All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  After lunch, my father rode in taxis. He would hail a cab to take him home, always with the hope that he’d wind up in a cab with a driver who spoke a language that interested him. In that case his afternoon plan was cemented, and he’d have them drive, no particular destination in mind, so he could practice whatever language the driver spoke. He’d strike up conversations in Urdu or Serbo-Croatian or Hungarian or Greek or Spanish or French or any of another handful of languages, making small talk well into the afternoon if he found the conversation too important to abandon. As he sent the cab on long lazy circumambulations around Central Park, he asked questions (“How did you come by your English, my good man, was it in grade school or when you arrived on our shores? Tell me, how do you view Americans as a rule? What do they say back home in your country about our president? Say, are you raising your children here in New York? Bilingually? You must, it’s the finest gift a child can receive.”).

  Late afternoons, my father arrived home just as we’d be returning from school and after homework we’d sit with him in the library and watch television—I Love Lucy or Gilligan’s Island or the bewildering Dark Shadows. He’d occasionally let us take out his comb and we’d style his hair up in puffs on top of his head as we watched television. When my mother happened upon us, she’d find three girls in their school tunics and stocking feet, her husband in a smoking jacket with his hair up in puffs on top of his head and the TV set on. He’d have his first scotch of the evening on the coffee table, the ice cubes melting. His favorite was I Love Lucy, and he laughed a high-pitched giggle as Lucy and Ethel got into household capers, flooding the house with soapsuds or picking chocolates off a conveyer belt. The quiet snarl of Dewar’s scotch was there with us too. Faint but pervasive. Into the evening hours it lingered. Scotch as we grew up became not a substance at all but a characteristic. Scotch was my father, his smell.

  He became president of an organization called the English-Speaking Union, and under those auspices my father founded, published, and edited a monthly newsletter called English Around the World. He featured monthly articles on topics that included “Inbreeding and the Aboriginal Subjunctive” and “Togo’s Many Dialects.” These were the concerns that drove his passions, the demise of the subjunctive form among the descendants of Northern Finns in Australia or the evolution of dialects in Togo. Once a week he and my mother had a secretary, Mrs. Bertcher, come and sit in the living room at a folding bridge table near my father’s chair in the mornings. On the street below there would be the daily sound of jackhammers fracturing the smooth sidewalks of the Upper East Side, pavement that in the sunshine glinted like mirrors up and down the avenues. Amid the clang of the workday breaking in small dramas around the neighborhood, Mrs. Bertcher would ride the elevator to the eighteenth floor, hang her coat in the closet off the foyer, unfold the bridge table and chair, unlock the typewriter she stored in a hard leather carrying case, and settle in for the morning, taking dictation from a man in his pajamas and slippers as he edited his newsletter for his beloved English-Speaking Union—the ESU, as he called it. My mother also had need of Mrs. Bertcher from time to time, to make social engagements or type letters, and Mrs. Bertcher would go from the living room to the library, where my mother sat every morning on her side of the couch. There she’d perch on the edge of a leather wingback chair and take notes on a yellow legal pad. My parents both called her “Bertcher” as if it were her secret agent name—“Have Bertcher take care of it,” they’d say to each other, or “Get Bertcher in ASAP,” or “This is a job for Bertcher.”

  It also fell to Mrs. Bertcher to type up the Franklin stories. For years, my father had been working on the Franklin stories, a series of stories for my sisters and me, at my urging. Knowing his handwriting was impossible, he wrote them as they came to him, and then later dictated the stories to Mrs. Bertcher in his pajamas. His alter ego was an octopus named Franklin. The stories were Franklin’s bar stories, the people he met as he lounged at his favorite bar, which my father had named Ralph’s Rest. The significant thing about Franklin was that, being an octopus, he would order eight scotches at one time, one for each arm. Sometimes, he would ask Ralph to make it a double or a triple. Scotches in the story multiplied by eight.

  When my father wasn’t at home studying languages, index cards at his feet, he took us traveling where he could use them.

  The summer we were in Greece, he taught us how to write the Greek alphabet. He propped up his books on the table in the hotel suite, open at the spine, so we could follow along. He always traveled with boxes of No. 2 pencils, sharp and new, and gave us each a pencil and a package of unopened index cards, still fresh in their cellophane wrapping. He had whole suitcases just for supplies such as these, language books, pencils, and index cards. When my family traveled, my sisters and I had one suitcase each, my mother had an enormous folding Val-A-Pak, and my father had six suitcases mottled with luggage tags.

  “I’ll teach you a word,” he’d say. “‘Parakalo.’ You can use it at dinner tonight. It means ‘please.’ Then you say, ‘Efcharisto’—‘thank you.’ ‘Efcharisto poly’—‘thank you very much’—if you want to be extra polite.”

  “Efcharisto poly.”

  “Good. If you write it down on an index card, I’ll check your lettering.”

