My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

  My Father More or Less

  Jonathan Baumbach

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1982 My Father More or Less by Jonathan Baumbach

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2012 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Guggenheim Foundation for a grant under which much of this novel was wntten.

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-11-7

  eBook Cover Designed by Steven Seighman

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For you, G.B.

  Dearest Father,

  You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.

  —Franz Kafka

  1

  I had a dream the night before last in which I had already made the trip to London and had unwittingly got into a fight with my father at Customs. We had both bought souvenir penknives from an airport shop and as a joke, as what I thought was a joke, were slicing the buttons off each other’s jackets. He gets angry for no apparent reason—I had done nothing he hadn’t done first—and he says, Tom, I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll remember for as long as you live. I say I’m sorry, but he jabs me with the knife, ripping a fist-size hole in the side of my jacket. The knife withdraws with a rosebud of blood at its point. You’ve gone too far, I say, astonished at the blood. He shuffles around, taunting me with the knife, saying, Come on, come on, let’s see what you’re made of. Although I am angry, I mean only to defend myself, not to strike back. When he thrusts his knife at my heart—it’s as if he really means to kill me—I spear him in the back of the hand, the blade sticking, snapping off at the handle. It seems not to bother him and he comes at me again, slashing the air, pricking me in the thumb, the blade of my knife lodged like a wing in the back of his hand. You shit-faced son of a bitch, he yells. His thrusts are without force, are easily defended against. At some point I notice that the front of his shirt is thick with blood. I think, How will I get back to America if the old man dies.

  I keep making this trip to London in my imagination, the same trip to visit my father, sit each time at a window seat in the No Smoking section of a Pan Am 747, the plane taxiing down a runway, changing direction, stopping and starting, trapped in indecision. There is almost always an unspecified delay that prolongs itself beyond my patience. And then without further announcement, just when I think we’ll never go anywhere, we tear loose from the earth. The plane ascends with heartbreaking abruptness, Kennedy Airport reducing itself to abstraction in the distance below. I am on my way, though unready for the trip, without expectation of what awaits me on the other side.

  I have a copy of one of my father’s novels on my lap, a book called Interior Corrosions, which I will make an effort to read. Oddly, I have never been able to read any of his books word for word from beginning to end, though I had tried—give me that—had pretended to read them, had carried them with me when I was younger as though they were medals earned in battle. I had never given up the idea of some day reading his books as I had never really fully given up the idea that he would one day return to our family. He left us when I was four and Kate seven, returned inexplicably when I was five and left for good two days after my sixth birthday. Since he had left forever once and returned, I saw no reason why it couldn’t happen again. My mother certainly acted as if she expected him to return, talked of his absence as if he had gone to the supermarket and forgotten the way back. I assumed that he would eventually tire of whatever he was doing (I thought of him as being like Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita) and return to us, his faithful family. As much as five years after he had walked out, his bed, still talked of as his, remained alongside my mother’s awaiting his momentary return. We are still waiting, though with smaller investment of hope than before. He has been gone twelve years, has lived in a different state for most of five and in a different country for the past two.

  I mean, it was not that we never saw him after he left. It was that there was no longer any pleasure in his presence for us, that he visited seasonally like a salesman, selling his time at inflated prices. He seemed like an imposter, this visitor from another planet, this salesman of damaged goods, an inadequate stand-in for the father we had lost. I mean, he went through the motions of being our father, tried to buy us with unexpected kindnesses. Nothing we got from him lasting or satisfying, we became tougher and tougher customers, my sister and I. Kate got married when she was twenty and moved to Colorado, got divorced the following year but stayed on among the vanished bison. She would not talk to him again, she said, unless he called to apologize for twenty-one years of damage he had done her.

  Although it is a No Smoking section, the conservatively dressed black man in the seat next to me lights a cigarette, takes two drags, then holds it out absent-mindedly as it burns down, the smoke crowding my space. I cough, but say nothing, brush the smoke away with the back of my hand, expect retribution to come from one of the stewardesses passing among us, taking orders for drinks.

  “It’s your father’s opinion,” said my mother, “that I make it difficult for his children to see him, but as you can see the opposite is more nearly the truth.”

  I had been saying I didn’t know whether I wanted to go to London and I saw no reason to go if I didn’t really want to.

  “There’s no question that you’re going,” she said. “You told your father that you’re going and you’re not changing your mind.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Okay? He’s changed his mind when it came to seeing me any number of times. Why is everything the way he wants it?”

  Her answer to that was made from under the drone of the dishwasher turned on in midsentence, and I had to ask her to repeat her remark.

  I had to follow her to her room to get an answer, such as it was, from the other side of a closed door. “It’s important that you have some sort of relationship with your father,” she said, sniffling. “I’m not defending or attacking him. I don’t want to talk about it any more. Is that clear?”

