Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir

by Wendy Davis

  Back in New York, on the surface, things seemed tranquil, but to me there was a palpable sense that the situation was once again becoming unstable between my parents. I was beginning to grasp, I think, from the innocent perspective of the child that I was, the fact that my father had friendships—relationships—outside their marriage.

  —

  Childhood memories, like all memories, are unreliable, distorted by desires and dreams of the past and a need to see things as we wish they’d been, not necessarily how they really were. For a long time, our Pearl River house existed in my mind as enormous and expansive, but years later, when I returned to it with my second husband, Jeff, during a trip to visit friends in Connecticut, it was much less grandiose than I’d remembered it and described to him on the way there. There was no huge home, no vast acreage, no movie-set estate grounds—just a modest stone house badly in need of paint. Much of the expanse of trees had been replaced by houses where the adjacent land had been sold off and built on over the years. Other than the house, all that remained of the first place that had ever truly felt like home to me was the brook and the heavily treed area alongside it, which looked exactly the same.

  Some things are indeed as we remember them.

  When I walked down the hill to its banks, the brook’s peaceful babble sounded just the way it had all those years ago with Joey always at my side. And for a brief moment, the serenity and simplicity of that time, born of hours of rock hopping and watching squirrels, feeding horses and rescuing rabbits, all flooded back, and I reached into the water for a rock, a souvenir of the past, a pearl of memory to bring with me. Nostalgia and sentimentality might have distorted size and proportion, but the essential truth of my memories was still intact:

  Home is where you always leave a little bit of your heart behind.

  Our lives are full of paths we choose to take and paths we don’t and people, fellow travelers, we meet along the way. Though I didn’t know it then as a child in Pearl River, a fork in the road would soon appear. But unlike my father’s riddle, here there would be no truth tellers or liars to help solve the question of which path to take. When the time came, depending on choices that only he would make, my father would decide on his road, and thus on ours as well.

  FOUR

  All you need is love.

  —JOHN LENNON AND PAUL MCCARTNEY

  BOTH OF MY PARENTS handed down little superstitions that they followed. My mom’s were fairly typical. If you spilled salt, you had to grab a pinch and throw it over your shoulder to ward off bad luck. Found pennies were only good luck and only to be picked up if they were “heads up.”

  My dad had only one superstition, but he adhered to it resolutely. If one of us kids was walking alongside him and we were separated by an object, whether a light pole or a person walking between us, my dad always muttered, “Bread and butter.” To him that momentary and physical break threatened a more permanent break between himself and us. But the words “bread and butter,” in his mind, were enough to reconnect us.

  When I was an infant and my parents divorced for the first time, it was the pain of not being with his children that ultimately drove their reconnection. I wonder, while we lived with my grandparents in Muleshoe and my dad was far away in Rhode Island, with all that physically separated us, whether he whispered those words to himself. And again, when my parents separated and divorced for a second time. Did my dad repeat his “bread and butter” mantra?

  Whatever the cause, and despite the periods of physical separation and absence that were the by-products of my parents’ divorces, I always felt a closeness to my dad. I knew that he would never let anything break the seal between us, no matter the time or distance. Like butter on bread, our bond was seamless.

  —

  To know me is to know I absolutely adored my dad, and to have grown up with him was to understand what it meant to be cherished and loved unconditionally. He had the most amazing eyes—big, warm brown eyes—and if there’s one thing I wish everyone could have growing up, it would be a dad with eyes like his. He could literally hug you with them. Feeling so adored by him and connected to him is, I’m sure, one of the reasons I was able to pull through so many trying times and to thrive in spite of them.

  My father was fun. My mom had come up hard in a farming family of fourteen children, so for her, understandably, life was about pragmatism, about taking care of the tasks at hand: feeding, bathing, cooking, laundering. But for my dad, who grew up without siblings, raising his children meant an opportunity to be a kid again himself, this time with playmates.

  He created rituals with us, making sure we always sat down as a family to watch the cartoon specials that came out during holiday seasons—the stop-motion animation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Peanuts specials during Christmas and Halloween, and most important to me, Winnie the Pooh, from which my father, and then my mother, drew my nickname. From that point forward, when they were speaking to me fondly, I was Pooh.

  Christmas was a big deal to my dad. A really big deal. He loved Christmas as much as—if not more than—we kids did. Each family celebrates Christmas in its own way. In ours, we always went to midnight Mass, and then Santa would come on Christmas morning. The presents that the family got for you were wrapped, and the presents that Santa brought just suddenly appeared under the tree that morning, unwrapped. Those few years when there were stacks of presents, my dad was always as excited as we were when Santa would finally arrive, leaving a little pile of treasures for each of us. Dad’s deep brown eyes would sparkle with mischievous pleasure, watching us discover some unique surprise that we weren’t expecting amid our bounty. One of my favorite Christmas memories was our first Christmas in Fort Worth, when my dad snuck out of church while we were at midnight Mass without our knowing and was waiting to take pictures of our excited faces when we got home and saw what had “arrived” under the tree. Without fail, every Christmas morning he would join us on the floor beside our artificial silver Christmas tree, or in later years the live trees he would insist we have, and immediately start playing with us and our toys, whether it was air rifles for my brothers, a little typewriter for me, or games for everyone to share.