  My sisters and I spent vacation hours in hotel suites writing vocabulary words on index cards in new languages. If we were well behaved in restaurants, he promised to bark like a seal at the waiter when he came by with the check. We held up our end of the bargain and so did he. “Thank you very much,” he’d say to the waiter, then pretend to reach for his wallet, pause, and look up at the waiter and open his mouth as if to ask a question. Instead, he’d let out a loud series of barks, startling many a waiter and surrounding tables of guests. “I gave him a good tip,” he’d say as we’d leave the restaurant. “Affable fellow.”

  Our laughter, he said, was everything. Ditto, I might say to that. His laugh was the freest thing about him.

  “Laughter is the universal language,” he used to tell us. “The great unifier. Never forget that.”

  A photograph has the date June 1965 stamped on the white-rimmed edge of the print. We are at the Parthenon, running along the sun-bleached slabs of limestone, playing hide-and-seek. My two sisters and I are dressed in matching sundresses and white Mary Janes; my father is in a short-sleeved white shirt and gray lightweight suit trousers. He would be counting out loud to ten in Greek while we hid. In the picture, we are behind him, peeking out from behind the marble columns. He stands on the stones of the ancient Greek acropolis with his light blue sports jacket draped over his head, so as not to peek as he called out the numbers: “Ena, dio, tria, tessera, pente, exi, efta, octo, ennea, deka!”

  “How do you say ‘lion’ in Swahili?” we asked one summer when we were in Kenya. We were driving through the arid countryside. Occasionally we’d pass elephants and okapi and warthogs along the way. We wanted to see a lion.

  “‘Simba.’ Say ‘sim-ba.’ Go ahead, try it.”

  Often, on long road trips, our parents sang. My father had an easy tenor voice, my mother, though she couldn’t hold a tune, sang with a playful, rhythmic exuberance.

  Together they sang duets, love songs, show tunes. “You’re Not Sick, You’re Just in Love” was a favorite. My father crooned. My mother snapped her fingers as she sang a jaunty accompaniment.

  We were on our way from Nairobi to a Masai village so my father could practice his Swahili. I wonder what they must have thought of us, the regal Masai villagers, their bright cloths wrapped around them, when we emerged from our rented van. Our van was white with black zebra stripes, as were all the vans rented to tourists. My mother had gone to Abercrombie & Fitch on Madison Avenue before the trip and outfitted herself and my father in khaki outdoor wear, which the Abercrombie catalogue referred to as “Safari Chic.” While she poked out from the sunroof of the van with her camera, my father emerged with Pam, our British guide, and engaged in lengthy
though halting conversation with a tall Masai tribesman. The man wore a lush orange cotton wrap and nodded as my father spoke. Soon both my father and the Masai were laughing their heads off.

  My father had three rules for measuring proficiency in a language. Can you tell a joke, can you understand song lyrics, and finally, do you ever dream in that language? The last, the dreaming, was the final test of proficiency. “But start with the joke,” he’d remind us. “If you can tell a joke in a foreign language, you reach across cultures, time zones, and barriers you girls can’t possibly realize. It’s the unifier, I always tell you girls that. You make a lot of friends through laughter.”

  By the time we went to Africa, I was thirteen and our traveling road show embarrassed me. My mother dressed up like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, her noisy Super 8 movie camera going out the top of the sunroof, we three girls in the back seat of the zebra van, my father busting into the Masai’s daily routine to tell a few jokes, as if he were some kind of freelance Bob Hope. What I remember of that day is a woman holding a tiny baby wrapped tight about her chest in a carrier made of bright pink-and-green fabric. She wore long strands of beads in many colors. She had the tired, patient face of an overwhelmed young mother. Beside her, a young boy, a boy around eight, the age of my sister Catherine, was crying, his ankle tied to a pole by thin rope.

  “That fellow was a very amusing chap,” my father said of his new Masai friend when we were settled in the car and driving back to Nairobi. “Good sport letting me barge in on him like that.” He laughed to himself as we drove along the dry dirt roads.

  “What did he do, the kid?” we wanted to know. We wouldn’t let this go and kept asking our father all the way back to Nairobi. “Why did they tie him up?”

  “Honey, that’s their culture, not ours.” He pulled out the phrasebook and passed it back. “‘Samahani,’ say.”

  “Samahani.”

  “That’s right. Samahani.” He sighed. “It means ‘I’m sorry.’ I think he had probably done something naughty, and she was waiting for him to apologize.”

  “Samahani,” we repeated.

  “As much as you should say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in each language, ‘I’m sorry’ is pretty useful too, if you get into scrapes,” he told us as we drove.

  “Which John McCulloch never does, does he?” my mother said from the front of the van.

  “Me? Honey. Scrapes? I never.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” she said. Sometimes, the mood between them altered suddenly.

  The truth was, he did get into scrapes. He would go off “exploring,” as he called it, in cities we visited and return late and sloppy. Sometimes his traveler’s checks or watch went missing during these excursions, and like a tarnished angel he wanted forgiveness. In these instances, for long empty hours his remorse hung heavily in the air, gray and loud, drowning out any other family life. He’d shuffle around or sit silent in a chair in our hotel suite, watching us but not seeing us, his eyes watery, his body hunched, a man slumped in guilt. And then he would drink more, another scotch or another martini. He’d hold the glass in his hand and tears would run down his cheeks. As a child, it was painful and terrifying to watch this man, our sweet and loving father who spoke volumes in a multitude of tongues, who barked like a seal for our amusement, now changed horribly in the space of a few hours into a well of helplessness, and self-pity.

