My Father Before Me (15 page)

Also on Paul's mind, thankfully, was basketball. He, too, hoped to be a Sonic. We got into the habit—the obsession—of playing against each other after school on the playground court. We went head-to-head in an unending championship series; one of us might be ahead in games won, 43–25, but he couldn't get complacent. No one in this series was ever conclusively the victor. Always there was the possibility of a comeback, a weeklong hot streak, an unprecedented shift of momentum that would make the series interesting again. We played one-on-one, but in our minds each of us was an entire team, with uniforms, logos, arenas adorned with championship banners, and legions
of fans who lived and died by our fortunes. The name of Paul's team was inevitable: the Ringo Stars. To document the existence of my team, I clipped a full-page photo from
Sport
magazine: John Havlicek racing downcourt, ball gripped before him in both hands, preparing to pass. From a copy of my recent school picture, I meticulously scissored my head and glued it over Havlicek's. Onto his jersey I glued a thin slip of paper that obscured
CELTICS
and replaced it with the name of my team.

That evening I showed the picture to my father. Would he be willing to make a dozen or so photocopies at the office the next day? He grinned, nodded, and slipped into his briefcase the doctored photo, the souvenir poster of the Forhan Phantoms.

35

One night each year, the school was not itself: the night of the spring carnival. The fifth-grade classroom became a pond in which to fish for prizes, the second-grade classroom a maze of high cardboard walls, the kindergarten classroom a candlelit haunted house with narrow corridors of black curtains and a bowlful of mushy pasta—human brains to plunge your fingers into. One year word spread quickly about the fortune-teller in my classroom: she was Valerie Harper's sister. Really, I was told: Rhoda from TV had a real sister, and she was there, with beaded headdress and bangles and crystal ball, telling fortunes, or pretending to. I liked it all, the tangle of it: the mingling of the fictional, of Rhoda and the fortune-teller, with the real, the woman who was truly there and truly a TV star's sister—and my classroom that, for this night, was not a classroom. And me, whatever I was.

The grown-up world, inhabited by Valerie Harper's sister and my teachers and my parents and those strangers onto whose porches I flung the afternoon paper in the dusk, remained inscrutable, although I lived within it, or alongside it. I did not fully comprehend the messages it sent. One weekend, a few of us kids tagged along as our dad drove downtown to his grandmother's apartment. Grandma Carey, we were told, had decided to get rid of a bunch of her belongings, little things she had no use for but that children might cherish. She would like us to have them—Grandma
Carey, who normally seemed indifferent to us, even silently disdainful. Who knew what treasures might soon be ours to divvy up: a conch shell with the sound of the ocean trapped inside it? Bright strands of beads? Books about adventurous orphan boys? Postcards from lands across the sea? This day was one of those unearned and sudden gifts of childhood, like the occasional day when our father thought, oh, what the heck, he'd split his big bowl of spare change among us, and we could buy whatever we wanted with the coins, a Big Hunk or candy cigarettes or a Matchbox car. As we drove home from her apartment, Grandma came with us, her big, mysterious cardboard box in the trunk. Then, while she sat in the living room with my mother, chatting, I waited quietly in the next room. I felt myself being mature, being patient and considerate. I kept waiting. I waited and waited. Finally, I could take it no longer. I entered the living room and approached my mother. “Mom,” I said, “when are we going to look at Grandma's things and decide who gets what?”

Grandma Carey glared at me. “What a selfish child!” she said.

I understood immediately that I had been misled, that she had never intended to give us a thing. Had my parents misinterpreted her intentions, or had they spoken of them imprecisely enough that I happily misread them to my benefit? Regardless, I felt myself suddenly, and merely, a child: judged unfairly—and helpless to defend myself.

At such a time, the world of grown-ups seemed to be populated by a wholly different species, one whose customs and interests were arcane. There was something important that adults knew, and they weren't telling. At the parish picnic every summer, while the kids lurched along in the three-legged race or potato-sack race or gripped a thick rope for tug-of-war, the grown-ups were the ones on the periphery, the moms keeping watch on us with half an eye, peeling Saran wrap off big bowls of macaroni salad and melon balls, speaking mysteriously to one another, laughing and nodding. The dads were pressing burgers flat on the grill or gathering in a circle in the distance, smoking, flicking ashes, eyeing the trees,
or they were slicing twine from bales, strewing hay on the ground, calling the children over to sprawl in it, then circling us, tossing coins toward the hay and laughing as we scrambled for them: dimes, nickels, quarters, sometimes whole dollars; they kept coming—here, then here—a bright coin, then another, descending upon us, spinning, glittering in the sun; we stretched our whole bodies toward them, toward our fathers' offerings.

