Tea With Dad

by Nancie Laird Young

  “And the rest is history,” I commented.

  “I can still see your mother following his instructions and typing away. He told her exactly what to say.”

  I laughed, “A good man, protecting the integrity of the enlisted ranks.”

  Dad laughed too. “Right.”

  I was not familiar with this story. I’d certainly heard my mother’s version of how they were engaged, with a ring he picked out without her input, certainly not the one she would have chosen; how he enlisted in the Army without telling her he was even thinking about it, and left a few days later; how she’d taken the bus from New York City to Augusta, Georgia, to break up with him. Just before I could muster the courage to ask her whether a letter might not have been just as effective, she’d said, “And then we eloped. It made my mother very sad.” And from my superior perch on the tree of teenage knowledge and insight, I wanted to chirp, “If it was so bad, why did you marry him?” Wow! Sometimes, when I look back, I want to slap myself.

  “Mom told me you enlisted on a Friday and shipped out the following Monday. She said you didn’t tell her you were going to enlist. One evening, you just announced you had enlisted and that you were leaving in a few days.”

  As I weeded the flower bed and boxes that bordered the patio in the back of our house, I looked up at him. Dad looked out across the lawn to the pool from his chair under the umbrella.

  “Yes. That is true.”

  “Seriously?” I turned to look at him.

  “Mom said she had no clue, that you did not discuss it with her first. One day you said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m leaving for Camp Gordon, Georgia, on Monday. I enlisted. Isn’t that great?’”

  “I don’t think I said, ‘Oh, by the way….’ or ‘Isn’t that great?’ But, yes, that’s pretty much how it went along, with some shouting and tears.”

  “Don’t you think you should have discussed it with her? You were engaged. It affected her too.”

  “Absolutely not. It was better that way. It left no time for her to get too upset and it was the best thing at the time. You didn’t know your mother.”

  I stood up. Then I stared at him. “I didn’t know my mother?”

  “You didn’t know her then.”

  For most of my life I handled conflict differently than my mother. I lived defensively. I assumed positive intent from others while I listened to the signals my gut transmitted. I anticipated every possible manner of assault, defended against all of those, and then hoped for the best. If I waved a flag, it would have been white with lettering that spelled out: “The best offense is a good defense.” Mom and Dad held to “the best defense is a strong offense” concept. And in the case of Dad’s enlistment, “It’s easier to apologize later than to ask for permission ahead of time.”

  Dad explained that after graduating from high school, he had been working for Johnson & Higgins on Wall Street, first as a runner and then as an insurance underwriter. As I tried to picture my father at various stages of his life as one of the millions of people who caught trains into New York City every day, I did a quick analysis. What if he had not joined the Army? An involuntary shudder ran through me. I could not picture him in any other career. I turned my mind around and headed back to our discussion before it dove headfirst into imagining what my life would have been like had he chosen a different course and whether I’d have been born at all.

  “Why in the world did you decide to join the Army then?” I asked him as though it were not a better choice than sitting behind a desk all day for forty-five years writing insurance documents. Dad raised his eyebrows.

  “Because of Mr. Gerke,” Dad said. He explained that on the day Mr. Gerke retired, everyone gathered around his desk to say goodbye.

  “Forty years with the company and he got a flimsy cardboard box to empty forty years of desk crap into, a $75 savings bond, and a cheap gold watch. They said some nice things. Everybody clapped, and then they all left him standing there staring at the box, wondering how he’d get it home on the subway.”

  Dad shook his head. “Every time I hear ‘Is That All There Is?’ I think about that.”

  I refrained from saying that these days, four years with a company would be an amazing feat.

  “That was the saddest thing I’d ever seen, so I walked over and asked him if he’d like to join me and your mother for a drink after work.”

  I imagined my father, the cheerful, optimistic, and enthusiastic young man smiling out from photographs I looked at from that time. I tried to imagine myself at the end of forty years with a company, toting a cardboard box and my cheap gold watch to a bar to have a drink with two kids in their twenties. I could not. Not even for the free drink. Not after forty years.

  “He said he’d like that, so your Mom met us downstairs and we went out and had a great time. He thanked us. I was glad I’d asked him. Not one of the men he’d worked with all those years said, ‘Hey, let us buy you a drink.’ It was sad. I felt bad for him.”

  “So you decided to join the Army because you didn’t want to wind up like Mr. Gerke?” I asked, trying to clarify.

  “Damn right,” Dad said. He thought for a while and said, “We had such a nice time that evening. You know your mother could talk to anyone and was so interested in people. Do you know he tried to put the move on your Mom?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I don’t know why I was surprised, but before I could ask Dad how he and Mom handled that, he went on.

  “‘I should have stayed in the Army,’ Mr. Gerke told me, ‘The best time of my life was when I was with General Pershing.’”

  “Okay, you joined the Army because Mr. Gerke had a great time with General Pershing, and you thought …”

  Dad interrupted me: “No, Nancie. Not just that. In those days, remember, there was still a draft. The Korean War was going on. It was better if you enlisted. You had more choices than if you were drafted.”

