More: I begin to suspect, for the first time, that he did have that say. And still does.
All at once, the random file of documents reads like a story. I trace his way, island to island, no longer afraid to make up the missing material between. The pediatric nurse at the Teaneck Lying-in Hospital commemorates his birth by sticking two inky baby footprints against a state form. She gives him his first form of ID, flourishing his name across the top in twenties nub-pen italics, as if the world will mark it, in time. I see my grandmother, years later, after winning her first gold star, holding on to the paper as if it were him.
I follow him through his school days in a steady stream of report cards and evaluations: the C’s in handwriting, the A’s in music. He attends the senior prom with a spookily beautiful utter stranger. I read, over his shoulder, the letter from the government about his brother. He pounds on the door of his neighborhood draft board but is kept home, two inches too many in the height box.
In uniform, he swings through the south, closing up air bases, bringing down the curtain on what his separation papers poetically call the “American Theater of Operations.” We both know that his locale qualifies as a Theater only charitably. It cannot match the Pacific, the European, or even the African Theaters for the raw expiation he is after. I read the Theater programs from the Shelby-Amarillo circuit: definitely Off-Off-Broadway. My father, in the supporting cast, hangs out in the stage wings, “examining them for evidence of wear, correcting such defects by appropriate maintenance.”
To earn his rations, he lies on his back on a dolly underneath a fuselage of a B-29 that has liberated who knows how many square miles by dropping who knows how many tons of bombs on who knows how many people like himself. Convinced that the chain of command mocks him bitterly, he composes mental letters to his mother, tragic, if routine. “Dear Mom: We lost seven thousand men in the South Pacific yesterday. I adjusted carburetors.”
She writes back weekly, grateful that her remaining boy is out of the line of fire. “Hope you are well, and PLEASE take care.” Each word tortures him to find some way to emerge from this world conflagration a casualty. My father, fixing fuselages, mouths his magic charm: “If you can wait, and not be tired by waiting.”
The official papers say he fills his every hour “manipulating cockpit controls and making required adjustments.” But home leaves, inescapable, drag him back to a house papered with certificates, triumphs, and cum laudes of a dead older brother. My father boxes against an unbeatable ghost. He cannot hope to improve on his brother’s fluke disaster at Brownsville, captured in a prize-winning photo, clipped from a popular magazine for the family archives.
His father is conspicuously silent. The man has forfeited the voting franchise. What Granddad thinks of the son-ruining world goes unrecorded. He achieves reconciliation flat on his back on the sofa, clinically uninteresting and unheralded, except in family legends: the tale of a drippy faucet that, fist-smashed, dried him out for good.
The official papers go on to describe another home leave. Dad marries my mother, to my relief. In a lightning honeymoon, they dine at a place whose preserved menu warns: “Cela exige le temps de sa preparation.” These things take time to make. He tells her it is pizzas from here on, and she laughs, agreeing.
He writes her funny and fitful letters. “Dear lady from the matinee.” He dares to talk about that historical incongruity: their life together, after the war. He types imperative plans for what will happen in their shared life after his “duration and six.” Duration and six! The favorite phrase applied a hundred times a month when I turned draftable age. Here it is for real, in the original sense.
Most urgent among these scenarios he paints for Mom is the agreed-upon need to fall to work, at once or sooner, in surrounding themselves with at least a dozen kids. He sustains himself in these letters on the thought of the next, better generation. Meaning their daughters, their sons, me. Mom readily concurs with this plan of battle. She writes back methodically to this stranger, her husband, telling him all the Stateside news, the scrap drives and community campaigns, forgetting that loose lips sink ships and that deep South air bases are not, after all, another country. “Children,” she always adds in the closing paragraphs, blushing visibly through her pen, “and lots of them.” She harvests his letters and preserves them, more certain of their substance than of his. She does not dare hope that the fighting will ever wind down.
But soon the last hot shot is fired, the last B-29 maintained. My father comes home in June of ’46, his date of separation and honorable discharge, after “honest and faithful service to this country.” But sometime before the end of his tour, something makes him begin to walk away from the world, and for good reason. Somewhere in the Southwest, while he recites, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same.” Looking carefully, I find the account in the folder: just where, when, and how everything begins to change.
Aimless in a world that has pushed through to its destiny, Dad goes back to school on the GI Bill of Rights. He takes night classes, earning a whirlwind degree. Days he devotes to an assembly line. Mom keeps her job after the war, leaving little time to begin producing the hoped-for dozen babies. They pass a nervous interlude of years. Each sees respective specialists, but both check out A-OK.
They obey the doctor’s orders to the letter. They time their intimacy, waiting for the opportune moments. They throw themselves to the task at hand with all the industry of postwar recovery. I imagine my mother, who during the entire four years of war could not rouse herself to feel hatred toward the impersonal enemy, hating her own familiar but blameless body with a deepening fury. As the situation becomes increasingly grim, my father’s famous black humor makes the first of its many appearances. The countless cruel and unusual jokes about renting a furnished womb never make it into the final records. But I can hear each one of them, and their prolific offspring.
