My boys want to know if my father’s death is a tragedy. They’ve heard the term employed to describe everything from a school shooting to a rained-on picnic. I tell them that the term has become tired through overuse, but still, they want to know: Is my father’s death a tragedy? For me, and for our family, yes, I tell them, it is a personal tragedy, although private disaster is how I’ve thought of it all along. Sophocles would not understand our bandying about of the term tragedy whenever something unhappy occurs, and he’d no doubt wince at the widespread redundancy terrible tragedy. The Athenian innovators of tragedy had very different, much loftier, notions of what constituted the tragic: a great figure’s about-face of circumstance brought on by a concussion of the accidental and the ordained. Oedipus’s fate is a maddening paradox, both predetermined and his own hubristic fault. Perhaps my father’s fate shared some of those classically tragic strands: his hubris on the machine he was ordained to ride.
“What didn’t he just stop riding?” Ethan asks me, his six-year-old simplicity sobering, shaming of all rationalization. But that’s the rub, I tell him; he could not stop without forfeiting who he was. “Well then, why didn’t he just slow down?” Because the Yamaha R1 wasn’t engineered for lethargy; it doesn’t work without racing. His own sneakers, I point out, were engineered for running. What is he compelled to do, helpless not to do, in those lustrous new sneakers—what’s the first thing he does in them? He runs, he sprints. But the analogy is defective, and he knows it. There’s that slight strain in his forehead, the slight pursing of his lips, evidence of the thought he suspects is an upsetting accusation and so he pauses before he says it: “So then he did it to himself. He asked for it.”
Those are my own words he’s returning to me, precisely what I say to him when he’s heedless on his bicycle, when his headlong riding puts him on the pavement with bleeding elbows and knees. Both he and his brother have been fearless on bikes since they were two years old; they skipped training wheels entirely. When Ethan turned two, the smallest pedal bike I could find was still too big, and so I had to modify it, hacksaw the seat post, swap the handlebars. The other parents in our neighborhood often pointed, gasped when one of our tiny two-year-olds sped by without training wheels, and then looked to my wife and me with a weave of accusation and awe. The skill of balance and lust for speed seem to have been encoded in their very cells. Unable to live in me in that way, my father lives in them. I never attempted to curb those abilities, was in fact mutedly proud of them—I couldn’t ride a bike until I was five—though they frightened me then and frighten me still.
When Ethan is there on the pavement with bloodied elbows, I tell him: “Show some caution. You’re responsible for your own safety. You did that to yourself. You asked for it.” I say that to him—with a sternness born of fear and love—because it is true, but also because I never got the chance to say it to my father. Caution was anathema to his Sunday clan, and one of my missions as a father—a mission persistently hounded by my own father—is to make sure that caution is never anathema to my sons. When we talk about my father and Ethan accuses him of causing his own death, I honor his perception while honoring the complexity of the truth. I tell him that he is right—yes, my father did it to himself; yes, my father asked for it—but also that he will have to wait several years to read this book, to see that my father’s death was much more complicated than mere recklessness, that he lived in the grip of a powerful legacy, of enormous pressures from the patriarch, pressures that many of us are not fast enough to outrun.
New memories, I’ve found, shout away old ones. Looking at early photos of my kids, I can’t recall them at those ages. I can see them there in the photos, and I can see myself with them, and I know those moments, those events, occurred, but I simply cannot locate them inside myself. And never mind the photos of ten, fifteen, twenty years past, photos of my father and me. I yearn to recall the details of those days but cannot. I cannot sift through the addling fugues of memory in order to hear the individual notes I want. Our memories, I’m sorry to say, aren’t up to us. And if the neuroscientists are to be believed, the mechanisms of memory are so organically unsound, so prone to disruption and deprivation, to revision and error, it seems paranormal that we can remember anything at all.
One of the things I’m sure I remember is this: for a brief while after my father’s crash, I comforted myself with the thought that the gods were surely finished using me for target practice. The thought, steeling in one way, was a near masterpiece of self-pity in another. After the childhood abandonment by my mother and the violent early death of my father, I was clear. No more ill tidings for this orphan. Self-pity is by its very nature a cloistered, incestuous view, a fundamentally privileged conception of self, and mine smugly assumed that losing my parents as I had was the worst that could happen to me. Not until you have children of your own do you understand what breed of anguish can be visited upon you.
I’m never not nervous about my kids being maimed or killed, abducted or abused. The fear is always there, at one register or another, an almost distracting hum of anxiety. When they leave the house in the morning for first grade and preschool, there’s not even a flake of certitude that they will return in the afternoon. The way they won’t return is one of the ways children have always not returned: traffic disaster or collapsed roof, drowning or inferno, fall or flood, or else another American warp with an assault rifle. We do what we can, take caution, take care, but for many of us, all of life is a crossing of the fingers, a letting go and hoping we’ll be spared by calamity. When you have my history, my sense of certain chaos and injury, you’re always waiting for another phone call. My phone doesn’t ring without my muttering of Dorothy Parker’s immortal line: “What fresh hell can this be?” My life is a passive struggle against forces I cannot harness. “Things,” Larkin says, “are tougher than we are,” and that fact impelled me into weightlifting at sixteen years old. It was my attempt to balance the scale. At forty-one, with two small children I try gravely, daily, to protect, I know there’s no balancing of that scale. Things will always be tougher than we are.
