When the dawn slanted through the small dormer window in the spare room, though, he’d sit up, confused and angry. “Goddamn it,” he’d say. “Where am I? What is this? What the hell am I doing here?”
HE HADN’T KNOWN I was transsexual, or if he did, he never said anything about it. I’m not even sure he knew the word transsexual, or transgender, and almost surely he could not have explained the difference between the two. But that’s all right. For a long time I couldn’t figure it all out, either.
Once, though, when I was in high school, Dad and my mother were watching television, clicking through the channels, and for a moment they rested on a Movie of the Week presentation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was the scene when Frank-N-Furter waltzes around in fishnets singing, “Well you got caught with a flat. Well how about that?”
My father raised an eyebrow and said, “There he is, Jim. Your biggest fan.”
For a single, terrified second, I feared that he knew exactly what was going on in my room, up on the third floor, when the deadbolt was drawn. Was it possible, I wondered, as Frank-N-Furter danced before us, that from the very beginning my father had understood the thing that had lain in my heart, and that I had apparently so completely failed to conceal? But just as quickly, I realized this was impossible. The truth about my identity was so completely improbable that my father could make a joke about it, as if the very idea was funny.
My mother picked up the remote and we moved on to another movie. Kirk Douglas was standing in a sea of men in gladiator costumes. “I’m Spartacus!” the men shouted, one after the other. “I’m Spartacus!”
My mother put the remote down. They loved movies about the ancient world, and I could understand why. My mother was Spartacus. My father was Spartacus. My drunken grandmother was Spartacus. Even Sausage, our gelatinous, overweight Dalmatian, was Spartacus.
In our house, sometimes, it seemed like just about everybody was Spartacus. Except me.
ON HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY, we gave my father an inflatable rubber boat. He spent the rest of that day in it, floating around the pool, with a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other. I’d spent the morning in my third-floor room with the door locked, wearing my hippie girl clothes and reading Betty Friedan. Then, when it was time for the party, I changed back into boy clothes and helped carry the hibachi grill and the beef patties and the charcoal and the cheese out to the pool, and I made my father a cheeseburger.
By the time he turned fifty, he’d been cancer-free for years, but a year later, in ’79, he had a second mole removed, beet red in color. Then he was healthy for another six years, until the last one. That time, they had to follow through with radiation, and interferon, and cisplatin. Too late, though.
After his funeral, on Easter Sunday 1986, as we followed the hearse through the rain, I thought back to the happy, sun-soaked occasion of his fiftieth birthday, just eight years before. We’d set up a stereo outside and played his favorite music for him. A couple of Beethoven symphonies, and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach. It was the first time in his life that my father seemed to understand the joys of a kick-ass stereo. He lay back in his boat with a look of complete peace as he listened to the Bach.
You could see a place on his leg where they’d taken off the mole, and another on his back where they’d taken the skin to do the graft.
When the fugue was over, Dad opened his eyes and said, sweetly, “Can we play it again? Louder?”
MY FATHER’S MOTHER, Gammie, was married four times, although there were times when she dismissed marriage number one as “a trial balloon.” The first husband she actually counted was my grandfather, James, whose nickname for her was “Stardust.” My father was her only child, but she lost interest in him after James dropped dead of a brain hemorrhage, just after my father’s ninth birthday. By the time my father was sixteen, he was living virtually all the time at a friend’s house, on a cot out in the hallway. Now and again he’d show up at his mother’s house to find smashed bottles on the floor, dishes in the sink. A wild party began at Stardust’s house sometime in 1938 and didn’t really finish until 1946.
My grandfather had left her a fair amount of money, but by the time my father hit high school, the cash was gone. What happened to it? As Gammie herself later explained it, “I like men. And I like money. And men who like money, like me.”
MY FATHER’S HOBBIES, in childhood, had been collecting baseball cards and playing marbles. So it was a surprise when he introduced me to model rockets on my twelfth birthday, with the gift of a kit from Estes. The name of the rocket was BIG DADDY.
