Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

  As she wasted, she lost her hearing and would not even consider a hearing aid. We experienced her as withdrawing, and my father, in our telephone conversations, always referred to her as “fading” or “disappearing.”

  I remember, sometime after that, sitting in her living room with my father, who teased her, loudly, “Jesus, Kitty, you’re disappearing. There ain’t nothing to you no more. You were always a big strapping girl!”

  “Ha,” she said, “I was never big, don’t you dare call me big.” And she turned to me and winked, “I had a pretty nice shape on me, though; a pretty nice shape!”

  My father, on the other hand, began referring to himself as old soon after my mother died. He was fifty-nine. If Joe or I tried to convince him to take a trip—in my case to come to visit his grandchildren in Boston—or even to just get out and have some fun, he’d reply, “Leave me alone. I’m an old man and I just want to sit here on my ass.”

  And in the long view that’s what he did for nearly a quarter century after my mother’s death. But that’s too dismissive. And although he was clearly depressed, I don’t want to reduce him to a diagnosis. For company, he had his huge TV, and if he was awake it was on. (Actually, I came into the house on more than one occasion to find him asleep in front of it, even though I could hear it a block away when I parked the car.) Staying in the house, especially visiting with kids, was hard. There was no escape from the massive, booming presence of that TV; it vibrated the walls, the floors. If you went upstairs to bed, you lay there until the late show and then the late-late show were over.

  It was a gray November day in 2006 and I was in the supermarket when my cell rang, by the dairy case if I remember correctly. I saw the call was from “HOME” and figured it was Veronica, maybe asking me to pick something up.

  “Daddy, are you coming home soon?”

  “Soon as I check out here. I’m at the supermarket. Why?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Why? What’s up?” I was keeping my tone light, but only because I could hear panic edging into her voice.

  “Just come home.”

  “Why? What’s happened? Veronica?”

  “Daddy, just come home.”

  I rushed around the store, shopping list in hand, worry mounting. Veronica was only eighteen, but she was already a junior at Boston College, studying nursing. Had she failed a test? Had she cracked up her car?

  “Sit down,” she said when I had piled the groceries onto the kitchen table and taken off my jacket. She handed me some kind of stick, something like a thermometer with a window in it. In the window were two pink stripes. Although I’d never seen one of these before, I knew what it could only be. In the chair across from me, her legs pulled up so that her chin was on her knees, Veronica looked terrified.

  “Well, wait a second,” I said, “one of these lines is pretty faint, and it doesn’t really extend as far as the other. Besides . . .”

  “Dad.”

  “I know. I know. I’m just trying to slow things down so I can take this in.”

  “But what should I do?”

  I can’t recall exactly how the conversation unfolded. She did tell me how it happened, how she and a guy she knew from high school had met again at a party and gotten carried away. “It was only one time!” she blurted.

  I made a face at her.

  Laughter through tears. “But what do I do now?”

  “It all depends what you want to do.”

  “Mom’s going to tell me to get an abortion.”

  The way she spoke the word “abortion” spoke volumes. The thought crossed my mind that she might carry this baby to spite her mother and her mother’s feminism, which of course had afforded her the choice, among so many other things in her life, in the first place. This was quickly followed by the thought, the understanding really, that for all her demonstrated competence in the world and her quick intellect, she was still an adolescent daughter struggling to become autonomous, and that realization made this whole situation seem even sadder.

  “It’s your decision to make.”

  “What do you think?”

  What I thought—or at least thought I thought—was that this was not the time in her life for a baby, and not with a young man she hardly knew (and whom I’d never met!). If she wanted to have a child with him, she could choose to do that—later. This was an accident, a mistake, and an ill-timed invitation to a new and very different life, an invitation to be declined.

  But what I felt, and what seemed to easily overwhelm my thinking, was something else entirely. I felt a hot splash of joy right in the center of my chest.