  In the summertime there was always a trip in the big green-and-white Pontiac, and later, in our maroon Ford LTD, heading for an adventure that he had designed and painstakingly planned—complete with games in the car that he would play with us to keep us entertained along the way. He was really wonderful about occupying our time and attention when the drive would get long and we would grow antsy and irritable: challenges to spell names out of license plates, seeing who could spot ten Volkswagen Beetles first, and more. He was just so patient and so much fun, which I find amazing—being crammed in a hot car for miles and miles and miles with four young kids would try a saint’s patience. But the one thing he wouldn’t stand for during those car trips was stopping. He was bound and determined that we would never stop along the way—no matter how long the trip—even if that meant, literally, peeing in a jar, as my mom reminded us all recently. My siblings and I can tell you that this was good bladder-control training that’s come in pretty handy at times.

  Our summer trips were almost always to theme parks—Disneyland and SeaWorld and, of course, Six Flags after we moved to Texas. But we also went to the Alamo, New York City, and Carlsbad Caverns, among others. At each, particularly at the adventure parks, the first thing that always happened was that my dad would ask for a map of the park, sit down on a bench, and—as we all begged and clamored to get started—plan the entire day for us. He was a planner. If we were going to spend all that money to be there, then by golly we were going to see every damn show there was to see and we were going to ride every damn ride there was to ride. Before long he would have the whole day sketched out, and off we’d finally go, experiencing every single adventure the park had to offer.

  I love the photos of us in those p
laces, faded now and in boxes that I keep promising myself I’ll organize into proper albums. I love those vacation photos, because I know it’s him standing on the other side of that lens, capturing scenes of us having fun, not only on film but in his eyes and in his heart, too. On rare moments when he wasn’t squinting into the camera, I would catch my dad looking at us that way. Soaking us in. Literally soaking us in. With so much love. So much love.

  I have such wonderful memories from when I was a young girl of my dad sitting at the dinner table with us, doing homework. If we got stuck on something, he would take our book—whether it was algebra, science, or anything else—read the material (essentially learning it for himself), and then guide us through our sticking point. He was a whiz at math—even the “new math” that he’d never been taught in school. And he was a master with words. He loved doing the New York Times crossword puzzle and, when he got older, completed it every day—to a timer.

  No matter where we lived—El Paso, Oklahoma City, San Diego, Pearl River, and finally Fort Worth—there were the games, from badminton to croquet, gin rummy to cribbage, chess to Risk and Monopoly and Speculation and Yahtzee. His favorite kinds were strategic games, and he loved watching us puzzle things through as we developed our own strategic sensibilities. We earned our wins; nothing was given. Through those games my father taught us all, in the safest, most loving of environments, about winning and losing. How to find and embrace a competitiveness that would contribute to our strength as the people we were to become. And, perhaps most important, to know that we were going to be loved, win or lose, though we all much preferred winning.

  —

  In the midst of all of that, there was always the backdrop of my dad the actor, the performer, the artist. My grandmother, and also my mother, put together numerous scrapbooks over the years of news clippings that stand as enduring testament to the many, many hours he performed in theaters throughout the country. Again, in each city where we lived, his first mission was always to seek out the community theater and get involved, almost invariably in the leading role.

  My siblings and I grew up in that world—that world of theater. That world of watching our father, from our earliest of memories, bigger than life onstage. Chris and Joey both carry with them that kind of talent, each having had his own impressive stage experiences alongside my dad. My sister and I to a lesser degree, but we, too, were no doubt infected with his enthusiasm. Jennifer shared his love for baseball, raising her two boys as fine baseball players and competing with my dad for who was the bigger Texas Rangers fan. As for me, my dad and I shared a passion for people, for justice. And later, for politics.

  Both our parents instilled in us a deep work ethic; both valued education and the good grades we always brought home; both raised us to believe there wasn’t anything we couldn’t accomplish if that’s what our hearts were so inclined to do. And while my dad was far from perfect, he is truly the person who always made me believe in myself.

  It’s fitting to me, then, that the last role my dad ever played onstage, in the spring before he died last year, was that of the title character in Clarence Darrow: A One-Man Play. That was the third time he’d done it in his career, and it was one of his most beloved roles. In the play, Darrow says, “If I became anything at all, I owe it to my father’s patience and his books.” I hope, as my father repeated that line in rehearsals and in those performances, he understood that those are the words I’d said before, and that even though he has now passed, I still say to myself and to others:

  If I became anything at all, I owe it to my father.