In the sterile time, Dad earns another degree. He responds to a growing need for teachers to meet the spike in the nation’s children graph. He drifts into a certificate in history for entirely private reasons. He wants to undo what was done to him out in the desert, during his tour of duty. He wants to understand the incomprehensible climax of the present, the cathedral of justifiable injustice he has only read about, never felt. Already people talk about the last necessary evil as if it is fairy tale. He wants to see if big is the sum of little, or if the two belong to unjoinable worlds. He wants to see if he can keep his head while all about him are losing theirs and blaming it on him.
I follow the terms of their first mortgage. I proofread their payments. I assume the pride and curse of ownership. I witness my father in his first teaching job. And then, miraculously, when they have both resigned themselves to vanishing from the face of the earth without a trace, after they go back to coupling for its own sake, my mother returns from a checkup with a wild look and astonishing news. The law of averages has at long last earned out in their favor. The new round of inky infant footprints begin another folder. My father insists on the christening. “It is a good name,” he tells his wife. “And it’s time somebody brought it back into circulation.” They resurrect my uncle’s name, a casualty in the global war.
Encouraged, the couple, once more in love, return to their dreams of an infant production line. In three years, they knock out a few more. Whatever they had been doing wrong, this quick turnaround corrects. But a quarter of the way into the long-dreamed-of army of offspring, they hit a dry spell, pause for a breather, or realize that they no longer have enough time remaining to make it all the way to an even dozen, the wall of fresh souls they had hoped to surround themselves with.
Photos describe the life of the diminished tribe. Life together alters my parents slowly beyond recognition. They dissolve into parental roles, gradually become those outside interveners in science fairs, paper routes, music lessons, white glue, and home bread molds. Once or twice, every few years, they stumble into a
n aha, the evidence of older, untouched civilizations. Their parents die; the world shifts alliances. They learn by reading, decades later, just what upheaval they have lived through. Through a series of partial differentials—infinitesimal, incremental, and interlocked decisions—they become the two people I knew.
Mother works, gets out from time to time. But she lives for the children, their daily and remarkable differentiation. Dad discharges his half of the upbringing. A few keepsakes document his life outside the home. Mere years before, he had known no more serious an occupation than kicking around the Palisades with the singing-waiter routine. Now he throws himself into the crucial work of teaching children who know nothing except how to explicate their favorite poems something about history.
He begins like every other teacher: well meaning but inept. Then, a handful of semesters into his career, while standing up in front of thirty-two at best indifferent pubescent teenagers, lecturing about the importance of the X Y Z Affair, he has a revelation. Dad suddenly sees that every one of these fifteen-year-olds has reached this classroom and will leave it for places unknown through a series of small and unnoticed decisions—thousands of them a day. More often than not, those incremental decisions are made in complete ignorance of the Big Picture. All at once, the traditional teaching of history as assorted facts means nothing. The only thing that matters is to reveal to that pasty boy in the second row that he is the inheritor and future of the world.
From that moment, the cartoon tales about silver dollars thrown across the Potomac disappear. My father sweats in the classroom to create History, that single, linked quilt connecting the school principal’s handling of a recent varsity blackballing to Ike’s refusing to pardon the Rosenbergs. He shows how Perry’s words on Lake Erie mutate, in startlingly short time span, into words such as Finger Ridge, Heartbreak Ridge, and Panmunjom. Everything becomes fair game in the search for the connective tissue: the quiz-show scandals, the Oppenheimer case, the shady doings behind selecting this year’s homecoming queen.
He becomes a stickler for the overlooked, the reinterpreted, the taken-for-granted. His specialty is superimpositions: he takes his classes on field trips to an imaginary Hudson River Valley of words. From the banks, he conjures up a series of vertical scenes—from the trapper cleaning pelts to the manufacturer dumping sulfate sludge: the passage of events, including the current diorama, becomes not so much successive solutions as branched alternatives, some harmonious, some tragic. But none inevitable. None without our say.
Everything becomes an excuse for drawing relations between things. My father grows notorious in small circles. For a stretch of years, he is an annual shoo-in for the Most Influential Teacher plaque. The documents are all here: the teaching awards, the spotlights in local newspapers. One high school journalist writes, “He is one of the few adults whose opinion teenagers actively seek out.” But his opinion is nowhere written down. My father’s opinion has vanished into world history, the world’s fair.
I don’t need printed material to animate this era of the man. I was there. I cannot build a simple soapbox-derby entry without bringing on a bout with the Golden Book: Automobiles Through the Ages. My sister cannot excuse herself from the table without first checking for a quorum, securing a second to the motion, and following Robert’s Rules all the way to the parliamentary vote. Even choosing sides for a game of cards leads to a debate on the Cuban missile crisis. We cannot simply take our immunizations like other children; we have to hear the whole, horrifying tale, from rats’ viruses in medieval Europe to the iron lung of a few summers before.
