Then I knew what to do. I stepped into the professional voice I use in my practice as an acupuncturist as a way to educate someone. I started. “You took nude photographs of my brother and me to chart the development of our bodies. That was a violation of our sexual boundaries.”
He had kept the Polaroids in his upper-right bureau drawer, where he dumped his coins at the end of the day. If I closed my eyes I could reach in that drawer and slip out the faded photos. My brother and I stood in the living room, nude children. My brother’s eyes stare through the floor. Our faces flat and enduring. Our young bodies held captive on fading blue-green glossy Polaroids.
“You forbade us to close the bathroom door when we took showers. You walked around the house naked, with just a magazine over your groin, when our friends came over. This was a violation of our boundaries.”
I wrenched myself out of my childhood to look out the window. Where were the kids? I stretched the phone cord as far as it would go so I could look down the snowy hill. There they were, slowly skiing. Peter was holding Miriam under her arms so she could ski right in front of him and not fall down. Gabe was farther ahead, turning back to wave to his dad.
I breathed, trying to calm the tightness in my belly, before I spoke again. “You made me lie naked and gave me back rubs and then front rubs. That is sexual abuse. I froze my body so I didn’t feel anything.”
He asked with a saddened voice, “Does it make any difference that I never meant to hurt you?”
I answered, “Even if you didn’t mean harm, harm was still done. I’ve gone to therapy for fifteen years.”
His voice was anguished. “Why would you have anything to do with me?”
“Because I love you. I kept working and working on this for years, trying to heal, and still have a relationship with you.”
He was in tears. “I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”
I cried too. “I’m sorry too. But the biggest gift you could ever give me is that you asked. You listened, and you said you are sorry.”
“I’m so sorry. I feel so bad about this. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
After I hung up, I felt dizzy and shaken. I picked up the water bottles, put on my snow boots, and walked out into the bright sunlight. I walked through the snow following my family’s footsteps to the field just as Peter, with Miriam on his back, skis askew, arrived at the top of the hill. Gabe was beaming because he’d beaten them to the top. I handed them each a bottle of water and put my arms around Peter, and began to cry.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“A miracle,” I smiled. “My dad said he was sorry, for everything.”
Peter wiped the tears off my cheeks.
My daughter asked, “Why is mama crying?”
“Because I’m so happy.”
A WEEK LATER, winter settled back in with a vengeance, ten below zero. The north wind carved the snow in hard chiseled ridges around the house. The woodstove warmed our hand-built home. Miriam lined up her dolls in a row. Gabe built a Lego fort. I was upstairs folding laundry when the phone rang. Before I sensed danger, I said, “Hi, Daddy.”
His words throttled me. “You stupid, hysterical, ridiculous woman.” His words pinned me like someone holding a knife to my throat. I stumbled to sit in my desk chair, staring at the door to anchor myself. His furious voice bellowed over the phone. “Why have you done this to a dying man? You are a vicious, sick, cruel woman!”
I sat in my bedroom at my desk, staring at the wooden door my husband made from wild cherry cut from our woods. My father’s voice blasted into my ear. I stared into the grain of the wood, unable to see the sun-drenched snowy meadows stretching beyond the window behind me. I heard my daughter laughing on the swing we had bolted into the ceiling beam.
I was reeling. I didn’t know what to do. He was a sick, dying man. Maybe I had to listen. Maybe I had to be understanding. His mind had played him like a mad piano night and day. His words kept socking me. “You lay this shit on me. It’s shit, that’s what it is! You are cruel and relentless.” His words were jabs, slaps, punches.
IT TOOK ME half an hour before I remembered: I didn’t have to listen to this anymore. I decided no one would ever yell at me again. I interrupted, speaking quietly, “I’m done, Woodie.”
“What?” he demanded, startled that I dared speak and break his tirade.
