My Father Before Me (8 page)

21

Sitka. I heard the name often in my childhood. It was the place my father flew to and then returned from, weeks later—a place I couldn't picture, except I knew it was very far away and had a pulp mill, whatever that looked like. Sitka was on the west side of an island, looking out to the Pacific. To get there, my father had to travel on a small plane from Seattle a thousand miles north to Juneau, overshooting his ultimate destination, then board a seaplane and reverse direction, going south the last hundred miles to the coast, landing in the water, and motoring up to the dock. Sometimes he traveled to Wrangell, two hundred miles from Sitka, to the company's lumber mill.
Sitka
.
Wrangell
. These were words my father carried back to us, as if in little leather pouches, from the edge of the world, to speak at the dinner table, words with jagged music in them, initial syllables falling swiftly like an ax—
Sitka, Wrangell
, consonants closing the throat: words almost absent of meaning but with mystery glittering in them, the mystery of what my father did in those places, of what the air smelled like there, of who the people were. At five, at seven, at ten, I could have only the vaguest understanding of what my father did for a living. I might not even have cared much. Fathers went to work; that's what they did. Up and down our street, morning after morning, Jenny's dad, William's dad, Pete's dad, Tommy's dad—each gripped the top of the
steering wheel with his left hand, craned his neck to look behind him, backed down the driveway, shifted gears, then drove off, turning at the corner and disappearing. They each might as well have been going to the same office. But my father sometimes was gone for days and days, leaving us for Sitka, for Wrangell, leaving us with room to imagine anything we might about those places, leaving us with time to begin feeling that he, hardly ever here, was hardly real himself.

Sitka and Wrangell—Alaska in general—remained illusory: words, not places. They were postcards my father sent home from his travels: a totem pole beside a grinning, squinting Eskimo; a team of huskies pulling a sled through snow; a log cabin, solitary among looming firs and spruces; and, once statehood was official, the flag: gold stars of the Big Dipper against a deep blue background.

That gold was Yukon gold, the elusive yearned-for thing we heard about when our father recited “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” This was one of the first poems I knew, and I loved it. Or I loved the few minutes my father sometimes spared in an evening, my pajama'ed brother and I sitting together on a bed, when he pulled up a chair and opened his book of Robert Service poems. Maybe he'd owned the book for years; maybe he'd had it as a child. More likely, he'd picked it up recently on a whim at an Alaska tourism office. It was “The Cremation of Sam McGee” we wanted to hear, always. We were tickled by the wild, morbid comedy of it, and he was, too. We loved that we were chuckling about the same thing our father was; we loved the words of the poem in his voice, and we loved his voice in our ears.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun / By the men who moil for gold.
The brisk but steady rhythms, the frequent rhymes, all exact and landing squarely on the beat: these surely appealed to Kevin and me. But it was the story—what child doesn't love a story?—that mattered most. A prospector from the warm clime of Tennessee has never had it so cold as he does in the Yukon, so cold that his dreams of riches
are overcome by dreams of death and of the relief he might feel if his partner keeps a promise to cremate his remains.
'Tain't being dead—it's my awful dread / Of the icy grave that pains
. The promise is kept: Sam's pal builds a fire in the furnace of an abandoned boat and stuffs Sam's frozen corpse into it. He leaves, but then he can't help himself—he returns to take a peek. There, in the blaze, is his friend, smiling, imploring him to close the furnace door, saying,
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, / It's the first time I've been warm
.

A man happy at last only in death, amid the flames devouring him: Dad and Kevin and I sat silently for a moment, grinning in the glow of it.

– Part III –

Empty Plate

22

My parents voted for the Catholic and the New Frontier. As JFK and Jackie were preparing to move into the White House, my parents were boxing up their belongings and transporting them to a new home, the one where all of their children would grow up. About a mile away from their old house, it was more than twice as big and cost twice as much, but, with the higher salary of my father's new job, they could afford it, even if they would otherwise have to scrimp. Since the house was brand-new, they'd had a hand in designing it. Instead of their old one-car garage, they now had a carport big enough for two vehicles. With five children already, and Dana due to be born around the time of the move, they made sure to include six bedrooms—three on the top floor, three on the bottom. The oldest children would each be given a downstairs bedroom, and the youngest would live upstairs in rooms across the hall from our parents. As the years went by and new babies were born, the younger children, one by one, moved downstairs into the bedrooms the older siblings left behind when they moved out. The new house had three bathrooms: one for my mother; one, off the master bedroom, for my father; and one, downstairs, for the children. That bathroom featured a long counter with three sinks side by side, each with a medicine cabinet built in to a mirror extending the length of the wall. With their three oldest daughters soon to be teenagers, my parents anticipated traffic jams.

