Aloft (4 page)

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head might just wonder who was doing such a thing, this mystery man calling out from deep in the suburban wood.

Which would be somewhat ironic, because increasingly it seems I'm not a mystery to anyone, the very fact of which, as has been made more than clear to me on a number of occasions, is part of my so-called life problem. This from Theresa, mostly, though also from Jack (in Surround Sound silence), and from my once-loving Rita, each of whom holds to a private version of the notion, furious and true. The only one who seems unable to fathom my evidently patent, roughshod ways is my ailing father, who continues to misread my every motive and move, with the resulting accrual of enmity and suspicion steadily drowning out the few remaining vitalities of his mind (yet another mirth-less progression to be considered and acted upon, and alarmingly soon). If anything, I'm afraid, he and I are long-steeped in a mystery without poetry, a father-son brew not just particular to us, of course, though ours is special recipe enough, and like the rest warrants further parsing, which I must try, try.

And as I aim my sweet ship in line with the field, I can just barely glimpse the X in the distance, faded enough from these brief seasons that it reads like a watermark on the broad, gently pitched roof of my ranch-style house, and the temptation is to interpret this muted-ness as muteness, my signage ever faint, and disappearing. This is probably true. I am disappearing. But let me reveal a secret. I have been disappearing for years.

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FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I worked in the family business, Battle Brothers Brick & Mortar, a masonry company that my grandfather started in the Depression and that my father and uncles gradually turned into a landscaping company that I maintained and that Tack has plans for expanding into a publicly traded specialty home improvement enterprise to be re-named Battle Brothers Excalibur, L.L.C. (OTC ticker symbol: BBXS), replete with a glossy annual report and standby telephone operators and an Internet website.

The family name was originally Battaglia, but my father and uncles decided early on to change their name to Battle for the usual reasons immigrants and others like them will do, for the sake of familiarity and ease of use and to herald a new and optimistic beginning, which is anyone's God-given right, whether warranted or not.

Battle, too, is a nice name for a business, because it's simple and memorable, ethnically indistinct, and then squarely patriA I, 0 F r

2Y

otic, though in a subtle sort of way. Customers—Jack says
clients—have
the sense we're fighters, that we have an inner resolve, that we'll soldier through all obstacles to get the job done, and done right (this last line can actually be found in the latest company brochure). My father insists that the idea for the name originated with him, and for just the connotations I've mentioned, which I don't doubt, as he was always the savviest busi-nessman of his brothers, and talked incessantly through my youth about the awesome power of words, from Shakespeare to Hitler, though these days he mostly just brings up his favorite blabbermouths on the Fox News Channel. But it's not just marketing for the most part the tag has been true, though certainly more so in my father's generation than my own, probably more in mine than in Jack's; but this is world history and I'm not going to rail on about the degradation of standards or the work ethic. My father and uncles did their work in their time, and I did mine, and jack will do his at this post-turn-of-the-millennium moment, and who can say who will have had the hardest go?

Sometimes I think Jack's is a tough slot, given the never-ending onslaught of instant information and the general wisdom these days that if you don't continually "grow" your business at a certain heady rate it will wither and die. Good for him that for the last four years he has seemed to be practically printing money, what with all the trucks out every day and him needing to hire extra help literally off the street each morning in Farm-ingville, where the Hispanic men hang out. Now with the economy in the doldrums he probably wishes he hadn't built his mega-mini-mansion but he doesn't seem concerned. In fact, we're all meeting at his new house this weekend, both to celebrate Theresa's recent engagement to her boyfriend Paul
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(they're flying in from Oregon), and my father's eighty-fifth birthday, which of course he has forgotten about but will enjoy immensely, as he does whenever he is celebrated, which Jack and Eunice will do in high and grand style.