The child-rearing differences from generation to generation are usually distinct, and each day now I feel those differences with the particular force of my own history. As children we all rode in vehicles without car seats, toddlers on the unbelted laps of Camel-smoking mothers. My own boys, by contrast, don’t get on a scooter or skateboard without looking like scaled-down Michelin Men. They’ve never been inside a moving car without being strapped to seats fit for spacecraft. Come near them with a cigarette and expect a tirade. The notion of handing them a BB gun or hunting bow strikes me as criminally incompetent. The men of my family didn’t raise me with much praise or affection, and so for the past six years I’ve unleashed so much verbal and physical love upon my sons, so much you’re-number-one rhetoric, that I fear I’m building coddled autocrats with no notion of necessary struggle. They’re only six and three, I know, but nothing ever completely undoes what we do to them at these ages: not religion, not education or medication, not nonstop sorties of psychotherapy. We damage them one way or we damage them the other.
We also mislead them without meaning to, with ambitious diction, always or forever. In the saddest scene in John Updike’s story “Separating,” Richard Maple, after telling his teenage son that he’s leaving the family home, says, “No matter how this works out, I’ll always be with you.” When I first read that story at eighteen, it had what felt like a teleporting effect on me. I instantly remembered what I’d long forgotten, that scene with my father slumped on a stool in our darkened kitchen when I was nine years old, when after an hour-long quarrel with my mother, he said to me, “No matter what happens, I’ll always be your father.” That sentence had a particular meaning when I was nine: disruptions were coming to our home, my mother would be leaving us, but I could count on him to remain. And he did; he was overwhelmingly there. Now, since his fatal crash sixteen years ago, the sentence means something els
e altogether. He is still overwhelmingly here. What he told me was much truer than he could have realized: I will stick around now, yes, and I will stick around long after I’m gone.
In Updike’s story, in the buildup to telling his son about the impending divorce from his mother, Richard Maple must have rehearsed his line, “I’ll always be with you.” It’s exactly the right sentence at exactly the right spot in the story, the assurance the boy needs from the parent about to leave home. But my father’s nearly verbatim sentence to me was unplanned and maybe ill-fit to the circumstances. He was not the one leaving our family, and of course he’d always be my father. In what possible way could he not be? On that evening of schism, the assurance I needed was being issued from the wrong parent. But he knew then, didn’t he? That night in our kitchen, at what was for me the very start of our family’s unstringing, he knew that I wouldn’t have any assurances from my mother. He knew she’d soon be disappearing. And so he offered me his own assurance as consolation. He didn’t dish me the false pop-song banality I’ll always be here for you, but he also meant something other than the self-evident fact of “I’ll always be your father.” He meant, I think, precisely what Richard Maple tells his son: “I’ll always be with you.” My father’s always wasn’t a lie, not then and not now that he’s gone, because for me it means I will always have been your father.
I tell my sons what I tell myself: my father lived and died attempting to be worthy of an ancient code. His story remains the story of most men, writ large, writ fast, writ in blood. His story is my story too, because he breathes in me, in whatever hopes I have for a larger life. One of my family’s narrative threads speaks of us as an unlucky bunch: diseases and deaths, divorces and depressions, the manifold injuries and injustices. But we are no unluckier than average, and I’d say a good deal luckier than most. Luck, anyway, is a knave’s game. Our luck is the work and the love that await us.
Acknowledgments
With enormous thanks and much love to:
Bob Weil, maestro and shepherd, without whom this book would not exist.
Steve Almond, who gave these pages more dedication than I had a right to ask.
Nick Giraldi, uncle, pal, pursuer of speed.
Will Menaker, tireless mind of many insights.
Bill Pierce, who listened without complaint.
Katie, Parma, Ethan, Aiden: my heroes.
David Patterson, steadfast 007.
Steve Attardo, graphic artist extraordinaire.
The committed staff at Norton/Liveright, paragon of publishing.
The editors of Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, The Pushcart Prize 2010, and Best American Magazine Writing 2011, where sections of this memoir first appeared.
Also by William Giraldi
Hold the Dark
Busy Monsters
About the Author
William Giraldi grew up in Manville, New Jersey, and attended college at Drew University and Boston University. He is author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University, and a contributing editor at The New Republic. He’s been granted fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Oxford American, The New York Times, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Baffler, Ploughshares, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and online at The Daily Beast and Salon. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.
The Hero’s Body is a work of nonfiction, but many of the names have been changed and certain identifying characteristics of individuals altered. The gym at which some of the action of this work takes place is unrelated to existing entities of the same name.
Copyright © 2016 by William Giraldi
All rights reserved
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