by Bob Morris
I brush my teeth in the dusty rose-tiled bathroom. The sink sits on crooked chrome legs. The lamps flanking the medicine chest are hopelessly kitsch. I put on my old pajamas from the top drawer of a dresser that’s been there forever. I peel down a worn red bedspread to reveal the twin bed that has creaked ever since I jumped on it as a boy. The other bed, where my brother used to sleep, is empty. He has not slept in this room with me since he got married fifteen years ago. I’ve missed him ever since. How did he, a socially awkward young man, end up growing into himself, finding such an attractive wife, raising such lovely kids, and making such a rich and complete life for them all? Is it a failing of imagination to fall into lockstep with society as he did to create a family? Or is it an invigorating leap of faith? At least he’s gone somewhere since adolescence. Where am I? Back alone in this bedroom, still waiting for life to begin. I turn out the lamp on the end table where I still have record albums from high school.
And soon I’m sleeping better than I do anywhere else in the world.
In the morning—quel horreur—there’s only hazelnut nondairy creamer for the coffee, even though Dad knows I prefer real milk. The mug I pull off the shelf is so dirty I have to rewash it. Dad is spending far too long in the bathroom with a copy of Tennis Week, leaving me to wonder if we’re ever going to get to the cemetery. Nothing quite stills him like a magazine on a toilet.
“Dad,” I say outside his bathroom door. “What are you doing in there?”
“All right already,” he says. “I’ll be right out.”
It’s strange to be in this same spot in the front hall, where my mother used to stand her whole life, begging him to get out of that bathroom for fear of being late.
“I don’t have all morning, Dad!”
“I said I heard you!”
As he puts on his cardigan, I wonder why have things gotten so peckish so fast? Death is supposed to have transformed us. They say that when it happens in your family, it’s like something has changed in your life that’s as monumental as the geography or climate. I think I want to feel that more potently. The loss of his wife of fifty years, my mother for almost as many, should be helping me put all my petty issues aside so we can finally be the easygoing father-and-son team we’re meant to be. We have that potential to enjoy each other, I think. He doesn’t just tolerate me. He respects me. And even if I can’t quite respect him back, I’d like to be able to accept him more graciously. There are times I can almost feel it’s about to happen. So what if he chose the Mets over me last night? So what if he scheduled a bridge game at the last minute so that we now have to rush the time we planned for the cemetery? And what’s the big deal that he can’t be bothered to clean out his car or kitchen for my oh-so-charitable visit? This is all so meaningless, so superficial, nothing that should get in the way of the all-encompassing affection a son should feel for his hapless, well-meaning father in his last years on earth.
Yet I keep feeling myself pulled back to the cynicism of adolescence.
Finally out of the house, we drive through the old hometown. Same old sprawl. Same old Catholic churches on every other block and looming sports fields—two worlds that excluded me and contributed to memories of high school alienation. By the time we pull up to Dad’s bank at the shopping center I’m deflated. We are here to close one of Mom’s savings accounts. My father wants to sign it over to me. It’s a small amount of money I can use in my freelance life. He walks in, and the whole place is greeting him like a conquering hero. “Hello, Mr. Morris, how are you?”
“Hello, Linda,” he calls out. “Hello, Debbie!”
“How you doing?”
“Great, I’m doing great,” he says. “This is my son, Bob, the writer.”
He introduces me to every employee in the bank as if he were something between a campaign manager and a publicist. He turned me into a quasi-celebrity here years ago by handing out clippings of all my columns and travel articles. It’s very sweet, I have to say. But also embarrassing, especially because I’m not nearly as accomplished as I’d like to be. If I’d gotten as far in life as I’d imagined when I lived in this town, these people would know who I am without my father telling them. I force a smile. But no thanks, I don’t want to chat with Annette, the assistant manager with the Dolly Parton cleavage. I just want to close a bank account, get out of here, and get to my mother’s grave.
