My Father's Tears and Other Stories

by Unknown

  I blamed it on our handshake: for eighteen years we had never had occasion for this social gesture, this manly contact, and we had groped our way into it only recently. He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realized, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I. I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller. He had loved me, it came to me as never before. It was something that had not needed to be said before, and now his tears were saying it. Before, in all the years and small adventures we had shared, there was the sensation, stemming from him, that life was a pickle, and he and I were, for a time, in the pickle together.

  The old Alton station was his kind of place, savoring of transit and the furtive small pleasures of city life. I had bought my first pack of cigarettes here, with no protest from the man running the newsstand, though I was a young-looking fifteen. He simply gave me my change and a folder of matches advertising Sunshine Beer, from Alton’s own brewery. Alton was a middle-sized industrial city that had been depressed ever since the textile mills began to slide south. In the meantime, with its orderly street grid and its hearty cuisine, it still supplied its citizens with traditional comforts and an illusion of well-being. I lit up a block from the station, as I remember, and even though I didn’t know how to inhale my nerves took a hit; the sidewalk seemed to lift toward me and the whole world felt lighter. From that day forward I began to catch up, socially, with the more glamorous of my peers, who already smoked.

  Even my stay-at-home mother, no traveller but a reader, had a connection to the station: it was the only place in the city where you could buy her favorite magazines, Harper’s and The New Yorker. Like the stately Carnegie-endowed library two blocks down Franklin Street, it was a place you felt safe inside. Both had been built for eternity, when railroads and books looked to be with us forever. The station was a foursquare granite temple with marble floors, a high ceiling whose gilded coffers glinted through a coating of coal smoke. The tall-backed waiting benches were as dignified as church pews. The radiators clanked and the caramel-colored walls murmured as if giving back some of the human noise they absorbed day and night. The newsstand and coffee shop were usually busy, and the waiting room was always warm, as my father and I had discovered on more than one winter night. We had been commuters to the same high school, he as a teacher and I as student, in second-hand cars that on more than one occasion failed to start, or got stuck in a snowstorm. We would make our way to the one place sure to be open, the railroad station.

  We did not foresee, that moment on the platform as the signal bells a half-mile down the tracks warned of my train’s approach, that within a decade passenger service to Philadelphia would stop, and that eventually the station, like railroad stations all across the East, would be padlocked and boarded up. The fine old building stood on its empty acre of asphalt parking space like an oversized mausoleum. All the life it had once contained was sealed into silence, and for the rest of the century it ignominiously waited, in this city where progress had halted, to be razed.

  But my father did foresee, the glitter in his eyes told me, that time consumes us—that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. My life had come out of his, and now I was stealing away with it. The train appeared, its engine, with its high steel wheels and long connecting rods and immense cylindrical boiler, out of all proportion to the little soft bodies it dragged along. I boarded it. My parents looked smaller, fore-shortened. We waved sheepishly through the smirched glass. I opened my book—The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton—before Alton’s gritty outskirts had fallen away.

  At the end of that long day of travel, getting off not at Boston’s South Station but at Back Bay, one stop earlier and closer to Cambridge, I was met by my girlfriend. How swanky that felt, to read Milton all day, the relatively colorless and hard-to-memorize pentameters of Paradise Regained, and, in sight of the other undergraduates disembarking, to be met and embraced on the platform by a girl—no, a woman—wearing a gray cloth coat, canvas tennis sneakers, and a ponytail. It must have been the spring break, because if Deb was greeting me the vacation had been too short for her to go back and forth to St. Louis, where her home was. Instead, she had been waiting a week for me to return. She tended to underdress in the long New England winter, while I wore the heavy winter coat, with buckled belt and fleecy lining, that my parents had bought me, to my embarrassment, to keep me from catching pneumonia way up in New England.