  —

  There’s a term for the imaginary lines drawn from the farthest seats in the back of the theater to the stage: “sight lines.” Where the action takes place on the stage depends on them, so that everyone can see everything that’s happening onstage from every angle and from every seat in the house.

  I think that people looking at our family then, from the outside—from right up close or from far away—if they’d watched us racing through the theme parks we visited those summers, or if they’d peeked through our windows at dusk while my mother was putting dinner on the table and afterward, when we were reading in the living room, or listening to comedy albums, or getting help with our homework—I think they would have seen what we saw then: a happy family. And for that brief time, from the furthest reaches of my heart and mind, that’s what I saw, too. The journey to that point had been rocky for all of us, but finally, at the ages of ten and eleven, my view was clear and unobstructed from every angle. For the first time in my life, I had a hopeful anticipation of what might happen next.

  —

  Our last move would take us back to Texas, to Fort Worth, where my dad was transferred right after I finished fourth grade. I was turning ten. As always, we packed up the big green-and-white sedan and drove there, all four of us kids in the back with Mr. French and my dad refusing to stop unless it was absolutely necessary until we got to our destination.

  It was the summer of 1973. The year had started with the first American POWs being released from Vietnam after the peace accord, Lyndon Johnson passing away on his Stonewall Ranch in Texas, and Roe v. Wade overturning state bans on abortion. By the time we drove west, and south, from Pearl River to Fort Worth—a sixteen-hundred-mile journey that would have taken us at least twenty-four hours of solid driving time, stopping and overnighting somewhere only once along the way—inflation was in full swing, the Watergate Hearings were already being televised from the United States Senate, and Paper Moon and American Graffiti were the big movies. I didn’t know much of what was going on in the country during that time when America was growing and changing in ways big and small; all I knew was that we were moving again and starting over, which to me meant only one thing: having to go to another new school.

  Once we got to Fort Worth, we lived at the Holiday Inn for about a month while my dad found our house and got everything settled. That meant we were in a swimming pool every single day, which we all thought was the greatest thing ever. The house we moved into was on Scranton Drive in Richland Hills, a blue-collar suburb just northeast of Fort Worth; the families whose parents worked at Bell Helicopter tended to live in the slightly newer, more upscale part of the adjacent community of Hurst. My parents paid around twenty-one thousand dollars for that house. It’s the last house we lived in as a family and the one my mom still lives in to this day.

  We joined St. Stephen’s, an Episcopal church nearby with a wonderful priest, Father Parker, who would hug everyone warmly as we filed out of church. I just loved him. One night he came to our home and went out to dinner with my parents, which I thought was so unusual—A priest was coming over to go have dinner with my parents!—but it turns out the night he took them to dinner was the night that he remarried them. It was quite a shock when my mom told us about it much later, since we’d all assumed our parents had gotten remarried in El Paso, right after my dad’s quickie Mexican divorce. I don’t think my younger sister even knew she’d technically been born out of wedlock.

  So, as my parents were settling into being a married couple again, I would be settling into the place that would become my forever home—Texas. For all my usual dread and anxiety about starting another new school, fifth grade at Glenview Elementary was a real turning point for me; it’s where I came out of my shell. It’s the first time I remember an actual first day of school (I was nervous and excited, instead of nervous and terrified), and it’s the last time I would have to endure that first day as the “new kid.” I cannot tell you a single name or a single distinct memory of friends other than Joey that I had before we moved to Texas, but everything started to change in Fort Worth, and I finally began making my own friends. It was a warmer place to be from the get-go—people in Texas are just friendlier, they really are—so kids were friendlier to each other, too. The street we lived on had several families with kids who were our age, so we would play together outside at nig
ht, riding bikes around the block or having games of hide-and-seek, and it gave us the classic experience of growing up in small-town, blue-collar America. It didn’t take long before I finally become more comfortable in my own skin.

  Glenview was the first school where I ever remember feeling really happy. It was only a few blocks from our house on Scranton Drive—Joey and I walked there, of course, and my brother Chris walked to the junior high school that was on the same street but in the opposite direction, less than half a block away. My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Vance, had long, dark sideburns and longish dark hair. He used to tease me in front of the other kids about being so thin, in a way that hurt my feelings, but I thought he was pretty cool, even though he gave me terrible marks in conduct. I was smart and would finish my work quickly and then cut up and keep others from doing theirs. I became a bit of a class clown. Although my grades were excellent, those poor conduct marks used to make my mother crazy. Respect was terribly important to her, and she felt that my acting out in class was disrespectful.