“Bobby,” says Dad, with the stagy cordiality of a talk-show host, “why don’t you tell Annette here what articles you’re working on this week?”
“Nothing of interest right now,” I say, as my foot taps the floor.
“Any celebrity interviews scheduled? Any travel stories?”
“No, Dad, nothing.” My cheeks are starting to burn. I take a step away.
“Well, have you heard anything from Sarah Jessica Parker or Jennifer Lopez?”
“What? No! I’ll see you in the car. Nice to meet you, Annette.”
Outside, in the parking lot, he looks defeated. I feel prickly.
“Annette is a big fan of your column,” he says, as he gets out his car keys and some old tissues from his pocket. “She was excited to meet you.”
“Yes, because you bring her my clippings, right? You just like showing me off.”
“What’s wrong with that? I’m proud of you.”
He blows his nose with a honk loud enough to stop traffic on Union Boulevard.
“Look, Dad, I don’t feel like talking to strangers today, okay?”
“Just trying to pass the time,” he says. “Nothing to get upset about.”
“I know,” I say as I pat his shoulder. “I know that.”
In his car, while he listens to the news, my head starts throbbing—thud, thud, thud—as if it were a wall of one of the dilapidated handball courts where my brother and I practiced tennis as kids while he played all day on a public court. I smolder as he drives too slowly to make it through one traffic light, then another. Always the same story. Does every father have the ability to annoy a son so easily with his harmless habits? “Come on, Dad, focus,” I sigh. “You can go faster.”
“Please! Don’t rush me, just let me drive.”
I hate that it always comes to this. I wish I weren’t so critical of his every foible, so anxious to bust him for every tiny thing he does wrong. And I’m ashamed of how often I think my life would be so much simpler without all the long-winded phone calls, tedious meals, and inopportune trips he expects me to take to see him in Florida each winter. I’m angry with the last person in the world who deserves my wrath, and I know it.
So now here we are, standing at my mother’s new grave, where he has just sung to her so sweetly, and he has just as sweetly offered me a chance to join both of them here for eternity (his treat) because he doesn’t want me to be alone. And I know this is my chance to say yes for once, to start over before we end, to hug my father, to forgive my father for his imperfections, to forgive myself for judging him so harshly, and to forgive the whole world for everything I find so objectionable.
But that’s not what comes out of my mouth.
“Listen, Dad,” I say instead, “this cemetery is right next to the parkway, and you know how I am about traffic noise. I’m a very light sleeper. It’s just not my scene.”
“Suit yourself,” he says, as he turns to head back to the car. “Just thought I’d offer. You can always change your mind.”
CHAPTER 2
Song in His Heart
Who is Joe Morris? A seventy-nine-year-old man fully conversant with the idea of happiness, especially his own. A retired lawyer (and administrative law judge for the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles) of little ambition or taste who doesn’t have an entitled bone in his body. His outfits—from the ski parka he used to wear around the house instead of a bathrobe to the gray vinyl loafers he used for tennis while he still played (and still wears today, even for dressy occasions)—are down-market at best. When you are as insecure as I am, you tend to believe that your father is
a reflection of yourself. I want him looking sharp, and assess him with the eyes of a brutal teenager.
“Where did you get that?” and “Must we, Dad?” have been my laments for years.
Who is Joe Morris? He is the only real estate investor who ever lost money in the Hamptons. He is a man who would rather complicate than simplify. He has nineteen bank accounts and half a dozen partly organized bridge games that he has to monitor like an air traffic controller. He has discount cards from every oversize drugstore in America and frequent-flyer miles on a smorgasbord of airlines that don’t add up to anything, but keep accumulating on beds, tables, counters, or anywhere but the wastepaper basket. He is a man who tapes tennis tournaments and basketball games while watching them on TV. He is a man who gleefully mixes his prescriptions as if they were sundae toppings, and pushes them on you every time you sneeze. That’s because he likes to be useful and also have control of things. And when he sees someone like me, a little vulnerable and frustrated with life, it really revs his engine.