  She told me, as we rode first the Green Line and then the Red back to Harvard Square, what had happened to her that week. There had been an unpredicted snow squall, whose sullied traces were still around us, and, at the restaurant where she waited on tables some evenings, she had been given, because she was the only college student, the assignment of adding up numbers in the basement while the other waitresses pocketed all the tips. She was angry to the point of tears about it. I told her what I could recall of my week in Pennsylvania, already faded in memory except for the detail lodged there like a glittering splinter—my father’s tears. My own eyes itched and burned after a day of reading in a jiggling train; I had lifted them from my book only to marvel at the shining ocean as the train travelled the stretch of seaside track around New London.

  . . .

  In the years when we were newly married and still childless, Deb and I would spend a summer month with each set of parents. Her father was an eminent Unitarian minister, who preached in a gray neo-Gothic edifice built for eternity near the Washington University campus. Each June he moved his family from the roomy brick parsonage on Lindell Boulevard to an abandoned Vermont farmhouse he had bought in the Thirties for five hundred dollars. That June, Deb and I arrived before her father’s parish duties permitted him and the rest of his family, a wife and two other daughters, to be there. The chilly solitude of the place, with basic cold-water plumbing but no electricity, high on a curving dirt road whose only visible other house, a half-mile away, was occupied by another Unitarian minister, reinforced my sense of having moved up, thanks to my bride, into a new, more elevated and spacious territory.

  The lone bathroom was a long room, its plaster walls and wooden floor both bare, that was haunted by a small but intense rainbow, which moved around the walls as the sun in the course of the day glinted at a changing angle off the bevelled edge of the mirror on the medicine cabinet. When we troubled to heat up enough water on the kerosene stove for a daylight bath, the prismatically generated rainbow kept the bather company; it quivered and bobbed when footsteps or a breath of wind made the house tremble. To me this Ariel-like phenomenon was the magical child of Unitarian austerity, symbolic of the lofty attitude that sought out a primitive farmhouse as a relief from well-furnished urban comfort. It had to do, I knew, drawing upon my freshly installed education, with idealism, with Emerson and Thoreau, with self-reliance and taking Nature on Nature’s own, exalted terms. A large side room in the house, well beyond the woodstove’s narrow sphere of warmth, held a big loom frame that had come with the house, and an obsolete encyclopedia, and a set, with faded spines, of aged but rarely touched books entitled The Master Works of World Philosophy. When I broke precedent by taking one of the volumes down, its finely ridged cloth cover gave my fingers an unpleasant tingle. It was the volume containing selections from Emerson’s essays. “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact,” I read, and “Everything is made of one hidden stuff,” and “Every hero becomes a bore at last,” and “We boil at different degrees.”

  Deb used this large room, and the vine-shaded stone porch outside, to paint her careful oils and pale watercolors. When the day was sunny, and heating the tub water in a kettle on the kerosene stove seemed too much trouble, we bathed in the mountain creek an easy walk from the house, in a pond whose dam her father had designed and built. I wanted to photograph her nude with my Brownie Hawkeye, but she primly declined. One da
y I sneaked a few snapshots anyway, from the old bridge, while she, with exclamations that drowned out the noise of the shutter, waded in and took the icy plunge.

  It was in Vermont, before the others arrived, that, by our retrospective calculations, we conceived our first child, unintentionally but with no regrets. This microscopic event deep within my bride became allied in my mind with the little rainbow low on the bathroom wall, our pet imp of refraction.

  Her father, when he arrived, was a father I wasn’t used to. Mine, though he had sufficient survival skills, enacted the role of an underdog, a man whose every day, at school or elsewhere, proceeded through a series of scrapes and embarrassments. The car wouldn’t start, the students wouldn’t behave. He needed people, the aggravating rub of them, for stimulation. Reverend Whitworth liked Vermont because, compared with St. Louis, it had no people in it. He didn’t leave his hill for weeks at a time, letting the rest of us drive the two miles of dirt road to the nearest settlement, where the grocery store, the hardware store, and the post office all occupied one building, with one proprietor, who also managed the local sawmill. We would come back with local gossip and a day-old newspaper, and my father-in-law would listen to our excited tales of the greater world with a tilted head and a slant smile that let us guess he wasn’t hearing a word. He had things to do: he built stone walls, and refined the engineering of his dam, and took a daily nap, during which the rest of us were to be silent.

