A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (10 page)

“Well, finally after a few months your father proposed. I remember we were walking and he seemed so nervous. At one point he just stopped right there on the path and his hands were shaking. He turned to me and out of the blue asked me if I would marry him.

“But at this point, you see I didn’t want to be married, not to anyone. I wanted to be a painter and live in Paris or Greenwich Village in New York City.

“But your father told me that if I didn’t marry him, that he would kill himself.”

My mother reached into the patch pocket on her dress and brought out her cigarettes. She lit one and stared at her painting, blowing smoke. “Mother wanted me to marry him. Mother told me, ‘This is what you do, Margaret. He’s a good man and he’s asked you and you must say yes.’ I remember your father’s eyes, so dark, and I was terrified. I was sure that if I turned him down he really would shoot himself in the face so I said yes. It wasn’t long after that we were married at Mother’s house down in Cairo. Just a small wedding.” Her voice had dropped to nearly a whisper.

“What was it like?” I asked.

As she spoke, she gazed into the air above my head, absently twisting the wedding band on her left hand with the thumb and forefinger of her right. Around and around she turned it, as though unscrewing the lid to her past.

Most of the living room furniture had been moved out of the room, but footprints from the sofa, coffee table, and chairs remained indented in the floral carpeting. A white fabric runner had been unrolled atop the carpet, extending from the fireplace across the room, to the position where the minister would stand. My mother’s white satin heels constantly caught on the runner.

Hours before the guests arrived, my mother’s mother had placed a bouquet of white flowers on top of the mantel. White carnations, lilies, and ferns. She placed a similar arrangement on the buffet, between two tall silver candlesticks.

My father’s parents had dressed in a surprisingly somber fashion for a wedding. With my grandfather’s charcoal suit and black tie and my grandmother’s deep red dress, belted so tightly at the waist a deep breath would have been impossible, they looked like guests at a funeral and not a wedding.

But nobody could have mistaken my mother for anything other than a bride. At five foot nine and with her long neck and strong, defined jaw, she looked something like a movie star. She wore a simple, strapless white silk dress that cut straight across the bust. A band of tulle extended the bustline an inch higher. She wore a hat that was little more than a silk bow, with a veil that fell on either side of her head to just past the elbow. In her hand she carried a long satin ribbon tied with white orchid blossoms. Though all her life friends had told her she ought to go to New York City and become a model or even an actress, my mother had never considered it. But today, looking at herself in the mirror above the fireplace mantel, she felt beautiful. She had a heart-shaped face, perfect lips, and a tiny nose. And today she was a bride and this would be the happiest day of her life. She told herself as much, as she looked at her reflection. “It will be,” she whispered. “You’ll see.”

My father wore a black suit and a narrow black tie. A white carnation was pinned to his left lapel, its green stem wrapped in white satin ribbon. He appeared stiff and uncomfortable, a guest at somebody else’s wedding. But in his eyes was a glint of something everybody mistook in the future young minister for 
the spirit
. But what flashed in those eyes had nothing whatsoever to do with God.

Both sets of parents, a couple of family friends, a flower girl, and a minister. The brick house held the heat all day and the guests were hot enough as it was. If more people had been invited, the room would have been unbearable.

In the overheated kitchen, Lucille mopped the sweat from her brow with a dishrag, then tucked it back under the apron string knotted around her full waist. She added a splash of rum to the punch, then thought about it and added some more.

Lucille had worked for the family since my mother was a baby. She had a family of her own, back yonder on the other side of the railroad tracks in the little shantytown where all the Negroes lived. But my mother considered Lucille part of 
her
 family, not belonging to a husband and children of her own.

My mother’s mother had pulled her into the bedroom before the ceremony began and whispered, “Now, Margaret? You’re doing the right thing. John is a fine young man and you will be very happy.”

Lucille had pulled her aside, too. She’d hugged her to her ample bosom and whispered into her ear, “Child, I am gonna miss you. You make sure he treat you right, you hear?” She didn’t say to my mother that there was something funny in the young man’s eyes, something not quite right. Best to keep that to herself.