Oh, to be older, to be the one with a pocket full of change, the one with a lighter in his shirt pocket and a hand on the wheel. The summer of my thirteenth year, the most I could do was be the attentive and clever older brother. Kim and Erica were six and four and bored, standing on the back lawn in pigtails and sundresses, sullenly kicking a rubber ball back and forth, or sitting cross-legged on the rec-room floor, staring at their dolls' fixed smiles. I owned a guitar and knew six or seven chords and saw before me week upon week of nothing but free time, so I recruited my sisters into a band: the Purple People. I would be songwriter, guitarist, arranger, producer, audio technician, concert promoter, and general impresario. We gathered in my bedroom, where I presented Kim and Erica with material to learn—a ballad about a friendly leprechaun who lived beneath a sewer grate, an ode to doors and the varied sounds they make—and, when they had rehearsed sufficiently, I recorded their performance on cassette. The girls played xylophone, bicycle bell, and coffee can and did all of the singing. If Erica, distracted by sudden doubts about the value of our project, forgot the lyrics and collapsed into giggles, or if Kim, overcome by shyness, began to stammer, then whisper, then retreat into a pained silence, I could stop the tape, rewind it a few seconds, embolden the girls with some cheering words, and start again mid-song. Not once, when the tape was rolling, did I join in the singing, pubescent self-consciousness having gathered around me like a fog. Who knew how long these tapes would be around and who might hear them. I would assent to my strumming being heard, but not my voice.

That same summer of 1972, the family spent a week at a cabin on an island in Puget Sound. We weren't roughing it; there was a public swimming pool across the street. One afternoon, I stood in the warm chlorinated water, holding Kim in my arms. She had not yet learned to swim, and I was the strong big brother. I held her in front of me and strode around in the shallow end, my legs cutting easily through the water. “Isn't this fun?” I announced. Then I turned and walked slowly toward the deeper water, the concrete bottom of the pool rough against my feet. The incline was steeper than I'd expected and, because I was holding Kim, hard to negotiate. I felt myself weakening, being overcome by the water. Kim and I were up to our chins. Did she know we were in danger? I hoped not. I didn't call for help—I was too embarrassed. I gritted my teeth, took frantic deep breaths. Desperate for traction, I scratched at the bottom of the pool with my toes. Somehow I gained my footing and enough strength to move us haltingly away from the deep end. Gradually, the water lowered around us. I returned us to the shallow water, where we belonged.

One night that same week, driving the family back to the cabin on a dark road through the woods, my father, silent at the wheel, was taking the turns too fast and hurtling over hills. It was mildly thrilling—and, I realized, possibly frightening to my little sisters. As we plunged down a hill, in order to cheer them, I squealed, “Whooo!”

“Shhh!” my mother said. She looked at me sternly. For a moment, the curtain between the child's world and the adult's lifted; I glimpsed a darkness, an uncertainty I was living in and rarely sensed but that my mother was aware of constantly. Pretending to delight in my father's reckless driving, I had risked encouraging that recklessness. My anxious mother knew better: she was maintaining her vigilant watch over him, her watch over all of us. She was trying to keep us safe.

My mother's every act implied a vision of the world as an orderly, dignified thing. There was a God, a merciful one, whose perfect wisdom was beyond our comprehension, and His spirit breathed perpet
ual life into the universe, and that life was revealed most powerfully in our capacity to love, and that love, as a daily practice, looked a lot like respect, and that respect extended beyond oneself and others and into one's surroundings. It was my mother who promised that, if I vacuumed the rec room, I could join the family at a matinee movie and then, when I had finished the job, bent down, ran her fingertip across the floor, and said, “There's dirt here still. You'll have to vacuum again.” But it was also she who scolded and sent away a man who'd come to the door with a petition to keep “coloreds” out of the neighborhood; it was she who turned to me then and said, “It reminds me of that song you like—‘The child is black, the child is white, together they learn to see the light.' ” It was she who, when I found a crumpled ten-dollar bill on the street, made me earn the right to keep the money by knocking on every door in the neighborhood and saying to everyone who answered, “I found this money in the street. Is it yours?”

And it was she who ensured that the whole family attended Mass every Sunday. My father, when he lived in the house, came, too, although I rarely sensed that he was as enthusiastic about the ritual as my mother. He seemed to attend as a matter of course more than as a matter of faith.