  My father is explaining that he thought it best to name my brother as executor of the will, since he is local. He has also given him power of attorney when it comes to medical decisions. Well, he hasn’t actually filled out the paperwork, including a Do Not Resuscitate order, but he assures us he is going to do so. His signature there will ratify something he’d said to me on the phone a week or so earlier. “Just promise me that when I go you don’t let them bring me back, you hear? For Christ’s sake, it’s bad enough to have to die once.” I know he’s had a similar conversation with my brother, so there’s something about this meeting at the scarred and wobbly table that is formal, official, like closing on a house. My father is “passing papers.” Earlier he’d said, “After supper tonight I’d like to sit down with my sons and go over some things,” as if we were not the sons he was referring to. And in fact there is something detached and ceremonious about the way this is unfolding. “So. Any questions before I close up this box? Anything unclear you want me to go over again? No? Good.”

  Then, the silence uncomfortable, I start to gather the remaining dishes, rise to take them to the sink. “Sit. Sit,” he says. “There is something else. Something else I want to talk to you boys about.” Joe and I sneak a look at each other: you boys?

  But whatever my father had planned to say, or at least the words he’d planned to use, won’t come; tears, which he stanches with difficulty, arrive in their stead. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I made a mistake once, a big mistake, and I don’t want it to cause any more trouble. Joe, I think you know a guy named Beerman. I think you went to school with him.” My brother is nodding, his brows knit, wondering what’s coming. “Well, his aunt is a woman named Amanda Schuler. I don’t know if that name means anything to you.”

  It does. To me. And I can see my brother knows where this is going, too.

  I can remember my father slamming the door on his way out to visit her. He and my mother had been arguing. It was right before Christmas, either the first or second since our move to this house, so I would have been fourteen or fifteen. I’ve never considered this before, but thinking back to my father in a coat and tie—something he never wore—groomed and cologned on his way out the door to his girlfriend’s house, farther west than our house on Thirteenth Street, farther into the wealth of the city, my father was, perhaps, trying desperately for the bourgeois life denied him in the semi-squalor of our family. There was not only the heartbreak of my two brothers wasting away in their wheelchairs, doomed by Duchenne muscular dystrophy, not to mention their constant need for care, but also my mother’s less-than-respectable family—Helen, Cory, Etta, and Kenny: without education, alcoholic, vulgar, poor. My father’s prospects had just improved: he was hired as recreation director for the city. For years he had worked as a coach at the Boys Club, as a laborer, then as a city health inspector, all the while umpiring and refereeing for extra cash and his love of sports. Now he was finally getting to do what he loved. I imagine it felt as if a new life were possible.

  “Well, you might someday hear from this guy Beerman that your dad had an affair with his aunt, so I wanted you to know that it’s true. I’m not proud of the fact. I was selfish and weak and I know I hurt your mother terribly. But I just wanted you to know so you don’t someday get in a brawl or something with this Beerman kid trying to deny it.” The look on my brother’s face,
my fifty-four-year-old brother who I don’t believe has ever been in a fistfight in his life, is perplexed. When my father turns his head to talk to me, Joe allows himself an amused shake of the head.

  “And Dick, the worst thing is that I let you down.” I was ready to protest, but the hand came up in the STOP sign. “You were dealing with a lot back then, and I wasn’t there for you. You needed your dad, and I wasn’t there for you.” He was biting his lower lip, eyes welling again. “I’m sorry. I want to apologize to both of you boys.”

  Some fifteen years earlier I had told him about being raped by my Little League coach—what he meant by “dealing with a lot back then.” I had written about it in a memoir that sent that coach, who was still violating young boys, to prison. My father had been instrumental in putting the book in the hands of people who knew where the coach was. He took it on himself as a moral failing he had to put right, and I’d considered the account more than squared.

  While my father was with Amanda, I’d stayed home in the evenings, watching TV with my brothers, helping my mother care for them, and sometimes trying to console her as she wept and raged at my father.

