In Spite of Everything (5 page)

The Halloween picture: Over the years, it has become an emblem. For one thing, Halloween was always Dad’s favorite time of year; masks were his thing. As we grew older, Ian (my junior by two and a half years) and I made our own costumes, and Dad was always in on them. Ian went for enigmatic characters: a vampire Chinese ghost, the Masque of the Red Death. I favored inanimate objects: a postcard, a package of M&M’s, a bunch of grapes. One time, Ian went as the mummy of some lesser-known pharaoh, and Dad built a sarcophagus apparatus laid over an oversized wheelbarrow. As Dad wheeled it around from door to door, Ian would push open the hinged cover, emerging with his track-or-treat bag in a ragged hand. That first Halloween, however, I dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, Dad as the wolf. Shortly after that photo was snapped, I became scared of his terrifying aspect. We shed the costumes and went as a little girl and her dad.

Certainly, in all these snapshots, one can observe early visual cues of those warring Gemini strains in Dad. The sharp-clawed, armored armadillo in the incarnation of a soft, cuddly stuffie. The cozy baby scene in the icy cave. The wild ocean and the Easter basket. But the one that emerges as something of a tarot card is the twin image of the adoring daughter and the uncomprehending prey, the Dad and the Wolf. Ultimately, as the hand played out over the course of my father’s life, the beast would prevail. But such clues were not obvious at the time. Indeed, raging duality doesn’t generally emerge as the central theme in a person’s life and character unless it has the chance to develop in the proper environment. All villains follow the same path—they’re just kicked in the right place at the right time. Which raises the question: If someone had been a little nicer to these guys,
would that kick have had the force to hurl them into bona fide baddie territory?

Mulling over the pivotal punt and its ensuing trajectory is the hobby of tragedy lovers like me everywhere. I’m not the first to have wondered, for example, if
Paradise Lost’
s Lucifer would have become Satan if he hadn’t been unceremoniously evicted from Heaven. Had a little more patience and compassion been extended to him, maybe all that arrogance, anger, and self-pity would have blown over after a while, or at least have persisted as manageable character defects to be kept in check—not as the fiery pits of Hell. Had
King Lear’
s Gloucester degraded his illegitimate son even slightly less flagrantly, Edmund likely wouldn’t have turned out to be such an evil punk. And knowing that she had such a volatile, immature son in Hamlet, couldn’t Queen Gertrude have waited at least a year before marrying his
uncle
? I’m aware that deploying any one of these solutions would result in a mind-numbingly boring deflation of drama—like trying to stage a Buddhist opera. But I’ve always loved the villains; moreover, I’ve always wanted to
help
them. In my view, a little kindness, a little understanding is all it would have taken to turn these extraordinary characters around, to blunt the blows of outrageous fortune. As Lady Anne said to Richard III: “No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.” But I came to this villain-rescuing way of thinking very early, literally before I can remember.

The watershed moment in my own paternal-filial dynamic was not documented in a picture, but rather played out in an event immortalized via family mythology. What actually happened seems to have been straightforwardly cute. Mom, Dad, and I had been driving back late at night from a party, and the car broke down on the highway. Dad was swearing stormily, my mother devolved into her customary talky panic, and I, just over a year old, was asleep in the back. As the situation crescendoed, with Dad thrashing around for flares in the glove compartment, I suddenly chirped from my car seat, “Daddy-Doe, Daddy-Doe! Susie and Daddy-Doe!” My dad
turned to his goofy-faced daughter, chortling in the dark. It was the first time I had uttered anything like a sentence, and it was a song. “Listen to her, Dugal!” my mother cried, thrilled. “Are you listening to your daughter?” He was. “Well, hello there, Suh-woo-zo!” he chuckled. Within fifteen minutes, he had cheered up, figured out how to fix the car, and was driving us home—with me singing my song all the way.

This incident, thereafter known as the “Susie and Daddy-Doe” song, became famous in our family and its circle of close friends. This inner coterie, it should be noted, were acquainted, to varying degrees, with Dad’s good and evil inner twins. In very basic ways, they were explicit. On the one hand, Dad was, physically, one of those men you could identify from two blocks away as being Harvard Class of ’60. He was, like all his ilk, an impeccable old-school preppy business dresser. Everything from his overcoat to suit to boxer shorts was Brooks Brothers. Tortoiseshell-framed glasses. Always. On the other hand, he was long on the loutish Libertarian bluster. You could always count on him to rail about downtown Berkeley’s “lazy commie pinkos” and his character appraisal of Nixon as a “congenital thug” (ripped off from Hunter S. Thompson). He was open about his you’re-goddamned-right-I-have-the-right-to-bear-arms membership in the National Rifle Association, though he was also actively involved in the Sierra Club and the Explorers Club; he worshipped his first-edition volumes of the naturalist writers John McPhee and Peter Matthiessen. Think Don Imus funneled into Dick Thornburgh.