“I’m done. Good-bye.” Setting down the phone felt like locking a door. The bond with my father which had always kept me, trying and enduring, had broken. I felt faint and trembled. I lay down and stared at the ceiling. I heard my children talking to Peter as he made blueberry pancakes for breakfast. Slowly the goodness of my life brought me back.
A month later, on Valentine’s Day, my father’s voice was tender on my message machine, when the kids and I got home from school. “Hello Sugar. I was hoping to talk to you. I miss you.” He paused before saying goodbye, the last time I heard his voice. “Love you.”
BY THE TIME my father died a few weeks later, no one from our family was there. He had worn us out. No one spoke of madness. He was Woodie, damned stubborn, unrelenting, unbending, impossible, Woodie. His apartment was like places you read about in the paper, of old men living in mazes of piled newspapers. It was a labyrinth of books, architecture journals, sculptures, and papers, stacked and falling. He was dying and hell if he was going to eat Meals on Wheels. Hell if he was going to let that old woman give him a bath. Hell if he was going to let anyone move him to the hospital. But in the end, when he was screaming in pain, they took him by ambulance into the city to hospice, where they made him comfortable for the last two days.
When my youngest brother, Hubbard, called to check on him, the nurse said, “He’s in a light coma, but I’ll hold the phone next to his ear so you can talk to him. He can probably hear you.”
Hubbard heard the Dave Brubeck they were playing for him, and his rough breathing. When Hubbard began to speak of their years together, Woodie opened his eyes. “I want you to know we love you. Remember that trip when we went to Boston to Legal Seafood, and how you loved plates of raw oysters. Do you remember the time I was sailing so fast and hit a rock and flipped your catamaran in the main channel with everyone watching? And they were supposedly impossible to flip.” He continued until he ran out of stories. He paused. “We love you, Woodie.” He was quiet and stayed on the line from his office in Boston.
The nurse came back on the line, “Your father just died.”
After a long pause, she added, “Yesterday he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m not afraid to die. It will be a relief.’”
A BLIZZARD SCOURED the windows of my home in Maine when my mother called me. “Your dad is gone.” While the wind whirled around the house, I sobbed like a girl who had lost her daddy. Yet after the tears eased, I felt a sudden release of tension in my body. “I don’t have to be afraid, anymore. Nothing more bad can happen.”
The next morning I began driving before dawn. My husband and two children would follow in a few days. The plows had cleared the blizzard’s sprawl across the roads, carving smooth walls of snow three feet deep. The wind on the high ridges kept drifting snow across the back country roads as I drove toward the highway. I barely made it to the plane in Portland. My mother joined me at the airport and we slipped into our seats. We felt suddenly celebratory, called on an unexpected errand. She pulled out of her bag little containers, offering me cool squares of pineapple, a spoonful of her frozen applesauce, sharing a granola bar. She was coming to Cincinnati to be there for her children. She would rejoin the Garber family that had been hers for twenty-five years until my father banished her after the divorce. She wouldn’t go to the funeral.
When the plane stopped in Boston for passengers, Hubbard joined us, sliding his long legs under the seat ahead. We laughed and hugged as if we were going to a wedding. The stewardess noticed. “It’s so nice to see a family so happy together. Going to something special?”
“Yes,” m
y brother and I smiled curiously. “Our father died.”
Her smile froze and she hurried on. Looking into each other’s faces, my sixty-year-old mother’s beautifully lined face edged with short white hair, my brother’s tall forehead and strong-boned face, we reached out for each other’s hands, our eyes tearing with a strange confusion of feeling.
My brother Wood had been reached by ship-to-shore radio, miles from land, where he was in charge of a container ship’s engine room. He was transported by boat, helicopter, and plane to arrive in time for the funeral. When he arrived, we put our arms around each other and held on tight. I looked at my brothers, both in their thirties. Wood was weary in jeans and a work shirt, his long hair in a ponytail, and Hubbard towered over us with short hair, mustache, and tailored clothes.
