For my father, who is never relaxed, wants everyone else to be. He can’t bear the agitation that any nervous, pulsating being adds to his considerable store of anxiety. He is always telling us, sometimes at impossibly high volume, that we must, individually and collectively,
relax.
“Relax!” At meals, where he is especially tight, he sometimes decrees complete silence. When we chatter too much, he slams the table and hits us with an old National Guard command, “Chuck it in!” Until I was about twenty, I half believed that talking at the dinner table was not a sign of cultivation but of pig-rudeness.
Johnny was relaxed. He was calm, sure, and also very much himself—a midwestern skeptic, Montaigne from Nebraska, without the classical quotations. He accepted nonsense from no one. So when Carson gets set to go into one of his standard routines—say, Carnak the Magnificent, his mock fortune-teller—my father will exhale hospitably through his great beak and say, “Listen, listen, listen, Mark. I think you’re really going to like this.” And this concern for what I might like, this willingness to put himself in my seventeen-year-old weird, blemished place and imagine a pleasure for me, warms me nearly to the point of tears.
To my father, Carson was the apogee of sophistication, and for my father to think that I might be capable of sharing this taste with him was no small tribute. My brother, Philip, seven years younger, was much too junior to enter the Carson circle. It was my father and I who together attended his television academy.
My father, up late at night, talking to Johnny, and through Johnny to me, told me what he thought the world was like and showed me what he most aspired to, which was a kind of balance, the balance that Carson had on camera, supported by his handlers and dressers and makeup men. It was a balance that my father wished for and perhaps thought he possessed. Such balance was achieved by being affable, witty, receptive, but only up to a point, for there a sharp if adroitly phrased skepticism had to come into play (Carson was no gull—ever). One was courteous without being stuffy; mildly curious, but never particularly surprised by anything; one was, above all, supremely relaxed, though one never needed to holler at other people to relax in their turn. Carson, at least the on-screen Carson, followed Jocasta’s advice from
Oedipus Rex:
He lived lightly, not worrying himself about the big questions, taking in the passing show with detached ease, doing no philosophy, consulting his account books when need be, diverted by the world as it unfolded before him, but unimpressed by it, too.
It was not just my father and me in the living room (dining room, den) awake late at night. For with us there is a constant unseen presence that never sleeps. It is my sister, Barbara Anne, who died at the age of six, three years ago. She is rarely spoken about, rarely alluded to, though a small photograph of her sits on one of the end tables and the room is decorated with reproductions of famous paintings depicting innocent young girls. Renoir’s
Girl with a Watering Can
has pride of place over our television set, presiding in melancholy grace over Carson as he runs through his shtick. Barbara’s death, from a series of strokes, had been brutal, horribly painful to watch, as she slowly, slowly degenerated over time. First she lost what speech she had; then she could not walk without dragging her foot behind her. All the expressions of pleasure that come to pass in our living room are partial, muted: Every birthday party or Christmas celebration goes on beside a small unseen grave, barely covered over by the dense yellow carpet, the ornate couch, and the large patriarch’s chair on which my father sits, pitched and ready for battle with the TV. In our house, we attend what seems to be a never-ending wake.
When I told my father about what I gathered to be Frank Lears’ views on TV, did he take them as a slap at the medium only, a snob’s dismissal of what the unwashed loved to drown their rages and pains in, a kind of ocular booze, or did he see it as a stroke against our tiny confraternity of Carson, which—who knows, for he would never have told me—might have meant as much to him as it did to me? When, two years later, I spent a summer working at Raytheon, one of my father’s colleagues after another commended me for some past achievement that my father had described to them in pinprick detail, though he had not offered me a direct word of praise about it.
Carson is a credible figure, a plausible Nebraskan man of the world. When my father wants something more high-flying, he goes to Humphrey Bogart.
