The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  I bit my lip all fall. I watched the markets fall and McCain’s botched response remove the last doubt that he was going to lose, perhaps badly. I avoided political conversations for the most part but found myself at a friend’s house watching the last debate with a group of Ivy League policy wonks and literary types. The McCain trashing began early. I left after the seventeenth joke about his strange facial expressions, telling my host that I didn’t have a problem with people not supporting him, but the vilification of a man who spent longer in a prison camp than Obama spent in the Senate wasn’t how I wanted to spend my evening.

  I called Mom on the way home. She could hear the rage in my voice. She let me babble until I ran out of steam.

  “I know, son. McCain suffered like we suffered. Other people are never going to understand that. You vote the way you want to vote.”

  A week or so later, I went to vote in an old, beaten-down Brooklyn school. The line was so long that I was able to concentrate on the excitement on the faces of African Americans as they entered the voting booths with their children. I was envious of their joy. I wondered if the past was really past.

  Finally, I entered the booth, closed the curtain, and stared at the names. I stared so long that I could hear folks behind me begin to grumble. I delayed by flipping the switches for all the Democrats in local offices. My finger went to McCain-Palin, but I didn’t flip the switch. I moved my hand over the Obama-Biden switch, then flipped it, pulled hard on the main lever, and departed. I could barely breathe. I called Mom to tell her what I had done. She crackled with laughter.

  “I did too! Maybe the future will be different. Sugar, it’s worth a try.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this new version of Mom. Was that all I needed to do, talk about Dad, and now she was all touchy-feely about our history? Is that how little it took? If so, why did we wait so long?

  I arrived in Flint on a low-ceiling, humid summer day that reminded me of my miserable teenage years. The house was not the same. Mom had sold the place in Flushing when she moved to Florida, but once Christine started having kids, she couldn’t bear to be so far away and bought a small ranch-style home in Grand Blanc, about twenty minutes from where I lived as a boy. Some things had survived the move; models of Dad’s planes still rested above the fireplace next to the flag presented on behalf of a grateful nation.

  Mom had adopted the characteristics of an old woman living alone—the too-large television left on for company morning, noon, and night. She hobbled around on an artificial knee, a little uncertain on her feet. Her mind was sharp but her health wasn’t great. She had endured an angioplasty a year or two earlier. At the hospital, Christine and I looked on slack-jawed when she told the nutritionist that she would still be cooking with Crisco and it wasn’t open for debate. Watching her cook me rigatoni—one of her heart attack specials that I loved—I was struck by the thought that she would die, and not at some abstract point in the future but maybe before the decade was over. Somehow, the thought had never occurred to me before. My battles with her, now mostly in my memory, seemed as necessary to me as oxygen. I couldn’t imagine it ending.

  I lay awake that night in her spare room like I do most nights before a big interview. I decided what questions I would save for last, an old strategy to get what you can from a source before things turn ugly. In the morning, she made me eggs and bacon with some Pillsbury biscuits—my favorite childhood breakfast—and then she settled onto her sofa with her VAQ-135 mug. Mom’s poodle, Ollie—her fourth child—curled up in her lap, sighed, and then slipped off to sleep.

  We started with the day they first met. She told the familiar story of meeting at a dance after the 1961 Oyster Bowl game between Navy and Duke. The rest of their courtship went according to legend, except when it didn’t. She began making the five-hour drive to Annapolis with other girlfriends dating midshipmen. The girls would stay in “drag houses,” local homes chaperoned by widows and matrons. I asked her what she first saw in him.

  “He was just extremely smart, but he never made anyone else feel like they were beneath him, as far as intelligence. He was just a very fun, fun person. He liked to pull pranks.”

  I joked that I’d never heard anyone describe Dad as fun before. Mom cut me off.

  “Oh, he was. He loved nature; he loved to go on picnics.”