Our launchpad was an abandoned horse-racing track on a farm a few miles from our house. The grass had grown thick and snarly in the center oval of the track, and in the distance we could see the burned-out remains of what had once been the farmhouse. The farmer’s windmill had survived the fire, somehow, and it spun in the breeze not far from the ruins. I set up the launchpad and unwound the wires with the alligator clips that connected the rocket’s igniter fuses to a battery-powered launch controller. After checking the wind, I adjusted the angle of the launch rod so that the rocket would fly in the windward direction at first, because I knew that once the parachute opened, and the breeze filled it, BIG DADDY would begin to drift.
My father stood at some remove, watching as I ran through my prelaunch checklist. I was very thorough, applying the proper amount of chute wadding into the fuselage (so that the detonator charge, which caused the nose cone to eject, thus activating the parachute at apogee, would not cause the chute’s plastic to melt). I secured the igniter fuses with masking tape. I double-checked the wind speed and the angle of the launch rod. Then I looked at my father.
“Are we go for launch?” I asked dramatically.
He replied, with as little enthusiasm as it is possible to imagine, “We are go.”
Then I started counting down. “Ten … nine … eight … seven—ignition sequence start!—six … five … four … three … two … one! Liftoff!”
For a moment BIG DADDY sat there on the pad. There was a sizzling sound. I was afraid, for a moment, that it was a dud, that, as they said at Mission Control, we’d have to “scrub the launch.” Then, all at once, there was a vast, silvery swooshing sound, and BIG DADDY raced into the sky, leaving only a vaporous trail behind.
We stood there watching the rocket rise out of sight. It neared the sun, and I shaded my eyes with my hand, like I was saluting. A moment later, I felt a hand on my shoulder, and when I looked over, it was my father, who’d placed his hand on my back, probably without even thinking about it. I remember that his other hand was shielding his eyes from the sun as well. I saw the look on his face, a look of surprise and wonder, not only at the miracle of space flight—which was wondrous enough—but also, I imagined, at me. I was a boy of whom nothing might have been expected—I don’t think so. He’s not much. At times I must have seemed like a strange creature to him, delicate and frail. But I’d done this: I’d made the homely creation fly.
I looked back up at the sky. The far-off speck of the rocket passed directly in front of the sun. For a moment I lost sight of it.
Then we saw a bright flash. A moment later there was a fiery popping sound. I felt my father’s hand grip my shoulder blade a little harder. Then there was smoke, as the pieces of the rocket fell to earth. We stood there in silence as the ruins rained down around us, some of them still smoking.
I looked down at the ground. “I’m sorry, son,” my father said. Then he got out a cigarette—an L&M King—and lit it with a butane lighter. As he blew the smoke into the air, he gave me a weary look that suggested that this was exactly what the world was like, that in the years that lay before us both, it should be expected that all sorts of things would explode and scatter.
“Stupid thing,” I said angrily. “Stupid BIG DADDY.”
WHEN I FINALLY saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, years later, I didn’t know that Big Daddy was the name for anything other than a rocket. But the
re was Burl Ives, embodying the man himself. “They say nature hates a vacuum,” says Brick, his son.
“That’s what they say,” replies Big Daddy. “But sometimes I think that a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.”
ONE NIGHT BACK in 1973, I was up late in my room with the deadbolt drawn. I was wearing a green paisley skirt and a halter top filled with grapefruits, and I was reading Tonio Kröger in German. On the stereo, Jerry Garcia was singing: “Saint Stephen will remain, all he’s lost he shall regain.” Your typical Friday night. From a long way off, I heard a glass break, down in the kitchen.
That was weird.
So I lifted the needle off the record. Then I took off my girl clothes, stuck them back in the secret panel that swung out from my wall, and put on my boy pajamas and a bathrobe and went downstairs. It was almost midnight.