The Maltese Falcon
is by far the greatest movie ever made; and my father will wake us up at any time of the night to come in and watch the best scenes with him. He knows the film so well that he can run two or three lines ahead of the track, so the movie is less in stereo, as sometimes happens when an inveterate repeat watcher of this or that classic is on hand to recite the dialogue simultaneously, than it is simply out of sync. More than a “cocker,” one of my father’s highest terms of praise,
Falcon
qualifies as a “peachy cocker.” But Bogart is a joy ride, a night of debauchery, liquored up in a black sedan. Carson—Carson is the unacknowledged anti–philosopher king of America. Though in my father’s mind, Richard Nixon will eventually replace him.
For now, Wright, whose name bespeaks accuracy, truth, rigor, is comfortably in the saddle and he can afford to play a little with my puzzlement and his own about this Frank Lears character. So what is to be made of an unprepossessing guy who apparently has no use for the
Globe
but who reads the
Times,
which my father has heard of and knows something about, since the
Globe
refers to it occasionally and nothing that was or is or ever shall be in that paper seems exempt from being stored in my father’s memory? But consider, if you read, truly read, a sound enough American newspaper (and the
Globe
was that, even if it had a predilection for stories about missing and found dogs and the like) and read it like a ferret, then took it and digested it and metabolized the whole business, and if you watched TV with hyperactive intelligence, you would know a good deal—all Johnny did and maybe more, though no little might escape you, too. Frank Lears may or may not have been a part of that no little. My father, oddly enough, was eager to know.
One night while we were discussing Lears my father became so interested that he threatened to turn up in class and break a lance or two with the guy, argue a few points about Plato, whom I was describing, raggedly enough, during a commercial. It would be the
Globe
against the
Times,
the Chuck Wagon versus Harvard. For, about Lears, I had already told my father other puzzling and tantalizing things.
I told him that Frank Lears liked rock and roll, despite his being a great reader of books. In fact, on a couple of occasions, Lears had indicated that there were things to be learned from listening to rock—that some kind of sloppy, fantastical vision was unfolding in the music. To me, rock was nothing but the kind of amped-up raucous noise exemplified by the Stones, a good prelude to a street brawl or a football game; or it was the agreeable surfer noodling that the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean provided. I didn’t much care for the Beatles. That rock had any consequence beyond being a kind of additive that raced or quelled the engine a little—this was a peculiar idea to me. I turned it over in my head, then pushed it aside to think about the Somerville game and Abigail Glynn, who looked like the human equivalent of Ivory Snow but, rumor had it, did it all with her boyfriend, Johnny Contini.
My father detested rock and adored Beethoven. Each year he asked us to present him with a bust of the composer for Christmas or for his birthday. For twenty years, we never delivered the gift, never really looked into it, in fact. Then, when it was finally found, bought, wrapped, and opened, my father, who then was getting old, though only in his fifties, simply looked at it ruefully and put it aside.
As to books: My father, in my sight, read two of them in his life. One was Yeats’ complete poems, a gift to me for Christmas when I was twenty-five or so; he stayed up all the night before Christmas reading it, and my mother had to wrap it the next morning. He pronounced it a cocker. The other was
Humboldt’s Gift,
by Saul Bellow: also a cocker but absurd, because the characters were unbelievable, too flagrant and power-packed—this from someone who could have auditioned for a role as a minor Bellow figure. Based on his affection for Yeats, I suggested that he try a few more modern poets—Stevens, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop maybe. He looked at me like I was nuts.
I told him that Frank Lears wore suits of fifty years’ vintage. “We got a guy at Raytheon who does that,” my father replied. “Wears hand-me-downs. He’s got a tiny goat beard, a goatee, and he says that it makes him look like an intellectual, so he’s worth one or two K extra at raise time.”
I told him that Lears, as far as the class could figure, drank only tea. Tea! A man who only drinks tea? My father was nonplussed. I could almost read his thoughts. What about coffee? What about Budweiser? Or Miller High Life, the champagne of bottled beers? What about Jingle Bells, J&B scotch—a true challenge to the belly and liver of the American male?
