Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  As each year passed, photos of Robyn and Bruce and Delores were displayed in frames all over the house. I have a clear memory of wandering around the house, wondering where I fit in, and noticing that my father hadn’t put out a single picture of me, not even a school picture or the baby snapshot of me surrounded by his trophies. That was what hurt more than the bedroom. There wasn’t one photo. I was, in a sense, airbrushed out of his life. He had a new car, a new family, new kids; I was the afterthought. If he had to introduce me to anyone, he would say, “This is my son, Scott. He lives with his mother.”

  But my father was charming. He was tall, about six foot five, and handsome with a brilliant, light-up-the-room smile. He could tell a story or crack a joke with the best of them. When he came to get me, he would sound smooth just by coming in the room, and even my grandmother was not completely immune to his charms. She retained a soft spot for him; my grandfather looked at the man in his living room and no doubt remembered the unpaid loan.

  My father sold insurance now. I had no idea how he ended up in that business or why he did it in Massachusetts, except that his manner must have made him a natural salesman. He had a way of talking that drew people in. My mother still talks about how he swept her off her feet. During my growing up, he spun stories for me, told me that he had been an Air Force captain, a navigator in fast military planes. His greatest stories concerned basketball. He said that he had played basketball first in Pennsylvania, where he grew up, and then in the Air Force. In between, he said, he had played pro ball in Cincinnati, stepping in for Maurice “Maurie” Stokes, the 1956 NBA Rookie of the Year. In the last regular game of the 1958 season, in March, after a drive to the basket, Stokes hit the floor, smacking his head. Three days later, he fell ill and slipped into a coma, from which he awoke permanently paralyzed. My dad told me that he had played for Stokes for a short time, but long enough so that Topps made a basketball card with his face on it and a bunch of stats, a card for C. Bruce Brown. He never showed me the card, and I never bothered to look for it. I also never bothered to do the math, which would have pointed to a different conclusion. My parents met in the summer of 1957 and married six months later, and in the Air Force, my father was an airman first class, an E-3 enlisted man.

  I did know that he flew airplanes, although not in the Air Force, and I never went up in any with him. The few times we were going to fly, we would get ready and then something would happen. The closest I got was when he used to drive over to the nearby airfield and plunk me down with my little half siblings to watch the twin-engine planes do takeoffs and landings. But friends of his say that they have flown with him and that he has a pilot’s license. And I know he had trophies from his basketball playing, but where he won them was vague. He never talked about his own family. I know his mother was named Delores, and that she drank and was what people in the 1930s and 1940s liked to call a “loose woman,” although in the photo I have of her, she is a delicate-featured woman with wavy dark hair and a taste for intricate jewelry, in this case dangling earrings and a necklace of colored glass or luminous stones.

  If you offered me a million dollars, I couldn’t tell you anything about my father’s father, not even his name. I was fifty years old before I saw a good photo of him—in one fuzzy image, he looks like a barrel-chested man with a hint of a belly wearing a houndstooth blazer over some kind of T-shirt, his hair puffed up in the pompadour style of 1930s or 1940s men. The photo looks as if it was taken in the crowd at a racetrack, and my father’s father is not even looking at the camera—his eyes are off following other action. The suggestion was that my dad had been raised by his aunt and uncle, until he got out of that small Pennsylvania town.

  He arrived, when he came, in a convertible. This was always the kind of car that he drove, in contrast to the image of an insurance salesman behind the wheel of a staid four-door sedan. My dad is a man who likes the top down. On our drives, when he wasn’t spinning stories, we made small talk; we basically talked about nothing. He was not a man for father–son talks; I was more likely to pry some stray fact or truth from my grandfather, in between puffs on the pipe that he loved.

  With my dad, I would wait for weeks, wanting him to come, and when he finally did, the reality could never meet the expectations. And truly I didn’t know what to expect. My dad later said that my mother would never let him see me, that I was a pawn in their wider war. He would say that she was unpredictable and volatile, and always confrontational, although in a different breath he could remember her beauty and how funny she was when they first met. My mother would retaliate and tell me that my father was a womanizer, someone who couldn’t be trusted and who was only out for himself. I don’t know. I never knew the truth. Fifty years later, the story is still too loaded from both sides. The only things I know are the things that I can see with my own eyes, or that I can touch. I cannot take anything fully on faith; I require, as the law puts it, third-party verification, and verification from someone I trust.

  Yet buried within the layers of stories and embellishments sometimes is the truth. Years later, when I was grown, my father told me that he worked for Jay Leno’s father. When Leno’s dad was the regional manager for Prudential insurance, he hired my father as one of his salesmen. My dad told me that he used to go over to the Leno house, that he knew Jay and Jay’s mom. And that story is true; my father hung around the Leno home enough that the family named their dog Claude, after my father, Claude Bruce Brown. Jay himself told me so when I was a guest on his show in 2010. And I know that my dad probably saw more of Jay Leno as a teenager growing into a young man than he ever did of me.