  He was a handsome man, with a head of tightly wiry hair whose graying did not diminish its density, but he was frail inside from rheumatic fever in his Maine boyhood. Rural peace, the silence of woods, the sway and flicker of kerosene light as drafts blew on the flaming wick or as lamps were carried from room to room—these constituted his element, not city bustle and rub. During his hilltop vacation months, he moved among us—his wife, his three daughters, his son-inlaw, his wife’s spinster sister—like a planet exempt from the law of gravitational attraction.

  His interactions came mostly with games, which he methodically tended to win—family croquet in the afternoons, family Hearts in the evening, in the merged auras of the woodstove and the mantle lamp on the table. This was a special lamp, which intensified and whitened the glow of a flame with a mantle, a kind of conical net of ash so delicate it could be broken by even a carelessly rough setting-down of the glass base on the table. Reverend Whitworth was ostentatiously careful in everything his hands did, and I resented this, with the implacable ressentiment of youth. I resented his fussy pipe-smoker’s gestures as he tamped and lighted and puffed; I resented his strictly observed naps, his sterling blue eyes (which Deb had inherited), his untroubled Unitarianism. Somehow, in my part of Pennsylvania blue eyes were so rare as to be freakish—hazel was as far as irises ventured from the basic brown the immigrants from Wales and southern Germany had brought to the Schuylkill Valley.

  As for Unitarianism, it seemed so milky, so smugly vague and evasive: an unimpeachably featureless dilution of the Christian religion as I had met it in its Lutheran form—the whole implausible, colorful, comforting tapestry of the Incarnation and the Magi, Christmas carols and Santa Claus, Adam and Eve, nakedness and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the serpent and the Fall, betrayal in the garden and Redemption on the Cross, “Why has thou forsaken me?” and Pilate washing his hands and Resurrection on the third day, posthumous suppers in an upper room and doubting Thomas and angels haunting the shadier margins of Jerusalem, the instructions to the disciples and Paul’s being knocked from his donkey on the road to Damascus and the disciples talking in tongues, a practice at which the stolid churchgoers of Alton and its environs did draw the line. Our public-school day began with a Bible reading and the Lord’s Prayer; our teachers and bankers and undertakers and mailmen all professed to be conventional Christians, and what was good enough for them should have been, I think I thought, good enough for Unitarians. I had been conditioned to feel that there could be no joy in life without religious faith, and if such faith demanded an intellectual sacrifice, so be it. I had read enough Kierkegaard and Barth and Unamuno to know about the leap of faith, and Reverend Whitworth was not making that leap; he was taking naps and building stone walls instead. In his bedroom I spotted a paperback Tillich—The Courage to Be, most likely—but I never caught him reading it, or The Master Works of World Philosophy either. The only time I felt him as a holy man was when, speaking with deliberate tenderness to one of his three daughters, he fell into a “thee” or “thou” from his Quaker boyhood.

  He was to be brought low, all dignity shed, before he died. Alzheimer’s didn’t so much invade his brain as deepen the benign fuzziness and preoccupation that had always been there. At the memorial service for his wife, dead of cancer, he turned to me before the service began and said, with a kindly though puzzled smile, “Well, James, I don’t quite know what’s up, but I guess it will all come clear.” He didn’t realize that his wife of forty-five years was being memorialized.

  With her gone, he deteriorated rapidly. At the nursing home where we finally took him, as he stood before the admission desk he began to whimper, and to jiggle up and down as if bouncing something in his pants, and I knew he needed to urinate, but I lacked the courage to lead him quickly to the lavatory and take his penis out of his fly for him, so he wet himself and the floor. I was, in those years just before my separation from Deb, the eldest son-in-law, the first mate, as it were, of the extended family, and was failing in my role, though still taking a certain pride in it. My father-in-law had always, curiously, from those first summers in Vermont, trusted me—trusted me first with his daughter’s well-being, and then with helping him lift the stones into place on his wall, where I could have pinched one of his fingers or dropped a rock on his toes. For all of my ressentiment, I never did.

