Tea With Dad

by Nancie Laird Young

  I knew from stories my father told me that he felt close to his uncle as a child. He believed their special relationship was forged during the time Al, in between marriages, stayed for two years in the bedroom my father shared with his older brother Jack. Dad’s oldest brother, Bill, was away in the Army Air Corps. This left one empty bed in the middle room on the second floor. Al slept there.

  My father described his uncle as quiet and observant. “He was more of a listener than a talker, unlike others in the family,” Dad recounted with a glance at me. “He didn’t say much. He just watched and listened.” Those who know my father might think the same of him.

  “Every now and then, Uncle Al would do something to irritate my father on purpose,” Dad told me, “like pour his coffee from his cup into the saucer and slurp it down. We knew he was daring my father to say something, but my father never did.”

  Dad went on, “You know, not long before my father died, he told me that he had feared Al. This surprised me. I wouldn’t have expected that. To me, he was always Uncle Al. My roommate.”

  My father shared that Al took him under his wing. He even taught my father to box after watching Dad get pummeled by his brother Jack.

  “One day Al said, ‘Come here, Lowen.’ Then he took me downstairs to the basement where he had set up a boxing ring. He handed me some gloves and taught me all the moves. And after a few training sessions, when Jack came at me again, I beat the hell out of him.” Dad looked at me with a satisfied smile. “Al laughed, and Jack wasn’t happy.” Al and Jack did not get along.

  “Al could be a fighter,” Dad revealed one day as we drank tea in front of the television in his den. “One night, when Al and I were at the kitchen table, Pop came home from Charlie’s Delicatessen with a black eye. He was holding his head and had a huge bruise on his forehead. You could tell his nose had been bleeding.” Dad said.

  Dad took some time to explain that Charlie was Pop’s friend and served the best beer in the neighborhood. Then he went on, “When Pop walked in and we saw that he was hurt, Al asked him, ‘What happened, Pop?’”

  “Nothing.” Pop replied.

  “Pop, what happened?”

  Pop told Al that some guy hanging out with Harold and Tommy, the Burke twins, had punched him in the face.

  Dad said, “Al got quiet. Then he wiped his mouth with his napkin, got up from the table and said, ‘I’ll be right back.’”

  My father laughed and shook his head as he remembered.

  “Charlie told us he warned the man who punched Pop to leave before Al found out what he’d done and came over to the bar, but the guy said he wasn’t going anywhere and asked, ‘Who the hell is Al?’ Just about that time, Al came through the door and Charlie pointed at him: ‘That’s Al.’”

  “Al walked up to the guy, and asked, ‘Did you punch my father?’”

  According to Dad, based on the accounts of unidentified witnesses at the scene, “Before the man could open his mouth, Al decked him with one punch. He just laid him out flat. Then he stood over him and said, ‘If you ever hit my father again, I’ll kill you,’ and walked back out the door.”

  “Charlie was very relieved that it was Al who came to handle things because it was fast and over with one punch. That bum was out cold and nothing else in the place was damaged.”

  Stories about the fighting men in our family were plentiful. Some told of gallantry, chivalry, or events where someone found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But my favorite Uncle Al story did not involve a fistfight.

  After World War II, my Uncle Bill left the Army Air Corps for a short time and took a job as a pilot for one of the big oil companies. He flew to and from the Middle East.

  As told to me, Bill walked into a dark, smoke-filled speakeasy in Saudi Arabia one night and found Uncle Al sitting on a crate playing poker and—this is important—wearing a fez. I was fascinated by the fez. I liked that word the first time I heard it. The sound of it. Fez. I liked the look of it, too, when they showed me a picture of what a fez was. Red with a gold tassel. To this day, the word fez conjures up an image I once saw of the actor Peter Lorre.

  “Al?” Bill squinted his eyes and looked across the room. “What are you doing here?”

  “Bill! Pull up a chair,” Al called out, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for his nephew to walk into that joint just at that time. He chomped on his cigar, swigged some beer, then kicked a free crate toward my uncle, who sat down at the makeshift table. Al handed Bill a beer and he joined the game, too. They stayed up all night playing poker and catching up.

  “Well, that part might have been true,” my father thought out loud the afternoon I asked him about that story as we sat drinking our afternoon tea.

  “They told me that Uncle Al left Brooklyn in a hurry because the three women he was married to at the same time found out about one another,” I said.

  “He was not married to all of them at the same time.” My father shook his head. “He was married three times but not at the same time. You could make good money in Saudi Arabia then. Maybe Al had alimony to pay and he had children to support.”

  “Did you know his wives?” I asked.

  “Yes. They were all lovely women. I knew one of his children, my cousin Jackie. She was a little girl then. I was a teenager. I used to carry her around on my shoulders. His first wife was my favorite though, because I knew her best and she was my godmother. I thought she was beautiful.”

  “Was she the Chinese wife?” I asked. I did not know much about her.

  “Chinese wife?” My father turned away from the television and stared at me in disbelief. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Grandma, Grandpa, Uncle Bill, others…. Someone told me that his first wife was Chinese.”