  When I pushed the door open—the scene plays itself in slow motion—my mother let out a small cry and lifted the blanket up over her breasts, which were in any event fully clothed.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said or something equally inappropriate. “You don’t come into this room without knocking first.”

  I open my eyes to glance at my watch—we’ve been an hour and twenty minutes in the air—read a few more lines in my father’s book. How much silence could we bear without beginning to rave, how much talk that was only silence amplified and distorted into language? Her face pressed to the window, she watched the discolorations of the leaves as if they were… His sentences exhaust me and I close my eyes to filter the words, to sift the meaning from the sound.

  A stewardess named Marlene is t
alking to the man next to me. She holds her smile as if it occupied her face against her will. “And what about you?” she says to me.

  “I’d like a beer,” I say. “What kind do you have?”

  “How old are you?” she asks.

  “How old do I have to be, Marlene?”

  Kate had a stomachache that day. She tended to get sick whenever my father came to take us the way some kids get sick when they have to take a test in school. My mother said that I should go alone with him because she didn’t have the energy to fight with Kate and she didn’t want to listen to her whine.

  I said if I had to I would.

  She said, “I don’t want to have to fight with you too.”

  I said, “What are you talking about? I said I would go, didn’t I?”

  She said, “I don’t want to hear any more about it from either of you. Is that clear?”

  She hurried into her room and slammed the door, an indication that she was about to fall apart and wanted to spare us witness of her humiliation. She was still shut up in her room when the doorbell announced my father’s presence. No one moved to answer. I kept thinking that I would do it—I was the only one that wasn’t in some room with the door closed—but it didn’t seem fair that I should have to do it all the time. “Will someone answer the door please,” my mother called from her room. “Tom, what are you doing?”

  The bell rang a second time, and a third. I remember walking very slowly to the door, thinking they couldn’t say I wasn’t trying. It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to see him; that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t get myself to the door. At that time, I still looked forward to his visits. I was open to anything.

  As soon as he started up the car, he said, “Tell me again why Kate’s not coming with us.”

  I said, “Neither of us was feeling well this morning, but I wanted to come anyway.”

  He said, “And Kate didn’t want to come?”

  I said, “She had a stomachache. It’s been going around, a stomach virus, half my class has been absent.”

  “It sounds like an epidemic to me. I’m surprised the streets weren’t closed off.”

  “She felt bad that she couldn’t go with you. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go.”

  “Tell me something, Tom. Does your mother make it difficult for the two of you to see me?”

  “She wants us to see you, Dad. She really does.”

  “Like the president wants to end the war in Vietnam,” he said.

  He parked at a meter on Hudson Street and got out of the car. It was raining and he offered me his corduroy jacket to put over my head and I said rain didn’t bother me and he said take it for God’s sake. I put the jacket under my arm, then I dropped it, and he said what the hell’s the matter with you?

  I was always dropping things, told him about dropping a bottle of gingerale on the way home from D’Agostino’s and then going back to get a second one, which I dropped and broke when I was trying to open the door to our apartment. I thought he would laugh but he didn’t. He had his mind on something else.

  He never mentioned the object of our destination, but I knew it was to see one of his women. The building we entered had no elevator. We wallked up a narrow staircase to the sixth floor and after knocking on the door and not waiting for an answer, went into this tiny apartment that seemed like a doll’s house. This is my only son, he said. The blond woman who belonged to the apartment laughed.

  The apartment was hot and I asked her if she had anything to drink.

  This woman, who was too skinny to be really pretty, had the emptiest refrigerator I had ever seen in a place where somebody lived.

  “You’ll have to settle for a glass of water,” she said, “unless you want to go out and get some pop.” My father said, “He drops bottles.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

  I said I really didn’t want any water, that I never really liked New York water, didn’t she have any milk or juice.

  “If he doesn’t want water,” she said to my father, “he can’t really be thirsty.”

  I said I don’t think it’s right to call someone you don’t know a liar.

  Later, for something real or imagined I had done to offend her, she asked us to leave. My father left me in the hall and went back.

  “Look, honey,” I heard him say through the closed door, “give him a chance for God’s sake. He’s not a bad kid.”

  “I’m very upset, Lukas,” she said. “This is my place and I don’t have to have anyone here I don’t want to see. Maybe after he’s gone you can come back.”

  My father whispered something I couldn’t make out, the word “time” coming through, repeating itself.

  “If you mean that,” she said, “then get rid of him.”