My mother had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from crying and spoiling her makeup. She nodded her head and whispered, “I will.”

After the minister pronounced them man and wife, my mother and father posed in front of the wedding cake, three tiers, white frosting with white flowers. My mother cut the first slice and my father reached down and broke away a corner, stiff with frosting. As he placed the morsel in her mouth, my mother reached up with her hand and let her fingers rest on his wrist. She could feel his pulse racing. The frosting was so sweet it seemed to burn her tongue.

“After it was all over, we posed for photographs. Really, the only thing that had changed was that I now had a band of gold on my left hand. But it seemed to me that 
everything
 was different, even the air. It was thicker, somehow. And I felt so far away, as if I’d traveled. We were in the same room, with the same people, in the same clothes, and yet I felt so removed. I reached down and placed my hands on the little flower girl’s shoulders. Her hair smelled like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and I just wanted to cry. I wanted to lean over and whisper something to the flower girl. I wanted to warn her. But of what? What would I have said? So I just stood there and I smiled and your father stood next to me and he smiled, too. And we were married and all the windows were open but the smell of flowers was so thick and sickly sweet, I felt like I might choke to death.”

My mother closed her eyes. “Mom?” I said. “Are you okay?”

She turned around and pressed her cigarette out in the ashtray she’d set on the dining room table. “It just makes me sad to think back, that’s all.”

“But he became a minister, right?” I asked, veering away from the wedding, trying to steer her from the sadness.

“Well, yes,” she said. “He was a Presbyterian minister but only for a short time. Your father decided after a bit that he didn’t believe in God. And that’s when he went back to graduate school and became a philosophy professor.”

I wondered again what it meant to be a philosopher. I could spell the word but I could not define it.

I’d asked my father, over and over, “What does it mean?” And he’d said, “Son, it’s too complicated to explain.”

“What is a philosopher?” I asked my mother now.

“Oh, that’s something you should ask your father,” she said, as she drifted away from her easel, ambled over to the sofa, and sat.

I followed her. Images of my father were swirling in my head, down on one knee proposing, lifting a gun to his forehead. I’d heard the story of how my parents met a million times but suddenly now, I only wanted to crawl under the coffee table and curl up. I thought of her wedding cake, how pretty it must have been, encrusted with flowers made of frosting, ropes of creamy white. “And the cake was really good, wasn’t it?” I asked.

My mother hadn’t heard me. She sighed and continued in a flat, lifeless voice. “Your father had so much rage toward his mother, I suppose for leaving him when he was so little, letting her daddy raise him. Or maybe he was angry that she even came back for him at all, maybe he only wanted to stay with Dandy and the aunts. In any case, he was very confused, very lost. Yes, I do think he would have killed himself if I’d said no.”

She brought her thumb to her mouth and bit the nail. “After we had your brother we moved to Seattle. And it was just so gray and rainy. I thought I’d made just a terrible mistake. Here I was, married to this man whose behavior was just getting stranger and stranger and I had a little baby and I was so alone and confused.”

But what had she meant, “stranger and stranger”? I asked her.

“Oh, he would drink. He would sit in the dark and he would drink and then he would say things that didn’t make sense. He would come into the bedroom and wake me up. 
‘Margaret, Margaret,’
 he would shake me awake. And then he would speak just gobbledygook. He’d be frantic, very, very upset. Very drunk. And just carrying on. I was terrified.”

The pines surrounding our house were so thick the needles trapped the growing darkness in the living room. My mother’s form was perfectly still on the sofa where she sat now, holding her brush. Dull yellow light from the kitchen fell into a rectangle on the floor outside the doorway and then died there.

“I was very afraid of your father back then. I had this little baby that cried all the time, he cried so much. No matter how much I hugged him and tried to comfort him, he just cried and cried.”

My brother, something off about him even then.

Her voice sounded like it was coming from a different room. Disconnected from the unmoving shape on the sofa. A ventriloquist’s illusion. It made me uneasy, the way she could vanish from a room without even leaving it.