The house was on an unpaved dead-end road in the northeast section of the city, where only in the last few years had lots been cleared for construction. There were still large thickets of trees in the area and ponds with tadpoles flitting about in them. Only three other families lived on the street, but as our house was being constructed, three other homes were as well. Young couples who had started their families a decade before were doing well enough to dream about and build their own homes, to clear the pines and wild blackberry bushes from their own chosen plot of land and stamp it with a new address. During the first ten years of our life on that secluded street, there was rarely a summer undisturbed by the rumble and grind of backhoes and bulldozers and the multiple short reports of hammers. After ours, another dozen homes rose up—another dozen mothers bustling about in kitchens and laundry rooms, another dozen fathers, in late afternoon, pulling into driveways, sitting at the wheel in a haze of cigarette smoke.

Before we moved in, my father spent weeks driving alone to the unfinished home in the evening, after his workday downtown. The builders had agreed to take five percent off the purchase price if he did some of the painting and tiling himself. So my father stowed in the family car what he needed—the cans and brushes and rollers and drop cloths and saws and pencils and tiles and tape measure—drove to the house, and went at it, solitary, happy. He was never more serene than when confronted with a project to accomplish: a physical predicament that he could solve through mathematical calculations, tiny, inconspicuous adjustments, and a steady hand. By trial and error and much corrective sanding, he learned how to slather and smooth mud onto drywall. He worked and worked, accompanied only by the fresh echoes of the empty house, while my pregnant mother remained in the old house, caring for their five children, awaiting his return.

One night, he didn't return. He had gone to the new house to spend the evening laying tile on the ground floor. Three hours went
by, then four, then five. My mother couldn't pack up her children and drive to check on him: he had taken the only car. She couldn't call him: there was no phone in the new house yet. Even if there were, would he answer? He might be lying unconscious on the partially tiled floor, having slipped into a diabetic coma. He might be—my mother didn't want to think of this—dead. She tucked us, one by one, into bed, then lay down in her own bed. There was only silence, no sign of her husband. She drifted off. When she woke, she was still alone in bed and certain something horrible had happened, something tragic, and she had been unable to prevent it. As she prepared breakfast for the family and saw Terry, Patty, and Peggy off to school, she was intent on remaining outwardly calm. Finally, with the three girls gone, she bundled me into a stroller and headed out the door with Kevin, who was three, toddling beside her. “We're taking a morning walk, Kev. Isn't this fun? It won't be a long walk, not too long. Make sure to keep to the side of the road.” My father had been gone probably fourteen hours. We walked the mile toward the new house, where she would deal as best she could with whatever crisis we encountered. There were neighbors across the street; she could run there and plead with them to call for an ambulance.

When we reached the house, my mother lifted me out of the stroller and walked with Kevin toward the basement door. She eased it open. On the floor, kneeling, pushing a tile into place, was my father—looking, my mother said later, “happy as a clam.” He glanced up, puzzled. “What are you doing here?” he said.

This was the house where everything happened, the house of my first and most indelible memories—indelible, perhaps, because they were half real and half created by imagination, the earliest of them forged when reality and imagination were hardly distinguishable. Gaston Bachelard says our childhood house is “our first universe,” that which “shelters daydreaming,” the enclosed space that retains its shad
ows. This space of my childhood is the dark nook beneath the stairs, behind the water heater; it is the one floor tile, set there by my father, that bubbled and buckled and would not lie flat; the rough stone wall around the upstairs fireplace, rising to the high ceiling, enough narrow footholds jutting out of it for us to climb, if we were patient, to the top; our parents' bedroom, at the end of the upstairs hall, in the ­daytime—the strict quiet, the king bedspread wide and cool and untouchable in the dimness; downstairs, the closet of my older sister with its menagerie of stuffed animals, emptied when she left the house and I fell heir to her room; the closet in the downstairs rec room, the kids' realm, filled with boots and skis and sleeping bags and tennis rackets and boxes of old documents, including, we discovered once through snooping, a photo of our parents on their wedding day, a photo dated only six months before our oldest sister's birthday, and that's how we knew our parents had lived a life before us, a life they didn't speak about; the concrete laundry tub, uncoupled from its plumbing and sunk into a pit in the backyard to make fires in; the flat carport roof, strewn with pebbles, upon which we were allowed to set foot once a year—when Dad lugged the box of Christmas lights up and we followed him, creeping to the roof's edge and kneeling, untangling the red and green bulbs so he could string them up; the wooden stairs to the back deck, fat slats we could sit on, slipping our skinny legs between them to dangle down as we ate our summer lunch, the milk in the glass slowly warming, absorbing the flavorless taste of sunlight.

This was the house in which, at two years old, lying in the dark, my charge being to fall asleep, I was given for company unnatural voices—deep and rolling, high and howling, as of wild giants quarreling. My parents had brought a radio into the room and tuned it to the classical music station. But it was not Bach or Chopin I was hearing; it was opera—voices wailing and moaning in no tongue I could understand. Gradually, terribly, I descended into sleep, as Tosca
hurled herself from the parapet, as Don Giovanni was dragged down into the everlasting flames.