  “No. She was not Chinese.” He thought for a while, then said, “She had black hair. She had one of those haircuts, you know, like the roaring twenties. Short with bangs.” He waved his hands and wiggled his fingers around his head.

  “A bob?”

  He nodded and stared at the television.

  “Could she have been a flapper?”

  “Maybe. Yes. I think she probably was.”

  Dad thought a moment. “She was small, very tiny. Always dressed in very stylish clothes. I remember her clothes. She was really sweet and nice to me. I loved her.”

  I’d always imagined Aunt Gladys in a traditional Chinese qipao. Maybe I’d seen a picture of her in a high-necked flapper sheath and just thought she was Chinese. Maybe Grandma told me her hair was cut like a Chinese doll. That’s something my grandmother might have said. For a moment I accepted that I must have misunderstood the stories and just thought Al’s first wife was Chinese.

  No. I knew what had been said and what I’d overheard. I wasn’t the only one who heard it. The story always popped up in the routine of any family gathering, no matter the size of the group or who was there.

  “You know, Al, Eleanor’s brother? He was married to three women at the same time. One was Chinese. He had to get out of Brooklyn when they found out about each other. Bill found him hiding out in Saudi Arabia wearing a fez.”

  No one had ever stopped that day’s oral historian to say, “What are you talking about? That’s not true.” Instead, they nodded and laughed no matter how many times they heard it or who told the story.

  “Why would they make up a story like that about Uncle Al?” I asked Dad.

  “Because they were bullshit artists, all of them. That’s why,” Dad said.

  I took a quick inventory of the best stories I’d been told me through the years. I’d loved and devoured them. Knowing them made me feel part of the family, no matter where I was or how long I’d been gone. Upon my return, my ability to start on the same page as everyone else proved, at least to me, that I belonged there as much as I imagined my cousins did. And whenever I returned home after being away, I interviewed, listened, and catalogued any new stories that I might have missed or events that might
have occurred while I was away.

  The stories became part of me. They shaped my idea of who I was and where I’d come from. They served as the familiar while my family moved from state to state, country to country, far away from “home.” I relied on the stories to make my ordinary family seem extraordinary, if only in my own mind, when I felt the need.

  Based on who told it, when I had heard it, and how I interpreted it, a story might support the reasons for life decisions I’d made. Now these stories became suspect. Which ones weren’t true? Which ones were? And why had they been so important to me? Now I felt as though I had been caught in a lie. Many lies. As though I’d made them all up myself.

  I wondered why I had loved the myth of Uncle Al so much. Maybe I’d needed to believe that no matter how far away we were from home, we didn’t change, and neither did those we left behind. Maybe the story reinforced a wish that no matter where in the world we were, we might bump into friends and family. They’d remember us and be happy to see us. That story made the world seem small and the distance between where I was at any given time and where I believed I was from shorter. Polygamy and Asian influences sprinkled throughout were just seasoning.

  Dad continued to watch his televised poker game. Men in sunglasses and baseball caps sat around a game table as they stared at their cards, fiddled with poker chips, and considered their next moves. I was sad for Uncle Al. Clearly Dad had loved him. At some point so had three women and his children. He’d been a policeman, a good uncle, a family man to many—but he’d been remembered as someone he wasn’t.

  Someone in the televised poker game folds, and they break for commercial. Dad stands up.

  “I’m getting another cookie,” he says, and heads toward the kitchen.

  I get up to follow him while I continue to think about all the stories that make up our family canon. I want to ponder how family stories heard through childhood filters, coupled with lack of life experience and context, create misunderstandings and shape the adult a child becomes. And I can’t help but search for some truth in the one about Uncle Al.

  “Hey, Dad.” I speak to his back as he walks out of the room, and I try to keep up with him.

  “What about the fez? Do you think Uncle Al really wore a fez?”

  “Oh, I’m sure of it,” Dad says.

  CHAPTER 24

  Driving Issues

  MY FATHER TOOK POSSESSION of his father’s Florida driver’s license and his car keys when Grandpa was almost one hundred years old. Dad had taken Grandpa to the ophthalmologist who told my grandfather, “Absolutely no more driving. You can’t see.” I don’t know why it took them that long to make that determination. Fifteen years prior I took three-year-old Rachel down for a visit. Grandpa nearly killed us by running through several intersections in a row on our way to Kroger’s.

  “OH MY GOD! WE’RE GOING TO DIE!” I screamed.

  “What’s the problem? Calm down,” my grandfather told me.

  “Grandpa, you just ran through three intersections without stopping.”

  “Well, who can concentrate when you’re screaming like a banshee?” he retorted.

  I did not get into the car with him for the remainder of my visit. If we needed something, I snuck out while he was in the bathroom so he couldn’t offer to drive me.

  “Go! Go!” my grandmother would whisper, watching the hallway as I grabbed my daughter and ran for the front door. “He’s still in there. He’ll be there forever.”

  As they left the doctor’s office, Grandpa pulled his spare set of car keys out of his pocket and headed for the driver’s side of his car.

  “Oh, no you don’t, Dad,” my father said. “Give me those keys.”