“After we moved to Pittsburgh, I thought I would kill myself. Your brother was seven and he just didn’t fit in at school, he would come home in tears because nobody wanted to play with him. And then I would cry because I didn’t know what to do. Your father was worse, he was so angry, he had so much rage in him that he kept bottled up. I thought he might snap and kill me, kill your brother. I was just terrified. Calling Mother on the phone and weeping, begging her to come stay with me. ‘Margaret,’ she said, ‘he’s your husband now. You take care of him.’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a single friend except our upstairs neighbor, an elderly lady named Eloise but, of course, what could she do?

“I didn’t dare think about leaving your father. I knew if I did that he would come after us. That he would hunt us down and that would be it. So I stayed.”

She finally looked at me, sitting on the floor at her feet. Her eyes were moist.

“And then you were born and I was so happy. You were such a good, easy baby, you never cried. I loved you so much and I knew I couldn’t kill myself because you needed me.”

A ringing in my ears. In the silence of the dark room, it was a buzz, a steady hum, like steel stretching. It could have been an alarm of some kind, a warning issued from within.

I STOOD IN the center of the house, the only area that could not be called a 
room
. It was the point at which the hallway met the top of the stairs, just at the entrance to the living room and dining room, right at the doorway to the kitchen, beneath the twenty-foot ceilings. I stood there and called out in my loudest voice, holding the note in my throat so that the word became a howl, a cry, 
“Dead!”

My mother appeared from around the corner, wiping her hands on the thighs of her skirt. Her face was stricken.

“Dead!” I called again, lifting my chin up, releasing the word like a swarm of bees.

My mother reached down with both hands and gripped my small shoulders. “Why are you saying that? What is it? What’s the matter?” There was a frantic edge to her voice, confusion mixed with terror.

Her intensity frightened me, as did her confusion. “What?” I asked.

“Why are you shouting ‘dead’? I don’t understand.”

I looked up at her and said, “I’m calling for my 
father
.”

It was magnificent, her sudden comprehension, the way simply understanding rearranged her features, seemed to drain some kind of 
awful
 from her, some kind of dread. I saw relief in her eyes, and something else, a glint of wit? “But do you hear how you pronounce that word? You add an 
e
. You are calling 
dead
, d-e-a-d, not 
dad
, d-a-d.”

I blinked. It was impossible. “I what?”

“All these years,” she said, “I hadn’t realized it, not until just now, when I heard you call for him. But you do, you pronounce 
dad
 as 
dead
.”

“But how do you say it?” I felt anxious, something close to panic. Was it true that I called my father 
dead
 and didn’t even know it? Was it possible something coming out of me could be so terribly, terribly wrong and I didn’t even know it? “How do you say it?” I asked again.

“Well, 
dad
,” she said, “flat 
a
. Bad, sad, mad. Dad.”

“Dead,” I repeated. And I heard it, I did. Quickly, I correctly said, “Dad.” Sad, mad, glad. No, I did not say the word like that, not ever. She was right. It was incredible.

I am the only Yankee in the family for generations. Both of my parents are from Georgia, and so is my brother. I was born in Pittsburgh, so I alone have no accent.

Dead.

My father arrived at the top of the stairs from the basement. When he gripped the banister and took the final step to join us in the nowhere area, he winced in pain. As though his shoes were filled with broken glass, as though tremendous weights were strapped to his shoulders, as though corrosive acid and not blood rushed through his arteries. “Okay, okay, I’m here. What’s all this shouting? Is everything okay?” As usual, he sounded like he’d just woken up from a nap, which he probably had. In his voice, the fatigue was clear. What was it now? No doubt, he was expecting to be told that something was in need of an immediate repair—a window broken, a faucet leaking.

The year before, I was throwing rocks in the backyard and one of them hit the sliding glass door, creating a spider crack. For twenty minutes he’d stood downstairs in the dark looking at the starburst crack, not saying one word. I’d brought him down there myself, apologizing deeply. But as he stood there saying nothing, I became afraid and backed away, one tiny step at a time. Until I was pressed against the far rear wall watching him watch the glass. Finally, I turned and ran upstairs. My father remained downstairs the rest of the night. The cracked glass was never spoken of again.