And while Dad could, Imus-like, easily burn bridges with his guns-a-blarin’ rhetoric, he was also deservedly known as a canny survivor. In his twenties, he had made the first solo ascent of the north face of the Gothics in the Adirondack Mountains, earning a place in the annals of American mountaineering; the route he pioneered is still known as “the Dugal.” Throughout my childhood, Dad was always taking off to go on climbs involving backpacks full of neatly coiled ropes and clanking pitons. Once, when I was six and
Ian was four, Dad had gone on an epic climbing expedition in the Sierras with a buddy, and a freak blizzard buried the region where they had last been seen. My mother piled us into the station wagon, and we gunned it up to the base camp and found it teeming with rangers on walkie-talkies, TV news crews, and emergency rescue workers. My mother crumpled on the steering wheel. Ian wailed, clutching his favorite stuffie at the time, a Raggedy Andy that he had named, poignantly, “Doll Daddy.” But there was no question in my mind that Dad was going to make it. When he and his pal were helicoptered to safety a few days later, emerging with rolls of spectacular film and having survived on a concoction he’d whipped up called “Mongolian milk” (powdered milk, snow, whiskey), Dad was fully intact, grubby and grinning like a teenage boy.

He was also notorious for being rib-cracklingly funny. Certainly grown-up men and women were always smiling broadly in his company—and, in short order, howling—but he was hilarious to my brother and me, too: a steady beat we could count on in the rhythm of everyday life. For example, Dad would be standing in the kitchen, his briefcase in one hand and a giant mug of coffee in the other, grumping in his Great Santini, ham-fisted way. But if he caught your eye, he might casually put the mug down on the counter, drop his briefcase on the floor, and spin into a graceful twirl and arabesque with his eyes reaching for heaven, then segue into a passionately furrowed Flamenco hand-clapping and foot-stomping piece. Then he would come to a complete stop on his tiptoes, set his heels down, and nonchalantly pick up the mug and the briefcase. When you laughed, he would bow and decorously intone, “And thus ends the recital of Julius Walrusso”—and leave for work.

But back in the evil-twin column, everyone who knew him also knew that Dad was just as likely to erupt into a molten rage as he was to crack a smile. He could be exquisitely vicious and foul-mouthed, especially if he was on a binge. (Dad’s alcoholism always colored everything he did, but when Ian and I were young, the tones were still pale; as he, and we, got older, they all but blacked out
everything about him.) But sometimes, the twin currents would converge like matter and antimatter—and then you were in for a treat. There was the time, for example, when Dad went to the supermarket to get some ice cream and became so outraged by the number of flavors—as well as the amount and variety of nuts, candies, and swirls bastardizing the pure, time-honored flavors—that he charged into the manager’s office and ranted that “we” didn’t want “this obscene array of choices, this New York super fudge almond chunk nougat swirly stripe bullshit”; he, frankly, found it “ostentatious and aggressive.” He didn’t know what was “going on here,” but he simply wanted to put the manager on notice that “we” just wanted “Butter Brickle! Plain and simple!” “We” didn’t want all this “goddamned frippery.” “We” never asked for it, and “we” wanted “no part” of it. When my dad relayed this story to me after the fact, I remained silent, while he sat there fuming at the memory of it. After a few moments, I ventured, “You know, Dad, I actually really like all that stuff—especially the kind with the peanut butter cups.” My dad balked.
“Really?”
He considered this, then nodded. “Well, perhaps I owe that hardworking citizen an apology.” I howled. He scratched his chin.

The trick was knowing what would tip the balance from bad to good—and, really, that’s what made the “Susie and Daddy-Doe” story so telling to people close to us. Especially to my mother. In her rendition of that night, it was pitch-black outside, there were no other cars on the road, and Dad had been so violently enraged about the car that he was a hair’s breadth away from a tantrum that she was not sure she could control. She was scared. But then, she said, I had somehow known
precisely
what to say and
how
to say it so that calm, arrowlike, would penetrate my father’s
roiling
soul. People would nod knowingly, sometimes reaching out to pat my mother’s hand and looking at me as though I knew a secret. “That little girl
loved her daddy
,” she would whisper, tearily.