  It was the remorse of the alcoholic. For years I thought of his demeanor in these episodes as pathetic and it made me angry. Yet being only a child, I blamed myself for my anger—it seemed wrong somehow, to feel irritation.

  My mother, impatient, seethed. Rows in hotel suites were a feature of these trips, and the pattern tinged our childhood. We did not know when our playful father would disappear behind his eyes and a blundering facsimile take his place. Not knowing when the cycle would recur scared us. As we got older, the cycle was more frequent, and as he got older, the cycle was more severe. I was young though, and I didn’t see it as a feature of having an alcoholic parent. I just reacted to the familiar pattern the same way every time: He “was bad” and in his subsequent guilt he inspired anger, then pity. My mother lashed out and we felt angry at her for yelling and angry at him for being pathetic. We’d retreat. The child of an alcoholic retreats in many ways; the subtlest is the retreat into the background, into silence. I recognized it only as self-preservation at the time, but of course it was self-abnegation, a hardscrabble strategy that becomes the automatic response to trauma, the desire to disappear.

  Then there was the physical retreat. The need to be anywhere but where the episode was unraveling. When we were home, we could simply retreat into our rooms, but in the hotel episodes, retreat was nearly impossible. Being too young to be allowed outside by ourselves in those early years, we developed elaborate escapes within hotel confines, plotting elevator races through the hotel to escape the din. The rules would be devised on the spot and someone would yell “Go!”: run to the eighth floor, pass through the whole hallway front to back once, then take the elevator to three, run down to the lobby, past the ladies having tea, take the elevator down to the Grill Room floor below, then up to the lobby, touch the concierge desk, then back to our door. By the time we’d run down the long carpeted halls that smelled like perfume, past the women in furs drinking tea in the lobby amid the ferns, and back up to our door, we’d be breathless and invigorated. We’d return to our rooms laughing, the silence no longer deafening. Our father would have gone to sleep or would be watching television with a blank stare. Our mother would be waiting. Sometimes we’d go with her for a walk outside, the fresh air bracing. She knew we needed an out, and hotel managers were handsomely tipped, I imagine, to indulge our relay drills. Casing hotels for potential elevator-race tracks was always something we did when we arrived. We had to be prepared. We never knew when it would all happen again, but it always did.

  Outside, that day in the zebra-striped van, the sun blasted the baked African plains, and herds of giraffes walked languidly in the tall yellow grass, their necks slanted forward as if leaning into the windless afternoon. These days held a golden extravagance wreathed in an intangible tension, which was often my memory of trips with my father in pursuit of words. By the time I was in college I had stopped traveling with my family altogether. I thought if I stopped and stayed home, then instead of retreating I’d actually be moving forward, like those giraffes that appeared to be leaning into the future as they made their way through the midday heat. I’d make my own way, and the reminder of our family sorrow would leave town without me and for a while I’d be whole.

  These are the naive expectations brought about by a blind faith, as if there were shortcuts to our wholeness and to my father’s redemption. Blind in the belief that things would change. Life could only go back to where it had been upon their return.

  I believe words danced in my father’s head. Even as he sat in our living room in his bathrobe, index cards by his feet and the morning can of Budweiser on a tray at his side, words were his passport to a world far outside his imagination. Words were his power.

  Danish was his final language. He was translating a novel from Danish into English the summer he died, and the index cards by his feet the last time I spoke to him were Danish words he collected as he worked on the translation.

  Pearls of wisdom, he said, each word is a pearl of wisdom, and in the art of translation you recognize you cannot replicate a pearl, yet you are called to equal its luster in the passage. That is the art. That is the challenge. Pearls of wisdom. Translation is a calling.

  My father: “Respect the words, girls. They will open doors to you that you’ve never imagined.”

  My mother: “Respect the sea, girls. It can turn on you in an instant.”

  These are the lessons we learned as children.

  Full fathom five thy father lies . . .

  Those are pearls that were his eyes.

  V

  The Perilous Dune

>   When I was young, before I was old enough to lie about where I’d been the night before or how late I’d come home, the thing I lied about with frequency was my address. Not egregiously, but artfully. I would say when asked that I lived between Madison and Park Avenues on 73rd Street in Manhattan, which, if one determined our address from the fact that our apartment was in the rear elevator bank of the building, would have been correct. Our kitchen, eighteen stories up, overlooked the courtyard, so why not claim it as my address? Nothing could have gotten me to admit to a stranger that in fact the entrance to the building was around the corner on Park Avenue, and that my family resided for twenty-five years in the duplex at the top. I was too wary of what the immediate calculation would be. Money. That inherited wealth could be a birthright, a genetic twist of fate as random as, say, red hair or a predisposition to drink, was a notion I distrusted. How much was real, and how much was illusion, and how might the perception of money make any one person different from anyone else? These were questions I pondered uneasily as a child as I lied about my address.