  I’ve had the feeling for some time—it may even extend back to the day I accepted my father’s invitation—that this is a final trip for me, that I’m either not going to arrive in London or not going to get back. I’ve always thought of dreams as prophetic, a kind of inside out warning, and the dreams I’ve had concerning this trip have almost all looked into the mouth of disaster. In one, a side door of the airplane would suddenly blow open and the passengers nearest to it would be sucked out into the atmosphere. A high jacker was responsible for the door coming open and I shouted at him that it made no sense what he was doing—I want this plane, he said. I need this plane—That’s childish, I said. None of us has ever had a 747 of his own. The man, who was undefinably familiar, said he didn’t want to hear the word childish again from me. He once, in fact, threw acid in the face of a classmate who called him childish—If there’s one thing I won’t tolerate, he said, it’s having my manhood undermanned. The pilot was ordered to jump from the plane though the hijacker, who was not completely awful, said he could use a parachute if it gave him a greater sense of security. The pilot wanted no favors, said he didn’t want to be beholden to a criminal and would take his chances on free fall. I could see that he was dissembling, that he had a parachute under his flight jacket—Okay, said the hijacker, it’s your funeral. When the door was pushed open for the pilot’s jump, the suction dragged us all toward the opening. The next thing I knew I was falling among clouds of parachutists, holding on to the seat in front of me. The pilot, who occupied the seat, said not to worry there wasn’t anything that flew he couldn’t land. What struck me most—it was the first awareness I had of it—was that pilot and hijacker had the same face.

  I mean to be dispassionate, to pass out these snapshots, these sometimes moving pictures as if I had no personal stake in them. The central figure in all is that mysterious man, that master of disguise, my father. He appears and disappears, changes his job, his appearance, his personality, the conditions of his life. It is his passion never to be the same twice. My first memory of him is with a mustache, a short thick brush, though he claims he has never worn a mustache (at least not separate from a beard). The picture is there and, accurate or not, I see no way of giving it up. The first face is the businesslike father, head of the household, smoker of fat cigars. I remember him, smelling of cigars, lifting me from the crib to rub his face into mine.

  The second face is really two faces or two aspects of the same face. He is clean-shaven, elegantly dressed, hair parted down the middle, a wise guy and stand-up comic, a self-made celebrity beleaguered by admirers. He has published an award-winning novel the year before and is between books, at odds with himself. I am six years old or almost six, thinking myself six in advance of that turning point. My father takes me with him to the town house apartment of his current editor, a man who has made his career, he says, out of knowing less than nothing, a man unencumbered, goes the joke, by the obligations of intelligence. I sit in the corner shyly, playing with a small rubberized plastic Godzilla, while the men talk or rather my father talks and the other man listens. Two other people come in, a man and a woman dressed like models in the windows of expensive department stores. I am introduced and complimented
on being the son of my father. More people come in, mostly men, an occasional woman. My father holds forth, holds court, while the others listen respectfully. More people wander in. My father is congratulated again. “How wonderful for you,” a woman says, kissing him on both cheeks.

  My father disdains admiration, says all success is fraudulent, others more than some. He is in terrific form. “Your father is in terrific form,” a woman says to me, an odd-looking woman in purple velvet pants.

  Whatever he says, sometimes a grunt or clearing of the throat, produces laughter. “Your father is a very funny man,” the woman says to me. “Are you also a funny man?”

  “I’m funnier,” I say. “I have to be because no one laughs.”

  My questioner laughs, goes back to look for my father to repeat this remark to him. When she finds him, when she is able to dislodge his attention from elsewhere, when she repeats my remark with slight variation, my father looks puzzled then laughs extravagantly. The picture that remains is of my father and the woman laughing together with exaggerated amusement.

  And there’s the other side of that face: suspicious, vulnerable, stern, glowering. He would fly off the handle, as my mother called it, at invisible provocations. “I won’t put up with that kind of behavior any more,” he would shout. “Do you hear me, Tom?” How could I not hear him? And sometimes after one of these rages he would apologize, saying that he loved me and wanted me to forgive him, tears on his face. Kate used to forgive him (I think she was afraid not to), but I refused him that satisfaction. I put my hands over my ears when he apologized, pretended not to be able to hear him. When he left home the second time, never to return, I could take some of the responsibility for his departure.

  The third face, which comes in several variations, is the face of the visiting father. It sometimes comes with full beard, sometimes artistically unshaven. Sometimes the eyes seemed so far back in the skull that I had the impression that the sockets were unfilled, that the eyes had retreated beyond return. I remember thinking that the eyes had turned around to get a view of the other side. I think of the beard as a kind of mask, and the third face, the several third faces of my father, as the old man’s disguise. The beard changes shape, is pointed, is rounded, covers the entire face, covers only part of it, goes to seed like an untended garden. It is as if he were trying to hit on the most impenetrable disguise. If you can’t pin him down, can’t say exactly how he looks, he is safe from your knowledge.