  Dad and picnics: now, these were words that didn’t go together in my memory. Mom told me they kept courting through the summer of 1962. Dad had six weeks off from the academy and spent them in Norfolk hauling cement bags at the construction company where Mom worked answering phones. Mom’s mom had just remarried and moved to Cherry Point with her marine husband, so they had a lot of, let us say, unsupervised time that summer. The following Christmas, Mom was wearing Dad’s Naval Academy pin, a pre-engagement move.

  “I had to pinch myself. I couldn’t believe someone like your father would want to be with someone like me.”

  We talked about their wedding, but she glossed over it quickly. She wanted to talk about how her fantasy life turned against her, pregnant for eighteen of her first twenty-one months as a bride. This wasn’t quite how she’d expected it to go. She wasn’t prepared.

  “After I had Terry and you, I was on tranquilizers, because I could not sit. I always had to be doing something. My whole personality changed. I was frazzled. I was looking for the fairytale marriage; it got to be like, ‘Is this what life is all about?’ ”

  Mom broached her unhappiness with my father on only one occasion. It was in 1968, after he told her they would be moving from Rhode Island to NAS Meridian, Mississippi, their third move in three years.

  “I said, ‘I don’t know if I can handle this anymore, two kids and all this stuff.’ He said, ‘When you married me, you knew I was going to be a Navy pilot; you knew this was my career. If this is making you unhappy, the only thing I can say is either you learn how to live with it or maybe we should just go our separate ways.’ That woke me up real fast. I never brought that up ever again.”

  The thought of perfect Dad bullying Mom threatened to topple their respective roles as the American Hero and the Dragon Lady in the movie of my life. I asked her what she remembered most of Terry and me when we were kids. She gave a sad laugh.

  “Terry was my blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl who did all the right things, and then I had my little boy: anything that you did, you did it to irritate me. When you were in the crib, you used to take your head and bang it so hard, I thought you were going to have a concussion. You used to chew holes in your shirt, and then you started chewing the bedspreads.”

  Now we were back on familiar ground! Apparently, I was a dick even as an infant. Mom told me that the thing that frustrated her most was that Dad would come home, offer a few words of stern instruction, and I’d jump to attention.

  “Your father used to say, ‘Ignore him,’ but he wasn’t around you all day.”

  Mom asked me if I remembered the child psychologist that she took me to in California when I was six or seven. I did, but only vaguely. She sketched in the particulars.

  “He tested you and he came out and said he’d never met a boy so little already trying to live up to his father. He felt you were already competing with him.”

  We sat in silence for a little while. I could feel darkness rising in my heart. If the thought of never measuring up to Dad was ingrained in me so deeply, so early, what chance did I ever have of winning that war? We kept talking. We talked about Dad’s frustration of whiling away the Vietnam War in the A-3 while his peers were flying combat missions.

  “I told him he was crazy—did he forget he had two small kids? But he felt he was missing out, not doing his part.”

  Mom begged Dad to get out after his Mississippi crash and fly for the airlines, but Dad just said no. He didn’t want to be a bus driver. That was the end of the conversation.

  “I just had to live with always being af
raid. That was the deal.”

  We kept talking for hours, revisiting old battles in Oak Harbor. Even thirty years later, Mom was still baffled.

  “I couldn’t get through to you. It was in one ear, out the other. I just felt like you couldn’t care less, that you were saying, ‘There she goes again, the raving mother.’ ”

  It was my turn to laugh. That was exactly what I’d thought. Mom didn’t like that. Her jaw jutted out in the old, familiar way.

  “I just never thought you were ever telling me the truth. Why was the truth so hard?”

  I sat up in my chair and started pulling at hair on my forearm, an old nervous tic. I mentioned one of the last conversations I had with Dad, the one where I admitted to him that I told her whatever she wanted to hear so she would stop yelling. I told her Dad’s advice was to “apologize even if you’re right.” She got angry.

  “So you’re telling me what you think I want to hear and I’m thinking, ‘Why does he keep lying to me?’ Great.”

  We broke for lunch and Mom made me a sandwich. She tossed an observation from the kitchen.