  All my other friends lived in houses with both their parents, in what I thought of as happy, stable families. Up and down my grandparents’ block, the neighbors knew that I was Scotty, the boy who barely saw his dad. I would roam from yard to yard, from Eastern up along Court Street, as far as Aborn Avenue and back over to Sweetser Street, popping in, and they in turn acted as if they almost expected me, opening their doors. But in my six-year-old mind, I tried not to be a pest. If a neighbor was raking, I would help. If another was mowing the lawn, I would pick up the leaves. Sometimes neighbors gave me a quarter or a cookie and a glass of milk. Within a few weeks, I knew most of the neighbors: Mr. Spicer, who lived across the street and tinkered with car engines; or June, the older woman who lived alone in the small white house with black shutters at the end of the block just across Court Street and who had me in for “tea,” which always involved a small plate of cookies at her kitchen table. She asked me to call her “Aunt June,” and I did.

  I made friends with David McClellan, one of the McClellan boys who lived three houses down on Eastern; and Susan Norton, who lived next door. No one turned me away, and whatever they thought of my mother and her marriages and her two children, the neighbors kept to themselves and I kept appearing at their doors.

  Not long after we moved back to her old home, my mother changed Leeann’s name. It was too confusing to have Scott Brown and Leeann Sullivan. It would require correcting people after introductions had been made, because who in 1966 or 1967 would assume that a brother and sister would not share the same last name? The simple fact of our different names would be giving away my mother’s life story, a story that she was not particularly keen on explaining. My mother petitioned to have Leeann’s name formally changed to Brown, and it was. My disappearing father now had two offspring, and Leeann now had two phantom dads.

  After the apartment in Revere, my grandparents’ house was like an oasis, down to my grandfather’s steady rumble of breath at night when we slept in our shared room, until I graduated to a daybed in the tiny front space, under the eaves. My grandmother kept a supply of crafts on hand to keep me busy, especially ceramics, bits of tile that I made trivets and mosaics from, and Popsicle sticks, which I turned into jewelry boxes and other creations. There was always a crafts table with a project, like making ornaments for the Christmas tree or for Hallowe
en, even in July. My grandfather had already taught me about raking, and as I grew, next came the push mower for the lawn. When the winter cold receded, my grandmother had me tagging along in the garden, weeding, planting tomato seeds in little pots, waiting for them to sprout, and then burying them back into the ground, staking them, and waiting for the red fruit. In the evenings, Grandpa taught me to play canasta, and he, Gram, and I would play for hours in the evenings. I hated to lose, and I still remember him always chuckling when he invariably won.

  Gram and Gramps were the source of most fun. When there were birthdays or holidays to be celebrated, Gramps was the one who took us all out to the Hilltop Steak House, sitting on a rise along Route 1. People drove for miles and lined up for hours to eat at Hilltop, which had a giant green cactus perched in front along the road, as incongruous a landmark among the oak trees as the oversize orange T. rex at the miniature golf park a few miles south. At Hilltop, the baked potatoes came out wrapped and steaming in silver foil; as I grew, I would order the filet and the lobster pie, eat them both, and always want more. Gramps liked Hilltop, but he liked McDonald’s too, and he watched the sign out front underneath the golden arches, checking for when they had sold their next million.

  He occasionally took me on larger outings that he deemed suitable for a young boy, driving across town to Pleasure Island—unveiled the year I was born with the hope of being the Disneyland of the East, offering boat rides through Pirate Cove, where passengers searched for the great white whale—or jaunts on the Slanty Shanty, the Jenney cars, and Old Smoky. A few times, we’d head south to Carver, Massachusetts, where the Edaville Railroad ran, with old-fashioned miniature trains and a small petting zoo. He particularly loved the trains, the sound of their tinny whistles straining and puffing, the rhythmic clatter as their wheels clacked along the rails. As an engineer, he preferred the orderly mechanics and precision of trains, arriving on time, departing as scheduled. My grandmother liked the animals. Her family had been farmers—some of her siblings still worked the land, and I distinctly remember visiting rocky New Hampshire farms and gazing at the barns and animals.

  Even with the activity around Eastern Avenue, I could barely sit still, and after living under the shadow of Dan Sullivan’s fist, it was tempting to break the rules, and I did. I would take off without telling my grandmother where I was going or return home late for lunch or dinner. After one such infraction, my grandmother began chasing me with a rolling pin in her hand, probably to spank me, but I eluded her second by second, diving under the table, and then just as her hand began reaching toward me, I took off again, taking cover behind the breakfront, racing off to the couch and then up the stairs, always maneuvering just out of reach. All over the house we went, my exasperated grandmother trailing after me, like a live-action version of Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons. She soon learned that when I got into too much mischief, the most effective punishment would be to force me to sit still for a half hour or longer on a red vinyl chair in the kitchen, facing the clock. There was nothing more excruciating than watching the minute hand move like a glacier from one side of the face to another. The moment my time was up I would be out the door like a shot, racing down the block, banging on the door for David or Susie to come out, and calling for them at the top of my lungs, heedless of whether it was early or late, lunchtime or dinnertime. Looking back, being active was the best medicine for me.