I do sometimes worry about Jack, and wonder if he's grinding too hard for the dollars. Just sit down with him to lunch sometime and you'll see all the digital hardware come un-clipped from his belt and onto the table, the pager and cell phone and electronic notepad and memo-to-self recorder. At least my father and uncles had the twin angels of innocence and ignorance to guide them and the devil of hard times to keep working against I merely inherited what they had already made fairly prosperous, and did what I could not to ruin anything, though Rita often pointed out that I had the least envi-able position, given that I really had no choice in the matter, expected as I was to sustain something I never had a genuine interest in. This is mostly true. I had no great love for brick and mortar. When I was still young I was sure I wanted to become a fighter pilot; I sent away for information on the Air Force Acad-emy, did focusing exercises to make sure my vision stayed sharp, tried not to sleep too much (you grew in your sleep, and I was afraid of exceeding the height limit). But when the time came I watched the application date come and go, applying only to regular colleges, my inaction not due to lack of interest or fear but what I would say was my disbelief in the real, or more like it, the real as it had to do with me. I suppose therapist types and self-actualizers would say I have difficulty with
visualization,
how you must see yourself doing and being—say, at the controls in the cockpit, or making love to a beautiful woman, or living in a grand beach house—but even though I can summon the requisite image and can get a little fanciful and dreamy, too, I can't A L O F T 2 7

seem to settle on any one picture of myself without feeling a companion negativity whose caption at the bottom reads,
Yeah,
right.

And if it's no surprise to those out there who are thinking that was probably my father's favorite line I would say it certainly was (and still is), not just to me but to everyone in the family and the business, with the exception of my little brother, Bobby, who surely would have benefited from a healthy dose of skepticism had he ever returned from his first and last tour in Vietnam. In all fairness, however, I'm Hank (The Tank) Battle's son, with the main difference between him and me being that I was never able to summon his first-strike arrogance, nor develop the necessary armature for the inevitable fallout from oneself. And while there will be more on this to follow, I will not complain now, and add that choices are a boon only to those who can make good on them. I made a fine living from Battle Brothers, and was able to raise my children in a safe town of decent families and give them every opportunity for self-betterment, in which I believe I succeeded. I always worked hard, if not passionately. I never took what was given to me for granted, or thought anything or anyone was below me. I was not a quitter.

In these regards, at least, I have no regrets.

And I had more than my fair share of good times. Through all the work, I still took the time to travel the whole world twice over, going pretty much everywhere, including the North and South Pole (well, almost) and even a few "rogue" states in Africa and the Middle East, and slipped into those countries I wasn't easily allowed to enter, like Cuba and North Korea (if you count that conference table in the DMZ). Of course this was after the kids were in college, and most of the time Rita came along with me, though often enough she didn't have the
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vacation days left and I went alone. The only typical places I haven't been, oddly enough, are Canada and Mexico, not even their side of Niagara, not even Cancun, but these glaring omis-sions never bothered me much, and I doubt ever will. I like to think I make up for any intracontinental bigotry by sending planeloads of tourists to popular spots across both borders, as I've worked for a couple years now as a part-time travel agent at the local branch office of a huge travel conglomerate (which

•

call Parade) that runs full-page ads in the Sunday
Times.

When I sold out my shares in Battle Brothers four years ago I hadn't fully realized that there was no place left for me to go, and decided, on the suggestion of Theresa, citing my extensive résumé as a "passenger," that I ought to try my hand at being a travel professional, which, it turns out, despite her snide decon-structive terminology, was just my calling. For long before I donned my red Parade travel agent's blazer I could speak to most every notable sight in every notable town in this shrinking touristical world, I knew the better ranks of inns and hotels and tour and cruise operators, and I knew which all-inclusives and play-and-stay packages offered good value or were just plain sorry and cheap.

