Father Knows Less

by Lee Kalcheim

  “Sono Letizia.”

  “Letizia?”

  “Si. You are with the college, yes?”

  “Yes, I’m a professor. I’m teaching playwriting.”

  “Italian playwriting?”

  “No. Just … playwriting. In English. I’m American.”

  “I don’t … I am not seeing many plays. But when I do see them, I love to go. Do you know Pirandello?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love Pirandello.”

  “Yes, he’s … wonderful.”

  “Do you write like Pirandello?”

  “No. Nobody writes like Pirandello. That’s why he’s Pirandello.”

  She told me she was studying to be a nurse and working at the college for room and board. I asked her, “How long do you have to study to be a nurse?”

  “Two more years.”

  “It’s a wonderful thing to be. I … I’m a writer. It’s fun to write, but I can’t say that I do much for the world.”

  “Oh yes. Writers are very important. More important than nurses.”

  “I don’t think so. When I’m in the hospital, I want a nurse, not a writer.”

  Samuel and Gabriel had always admired how easily I met new people. Went up to strangers and struck up a conversation. It was especially easy in Italy. Hanging out in cafés. Italians love to talk and are all patient and indulgent with your awkward Italian. Julia had met a couple from San Francisco, Alan and Diane, who had moved to Rome, and Julia ended up running with Alan and later, “repping” him as a writer. Our sons became friendly with theirs. But our ease with strangers did not rub off on the boys.

  The following year, in October of ’98, Letizia came to stay with us in New York for three months. I got her some volunteer work at St. Luke’s Hospital. Then enrolled her in an English language course. She came home every night with her vocabulary list filled with useful idiomatic expressions so she’d sound really American. One problem. The expressions were from the 1940s.

  “What means “bit the dust?”

  “Oh, that’s bite the dust. That’s an expression that means ‘to die.’ But no one uses that anymore. It’s from old detective movies, “He bit the dust.”

  “Si. Si … What means, “You are the ‘cat’s meow’?”

  What time warp did her text book come from? When she arrived, the Yanks were in the world series, and the boys immediately took to her. Taught her baseball. Soon she had her favorite player. “Je-ter. Go Je-ter!” The boys, embraced her, and she became part of the family. They got her to join them trick or treating at Halloween, dressed up in a nurses outfit with long fangs as “Monster Nurse.” And reveled in introducing her to an over-the-top American Christmas. Her infectiousness had opened them up to the joys of diving into a new friendship. And they gave back in spades. So that, ten years later, when we took a trip to southern Italy, to Taranto, to the small town of Pulsano to meet her family, we were part of a dramatic incident.

  We met Letizia and her new husband, Paolo, and drove down to Pulsano from Bari. Pulsano is a small town in the Puglia area of the Italian boot. No one there would speak English. This was a challenge for the boys, who prepared themselves on the drive by studying an Italian textbook and barraging us with questions about how to say this or that. On the trip from Bari to her childhood home, Letizia told me about her family, especially her father, who was a builder but had, as young man, wanted to be a musician. A clarinetist. And he was good. But his father did not want him to be a musician, and so her dad put down the clarinet, fifty years ago, and had not played it since. We were welcomed at her family’s house and feted with an endless home-cooked Italian meal, including home-made wine. (Strong!) And after the meal, Sam took out his violin and started riffing. Letizia’s brother-in-law took out his guitar and joined him. We watched as they merrily floated from song to song when suddenly Letizia’s father burst into the room—playing his clarinet! He joined in with them. He played with them. He was playing for the first time in fifty years. We laughed. We cried.

  Sam and Gabe had learned from us the joys of meeting strangers and making them into friends, and now, thrown into a household of strangers, they were not afraid to jump in and try their rudimentary Italian to communicate with all of Letizia’s family. And because of Sam’s impulsiveness, jumping in and playing with these strangers, he had lured Letizia’s dad out of his fifty-year funk and back to the joyous pleasure he had abandoned when he was a boy.