  “Your dad was never worried that you wouldn’t figure things out. He wasn’t panicking. That was me. Maybe he saw something in you of what he was like as a boy. But I had all these people saying how smart you were and you weren’t doing anything with it.”

  I said nothing. There was much more ground to cover, the years after Dad died. I tried to ease into that time, talking about how much I loved taking care of Christine when she was little. Mom said that wasn’t surprising.

  “She gave you unconditional love. I don’t think you really felt that from anyone before, especially not me. She helped fill a void for you.”

  My eyes welled with tears. She was right, of course. We kept talking, both of our voices cracking. She told me about the last time she saw Dad in Manila.

  “He asked me if I could stay a couple more days. I just couldn’t see how I could with you kids back here. So I said, ‘I just can’t do it,’ and then he kissed me good-bye. And I went hysterical. I watched him walk away through a window and I just knew that I wouldn’t see him again.”

  I asked why we moved so quickly, only five months after the accident.

  “I thought I was going to come home and his car was going to be in the driveway. I thought that since they didn’t find anything he’d somehow make it home. I couldn’t get that out of my head until we moved.”

  I’d felt exactly the same way. By now, we’d been talking for four hours. I couldn’t really bear to push on, but I feared that if we stopped, Mom would shut down and we’d never speak about Dad again.

  We moved on to the Flint years; there were minefields everywhere. She remembered a particularly hairy moment at the dinner table. She was cutting a pizza at the dining room table and I made one of my trademark sarcastic remarks. She flung the pizza slicer in my general direction. According to Mom, this is how it went:

  ME: You could have ended in prison on that one.

  MOM: I’d love every minute of it.

  Somehow, this made us both laugh. What grieving American family doesn’t have moments of hurling cutlery? I asked her if that was the lowest moment. She said it wasn’t close. Her voiced dropped to a whisper.

  “I wrote notes to myself about committing suicide. I’d write, ‘I love my family. But I can’t see any end to this. I’m so tired.’”

  There was silence. All those nights when she locked herself in her room and I sat outside listening to her cry, that was my fear—that she would end it all and leave us with no one. I wasn’t wrong. But to hear the actual words tore at my insides. The rational part told me that it wasn’t my fault; she needed professional help. But my gut told me something different—I’d let my mother down when she needed me most. I couldn’t save her. But I didn’t say anything like that.

  “Mom, I’m glad you didn’t.”

  She smiled her gap-toothed smile, the one Dad fell in love with, and tears ran down her lined face. I could still see the beautiful woman playing bridge while I watched from the stairs.

  “I would have never done it. There was no one left to take care of our kids.”

  I wondered aloud why she didn’t date to ease her loneliness or at least to have some adult conversation.

  “I didn’t think I had something to offer to anyone. I’m not smart. So why bother? Your dad saw something in me. He could see into my soul and made me feel special. I knew that wasn’t going to happen again.”

  I knew far too well what she meant, sorrow poisoning your blood until you feel like you just don’t matter in this world. I told her that she mattered to me and to a lot of people in the world. But I could tell that she didn’t believe me.

  “I don’t know how you turned out as well as you did. I did a terrible job with you. I know it now. I didn’t know anything about boys. I didn’t have any brothers.” She paused and fiddled with her wedding ring. “You were your father’s only son. I was so afraid of doing something wrong I overreacted to everything. Stephen, I’m sorry.”

  And there it was. The apology I’d waited for my entire life. But I didn’t feel triumphant. I just ached for my mother sitting right next to me. It wasn’t that we had not understood each other for all those years. It was that we were shouting grief and loss and anger at each other so loudly we couldn’t hear each other. She had done the best she could. I could finally accept that.

  I turned off the tape recorder and casually said that I’d wished we’d had this conversation twenty-five years ago. Mom bolted up on the sofa, sending Ollie sprawling off her lap.

  “I was so angry at you and Terry about that! You never mentioned Dad and it made me really sad. That’s why his pictures were everywhere. I thought if you saw pictures of him you might talk about him. But you never did.”