My dad, a self-declared enemy of emotional hyperbole, would never enter into such discourse. Indeed, he loathed metaphor and
what he referred to as “endless discussion”; he liked chutzpah, guts, gonzoism. But his concession to the veracity of Susie and Daddy-Doe came shortly thereafter in the invention of a bedtime story he called “The Adventures of Beverly Noodle.” A charming and agile strand of pasta, Beverly Noodle was forever finding herself in tough spots—an icy crevasse, a den of criminals—and, with the help of her kind-hearted, well-adjusted friend and assistant, Sebastian the Donkey, she was always able to rally her singular combination of wit and grit to figure her way out.

To the extent that Dad would countenance metaphor, there was no question whom he intended these characters to represent. Dad, who extended the Beverly allegory by referring to himself in our workaday lives as the “noodler-in-chief,” was always figuring things out, and I, often tapped in the “noodling” process—Sebastian the Donkey—was henceforth dubbed “the deputy noodler.” I loved being the deputy noodler. The job involved everything from figuring out how to pack a hiking backpack for maximum efficiency to determining which annuals to plant where in the garden based on color and height to more esoteric conundrums like figuring out what quarks were. Although Dad spent his career as the marketing director for various high-level investment funds, his métiers, other than ice climbing, were photography, painting, gardening, astronomy, and geology, and those passions often converged on expeditions, even everyday ones.

“Now, think about
this
, if you would,” he once posited to me on a run to the local plant nursery when I was around ten. “They’ve just discovered a new particle, and the scientists describe it as ‘the absence of nothing’—now, what in hell does
that
mean?” I considered this and then said that the absence of nothing seemed like it had to be everything. My Dad slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s
exactly
it!” he hooted. “I’ve been thinking about it all week, and
you got it
!” He laughed and shook his head. “Tell you what, there, little darlin’,” he said, grinning at me in the rearview mirror.
“What we got us here is not just one drop-dead beautiful
and
one funny-as-hell cookie—we got us one
smart
cookie.”

Noodler-in-chief and deputy noodler. As I approached school age, I evinced a more demonstrable sense of grit, the trait my dad most admired. In part because one of his heroes was the explorer John Wesley Powell, who famously navigated and mapped the Grand Canyon for the geographical survey of the U.S. government
without an arm
(it had been blown off during action in the Civil War), my dad relentlessly marketed the idea that grit is more important than talent. He would take my brother and me on camping trips in the Sierras, sometimes compelling us to hike—as seven- and five-year-olds—upward of ten miles a day. Ian would flop poutily on a rock and refuse to budge. I’d keep my head down and press on. You always felt incredibly nauseated in the mornings because of the altitude, and while my brother would, understandably, complain, I made it a point to suck it up. “Tough as nails, Suze,” he’d declare with gruff pride.

But the ultimate honor was the Arctic Trip. As reward for my proven determination to tough it out, Dad made me a special promise when I was around eight: When I turned twelve, he and I would take a trip up to Ellesmere Island. The northernmost island in the Canadian Archipelago, Ellesmere Island appealed to my dad as an ice climber; the place is virtually all icy mountains, and practically nothing grows there. But he was also drawn to what he imagined would be the singularity of the void. “There’s just
nothing
up there,” he’d marvel. The plan was that it would be a “troopers only” expedition, just the two of us: hard-core camping, climbing, and canoeing. We would not bathe; we would eat nothing but Ding-Dongs and Kool-Aid. “I bet you and I will be the only two crazy honkies up there, Suze-o.”

Did I really have a well of native grit, or did my love for my dad—and fear of losing my deputy noodler status—compel me to dig one? I don’t know. I know that I couldn’t wait for that trip. Could. Not.
Wait
. I could not believe that my notoriously gonzo, smart, funny, ice-climbing dad had selected
me
to take on the most serious expedition he had ever conceived. It meant, in my mind, that I not only had the right stuff; I must have
more
of the right stuff than anyone else he knew. He invited
me
. My father, who was so extraordinary, saw something extraordinary in
me
. Not only that, but he saw that we shared the
same
extraordinary traits. Dad and
me
.