  The boys were going to leave us in the fall. Off to Chicago—to a world of strangers. Would they carry this Italian spirit with them and embrace the new place and the new people? Could they improvise, even without their fiddles, and find another home away from home?

  We would soon find out.

  SCENE: THE BEDROOM OF THE NEW YORK APARTMENT.

  (Lee and Julia are getting ready for bed)

  JULIA

  I’m worried about you.

  LEE

  Oh?

  JULIA

  I think you’re going to miss the boys more than I will.

  LEE

  That’s possible.

  JULIA

  I think you’re going to be a basket case.

  LEE

  You could be right.

  JULIA

  I hope you’ll be okay, because … because

  (she is suddenly choking up)

  I’m really, really, really, going to miss them.

  (She bursts into tears. Huge sobs. Lee puts his arms around her and holds her as Sam enters the bedroom)

  SAM

  Is mommy okay?

  LEE

  She’s fine. She’s just worried about me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  SEPARATION AGREEMENT

  You hear a lot about “the empty nest.” How your kids leaving home either devastates you or, surprisingly, has little effect. Or becomes a blessing of silence and self-indulgence.

  After our boys left for college in September, we were in the toilet. It was too quiet. What could we indulge ourselves in if we were used to doing everything with our kids? Dare we do something … just together? Didn’t we do that before they arrived? Didn’t we have fun without them? Sure. So … what’s the problem?

  We were hoist with our own petard. We had schooled our children, particularly around the dinner table, in the art of merciless self-expression. Tell us what you think. I admit that this would get out of hand a lot. We interrupted each other at will in an effort to express our opinions. I had grown up with vocal relatives to such an extent that, when at a holiday dinner, everyone was talking at once, my mother would shout out her inimitable “Take a number”! And if I dared to remonstrate with one of the boys for interrupting me, I would be countered with, “Well you do it all the time!” Trumped. It’s tough to countermand a bad example you set for your kids. Even with such lame lines as, “The fact that it annoys you when I do it should teach you that you shouldn’t do it!” Right.

  You get the picture. Dinners, trips in the car, anywhere where we were bunched together and talking was the activity of the moment, the air was charged. It was often thrilling. Often exhausting. Fights broke out. The dog ran for cover. I stormed away from the table. Julia left to play the piano for solace. The boys often took a moralistic stand about things. Hurling invectives at us if we didn’t respond correctly. There were times it seemed that they had the morals of Christ and the mouth of Lenny Bruce. But every night, every night we gathered for dinner. We lit candles. We had a real meal. We all liked to cook. I cooked more often than not, but Julia is a much more imaginative cook. I tended to fall back on old standbys.

  “Oregano chicken again?”

  Whoever cooked was intimidated because everyone was a bloody expert on food! Once, I was making dinner and Samuel wandered into the kitchen and came up to me at the stove and asked, “What are we having for dinner?”

  “Scallops,” I replied.

  He nodded and said, “And what are you doing with them?”

  Tough act. Food. Ta
lk. Tough act. You’d think we’d look forward to their departure, so we could give our brains and our emotions a rest. We kind of did. But kind of, really, truly, didn’t.

  We drove a rented van crammed with stuff to the Chicago. We had been forewarned by a friend whose daughter had attended Chicago, that the separation ceremony would be tearjerker. We immersed ourselves in the details of moving the boys into their new dorm … a funky old hotel overlooking the lake. We helped them unpack and put up with repeated, “Mom, Dadoo, we can do that ourselves.” We just wanted to keep busy before we would have to leave them. Finally, the scheduled welcoming ceremony at the soaring Rockefeller Chapel. A large banner hung across the front. “Class of ’12” Class of ’12? I remembered when I used to work at my college reunion weekends and the class of ’12—1912—would parade by with a dozen old geezers holding up placards and wearing straw hats. I was older now than they were then. And my sons would graduate a hundred years after them. Life moved much too quickly. We sat, restlessly, looking at the makeup of other students. A dark, beautiful girl sat next to me. “Where are you from?”