Where you are depends on how you got there: that is the man’s whole point. Just underneath the late-breaking headlines, just inside the international trends, everything pops with consequences. He uses no textbook except the one we are plunged into, the one American life was designed to ignore. Things happen. Things matter. We are the present’s war.
I now see the danger in such a stance. The demon in the machine must stay hidden, and curse the one who wakes it. Each year our ability to feel the dangerous abundance on all sides of us slips away. We stay inside, sampling in half-hour slots the myths and rumors of the outdoors. When we do get out, the first, nervous titter of things bigger than us sends us screaming to the theater exits to beat the stampede. We cannot survive the head-on look, because we have lost our practice at it. We forgive everything except experience.
My dad stands naïvely at the head of his classroom, asking, “What happened today, too far away to feel? What will you do about it?” He himself receives far more history secondhand than he has seen. But the modest bits that he has lived through he shares openly: Flushing Meadow, B-29 school in Amarillo. These are his tools for teaching the current urgency.
But somewhere, he oversteps himself. Someplace along the way, he goes to the well of private biography too often, and history flashes alive in front of unsuspecting students’ eyes. It is no great surprise when his critique of school policies on historical principles forces local politics to put him in the criminal box. He comes away from the incident quietly stripped, scarred, with nothing between himself and the brink but his black humor.
I did not learn until years later about my father’s run-in with community. But here is the thumbnail sketch of the event in front of me: a summons from the school board, asking him to appear for questioning. Dad called it his “bout with the Tribunal,” although it is in fact just an inquiry by de facto committee.
The trouble begins when one of his seniors complains that the man is preaching communism. Dad appears in front of the informal session to answer the charge. In five minutes, he has the whole board laughing at a hypothetical teacher trying to describe the modern world without going into the Russian revolution. The punchline is his equating Superintendent Vance’s recent handling of the cafeteria crisis with the battleship Potemkin. He makes the country’s love/hatred with individualism jump off the page.
Another board member asks about the rumor that Dad has proclaimed the existence of more than one American revolution. Dad reels off four populist revolts—Shays’s Uprising, the Whiskey Rebellion, Nat Turner, the Southern secession—before they acquiesce in admiration. He is the history teacher more than one of them might have wished for.
My father understands how every now and then, organized groups feel the need to defend themselves from their inner parts. He knows that the present is in love with interrogation, as it has been in the past and will be again. Self-policing is, by common consent, the only way for individual interests to get along. Knowing this is after all his stock in trade. He has seen it before, about once every ten years. Why shouldn’t their own local nation on the Jersey shore have a home version, a HUAC of their own? He has long planned what he would do when his moment in front of the committee came. Not too rational, not too polemical. Don’t infuriate. Entertain.
And he almost gets away without a reprimand. The group discards any idea of recommending disciplinary action. Nor do they ask him to name names. It is not, as Dad, still playing for the laugh, will characterize it for us a decade later, simply another case of Hiss and Tell. But having survived the burden of disproof, he must still survive their compliments and congratulations. I imagine, as he is almost out of the room, someone asking how he has come to have such an immediate and vigorous sense of what is going on. And I see Dad start in glibly about what happened to him in The War, about his private brush with history. And that is when the man’s magnetic poles shift for all time. There, as he tells his instructional life story.
Nothing in the documents my family has saved makes any mention about my father’s first illness. I do not imagine anything so dramatic as a fit on his examiners’ floor. But I am sure he comes out of that first examination an enemy of the people. What he has seen firsthand, and has tried to tell about in lessons and riddles, will by nature cut him off from the protection of others. Soon it cuts him off for real, starting with a party of friends who stand in horror over the cocktail dip as Dad mak
es his first public swan dive.
It’s to the man’s great credit that he does not, right then, roll over and die. I survey the family archives, and tick off the strikes against him. A man with dependent family who loses his job. Whose savings might tide them over for a few months. Who tears himself up from the only place he has ever lived and moves into the blank spot on the map. Whose disease prevents him from ever again working steadily. Who knows, from the beginning, what the disease is and where it will lead. Who is stripped of membership, told that he can no more expect society’s safety net. Who knows that that society has reached a point where it cannot save itself from cultivated catastrophe without taking its own members hostage. Who is told that his outlook, the only undeceived look, a look he has stumbled on by historical accident and cannot shake from in front of his eyes, is unacceptable and wrong.
So dangerous to others that they must cut him loose, he is many times more dangerous to himself. My father, in front of the class, seeing through the agreed-on fantasy, cannot himself make the alternative jibe. The theory remains at best an If. The single figure simply does not, cannot fit into the greater landscape. The world becomes too runaway-abundant to yield any but an abstract connection.
He insists, through logical proof and moral imperative, that ours is the earth and everything that’s in it. He spends his breath telling of the mysterious and required link, but he cannot show it. Ought and Can tear him up between them. The danger of the search drives him, pointless and alone, into a place of no recovery.
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