It wasn't long before I heard music that drew me toward it, music that we children chose for ourselves. “She Loves You.” “Thank You Girl.” “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “All My Loving.” In 1964, my older sisters were fourteen and thirteen and twelve: they swooned for the Beatles. Considering their age and gender, they were duty-bound to do so. Weekend slumber parties meant entire nights of those Capitol releases spinning in the rec room while I lingered in the hall, trying to be a part of the party without being told to go away. I yearned to join the world of that room, a world without parents, a world that seemed built upon a single article of faith: abandonment to joy—a joy made manifest in sudden shrieks, giggles, and urgent whispers. I was the kid brother, the littlest one—cute, like Paul, if I was lucky. We were all expected to choose our favorite Beatle. It was Paul I wanted to be: maybe I'd discovered that the teenage girls lounging in their pajamas in the next room liked him best. Maybe, in the Beatles cartoon I watched on Saturday mornings, Paul engaged in the funniest high jinks. Maybe I liked his singing. My older sisters wanted to date the Beatles, but we three youngest children, Kevin, Dana, and I, wanted to be them. That's what the family badminton rackets were for. They were our guitars. One of our sisters acquired an array of mop-top paraphernalia: Beatle boots, Beatle dolls, Beatle wigs. And there were plenty of real beetles crawling around outside. When we spotted one, we classified it by species. Those with narrow, angular features: George. The more rounded ones: John. Those with evident goofiness or asymmetry: Ringo. And the cute ones were Paul.

What our parents thought of all of this, I don't know. They had their own life upstairs, the adult one, without music.

I recall them talking sometimes—about money, about my father's work, about what the mayor was up to. I also recall silence: the hush
in which my father recovered from his workday, in which he leaned back in his big vinyl armchair and scanned the newspaper, in which he smoked and smoked—sometimes Camels but mainly Tareytons, the crisp white package marked with two bold vertical crimson bars, like highway lanes. Sometimes the silence was heavy with tension, with an unspoken accusation and complaint that my mother, busy in the kitchen, was considering voicing, and with the recrimination my father was silently preparing in return. Probably he had returned late again from work. He knew that dinner was served at six. He had promised to arrive by then. Where had he been? Was his family that unimportant? Did he have that little respect for his wife?

Sometimes he would be so late coming home that dinner was long over, the dishes scraped, washed, and dried, the children in bed. Sometimes he would not return until the next morning. What could he have been doing all night? Certainly not poring over the company ledgers. Amazingly, my mother—at least as she tells it—did not ask. My father did not explain himself, and she did not insist that he do so. Maybe, when this pattern first developed, she asked him questions, but she eventually became weary of doing so. Her own father—the first Ed she had known—had long ago instructed her, through his actions, that a husband's way is to be distant and untrustworthy. As my parents' marriage progressed, how little my mother must have learned to expect and how little therefore to demand. My father knew that his behavior distressed her. He must have known, as the months and years went by, that it was making her less inclined, less able, to be generous and forgiving toward him. But if it crossed his mind that he might explain himself and express regret, he did not act on that thought.

Unable sometimes to address him directly, my mother could nonetheless communicate symbolically. More than once she left his dinner plate, empty and forlorn, fork and knife beside it, on the table for him
to notice when he walked in. Might that silent, accusing place setting rouse some feelings of guilt in him, even inspire a change? For my mother, this subtle, probably futile act of retaliation was a show of power—the little she had. My sister Peggy recalls a moment when our mother confronted our father about his absences and irresponsibility. She was in the kitchen, and he was sitting nearby at the dining room table; she told him he had to change. If necessary, he had to get help. Peggy, only eleven or twelve, ever cheerful, went up to our father and hugged him. “You can do it, Dad,” she said. “You can do it.” He hugged her back. “I can't,” he said. “I just can't.”

He had established a pattern of doing superior work in his job while acting, sometimes, like a ghost in his own house, as his own parents had been ghosts to him: his father a rumor, his mother an absence that ached, then faded into a sweet, unspeakable, useless love, fixed and distant.

One night, my oldest sister, probably fourteen, was a few miles away from the house, babysitting for a young couple who were out on the town. With three small children in their beds, Terry heard something that made her breath stop: an odd noise, the kind that teenage babysitters in unfamiliar houses are wont to weave into horror stories before they realize the noise is nothing.

But this wasn't nothing. A man had broken into the house. He was not imaginary; he was there.

He demanded that Terry take off her shirt. Then he fondled her breasts. Terror-stricken, she sat rigid, able to think only of what might happen next, what violence.

And then he ran off.

When she had steadied herself, and steeled herself, she got up and made sure that every door was locked tight. It was almost midnight. She called home. My mother answered; my father was asleep, and the phone did not rouse him.

“Ed,” my mother said, shaking him. “Ed, wake up. Something's happened to Terry.” He would not rise. Groggy, he lay in the sheets. How much of my mother's pleading did he hear? How much did he understand? However much of what she said sank in, he was unpersuaded that he should rise, dress, and go to his daughter. So my mother went alone.

She stayed with my sister for two hours, stayed while the police arrived and took Terry's report, stayed until the owners of the home returned. Then she drove home with her shaken daughter.

My mother explained to my father what had happened. He seemed content that the problem had been resolved; he needed to hear no details.

Later, as Terry sat scanning mug shots that the police placed before her, asking her if this was the man, or this, it was her mother, not her father, who sat beside her, who tenderly rubbed her back with a palm.