  “India. Mumbai.”

  “Why have you come all the way to Chicago?”

  “I had to decide between Princeton and the University of Chicago, and I just thought the education here would be more rigorous.”

  Her friend, her new friend from Indonesia nodded in agreement. We listened to the welcoming speeches. History-of-the-college speeches. All delaying the inevitable, and finally the organ blared at the ceremony’s end, and we all walked out of the chapel and down the long walk to the college gate. At the gate a band of bagpipers played. Bagpipes thrill me and make me cry whenever I hear them. I had them accompany me and my best man to the altar at my wedding. This wasn’t fair! The school was not making it easy for Julia and me to remain stoic. The boys kissed us both, Julia burst into tears, and the boys turned and walked to the college gate. Then, they stopped and turned back and waved to us, and I joined my wife and bawled. Upper classmen at the ready rushed up to us with boxes of Kleenex.

  Well that would be the worst of it. The leaving is always the worst. It would be easy riding from here.

  We flew home and started having meals alone. Together. It might as well have been alone. It was too damned quiet. And we couldn’t call them. We’d given the boys cell phones against their will. Strident luddites and ardent nonconformists, they didn’t want to be one of those kids who was glued to his cell phone.

  “You know, when we go away to school, we’re not going to call you every day on the cell phone like Melanie does to her mom.”

  “We don’t even want the cell phones!”

  “We’ll write to you. Letters. Longhand. What’s the point of going away, if you’re going to babble on the phone everyday?”

  “You could e-mail us,” Julia interjected.

  “Letters!” Sam insisted, “Like Henry James. Didn’t you write letters, Dadoo?”

  “Yes. Of course. With a quill pen.”

  They were getting a nineteenth-century education. They were damned well going to communicate in the spirit of that late, great era.

  Because I was used to working alone in the apartment, writing there, being alone there most of the day, the boys absence didn’t hit that hard. Only at dinner, when the hyped-up conversation about what was going on in the world was missing, did it seem off. But Julia felt it strongly. The vacuum. Her boys were gone. My boys were gone too. But her boys were gone. I think back to my experience being rejected by the boys in their cribs when I came to them and they said “I want mommy.” Mommies have a special hold. Daddies can love their kids, but they were physically attached to Mommy for nine months. They came from mommy, and daddies simply cannot replace that relationship. It’s Okay. Except when it’s not. But no, it really is Okay. I felt that way about my mom. And I’m overjoyed that my boys feel the same way about theirs.

  The downside of course is that Mommy hurts more when they leave. Or at least hurts longer. At least this Mommy. We wrote. On paper and by snail mail. And they wrote. Long, sometimes indecipherable, letters. But full of wonderful insights about this new experience. Not just college, but being away from home for the first time. For this long a time. This was a big deal. And Samuel, who was much more open emotionally, open in his letters, admitted that it was odd. It was difficult, but he knew it was important to have the experience. He reveled in the view from his room of lake Michigan and the spires of Chicago beyond. His honors calculus class was hard. Really hard. Even for him. But he liked the challenge. Gabe’s accelerated Latin class left him breathless as he tried playing catch-up with all the other kids in class, who’d had several years of Latin in private schools. But he loved it. And both had auditioned for the school orchestra and gotten in. First violin. Good news. Bad news? They hadn’t really had enough sight-reading training and were suddenly playing stuff that was way over their heads.

  “What do you do if you can’t play something?”

  “We just keep moving the bow in time with the rhythm and hit the notes we can.”

  “You fake it?”

  “Yeah. But … we aren’t alone.”

  “Why did they let you in the orchestra?”

  “Our tone is really good. It impressed her. I had trouble with the fast passages, but she (the conductor) said, ‘It’s okay. You can learn those.’”

  They had checkbooks, and cell phones, and debit cards—all things they’d never used before. We had sheltered them from the real world, and now they were faking it in the first violin section of the University of Chicago orchestra.

  On-the-job training. The best!