“Let me give you a bit of advice” is his clarion call.
Heaven help you if you’re his partner at the bridge table. Early in my parents’ marriage, when they still played together as partners, my father excoriated my mother so vociferously she turned bright red. She didn’t answer back. But she vowed never to play on his side again. Instead, she’d have to serve as peacemaker between him and whoever was unlucky enough to be his partner.
Joe Morris is a man who became an orphan at ten years old. My aunt Sylvia, his impeccably dressed and stalwart older sister, tells me that living between the homes of grandparents upstate and cousins on Long Island made him feel lost growing up, confused about where he belonged. “He never quite knew where he should be,” she says.
I wonder if losing both parents by the time he was ten makes him want to control as much of his life, including the people in it, as he possibly can. Maybe having no parents has also increased his need to be loved by as many strangers as possible. Is that why he talks to everyone and anyone he meets, even when they’re clearly not in the mood? He thinks it will make you happy every time he offers you something to drink or eat—the half a Little Debbie crumb cake from his overstuffed glove compartment, for instance, or the cocktail he’s invented of Amaretto and pineapple juice.
Years ago, when I was well into my thirties, unemployed, uncoupled, and living with my parents for a summer that lasted way too long, I was so bored that I went out to the driveway one day and inventoried his accumulation in the Chrysler Valiant he was driving at the time. In the front seat, I found a typed deposition from his law office, brochures from his tennis club, a schedule for a Chilean airline—although as far as I knew he wasn’t planning to go to South America. Also: a scrap of paper from a Marriott (his favorite hotel chain) with some of his scrawl on it, an old wooden Wilson racket, and a visor from the tennis club at Century Village, the retirement community in Florida. There were tissues in a box marked up with more of his barely legible scrawl—notes for a legal case on one side and an idea for a song parody on the other. I found a worn paperback novel, The Rabbi, with a Nedick’s coupon inside, and a wall calendar from the dry cleaner. Instead of cigarette butts in the ashtray, there were bank deposit envelopes. And wedged in by the emergency brake handle—a plastic cup with pencils, asthma inhaler, reading glasses, and a potpourri of pills, coins, and postage stamps.
I don’t know why I did this inventory. Maybe I thought that the best way to face what was disturbing me was to look straight at it. That summer I had been reading some short stories by Tennessee Williams, whose relationship with his father was also strained. “You will begin to forgive the world,” Williams wrote, “when you have forgiven your father.” It made sense but seemed an unattainable goal. But I kept trying. Anyway, it had been a clean moment for his car, I realize now. The worst may have been in the 1970s, when it smelled like decaying flesh. A veal chop had been rotting in his tennis bag.
“Life with Joe is irritating, but never dull” is all my mother ever said.
She would know. She was the one who had to put up with the dinner guests he brought home from the tennis court without giving her warning. She was the one who had to be delighted when, without so much as an advance conversation, he brought home a German shepherd puppy one year and a calico cat the next. And when there was a sale at the local dollar store, suddenly all kinds of things would be crowding her front porch. To this day he marks them with return-address labels, just in case someone feels inclined to steal his white plastic chair or cheap folding umbrella.
My mother’s sisters, Phyllis and Bev, still remember witnessing the aftermath of an incident twenty years ago, when he pocketed a bar of soap from Aunt Bev’s condo in North Carolina. My mother chastised him gently for taking something that wasn’t his.
“I’m warning you right now to leave me alone,” he told her.
“I’ll buy you your own bar of soap, honey,” she said. “Just put it back.”
“I’m going to divorce you, Ethel!” he roared as he stomped off to their car. Her two sisters watched with dropped jaws as she got in beside him. She was flushed with shame but stone-faced. He floored it in reverse and spun out of the parking lot, with my mother as his frightened hostage.
“All for nothing but a lousy bar of soap,” my aunt Phyllis told me.