  And Grandpa didn’t drive again. Not too long after, my grandmother died, and Dad brought Grandpa up to live with him and Mom.

  In the original script that I wrote about my life with Dad, he comes to me one morning and says, “Here are my car keys. It’s time I stop driving.” Another unanticipated plot twist—I don’t think that’s going to happen. First, I’ve determined that it’s against human nature for any human being who has a license to give it up willingly. Second, my father doesn’t think I’m a good driver. Third, my father thinks he still is.

  Dad was always a good, defensive driver. He taught me to drive because while he was in Vietnam and all my friends were taking drivers ed, my mom refused to let me.

  “What if you get into an accident?” she’d say. “We only have one car.”

  Finally, to stop my begging, she said, “Listen, just stop bothering me about that. Since I’m not ever going to let you drive anyway, there’s no need for you to have a license.”

  By the time I was seventeen, Virginia changed the law to state that anyone under eighteen had to have taken drivers ed. With all our moves, I hadn’t. I’ve always thanked Virginia’s politicians for legislating that I get my license; but actually, it was about money. Drivers ed would have been free if I’d taken it in school. Now Mom and Dad would have to pay for a private instructor. Dad said he’d teach me to drive.

  There were a few rules. First, I had to learn to drive a stick shift. Second, I had to wear my seat belt. Third, he didn’t have to.

  “Will you put on your seat belt, Dad?” I asked politely and responsibly after taking my seat behind the wheel, inspecting the dashboard, and adjusting all the mirrors and before starting the ignition.

  “I’m not wearing one,” he said as he puffed on his pipe. “I need to be able to jump if necessary.”

  It didn’t take me too long to learn to drive the Volkswagen Beetle Dad used to commute, though shifting and clutching in the right way did. Finally, Dad decided I could try the station wagon. I climbed behind the wheel, Dad rode shotgun, and Mom sat in the back seat with my brothers. I pulled the car out of our little street and navigated carefully along our neighborhood roads. There wasn’t a lot of space because it was after work and the street was lined with parked cars. Trying hard not to hit anything, I sped up a little, at which point my mother began to scream, “She’s going to kill us all. Stop her, stop her!”

  “Mom!” I said as I looked in the rearview mirror. Her face was pale, and she had my brother in a bear hug pressed up against her. It made me so nervous that I stopped the car. Dad told me to switch seats with Mom.

  I never drove the station wagon again and never had another driving lesson, but before the deadline of my eighteenth birthday, Dad said my friend Francis could take me down to get my license. As we drove away, I looked back at the house through the rearview mirror. My mother was standing on the front lawn, hands clenched to her bosom as though she’d never see me (or the car) again.

  I passed my written test and had no problem with the driving part, either, but as we left, I let out a “Whoop!” and proceeded to run through a four-way stop. Francis didn’t bat an eye.

  My parents let me drive from then on, but I knew that any infractions and my driving privileges would be revoked.

  Shortly after I “earned” my Virginia driver’s license, we moved to North Carolina. This happened in the last six weeks of my senior year of high school while my father was stationed at Fort Bragg. Perhaps to ease the pain of not graduating with my friends in Virginia, they let me drive our Volkswagen Bug to school almost every day.

  One day Dad came home unexpectedly for lunch. “This can’t be good,” I said to myself.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said as he walked through the door into the kitchen. Then he leaned back casually, arms outstretched, against the kitchen counter. Crossing his feet at the ankles he looked at me. Despite his casual positioning, I tensed a little in my chair at the kitchen table. From his expression and his posture, it appeared as though this might not be too bad. Yet his combat boots and battle fatigues gave him an edge. You just never knew. It might be a trick, a surprise attack.

  “You were observed driving ninety miles an hour toward Post this week after school,” he said, staring into my eyes.

  I accepted t
he challenge and held his gaze—I had practiced staring back without blinking a lot—while I asked, “What day? What time?” and searched my memory for when this could possibly have happened.

  “It doesn’t matter what day. After school you’re supposed to head straight home, and you are supposed to keep to the speed limit. He said you were driving like a maniac. Are you trying to kill yourself or someone else?”

  “Who said this?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You don’t know him.”

  You might ask how someone I didn’t know knew me or that I was my father’s daughter. Whether on a military base or “on the economy” nearby, anyone military or from a military family could know who you are, especially if your father was a battalion commander. Military communities are villages—incestuous villages. Also, back then, all automobiles belonging to military personnel had stickers that identified to whom they belonged, including their rank. These were required for entry through the main gates and onto the Post. How many battalion commanders could there be with a robin’s egg blue Volkswagen Beetle and an eighteen-year-old daughter on Fort Bragg?

  “How could he know how fast anyone is going?”

  “He clocked you.”

  “How? Is he an MP?”

  “Never mind about that. He said you were speeding.” Dad was losing patience.

  “But Dad, I could not have driven ninety miles an hour. At that speed, the doors and tires would fall off the Bug. If I was speeding at all it was maybe, at most, ten miles an hour over the limit.” Damn. I’d just admitted to speeding. Something made me wonder if he’d said “ninety miles an hour” to trick me into admitting I’d been speeding after all.