had an amazing life.

  LEE

  Yes, she did.

  SAM

  So why would she move to Florida?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE HOOD

  Many years ago, before I had kids, when I was a between-marriages-bachelor, I left my beloved skylighted studio because they raised the rent to an intolerable $240.00 a month. I bought a six room co-op across the street. I was single. Why did I need six rooms? Maybe two rooms for me and four for my dirty laundry? I was approaching my fortieth birthday. I was putting the cart before the horse. I was probably saying to myself, “Okay, you don’t have a wife. You don’t have kids. At least get a place to put ’em when you grow up!”

  But, buying a house is scary. Buying a house makes you instantly a grownup. Overhead! You have to meet a mortgage. Ergo you have to earn a certain amount of money. Yikes. The freelance happy-go-lucky life is over. I remember the first time I bought a house, a little house in Connecticut, I panicked. I asked my lawyer father for advice. “Should I go through with this? What happens if I can’t make the payments?” He was terrific. He said, “So, you lose the house.” What a surprise. My father was usually Mr. Cautious. And now, like him, I only feel secure when I
am financially secure. I realized quite soon that the secret of a happy life was: low overhead! My good friend Danny Klein says the secret of a happy life is: low expectations. Maybe it’s both. And being a little bit lucky.

  And we were very lucky. When we moved back from Rome, Julia had decided she wanted to start her own literary agency in New York. She had paved the way for this when we lived in L.A., sitting in on informal writers’ sessions, where the authors would read pieces they were working on and elicit feedback. Julia’s critiques were praised by the writers and excited her about the possibility of doing it further. Back in New York, she interviewed with various literary agencies and was offered several jobs—working on commission. But her desire to be available to pick up the boys after school, and her fabulous chutzpah, “I don’t need to work for them on commission. I can learn this business and do it myself!” inspired her to open her own agency. There was a terrific elementary school two blocks away from the apartment and her office. It was all happening in our little neighborhood. We were damned lucky. Julia had found her calling, and I had gone for that too big apartment twenty years back—that we’d now all call home.