One Sunday, for some reason, our mother could not attend the same Mass as the rest of us, so Kevin, Dana, and I accompanied our father to church. We paraded silently toward the front and slid into the second pew, facing the pulpit. No one sat in front of us. A few minutes into the Mass, Dana did what she often did, for little apparent reason: she giggled. “Quiet,” our father whispered. “May almighty God have mercy on us,” the priest pronounced. I stiffened, stared at my lap, sealed my lips shut. Then I giggled, my efforts to muffle the sounds succeeding only in making them burst out more violently. Our father leaned forward, turned his head, and shot us dark looks. “Stop it,” Kevin pleaded. “Christ have mercy,” the parishioners proclaimed in unison. Kevin erupted in laughter. Our father glowered, fixing his gaze before him. Then the
priest stepped up to the pulpit. Dana snickered. Our father's shoulders trembled. He put his hand to his mouth—and he giggled. He was overcome; he could not stop. We all were overcome, giggling uncontrollably. The priest glared at us. “Sorry, sorry,” our father muttered as he stood up, and we all stood up with him, biting our lips, staring at the floor, staring at our feet as we walked swiftly out of the pew, into the aisle, and out of the church. Once outside, in the crisp air, the sounds of birds and traffic around us, we exploded with laughter. We laughed and we laughed, and then it was out of us completely, finally, and we wiped our eyes and we drove home and we did not tell our mother.

The energy making mischief within us that morning might have been the kind that spawned
The Daily Nonsense,
the household newspaper my brother published when he was fifteen.
MAD
magazine was a likely influence, too. Kevin was revealing himself to be fiercely smart and sensitive to the absurd and to the use of language as a means of subversion and delight. He sat at the desk in his bedroom and patiently wrote
The Daily Nonsense
in pencil; he had to take great care, since the paper was minuscule—its tininess a kind of apology, an admission of its undersized ambitions: it came in folio form, a single, folded two-inch-by-three-inch sheet of paper.
EARTH INVADED! R
AY GUNS!
one headline screamed. The accompanying article read:

Mrs. Ray Smith discovered today that the earth in her back yard garden was being invaded by a few slugs. She called her husband (Ray) on the phone.

He was so upset he gunned his engine all the way home.

The weather report:

Look outside. On a 3 x 5 inch piece of paper describe the weather. Soak the paper in pig fat, stand on your head and say “rats!,” salute
General Electric, hold the paper over your head and sneeze. Read it. It will describe the weather exactly.

A political editorial:

The only time Spiro Agnew opens his mouth is to change feet.

While I was squinting and chortling at
The Daily Nonsense
and deciding I admired my brother more than I had thought, and while Kevin was sharpening his pencil and his wit, bending over another little scrap of paper that would be his next issue, our father was coming unmoored again.

He could not be depended upon even to remember a birthday. Our mother's came, and he ignored it or forgot it, so she gave herself a present: a day away from the house, away from him. “Pack some things. Get in the car,” she told us kids. “We don't need your dad—we can have fun by ourselves on my birthday.” It was as if our parents were separated again; it was as if we were rehearsing for a future in which he would not exist. The day was gray and chilly—autumn, in its first week, already ferociously devoted to its business—but it was the ocean, the beach, that our mother aimed for. We drove three hours and spent all day with our jacket collars up, braving the winds whipping in from the Pacific. Who knows if our father cared that we were gone. Who knows if he noticed.

He had slipped back into the habit of arriving home late for dinner, liquor on his breath, or not arriving at all. He was having trouble at work, although he no longer admitted that to my mother. “Fine,” he would say, “everything's fine,” when she asked how things were at the office. But on many weekdays he would sleep in, then rush out the door late for work. His secretary would call our mother to confirm that he was coming to the office, then cover for him as best she could while she waited.

But his bosses noticed. After fourteen years on the job, he was neglecting his work. They would not fire him, not yet. They were Japanese—above all else, they valued loyalty. They would try to help him. Was he having trouble with drink? They paid to have him tested at a local hospital that specialized in treating addictions. No, he was told, he was not an alcoholic. Well, he and his bosses decided, he would just have to try harder. He would have to be more disciplined.

In the meantime, my mother—always disciplined, always planning ahead—had earned her degree and, in a Catholic school in a nearby town, begun working as a first-grade teacher. She wasn't being paid much, but she was bringing in something. More important, she had begun a career. If we ever had to survive without support from our father, we could do it. It wouldn't be easy, but we could do it.