  Her words baffled me.

  “Wait a sec, I was furious at you because you never talked about him. It made me so angry.”

  It would have been funny if it were not so damn sad. Mom let Ollie out into the backyard and poured herself a Coke.

  “Well, that’s the Rodrick family. Everyone’s so frickin’ scared of hurting someone’s feelings, nothing really ever gets said.”

  I didn’t say anything. It was too late. The tape recorder was off. Our time was up.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Mom went to bed early that night and I tried to distract myself with a Tigers game, but I eventually drifted down to the basement and Dad’s cruise box. At some point, Mom had combined his Navy stuff with other Dad-related detritus into a treasure chest of things that make up a life. It sat apart from the rest of Mom’s old furniture and clothes, a lone box on a cement altar.

  I set aside letters sealed in a Tupperware container and dug in. There was his silver sword from the Naval Academy, a black cummerbund from his wedding, and a water-damaged Navy form listing all items shipped back from the Kitty Hawk after the accident.

  I sorted through Dad’s possessions for hours, fingering his rosary beads and trying on the Navy cap he wore at his change of command. Buried underneath a lock box and a newspaper ad of Dwight Eisenhower endorsing someone for Congress was a small, red book with “Daily Diary” embossed on the cover in fading letters. I carefully opened the pages. The words were written in a blurred mixture of print and cursive that mirrored my own handwriting. It was a diary that Dad had kept when he was thirteen, the same age I was when he was killed. I asked Mom about the journal the next day and she didn’t bat an eye.

  “I didn’t know that was in there.”

  I read the pages. The boy in the diary is more responsible and worldly than I was at the same age. On January 3 and 4, Dad served as an altar boy at four masses (“solemn high funeral, same as yesterday”); took an after-school job in the cafeteria (“emptying barrels and sweeping floors with Joe Barbour”); got screamed at by his mother (“Mom found sexy book &
gave me HELL”); figured his brother ratted him out and administered frontier justice (“I slit Dan’s shirt with a knife, because he squealed”). In his spare time, he delivered the Brockton Enterprise every afternoon.

  I sensed an inherent goodness in his heart that I feared I did not inherit. Many of the early entries recount in minute detail the famous used dishwasher Dad bought his mother with his paper route money. Dad was barely thirteen and he was supervising the purchase of a major appliance (“bought second hand dishwasher from one of goody brothers in Randolph, cost $100 paid deposit of $25”). And the follow-through! There are a half-dozen trips to the hardware store (“paid $3.34 for parts”).

  In March, he crammed for the Boston College High School entrance exam, earning a scholarship, a turning point in his young life. (“Not too bad, Math EASY! I think I got close to 100! English a little harder.”) He even eased over minor financial issues for his dad. (“Had to lend Dad 85 cents.”)

  My heart swelled reading about Dad’s wonder boy achievements and altruism, but part of it just depressed me. Much of it was genuine sadness that a good soul was taken so early, but some of it was my same old refrain, self-loathing for not measuring up. Sure, I had a paper route at thirteen, but I certainly wasn’t buying Mom a damn dishwasher. I was squandering my cash on ice-cream sandwiches and treating Mom like crap. And I’d been the world’s worst altar boy.

  Fortunately, there were other episodes that made me know that he was my blood. Dad was no angel. He missed a chance at a school trip to New York City because he received Bs in conduct and application. That part sounded like me. His paper route was sliced in half by his boss because he wouldn’t stop cutting across his customers’ lawns. That after-school job in the cafeteria? He got fired from it a month later. (“Me and joe got fight with a1 salad dressing sauce, joe got wrecked. My hair still stinks.”) At least once a week, he was kept after school because of mouthing off. (“Sister said I was ‘PUNK’ today.”)

  There was a destructive streak in him that was not limited to carving up his kid brother’s shirt. After a spring blizzard, Dad headed downtown to cause trouble.