There in the kitchen was my father. He was sweeping glass off the floor. “What happened?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“Gotta clean up after Mom,” he said in a sleepy, mumbly voice.
“Dad?” I said. “What’s happening?”
“Daddy died,” he said sadly.
This is when I realized that my father was sleepwalking, and that he was playing out some crazy scene from his childhood, from the days after the death of his own father, when Stardust, along with her many suitors, was drinking the money at the endless party. I could see my father’s boyhood self, trying to straighten up the house while his mother lay passed out on the sofa.
He was being very methodical, putting the shards of glass in the dustpan. I held the pan still for him as he swept, again and again and again. Then I poured the glass pieces into the trash, and I said, “All done.” He stood there with the broom, deep in his trance.
“Who—?” said my father, in a voice that sounded like wind rushing through a tunnel. “Who are you?”
I looked at my father’s face—and even though he was forty-five, and asleep, it struck me that, perhaps for the only time in my life, I was seeing what he’d looked like when he was a boy.
“It’s time for bed,” I said.
“Who are you?” said my father.
I considered telling him the truth in reply to this question, but instead I took him by the hand, led him up the creaking stairs, and tucked him into bed. And kissed my boy good night.
THE YEAR I turned forty, Deedie and the boys gave me a rubber chair that floats in the water for my birthday. Since it was raining, though, I didn’t get to repeat the ritual of my father, twenty years earlier, listening to Bach at top volume. I was still a man then, although I wouldn’t remain one for much longer.
We had a bottle of dandelion wine that my friend Tim Kreider had made on his porch, and I drank it. The wine instantly made me nuts, in the most pleasant way imaginable. I placed the rubber chair on the wooden floor of our house and put Peter and the Wolf on the stereo, and as I listened to the Prokofiev I happily floated around the room as my family waved from the couch. And if one would listen very carefully, he could hear the duck quacking inside the wolf, because the wolf, in his hurry, had swallowed her alive.
AS I FLOATED around the living room, I thought about my dad. I wondered if he had felt as uncertain of what the job of father entailed as I did. Like most of the men I know, he was an interesting mix of the masculine and feminine. Sure, he’d been an athlete in high school and college, and yes, his favorite place in the world other than our own house was the hardware store. He loved to spend hours stripping wallpaper and sanding windowsills and building walls with a sledgehammer and a chisel. At the same time, his hobby was raising orchids in a greenhouse that he and my mother built off the kitchen.
There were times I couldn’t figure him out—he spent all morning swinging a sledgehammer around, making walls out of fieldstone, and then in the afternoon would meticulously divide a phalaenopsis and water his flowers with a misting wand. Still, if there were masculine and feminine things about my father, he never seemed at war with himself about it; he seemed, above all, a man at peace.
I was not a man at peace, I thought as I floated on my raft from the kitchen to the porch. I was restless and uncertain. A will-o’-the-wisp, a flibbertigibbet, a clown. Still, I know a lot of men who meet that description, and it’s that very quality in them that I suspect is responsible for their inventiveness and their charm.
I had been lucky in having Dick Boylan for a father. As a dad myself, I wasn’t going to be anything like him. But in his kindness and his humor, his curiosity and his love, he taught me everything I knew about being a man.
And from whom, I wondered, had he learned this? He’d lost his father when he was still a child. Just as my own children, in years to come, would lose theirs.
ON THE BEACH in Florida, Seannie was hunting for jellyfish. Before us was the Point Ybel lighthouse. “Do you miss him?” asked Zach. “Grampapa?”
I watched as another woman my age loped toward us in her shorts and running bra. This one looked so much like a female version of me that I had to stare. She had the same blond hair, the little wire-rimmed glasses, the birdlike nose. I wondered whether the father of this stranger loved his daughter.
The woman reached out to touch the lighthouse with her fingertips. Then she turned around and ran back in the direction from which she’d come.
I nodded. “Yes,” I said, although my voice had fallen to a whisper. “I miss him.”