  “And I imagine, I don’t know, but I imagine that it’s good for you to know that your mother and I got through that okay. She took me back. She forgave me. And we were in a real good period in our life together when she got sick. That’s the hell of it.” He took a moment to steady himself. “But I want to apologize to you two boys.”

  I remember thinking that yes, it was the boys to whom he wanted to apologize.

  I waited until I was sure he was finished, not wanting to risk the hand again. I recounted the enormous pressures he faced, day after day, caring for two sick and dying children, the financial pressures, the emotional pressure, the knowledge that there was only one end to the story. I said I didn’t blame him.

  “Aw, you’re just trying to let me off the hook. You don’t need to do that. I don’t want you to do that. Not just-like-that”—he snapped his fingers—“I don’t want you making excuses for me.”

  He was right. As I was speaking it had occurred to me that my mother had been under all those pressures, too, had felt that despair, that terrible doomed love for her hopeless children, and had had to feel his rejection and betrayal besides. I am also my mother’s son.

  I remember her leaning on the sink, weeping over a stack of dirty dishes. I’d seen her from behind and her posture drew me to her. I placed a hand on her shoulder and she went on crying. Behind us, in the next room, my brothers were watching TV: Bobby, fifteen, in his wheelchair; Joey, eleven, hugging his knees on the floor; Mikey, nine, in the wheelchair that used to be Bobby’s. “What am I going to do?” my mother sobbed. “What am I going to do?”

  Before my brother Bobby grew weak, falling down, unable to get up, before he was diagnosed with Duchenne, and before my brother Joe was born, and then Mike, who never walked, my mother was a singer. She sang the whole day long: Shine little glow worm, glimmer glimmer. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. Don’t sit under the apple tree with anybody else but me.

  My mother sang in clubs during World War II. My aunt told me this is how my parents met. Of course, I always imagined it Hollywood-style: my mother at the microphone, spotlit in a sequined dress, a band behind her in the semidarkness, singing some torch song while my father, looking handsome in his dress uniform, medals above his heart, his tie knotted just so (as he had tried to show me time and again before finally giving up and buying me a clip-on), listened appreciatively from a small table across the smoky room. Mood indigo.

  But recently my father told me the story a little differently. Oh, I’d already long since understood that my version was fantasy. My mother in a slinky sequined dress? Please. And my father was a private back from basic training, awaiting orders. And a “club,” in Allentown, is a bar room, dark, with usually only a diamond-shaped, face-sized window in the door and a few frosted glass bricks to let in some light. A couple of years ago I asked him about it and he smirked and waved his hand in that way of his that means “Bah.” Or “Go on,” a kind of erasure to make room for what he would say.

  “It was up at the VFW, and your mother was in there with her mother and Kenny, her stepfather. Kenny was a blowhard when he was drunk, a loudmouth. He was a regular and had a kind of gang there. Him and Etta were up there all the time. And that night he was on his feet and telling everybody to pipe down, pipe down, his daughter was going to sing. Your mother didn’t want to. She asked him to stop. ‘My daughter Dolly’s going to sing a song!’ he kept saying, and I believe if she hadn’t got up to sing it would have got ugly. So she did. She was a little shy but she had a great voice. You know your mother could always sing. And I don’t remember if I asked her out that night or called her later.” I asked him if he remembered what she sang that night and he said he didn’t.

  Her songs, her singing, hung on for a while, though not for long. I remember my mother singing and ironing:

  (clump) Come onna my house, my-eye house,

  I’m gonna give you ca-an-dy. (clump)

  Come onna my house, my (clump) house,

  I’ll make you feel (clump) da-an-dy.

  Come onna my house: My mother is stirring soup made from boiling half a dozen franks in salt water, two or three potatoes and half an onion cut up in it, with parsley and a dash of pepper. Supper after supper of this. Supper is our word. We eat supper. “They” have dinner. Out in the “west end” of town, where “the Rockefellers” live, they have dinner.

  Or “hamburger soup”: meat boiled till it is gray, floating in the water it’s been cooked in, not skimmed, lenses of slick fat floating and rainbowing the florescent kitchen light, two or three potatoes and half an onion cut up in it, with parsley and a dash of pepper. Supper.