  I thought back to the Vietnam War. The draft was still in force then. I remembered the boys in my senior high school class weighing options, some opting to enlist for various reasons, including more choices, patriotism, or simply because their birth date was high on the draft lottery list—while others worked on acquiring deferments.

  “And I wanted to get the hell away from my family. It was a way out,” Dad said.

  “How did Mom take the news?”

  Dad laughed. “She was not happy, but we focused on the opportunities. In those days it was one of the best for men. Training, the G.I. Bill … and I saw the difference in the guys from the neighborhood when they came back after the war or after spending time in the service. They were mature. Focused. So I decided to enlist. And I left the following Monday.”

  “So you shipped off to Camp Gordon in beautiful Augusta, Georgia.”

  “I was off to see the world,” he said.

  “And the chance to see Korea.”

  “Yes. And that.”

  “You know, Dad, Mom told me that she came down to Georgia to break off the engagement. How did she get from that to married within hours of getting there?”

  He looked at me and said, “I messed up.” The guilt in his voice and expression was palpable.

  Dad explained that he was supposed to have made reservations at the guesthouse where visiting girlfriends or family stayed. “Things got away from me, and by the time I got over there, they were filled up.

  “Your poor mother. She was exhausted. She’d been on the bus for so long, and when she found out that there wasn’t a room at the guesthouse, which was chaperoned, and where she’d told her mother she’d be, she was very upset.

  “I told her, ‘Suzie, I’ll get a room at the Richmond Hotel.’ Well, that made her mad. ‘I’m not staying in any hotel with you,’ she said.”

  “Well, certainly not, Dad,” I told him, “After all, how would that look, her wanting to break up with you and all?”

  “I wasn’t going to stay there with her,” he said indignantly. “I had a bunk on post.”

/>   I waited for him to go on. By then I sat at the table across from Dad. I moved my chair out of the heat and into the shade under the umbrella and leaned forward to listen.

  “That’s when I came up with the plan. ‘Let’s just get married. Right now,’ I told her. I laid out the plan. I wanted to get away from my family. She wanted to get away from hers. We loved each other. We would be fine together.” He looked at me.

  “What did she say?” I asked. I tried to imagine my mother, who never seemed, at least to me, to make snap decisions—she overthought everything—agreeing to this. “Never make a decision when you’re tired, hungry, or upset, Nancie Laird,” she used to say. This day, with my father’s proposal on the table, she was about to make a snap decision.

  “She just nodded her head,” Dad remembered. I loved the expression on his face—a sweet smile—as he looked out toward the back boundary of the yard. Lost in thought about Augusta, Georgia, more than half a century ago.

  “Then we walked over the bridge from Augusta into Aiken, South Carolina, found a justice of the peace. It was so late; they backdated the marriage license to the day before so he could marry us. We were exhausted—got a hotel room and just fell asleep.”

  I am not sure whether I was more moved by the story itself or how my father told it.

  “Poor Mamie,” Dad recalled, speaking of my mother’s mother. “When she got your mother’s telegram, she called the justice of the peace to make sure we were really married and on what day so that she could put a notice in the newspaper.”

  Knowing my grandmother, especially from my mother’s stories, I knew that action was her way of assuring that if my mother got pregnant, there was documentation that she’d been married more than nine months earlier than any baby that might issue from this unfortunate situation.

  “I went back to post on Monday and your mother, I couldn’t believe it, went right out and got a job at Sears and found us an apartment.”

  “Well, as your mother used to say about Mom, ‘No grass grew under Suzie’s feet,’” I told him. Dad frowned a little.

  “It wasn’t a good idea to send her home to live with my Mom and Dad,” he said.

  I knew that my mother lived with his parents in the house on East 12th Street when I was born, but I didn’t know all the details of why. I’d always thought it had to do with the Army or the type of assignment my father was on.

  “We found out your mother was pregnant when she fainted at the bus stop one day. It was so hot in Georgia. Some people came out of their home and carried her inside. She woke up on their couch and they were caring for her. They were lovely to her.

  “We let everyone know and my mother said, ‘Send Suzy home. She can live with us. We’ll take care of her.’

  “Your mother’s parents didn’t have room, and your mother could not have handled what was going on in that house, not while she was pregnant. I was going to Leadership School and then Officers Candidate School so would not be as available to her if she needed me. That’s why she went back to Brooklyn.

  “It wasn’t a good idea,” he repeated, “but I didn’t know then.”

  I knew this story too. My mother went back to live in the house on East 12th Street, unsupported by her parents who lived across town and had their own issues to deal with. She was not treated well by my father’s family for many reasons. I realized while listening to my father that the two of them lived together, alone, only five months before a lifetime of career separations began and children joined what had begun as a partnership formed in a moment of necessity, and to which they remained loyal until my mother died.