Sean came running toward us. He had something in his hand, something globular and dead and tentacled.
“Yellyfish,” he said. He dropped it in the sand.
“Hey, Baby Sean,” said Zach. “Watch!” He leaned over and squeezed my nose. “Honk,” I said sadly.
Baby Sean thought this was the most wondrous thing he had ever seen. He looked at me, and then his brother, and then at me again.
“Can Baby Sean honk your nose, Daddy?” said Zach.
I nodded. I really didn’t see what difference it could possibly make now.
Sean reached out tentatively and clasped my nose. I felt his tiny fingers encircling my nostrils.
“Honk,” I said. “Honk. Honk. Honk.”
ON THE WAY back to the condo, Zach read the end of the book to his brother. The sun was shining all around us now, burning off the mist. I was still thinking of that woman I’d seen. If I’d been her, instead of myself, what would my life have been like? How was it possible, at this point, to imagine a life for me that did not include Zach, and Sean, and Deedie?
“What happens,” Zach explained, “is that in the end of the story, the very hungry caterpillar turns into a butterfly. He builds a little house, and climbs inside it, and then he changes.”
“Then?” said Baby Sean. “Then?”
“Then nothing, Baby Sean,” said Zach. “He changes, and becomes a butterfly. And has to fly away.”
RICHARD RUSSO
© Elena Seibert
I didn’t care about you at all.
There was a poker game to go to.
The track was there.
Richard Russo—known to his friends as Rick—is the author of seven novels, including Empire Falls, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He and I shared an office at Colby College in the early 1990s, when we were both professors of creative writing there. The friendship quickly grew to include Rick’s wife, Barb, and their two daughters, Emily and Kate; in our will, the Russos are appointed the legal guardians of Zach and Sean, should anything happen to Deedie and me. Our friendship has weathered many transitions—not only mine from male to female, but Rick and Barb’s, from parents to grandparents. In June of 2011, Rick and I sat on the sun porch of the Russos’ house in Camden, Maine, to talk about parenthood and fiction.
JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: Rick, a lot of your readers probably think they know your father because your novels frequently have a kind of brilliant but feckless middle-aged man at its center. And whether it’s The Risk Pool or Nobody’s Fool or Empire Falls, I think there i
s a certain “Russo Man.”
RICHARD RUSSO: Right. The rogue male.
JFB: How close is that to your father?
RR: My father was a man of just enormous charm. He had the ability to walk into a room and make everybody happy, just by his presence. Women in particular, he had a way of making … especially women who maybe once had been beautiful but weren’t anymore … he just had a way of making older women, sometimes elderly women … he would compliment them and charm them and just make them feel … you could just see their faces light up, you know, when Jimmy was around. He had that ability to just charm everybody. He was an incredibly generous man, too. Whenever he was around. But the problem with him was always not being around.
JFB: Why was he not around? I mean, he married your mother. How long had they been married when you came into the picture?
RR: Well, he married just before he shipped overseas. And he came home a different man. You don’t land on the beaches in Normandy and make it all the way through France and on all the way to Berlin and come back the person you were when you left. I think that my mother and father, before he left, were kind of on the same page about what they might have wanted the shape of their marriage [to] be. But by the time he came back, he had changed and she hadn’t. My mother, to another extent, would never change. She was, even deep into her eighties, a woman who looked at the world in essentially the same way. Whereas my father came home with very little tolerance for any manner of bullshit. He was celebrating the fact that he was alive.
So the last thing in the world he wanted was any kind of responsibility. When other soldiers came back and took advantage of the GI Bill, or put a down payment on a house, or started having kids and settling down, he just wanted no part of any of that, and my mother’s point with him always was that it’s time. She said, “Can’t you see? Look around you. Everybody else is growing up. Everybody else is coming into parenthood, everybody else has at least some ambitions as to what the rest of their lives are going to be like. Time for us to just do what everybody else is doing.” And my father just wasn’t in it, and he never would be.
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