  On Mondays (also the day my mother did laundry and hung it, billowing, on clotheslines the length of the yard) we had a supper called “cream-dry beef.” And every Monday my father would explain, again, that this creamed and dried beef was also called “shit on a shingle,” the shingle being the slice of toast over which the salty thick goop was ladled. I loved it because it was army food. I loved it like my father’s paratrooper regalia, and his bayonet in its sheath. I used to look at the stains on that blade, wondering if they were blood, if my father had killed Nazis with it. I only ever saw my father use the bayonet to open old paint cans that had crusted shut; eventually the tip snapped off of it, and it became even more useful for that task. I had the chance, recently, to order it—Creamed Dried Beef—in a southern diner, and although they plopped it on a biscuit and garnished it with a sprig of parsley, it still tasted good to me. Whether I acquired a taste for it via my father’s emphatic belly-patting pronouncements each week, “Man, that’s good!” or would have found it tasty anyway, I can’t say. So much of my life is history, I don’t know if anything, any soul or essence or self preceded it. I’ll leave that to the geneticists, since by the time I became aware of myself as someone distinct from the person my parents believed they were speaking to, by the time, that is, that I had enough inside to try to manipulate the outside, I was already brimful with history.

  Home from the store, my mother divides up the S&H Green Stamps between Bobby and me so we can paste them in their squares in the redemption booklet. For five thousand points you can get a nice set of tea towels. For ten thousand a set of cups and saucers. Fifty thousand will get us a floor lamp that would “go nice” in the living room.

  Que sera, sera, my mother sings, Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera.

  “Your mother and I got through that okay. She took me back. She forgave me.”

  What else could she do? What choice did she have? I wonder sometimes what choices she ever had. My mother grew up in rural poverty during the Depression, illegitimate, with a drunken stepfather and three younger sisters, and school ended after eighth grade. And yet she sang. What love—is there another word for it? Courage? Generosity?—to have been ke
pt from ever opening the gift, but to pass it along to her children just the same and not demean it or throw it away in frustration. What wisdom, astonishing in its offhandedness, to have passed along also the wish to open it, the yearning to be able to one day open it, the longing to live beyond mere duty and endurance.

  My father would most likely have encountered the word patriarchy as a ten-letter gap in one of the crossword puzzles he did with a pencil sharpened with a knife so the lead had a sculpted quality, rounded at the tip and smooth, not pointy, so it wouldn’t tear the soft paper, and so it wouldn’t incise the letters onto the page, which would make them harder to erase. Erasing, correcting, changing your mind when you were wrong, was a given; in fact, if you didn’t have to do this at least several times to complete the puzzle, it was too easy. That’s why each of his whittled pencils was capped with a pink wedge of eraser, soft rubber that didn’t wear away the surface of the page, that gave you as many chances as you needed.

  No one outside a marriage can really know its features: its ecstasies and regrets, its disappointments, reassurances, tendernesses, cruelties, secrets, truces, promises, compromises, least of all a child of that marriage. I can only say how it seemed to me; when I was young, before the future became a source of dread and inevitable grief, my parents were happy. They were in love: I recall enough of their touching and joking and kissing and flirting back when Bobby and I were young to feel sure of this. And I believe that “in love” or not, they loved each other continuously, even when their angers burned hot as hatred.

  This will not come clear. It can’t. There is no binary good/bad, glad/sad conclusion to be reached. When I have spoken of my family in the past, there is always someone who wants to know how such love and fury could coexist, and I don’t understand the question. It seems either naive or disingenuous. Families seem to me to be made of love and fury. The world is mostly water; we are mostly water; life itself is mostly water, but we don’t ask how such hydrogen and oxygen can coexist. We just drink it and live. Maybe we wish it were champagne, or root beer, or cider, but we’re not foolish enough to wish it were liquid hydrogen, or liquid oxygen.