When my brothers and I were growing up, my mother would take us to his third-floor office on South Wells Street. The elevator doors opened to a dank space with a gray tile floor, four desks and two large windows with their view blocked by a brick building bearing a Coca-Cola sign. A poster above my father’s desk bore an illustration of a mustachioed man gripping a thick stogie and declaring beneath a Perfecto Garcia sign, What this country needs is a good $1.25 cigar! The acrid odor of tobacco wafted through the air as the noise of passing L trains drowned our voices.
I recall one elderly man, Otto, who had worked for my grandfather and now my father. He had short white hair and wore glasses. He carried a clipboard and scurried from one desk to the next with the energy of someone much younger. Otto rarely spoke but always had a twinkle in his eyes and a grin on his face when he looked in my direction. Another man, Jack, sat behind a desk. He also wore glasses. They were balanced on the end of his nose and sometimes slipped off. The ceiling lights played off his bald head. He liked to show Butch, Michael, and me the math equations he loved to solve, much as Otto enjoyed crossword puzzles that we couldn’t fathom.
Perfecto Garcia Cigars used Cuban tobacco until the embargo in 1962. My father and Manuel found another tobacco source, but according to my mother it took a long time, and the company lost revenue. Competition from emerging chain stores also hurt the business. I remember hearing my father argue with Manuel over the phone about how to improve sales. When they finished talking, my father would slam the phone down and sit in the breakfast nook, legs crossed, tapping the air furiously with his foot and biting his knuckles.
When I was about to graduate from college in 1979, my father and Manuel sold the business at a loss and retired. I rarely heard my father mention it again. He was sixty-five. His Harvard diploma gathered dust. I wonder now if he thought of that imagined business he had wanted to start, if he even looked at his degree or asked himself what his dreams had all been for, given how things turned out.
As a family, we went along as if nothing had happened. Our lives didn’t change. We had a roof over our heads, three meals a day and still took vacations. We weren’t hurting, is what I’m saying. Externally, anyway.
Internally? Well, we had never been a “talky” family. We didn’t go to one another with our problems. We had no intimate conversations. My brothers and I knew to keep our left hand on our laps when we ate and to say thank you and no thank you. We did not confide our fears and joys in one another. We weren’t that kind of family. I don’t know why. I presume my parents were raised in a similarly remote manner. What all this means is that when my father sold the business, whatever he felt, he felt it alone. His temper grew shorter. He paced the house. He sat by himself. It was uncomfortable to be around him, but I wouldn’t say we suffered. Discomfort, avoidance, those can mean many things, but suffering isn’t among them. Not financial suffering anyway.
Decades earlier, my father had indulged in a fantasy about buying a ranch. That desire began when we visited Colorado in 1966. I was nine. As a family we all fell in love with the craggy Rocky Mountains covered with trees and the snowcapped peaks spread unevenly against the sky. My father watched men in cowboy hats pass us in their pickup trucks. He watched them riding on horseback, rocking with the movement of their mounts. He thrust his face into cool breezes. He took in the clean air and felt refreshed.
Back home, my mother drew the living room curtains to keep sunlight from fading the sofa and two swivel chairs. My father and I sat in the dark with the end table lamp on and read glossy sales brochures about dozens of ranches he had requested from Colorado real estate companies. I imagined lassoing cattle and heating branding irons red hot. I’d wear cowboy boots and jeans and red plaid shirts, and I’d learn to shoot. I’d ride a horse. I wouldn’t attend school.
My father and I reviewed brochures almost every weekend for months. It took a long time, but I slowly realized that our dream would go no farther than our living room. The accumulated excuses month after month for why he would not buy this ranch or that one quashed my nine-year-old fantasies of becoming a cowboy. I realized that we weren’t moving. My father, however, maintained the pretense, but without me. He sat alone in the living room, the lamp on in the darkness, until he too stopped pretending.
During the fourteen years I lived in San Francisco, I’d come home to visit about once a year. Over dinner, I talked about my work at the Ozanam Center. One evening, I mentioned that only one percent of our clientele got off the street.