  CHAPTER 6

  Temporary Quarters

  I THOUGHT everyone had a permanent address, even if the home at that address belonged to someone else and not your immediate family. I knew that if someone asked where I lived—a teacher or an MP (Military Police), for instance—I should give them the address of the home where I resided at that time, either on the post or near my father’s current station. Sometimes someone or a form required my permanent address—the place they called or wrote to if you were killed in the war, lost at sea, on the lam after robbing a bank, or maybe just lost—where there would be someone who knew who you were and where you might be.

  Our permanent address was 1529 East 12th Street, Brooklyn, New York, until my great-grandfather died and my grandfather retired seven or eight years later and my grandparents sold the house and moved permanently to their summer home on Long Island. At that point, I felt that I’d lost my permanent address, but by then I was in high school and worried far more about other things. In those days, it was less important for people to know where I was. I dreamt of not being found.

  My great-grandparents, John and Anna Marie Murphy, bought the house in Brooklyn for $4,000 in 1909, and there they raised their five children. It served as many peoples’ permanent address.

  It is where my paternal grandmother and grandfather, Eleanor and Charles Young, moved with my father and his two brothers when my other great-grandfather, William Joseph Young, died and the house they lived in had to be sold. It was where my great-uncle Al stayed between marriages and during a time he was ill. My grandfather’s cousin Elsie West summered there between academic years while doing research at the New York City Public Library for her book on Washington Irving. And it was where my mother went to live temporarily while she was pregnant with me, and then again off and on during the first few years of her marriage to my father when he was on assignment and she could not travel with him. It was both the most wonderful experience and, as my father recalls, an unbelievably bad idea.

  My mother and father considered “12th Street” an address and that’s all. I saw it as my real home, the one I was torn away from and to which I always wanted to return. My grandparents did nothing to prevent me from thinking that. In fact, they encouraged it.

  One afternoon, Dad and I drove through some small towns on the Chesapeake Bay side of the Eastern Shore. The places nestled on the tributaries off the Bay are rich with history and a culture all their own. I took photographs of the landscape and the old homes and soaked up the atmosphere; all of this as I looked for the setting or at least the feel of one where characters in a novel I was working on at the time would live.

  Decades ago, on my first trip to the beach with the young man who would become my first husband, I remarked that I felt calm, almost immediately, once we crossed the bridge. On this day, with Dad at the wheel, I was reminded again of how much I loved the terrain—fields of summer wheat, corn, or melons, farmers cultivating rows of crops. Glimpses of deer on the edges of fields. Geese gleaning harvested fields. Later we would find that my mother’s ancestors had settled an area between Oxford and Cambridge. I liked thinking that I had roots here. A new permanent address in the truest sense.

  Somewhere on the road between Salisbury and Cambridge, Dad shared, “It seemed an obvious solution to me when my mother said, ‘Send Suzy home. I’ll take care of her.’ And I believed her.” He shook his head.

  “It was not a good experience for Mom, was it?” I asked, though I knew. I wanted to hear specifics. Mom had spoken to me generally about the way she was treated by my grandparents during the times she stayed with them, but I wondered what she had shared with Dad.

  I am blessed, and cursed, with clear childhood memories. My mother confirmed many of my early ones, so I believe I know the difference between those that really happened the way I remember them, and those that are probably a blend of those told to me and my imagination. Some say early childhood memories prove a happy childhood. I consider that, overall, I had a happy childhood. I never doubted I was loved. The doubt came later, as I hit my teenage years.

  During my first few years, instinct told me that my parents and grandparents loved me and that their intentions were positive, even when the outcomes might not be. From the things that people said, I pieced together that though my father and mother hoped for the best, she was not taken care of from the time she moved into th
e middle bedroom upstairs to stay with my grandparents while she waited for me to be born.

  I have very few memories of my mother inside my grandparents’ home during those times we lived there while Dad was away. She would have slept in the middle room with me, but I don’t remember that. She would have had to eat meals with us, but I don’t remember that either. I know my mother was there, but she became invisible when we were in that house.

  I remember her taking me to Prospect Park where we fed the ducks. I remember going to the zoo with her. She took me to see her parents and my Aunt Diane at their apartment, we visited her old girlfriends, we took the subway to see my other grandmother at her job at Abraham & Straus, and sometimes we saw a movie together. But in my memories, two of the three beds in the center bedroom on the second floor were empty when I slept. And my grandparents and my great-grandfather, Pop, seemed to be the only ones who ate meals with me unless there was company like my great-uncle Harry, his wife Helen, or my Uncle Jack. My mother never had tea with us in the afternoon that I remember.

  When I look back, it is as though whenever I walked through those doors on East 12th Street, my mother disappeared, like a genie going back into her lamp. My father said she felt that way too.

  My great-grandfather, Pop, slept in the third bedroom on the second floor. He and Nana gave my grandparents the front room when they and their boys moved in. He had lost his sight by the time I arrived. When I was three or so, and we walked slowly down the stairs together, I would walk behind him so I didn’t trip him and so he didn’t fall on me. I watched his right hand grasp the banister, the long, thin, and crooked fingers of his left hand softly touching the wall as he descended. I remember being fascinated by his hands. They were pale, the skin thin like tracing paper, his veins so blue.