Likewise, I'm not the man to call if you are looking for some cloistered, indigenous roost in a cliffside sweat-lodge-cum-spa or a suite in a designer hotel where the bellboys wear gunmetal suits and headsets and the rooms are decorated in eight shades of white. I am suspicious of the special. I have always believed in staying in vacation trappings that are just slightly nicer than what I have at home, and certainly not any worse, where at least breakfast is included (even if it's just coffee and a gelid danish in the lobby), and the cultural tour, whether by coach or by foot, is led by a cheerleading guy or gal with an old-fashioned and A L O F T 2 9

gently ironic sense of humor and a thick local accent and a soul-ful character suffused with a grand and romantic self-aspiration. I have always preferred wayfaring with such a group, exchanging our white-man
arigatos
and
auf wiedersehens
with jolly inanity while hitting all the trod-over sites and famous vistas, for the allure of traveling for me has never been in searching out the little-known
pieve
or backroad
auberge
but standing squint-eyed amidst the sunbaked rubble of some celebrated ruin like Taormina or Machu Picchu in the obliging company of just-minted acquaintances of strictly limited duration and knowing that wherever I go be able to commune with fellow strangers over the glories of this world.

During her undergraduate years when she seemed angry about almost everything I did, and pretty much saw me, she once even said, as "the last living white man," my smart-as-heck daughter often felt compelled to expose my many travels for the rapacious, hegemonic colonialist "projects" that they were. At Thanksgiving or Christmas she'd idly ask where I'd been lately and I'd mention some island in the Caribbean or off the coast of Thailand and she'd start in on how my snorkeling was undoubtedly negatively impacting the coral reefs, and I'd swear I didn't touch anything except maybe an already dead starfish (which I brought home and had framed) and right there would be evidence of my integral part in the collective strip-mining of an indigenous culture and ecosystem. I'd answer that the locals seemed perfectly content to strip it themselves, given the number of shell and sponge and stuffed-bird shops lining the beachside streets, and then we'd get into the usual back-and-forth about the false-bottomed tourist economy (Theresa) and whether tourists should stay home so the natives could still weave their clothes out of coconut threads (J13) and
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the need for
indigenes
to control the mechanisms of capital and production (TB) and the question of who really cared as long as everyone was happy with the situation (JB) and the final retort of who could possibly be happy in this unthinking, unjust world (guess who)?

To which, when your once-sugar-sweet daughter, who used to hang on your shoulders and neck like a gibbon monkey, now just home from her impossibly liberal, impossibly expensive New Hampshire college, is glaring at you desperately with bloodshot all-nighter eyes from too much 3 A.M. espresso and clove cigarettes and badly recited Rimbaud (and other activities too gamy to think about), you're tempted to say, "I am," even knowing it would quite possibly put her over the edge. But then you don't, and hope you never do, just requesting instead that someone pass down the boiled brussels sprouts, which are as usual utterly miserable with neglect.

All this, it pleases me to report, has come full circle in our steady march toward maturation, as I'm now sitting at my desk at Parade Travel in Huntington comparing package prices for Theresa and her fiance, the purportedly semi-famous (and only semi-successful) Asian-American writer Paul Pyun. I'm to say

"Asian-American," partly because they always do, and not only because my usage of the old standby of "Oriental" offends them on many personal and theoretical levels, but also because I should begin to reenvision myself as a multicultural being, as my long-deceased wife, Daisy, was Asian herself and my children are of mixed blood, even though I have never thought of them that way. I must admit that I don't quite yet appreciate what all the fuss is about, but I've realized that words matter inL

ordinately to Theresa and Paul, and far beyond any point I wish to take a stand on.

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They're planning to get married sometime this coming fall or winter, right here on Long Island (Paul's parents, both medical doctors, live down the Expressway in Roslyn), and have asked me to look into a moderately priced one-week honeymoon in a tropical location. I assumed they wanted a
-que
holiday
(unique, boutique, exotique),
some far-flung stay with plenty of cultural sites and funky local flavor, but in fact Theresa told me herself that they were thinking something "spring breaky,"

maybe even a cruise. Apparently after endless backpacking forays into Third World sections of First World countries, they now desire the fun and the tacky, perhaps on the order of certain beachfront "huts" I can book them in Ixtapa, where they can roll out of bed and lie in the sand all day and get served strong, sweet drinks and only if they wish exert themselves with a paddleboat or parasail ride. No forced eco-hikes here.