Wood told us, “On the ship, they thought I was crying because I missed my father. Hell no. I cried because I never had the dad I wanted, and now he’s gone.”
Hubbard put his arm around Wood’s broad shoulders, comforting him.
HUBBARD AND I went to the funeral home, both of us taking time to be alone with our father. A man in a black suit led me to a private viewing room and wheeled in a metal table, my father’s body covered with a heavy grey cloth, waiting for us, before he was cremated. He closed the door.
I hadn’t seen him this long last year as he was dying. I hadn’t spoken to him since his voice sliced insults across the line. Yet I felt at home being near him even under this heavy cloth. I uncovered his heavy hand, curled into a fist. I placed my warm hand around his. His skin didn’t feel old, it felt new, like when you peel bark off a tree, smooth and never seen. His hand and arm felt heavy, as if it could never be moved, as if it touched bedrock and was part of it. If he was a drowned man, I could never pull him ashore. But this was good: to feel the weight of him, so finite, at the end, when he couldn’t hurt us anymore, when it was safe to love him again.
I remembered the stones, how we held stones with our eyes closed on the beach in Nantucket. I pulled a smooth black stone from an island in Maine out of my coat pocket. I took his cold clenched hand and slid the black sea-smoothed stone until it disappeared into his grasp. So he would not be alone when he slipped into the flames.
Sander Hall Implosion, 1991
IMPLOSION
1991
Architecture aims at eternity.
—CHRISTOPHER WREN
ON A JUNE MORNING IN 1991, THREE YEARS BEFORE my father died, I was working in the garden with my children playing nearby. I had no idea my father was standing on a house boat anchored at a precise location in the earth-brown Ohio River. He mentioned it casually over the phone a week later, as I spooned oatmeal for my one-year-old daughter. He said, “We met early at the dock.” Bob, the mechanical engineer for Sander Hall, had helped my father aboard, before motoring downstream until he angled his boat into position, out of the current. Tugs rumbled by, maneuvering barges piled with small mountains of glistening coal.
My father, nearly eighty, his back curved over from osteoporosis, had brought a bottle of chilled champagne. They trained their binoculars on the top floors of the mirror glass dorm that appeared, like a Japanese kite, flying high above the tree-covered hillside. They checked their watches and looked up every few seconds.
From that distance the tower had appeared as beautiful as my father had envisioned it, silvery rose mirrored walls rising high above the earthly world, where clouds floated over the surface, like the painting I’d seen in his office, a building surrounded with grass and trees. But my father’s grand vision had been hijacked by a miasma of circumstances. The tower was inextricably knotted into a collision of 1970s radical social change, wealth and poverty, racial inequality, and battles between administration and students in a roaring fury against the establishment that Sander Hall represented.
AFTER I LEFT home I’d heard occasional reports on Sander Hall. It was known for an epidemic of arson. Smoke rising up stairwells. Smoke seeping into dorm rooms. Eleven years after it was opened, a panicked girl used her desk chair to smash through the mirror glass wall of her sixth floor room to escape the smoke. Firemen on a ladder lifted her down. The University closed the building.
Studies battled over the fire safety of the dorm. Did it meet state code? What could be done to increase the safety of the building? Add an additional stairwell at the end of the building? Newspaper articles debating the issues stacked up on my aging father’s desk. An occasional letter to the editor praised the building and declared it was the students who had been the problem. The university considered changing the tower over to administrative offices. But the price tag for renovation came back nearly the same as for a new building.
The University finally abandoned the building, leaving it to stand empty, a dark derelict tower, a shadow hanging over the University for nine years. Twenty years after the hall opened, in 1991, the President of the University was quoted in The Cincinnati Enquirer: “If I didn’t know better, I’d say the building was haunted.”