  It’s ironic that my grandmother was my chief disciplinarian, however much she was a stickler for rules, because it was my grandfather who ruled their home. Gram was much more of a free spirit. Leeann later told me that when Gram was a teenager, growing up on her parents’ isolated New Hampshire farm, she would drag an old mattress down from the house, across the lawn, and toward the river, plunk it down on the grass, and sunbathe in nothing more than her birthday suit. She never told me that particular story when I was a child, but she did often say, when it was just the two of us, how she wished that she had never given up teaching, which she loved. But even with her children grown, returning to the classroom was completely out of the question. My grandfather went so far as to discourage her from wearing lipstick; he frowned on any type of what he called “face painting.” He was a man who expected to have his dinner waiting for him on the table at six o’clock when he came home.

  Late each afternoon, when her pots were already on the stove or the oven was on, Gram would gather Leeann and me up and put us in the car to head down to the station to pick up Gramps. The Eastern Avenue house was close to the train line, and all day the whistles sounded off, their high-pitched toots like a clock chime to Gram, counting down the hours from when Gramps left the house until he came back home. Philip Rugg was a thrifty, tradition-bound man, but I also learned that he kept a thick file folder of all my accomplishments—I have my middle name in honor of him—and he found odd jobs for me to do around the house to earn extra money. He was constantly helping out my mom. And, of course, they were also looking after Leeann.

  I loved him and I loved my grandmother, and they loved each other, but any emotion was restrained. What had begun as love had long since fallen into a more tight-lipped respect, affection, and lifelong dedication. They were married for over sixty years. Endurance was more the state of their marriage and resilience its overwhelming quality. I can still hear him saying, “Oh, Bertha, Bertha, Bertha,” blowing out the words along with his pipe smoke, shaking his head, and then pausing to inhale again when my grandmother was going on about something or other. For her part, Gram would pretend not to hear him. Instead, she would occasionally escape to the pantry closet, where she kept her cooking sherry, and pour a glassful or down a quick nip straight from the bottle to take the edge off the small house when they were both at home. In the summers, she escaped entirely, with me in tow. We would head north to Rye Beach in New Hampshire and rent at Hoyt’s Lodges, little, narrow cottages painted white with blue awnings, where we stayed for as long as three to four weeks at a time. Grandpa drove up once in a while for dinner, but most days it was just the two of us alone.

  Each Hoyt’s cabin was like an efficiency unit with a single bedroom—just large enough for a bed and chair and a chest of drawers tucked in a wall niche—a bathroom, and a small kitchenette, with an electric stove and a round, white mini Frigidaire. The walls were paneled in knotty pine, and just to poke your head in from the small screened-in porch was to smell that slightly musty, damp wood smell of the New England coast, bottled up inside the room. In the mornings I would eat Cheerios, or some goodies that Gram had cooked, or sometimes a doughnut, warm and sticky with glaze, and drink orange juice, probably from concentrate frozen in a can. Then Gram would pack a picnic lunch and she and I would head down to the beach, which in this part of Rye is really more of a rocky coastline, like Maine. I spent hours climbing and scrambling along the dark, massive rocks and exploring the caves and caverns and swirling tidal pools that dotted the shoreline, where small shells and skeletons came to rest after they had been tossed about by the salt water and bleached by the sun. I also collected jars and jars of sea glass, weathered browns and greens and the rare deep blues, a tradition that I would one day pass on to my own children.

  I could climb up the crevices and find the flat indentations for my feet amid the jagged edges and slick corners washed by the tides. I would go as far out as I possibly could without falling into the dark, chill water below. Of course, the day was not complete if I did not return with my pockets stuffed with crabs, starfish, and sea glass, and me halfway soaked from losing my footing and slipping in. Gram never went out on the distant rocks. She sat on the shore, which was simply a swath of smaller rocks and pebbles—to get actual sand, we had to go south along Rye Beach or down to Hampton—and read, watching me recede and then return along the rock line. Occasionally, she would explore too, dragging long threads of seaweed behind her, picking out sand dollars and seashells.

  In later years, when they spent more time in New Ha
mpshire and Gramps also came, he would wait in the car, parked in the little asphalt turn-in, and sit for hours while Gram, Leeann, and I cavorted along the seawall and scavenged for whatever treasures we could find.

  When I wasn’t climbing, she tried to get me to color or do crafts, or we might take a trip down to the wharf or the pier to watch the lobster boats coming in or going back out to sea, their replacement metal traps stacked and tied to hopeful, fading buoys that would bob in the waves. She took me on long, rambling walks through a nature preserve and out to Odiorne Point. We ended at a wooden bridge, where I bounced rocks and watched them skip in the water below. At night, we watched television or listened to the radio. We might sit around and talk, but Gram always put me to bed early, knowing I would be up not long after the sun.

  We went to Rye Beach for about five summers, from the time I was five until after I turned nine. We went there from the time of Dan Sullivan, from the era of tiny apartments and the two interludes of houses, houses where I lived but which were not my own. My dad might come on a Saturday, or he might not. My address might change every six months, but for half a decade, those weeks with my grandmother were fixed and orderly, like the moon traveling around the earth and pulling the ocean tides along.