Maybe his hoarding of things, like his extreme friendliness, is also a result of the childhood. Finally, as an adult, he had a home and a car to call his own and colonize in his own way. I don’t know why he’s such a sloppy dresser, when Aunt Sylvia always shopped for him at the best stores when he was growing up. And I don’t know why he’s such a happy boor at dinner. His table manners are as questionable as his jokes. For instance:
So the Pope and Bill Clinton both die at the same time and by some terrible mistake, the Pope ends up in hell and Clinton in heaven. When the mistake is found out, they run into each other while changing places. “How was hell?” Clinton asks the Pope. The Pope shrugs, winces, says, “Kind of hot, not so good. But how was heaven? I am so looking forward to being there. I have always wanted to meet the Virgin Mary.” And Clinton looks at him, shakes his head, and says, “You’re ten minutes too late.”
Joe Morris is a man who wanted to be a crooner his whole life. To this day he always has a song cued up in his heart, and like it or not, you’re going to hear it, and like it or not, he’s going to try to get you to sing along. For him there’s no occasion that can’t be sweetened by a song, just as there is no dessert that can’t be improved with one of the packets of Sweet’n Low he keeps in his wallet. When my mother, who was pretty and curvaceous enough to be nicknamed “Yum Yum” in her twenties, told him she was pregnant with my brother in 1955, they were in a restaurant on Long Island. He walked up to the pianist, asked for the microphone, and started crooning. She was both mortified and delighted.
Just Ethel and me
And baby makes three
That’s living,
Long Island Heaven!
Who is Joe Morris? A man who spent most of World War II performing little parodies of pop songs he wrote at his training camp in Amarillo, Texas. Then, the night before getting shipped off to Europe on a fighter plane, he ate six doughnuts and woke up with a stomachache that kept him from leaving the country.
“Wow, Dad, wasn’t that kind of disappointing?”
“That assignment could have gotten me killed, so I was actually very lucky.”
We are eating breakfast at his favorite diner on the highway around the corner from the old homestead. It’s a month after our visit to the cemetery, Veterans Day, the day he got married in a modest family ceremony to my mother in 1951.
“So you never left the country during the war, Dad?”
“I finally got sent to Iceland as it was ending.”
“Iceland? All your friends were in Normandy, right? Didn’t that bother you?”
“Why should that bother me?”
“Didn’t you want
to be a hero, Dad?”
“Who doesn’t? But if I had been, then maybe there wouldn’t be any me, and then there wouldn’t have been any you, so things kind of worked out for the best, right?”
He slurps his tea with orange juice, chews his pancakes with his mouth open. This is no power breakfast. The coffee in this Greek diner is anemic, the French toast soggy, and the view of the parkway entrance across the highway dreary. But to him, this is all perfect. It could be breakfast at the Regency or the Ritz.
“I can’t tell you how much I love this diner,” he says. “Try the blueberry syrup. If you add just a teaspoon of orange juice, it cuts the sweetness.”
Is there something to be said for being so content? He is essentially a happy man. Or is it just that he can’t be bothered to aspire to anything more than this? My whole life is about trying to leave a mark on the world in ways he never could. And my past few years have been consumed with failed pitches and proposals. I want things that are so far out of reach and beyond his imagination that I live in a perpetual state of aspiration. And what does Dad want? A toasted bagel, a good duplicate bridge game, and for me to enjoy his latest concoction.
“Um, no, thanks, Dad,” I say. “I’ll pass on the syrup.”
He shrugs it off—he’s used to my dismissals—but I can see he’s disappointed.
We leave the diner, after his long conversation with a waitress. There is no man on earth who loves talking to strangers as much as him. He has what used to be called a hotel face—that’s the guy who either knows or wants to know everyone in the lobby.
It’s nippy outside today, early winter, when the wind off the bay makes the south shore of Long Island damp and unwelcoming. Dad hates this cold, and his migratory hormones are rising. He’s counting the days until his return to Florida. In the parking lot, he fishes car keys out of his pocket, bringing up a half-sucked throat lozenge.