THROUGHOUT MY CHILDHOOD my father always declared, “I’ll be an architect until the day I die. It’s in my blood.” Yet no one could have guessed in the weeks before the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Sander Hall that the financial recession of the 1970s would halt major construction in the U.S. for years. In 1971, Sander Hall looked like the pinnacle of Woodie’s success, with the promise of more work to come. His career began with a glass tower that was never built and ended with the completion of a glass tower when he was fifty-eight. He held onto his empty office for a few years, finding consulting work, and finally, he taught a few classes to architectural students at Miami University.
ON CAMPUS THE crowds started gathering hours before. Some had stayed up all night partying and waiting. They pushed up close to the police barricades. Mid-June, Saturday morning, the University of Cincinnati campus should have been sleepy and quiet on summer school schedule. But surrounding the campus on flat roofs of cheap apartments, students clasped mugs of coffee and munched on bagels. Figures lined the top floors of University buildings. Crowds lined Calhoun in front of bookstores, head shops and the falafel shop where they would put up a framed series of second-by-second photographs of that day. Everyone waited, their eyes tracing the familiar high-rise dorm, Sander Hall, which had stood on the east side of campus since the turbulent early 1970s.
Twenty-seven stories tall, a grid of strong vertical lines with horizontal mirrored panels from an era famed for glass buildings, the dorm reflected two church steeples, pearly clouds, and plumes of airplanes across its glistening surface. On either side of the building, the column of windows was edged with my father’s invention, crushed milk-glass panels, made in Xenia, Ohio, sparkling when the sun cut through Midwestern cloud cover. Two years after the tower was completed, a tornado destroyed the town of Xenia and the plant where the panels were constructed. The panels were never used on any other building besides our home and this dormitory.
The only skyscraper outside of downtown, like an arrow on a compass, the gleaming tower could orient you even from miles away. “Oh, there’s campus,” you would say to yourself. While driving along Columbia Parkway edging the Ohio River, when the steep hills and wooded ravines tucked just right, you could catch a glimpse of the upper half of the tower, just for a moment.
That morning, everybody had their opinions of the building; the same rumors, questions, and curses multiplied like flies, a cacophony of murmurs across every crowded hillside.
“Man, who the fuck ever wanted to live twenty-seven floors up?”
“There were fires in there. I heard someone died!”
“Some people tried smashing open their windows.”
“Did anyone jump?”
“Whoever would have designed such a thing?”
“A damned eyesore!”
AFTER WE LEFT the glass house our father lived a cursed life, a kind of King Midas, except everything he touched seemed to turn to lead, leaking slow poison, accelerating his disintegration. By t
he time he sold the glass house for a pittance, he cursed it, glad to be free of “that stone hanging around my neck.” His investments tanked. What was left, he used to pay for his dream trip of sailing around the world, yet within a day of setting sail from Florida to Tahiti the seeds of disaster were planted.
He would later document, in his last Literary Club paper, the first half of his ill-fated journey, trapped aboard a forty-foot yacht under the command of an abusive and inconsistent captain who risked their lives and held their passports so they couldn’t leave. At the same time a common medication, Inderol, prescribed preventatively to keep his heart steady on the journey, was withering him. After six months at sea he returned, a collapsed skeleton of an old man, repeating every sentence three times, apparently terminally ill until he stopped the medication. He sued the doctor and lost. With his complicated cardiac and mental health history, it was impossible to prove the cause of his collapse.
He would recover slowly, and for a few years began to rebuild a life; learning how to use a computer, he’d stay up till dawn. But years of isolation and depression took their toll, and he began to sink. His teeth were failing, and his dentist convinced him to pull them all out and have implants screwed into the bone. This would turn into a year of torture, sleepless on pain meds and antibiotics, gums swollen and infected, a liquid diet, health robbed again. He wouldn’t recover this time, despite the wall of perfect teeth imbedded in his withering face. By the end his spine betrayed him, crumbling and caving in before cancer settled into his colon. This was the man who sat in the middle of the Ohio River that June day, looking up at the tower that had consumed all of our lives.
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