  And nothing prepares you for the empty nest thing. It’s also on-the-job training. And little by little you get used to the perks. Now, neither of my kids comes into the room while I’m watching CNN or MSNBC and says, “What are you watching that crap for? You read The Times. What more do you need?”

  No one comes into the living room as I’m about to watch the last few innings of a Yankee game and says, “I’ve got to practice.”

  “Can’t you practice in your room?”

  “Come on dad, it’s just a Yankee Game.”

  “We have other rooms beside this one. This is the only one I can watch the ball game in.”

  “This is the best room to play in. It’s … you know … It’s nicer to play in a big room.”

  “But the game is only on in this room.”

  “You watch too many games.”

  “I rarely watch a game. This is a good. It’s a pitchers’ duel.”

  I get a look as he pulls out his violin. I give in. I go in the kitchen and turn on the radio and call up the sweet rationalization that has always comforted me. I really do prefer listening to games on the radio. Like I did when I was a kid. It has a warm, sentimental feeling for me. Ballgames on the radio.

  Right.

  These days, I find myself rationalizing less about little things and more about big ones. I tell myself that having the boys away is a learning experience. I mean for me. I spent a helluva long time avoiding marriage and family. I had reveled in being alone. But my life with my family has been the happiest years of my life and to see the sunny side of being alone again was difficult. But maybe this was my ultimate learning experience. I had learned more from my kids I think than they ever learned from me. I remember my father telling me a story when I sought his advice when I was on the verge of getting married the first time. I was at sixes and sevens about going through with it and he said, “There’s a guy, Sidney. I play golf with him now and then. Never got married. He just has this very insular life. And he has to have everything just the way he wants it. He never lived with anybody, so he never had to compromise. And, frankly he’s one big pain in the ass.”

  I’d like to tell you that marriage and family have prevented me from becoming an insular pain in the ass. OK, so I’m not insular. Come on. You live long enough you get set in your ways, married, single, or any weird lifestyle you choose. But k
ids … kids have strong wills. And though they are too young to be set in their ways, they are strong in their ways. Of course, they pick it up from their folks. Having two strong-willed parents doesn’t hurt. But along with the time … the actual hours that it takes to bring up kids and therefore the actual hours that you spend not taking care of yourself (being insular) there is the giving up of … space … as we call it. You give up space. You give up ways that you would be set in if some kid didn’t test you.

  You do things you wouldn’t do … I don’t know…ski. I’m not a skier. I look stupid going fast downhill on those two narrow pieces of plastic. And I’m afraid I’m going to die. And look stupid doing it. I do like cross-country skiing, though. It’s more like sliding along in bedroom slippers … in freezing weather. But I’ve often been cajoled into going out on a wintry afternoon to be with them. And I loved it. Being cajoled out of laziness keeps you alive. And allowing yourself to be cajoled is a learning experience. There is a moment, a nanosecond, when you think, “I really don’t wanna get up off this couch, but I know I’ll enjoy the skiing if I go, and I know it’s good for me, but I really don’t wanna get off this couch, but we’d all have a great time, and I’d regret missing it, but despite that, I really don’t wanna get off this couch.”

  “We’ll stop at that place for hot chocolate after.”

  “OK … Let’s go!”

  And afterwards, exhilarated, you know that, but for the insistence of your kids, you would not have gone. And it makes you more available to life. To the next time, not just one of your kids, but anyone, asks you to get up off the couch and do something.

  Kids naturally say “yes” to stuff. And as you get older you “naturally” say “no.” And you start to atrophy.

  Doing stuff is what life is all about. And kids make you do it.

  But here’s the most important thing I learned from my kids: Giving in to them does not make you a wimp. I was never going to be a Marine-drill-sergeant parent. I’d hoped to be tougher in gentler ways. Making them clean up their room. Making them get up on time without prodding, and so forth. Okay, I failed at that. But having your way just because you’re the parent is dumb. Sometimes kids know more than you do. Not life experience more. Just … life enthusiasm more.