One habit of Lears’ that my father seemed to approve of unequivocally was his way of conferring praise. There wasn’t much praise to be conferred, not at this point in the course, but it came in an odd way. If Lears liked what someone said—that is, liked what Sandra or, occasionally, very occasionally, one of the rest of us, said—he would observe, grinning subtly, that the remark was “not too bad.” Or sometimes he would observe that the comment at hand was “really not unintelligent at all” or “far from stupid.” Over time—a long time, given the difficulty of the lesson for us—we learned that the more dire the word Lears negated, the more he liked the comment. So “Not in the least dumb” was better than “Not too bad.” My father—whose favorite adjective was probably
atrocious
—found Lears’ mode to be a reasonably dignified way of dispensing praise when there was no way of evading the job, and he probably began making use of it at Raytheon.
I told my father that Lears kept a journal. One day he had mentioned, apropos of not too much, that he often found it helpful when he was bothered by some issue, philosophic or personal, to sit down and lay his thoughts out in written form. Huh? The idea that someone would do this, like the idea that someone would eschew TV, would drink only tea, and would wear old clothes when he could afford new—these notions had me scratching my head, if only in passing. People I knew simply did not do these things. Who, for instance, would ever be faced with an issue so complex that it needed writing down? Then who could find the words to give it expression? I could maybe write a paragraph or two in English class under the rolling eye of Miss Cullen, but that would be about something we’d read, or should have. (I was rather good at guessing what the plot of a book might be from reading the first dozen pages or so, though sometimes this method failed, with me killing off many of the major figures in the end simply because they had rubbed me the wrong way on first encounter.) But using writing to make things clearer? I could not do it. I lived in a near phantasmagoria of feelings and illusions and hopes, with occasionally a stab of reasonable sunlight sliding in. If you had asked me to describe my family, my religious views, my politics, my likes and dislikes in music, I would have left the page empty or made something up. I was probably afraid of cogency, scared of what I’d see—didn’t want any of that business at all.
To the information about the journal and the exploratory writing, my father just gave a grunt. He wrote only Raytheon reports, no essays in the manner of Emerson and Thoreau, but he did take himself to be a prose stylist of distinction. He periodically delivered a lecture that might have been titled “When You Write Something, You Must Never Make a Mistake.” The lecture was an outgrowth of his central commandment about life, which, in digest form, was Never Make a Mistake, Period—Be Like Me. He talked with Ciceronian expansiveness about the rigors of punctuation, about the necessity for impeccable spelling. “Look it up if you don’t know it! If you don’t know it, look it
up
!” He was a similarly inspired professor of math or science. He would help me for a few minutes, then begin hollering his math-science slogan: “Either you know it or you don’t! Either you know it or you don’t!” When it came time to write my college applications, my father took control and composed them himself. When he was finished with one of the essays, he read it aloud to my mother and brother and me, then declared it worthy of Abraham Lincoln—which was true enough: It sounded a good deal like the Gettysburg Address.
What I was perhaps telling my father—unbeknownst to me, for at this point I would have told you that Frank Lears was a walking joke—was that I had found someone else to listen to, someone who seemed to be dealing cards from another deck. I wanted my father to see that though in the past I had rarely even made small shows of resisting his influence, I might now be open to someone else’s, that a diminutive scholar was piquing my interest and that, strangely, slowly, I was waking up from what seemed years of sleep, sleep that only fatigued and dulled me further. These feelings flowed like a tentative underground stream. I knew virtually nothing of them; my father, perhaps less. He had not done his job well enough and was not doing it, but, I probably wished to say, come and take over the seemingly pointless and dull kid sitting absorbed by his woes and dreams; there’s still time and, truth be told, there are few other contenders for the prize. What Frank Lears offered scared me, and I would rather have stayed home.
My father would eventually meet Lears in a dutiful sort of way, just as he went off dutifully to watch most of my football games—or, often, to watch me watching them from the bench. He watched us lose to Malden, his own high school, on Thanksgiving Day, watched me deck the opposing star fullback, sending him flying off the ground, a play that, I was told, found its way into highlight films for years after.