  I loved him, in fact. As innocent of harm as my own father, he made fewer demands on those around him. A little silence during his nap does not seem, now, too much to ask, though at the time it irritated me. His theology, or lack of it, now seems one of the spacious views I enjoyed thanks to him. His was a cosmos from which the mists of superstition had almost cleared. His parish, there in the Gateway to the West, included university existentialists, and some of their hip philosophy buffed up his old-fashioned transcendentalist sermons, which he delivered in a mellow, musing voice. Though Unitarian, he was of the theist branch, Deb would tell me in bed, hoping to mediate between us. I wasn’t, as I remember it, graceless enough to quarrel with him often, but he could not have been ignorant of my Harvard neo-orthodoxy, with its Eliotic undercurrent of panic.

  In Vermont, my household task was to burn the day’s wastepaper, in a can up the slope behind the house, toward the spring that supplied our cold water. One could look across twenty miles of wooded valley to the next ridge of the Green Mountains. With Reverend Whitworth’s blessing, I had been admitted to a world of long views and icy swims and New England reticence. He was a transparently good man who took himself with a little Maine salt. It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

  Pennsylvania had its different tensions for Deb and me. We had gotten off to a bad start. The first time I brought her home to meet my parents, we disembarked at the wrong train station. The train from Philadelphia was a local. One of its stops was a hilly factory town seven miles from Alton, also along the Schuylkill and closer by a few miles to the country farmhouse to which we had moved, at my mother’s instigation, after the war. We were among a handful of passengers to get off the train, and the platform in its tunnel of trees soon emptied. No one had come to meet us. My parents, in spite of arrangements clear in my own mind—I was trying to save them mileage—had gone to Alton.

  Now I wonder how, in that era before cell phones, we managed to make contact. But in that same era even little railroad stations were still manned; perhaps the stationmaster telegraphed word of our plight to Alton and had my parents paged in the echoing great station. Or perhaps, by the
mental telegraphy that used to operate in backward regions, they guessed the truth when we didn’t disembark and simply drove to where we were. I was a young swain, and Deb, so securely in her element in St. Louis or Cambridge, seemed lost in my home territory. I kept failing to protect her from our primitive ways. Blamelessly, she kept doing things wrong.

  Though we were not yet married, she had put some dirty socks and underwear of mine through her own laundry, and packed them, clean, in her suitcase. When my mother, helpfully hovering in the guest bedroom, noticed this transposition, she let loose one of her silent bursts of anger, a merciless succession of waves that dyed an angry red V on her forehead, between the eyebrows, and filled the little sandstone house to its corners, upstairs and down. The house of my childhood, in the town of Olinger, a mere trolley-car ride from Alton, had been a long narrow brick one, with a long backyard, so there were places to escape to when my mother was, in my father’s tolerant phrase, “throwing an atmosphere.” But in the new house we could all hear one another turn over in bed at night, and even the out-of-doors, buzzing with insects and seething with weeds, offered no escape from my mother’s psychological heat. I had grown up with her aggrieved moods, turned on usually by adult conflicts out of my sight and hearing. She could maintain one for days until, coming home from school or a friend’s house, I would find it miraculously lifted. Her temper was part of my growing up, like Pennsylvania mugginess and the hot spells that could kill old people in their stifling row houses and expand the steel tracks on the street enough to derail trolley cars.

  Whispering, I tried to apologize for this climate to Deb, while my mother’s sulk, which had frozen all our tongues during dinner, continued to emanate from her bedroom down into the living room. The click of her latch had reverberated above us like a thunderclap. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I assured Deb, though in my heart I felt that offending my mother was wrong, a primal sin. I blamed Deb for mixing up my underwear with hers; she should have anticipated the issue, the implications. “It’s the way she is.”