“Any business with those kinds of numbers would close its doors,” my father said. He put down his fork and left the table for the couch, crossed his arms, and stared at me in disgust.
“You’re a goddamned idiot,” he said.
When I started reporting from Kabul in 2001, my father expressed surprise when I told him that with its rugged mountains and vast expanses of barren land, Afghanistan reminded me of the American West. In the States, I told him, the glow from city lights illuminate the sky, but in Afghanistan, a country without power in many places, the night sky is a deep, tar-rich black. I could read by the light of the moon and stars.
“Now, that would be something,” he said.
I saw my father when Butch died in 2006 and again about four months later. I sat across from him in the breakfast nook on a Saturday morning eating breakfast. When I finished my coffee, I got up to take a walk. My father asked to come with me.
As we left the driveway we saw a man in a suit and tie inspecting flowers in his yard. “My father wore a suit and tie every day, even weekends, just like that guy,” my father said.
“Why don’t you have a photograph of him?” I asked. “You have one of Granny but not your father.”
He didn’t answer. We’d walked about a block farther when he told me to stop. “I’m tired,” he said. “You can go on.”
“Okay,” I replied. I watched him walking back to the house, bent over, pumping his arms in his rapid, nervous way of walking, and it bothered me seeing him alone. I went back with him. When we reached the driveway, he said, “I don’t know why I don’t have a picture of my father. That’s a good question.”
Nearly a year has passed since my father died, and my brief time at home has changed everything. Women from a home health-care service come by throughout the day and take my mother to church and help her with breakfast, lunch, and dinner before they go out again on an errand or help my mother get ready for bed. “Have a good sleep,” my mother will say to me on her way up the stairs.
Once a week a cleaning woman dusts, vacuums, and mops her way through the house, and painters have been hired, and a gardener mows the yard every Friday. Each evening I sort the mail. It doesn’t pile up.
I’ve wondered whether my parents were unaware of the extent of the deterioration that had claimed the house. I concluded it was more complicated than that. Toward the end of his life, my father was tired, his fatigue brought on by a long life. He was tired because the human battery was winding down, lights were shutting off, circuits breaking, never to be recharged. I imagine he was too exhausted to bother with maintaining the house. I’ll get to it in a minute, he thought.
Slowly papers began stacking up. Dust collected. Mildew flecked the walls. He would get to it. Eventually, tables were completely covered with unopened mail and newspapers. “Don’t touch it,” I imagine him telling my mother. “I’ll get to it.” She was losing her sight and her back was giving her problems. “Leave it, Letty. I’ll do it later.”
The piles got bigger too. He considered the amount of time required to sort through each one but he was tired. He would get to it all, he convinced himself. In a minute. In a minute.
I don’t miss my father. I miss not missing him. Sometimes I reread the love letters he sent my mother and think of the young man who wrote them and with whom my mother fell in love and married.
Wednesday—
There is a gale blowing over this desk at the moment. I have the west window open and its
wonderful although a little on the breezy side. I love you and miss you. Love, Chuck.
Lately I’ve begun recalling moments with him when I was very young. Summer vacation. I am six and in a pool with my father at a Bermuda hotel. Rain pours down. We duck under the water together and look up. The rain pellets the surface. We come up for air and my father says, “You saw the footsteps of hundreds of elves running across the water.” I laugh. My mother shouts from a window, concerned about lightning. My father grins. “We are risk takers,” he tells me.
My father would be pleased that I moved home to look after my mother. Her well-being would have meant more to him than his displeasure at the money I’ve spent fixing the house.
I try not to think about that, to engage in an argument between us that will never occur. Instead, at night, when my mother has gone to bed, I sit alone in his study in front of his typewriter and focus on his approval, a first step, I think, toward missing him.
Walking
(2016)
Weekday mornings I see children all bundled up, strolling out of driveways, book bags thrown over shoulders. They look younger than I was when my mother finally allowed me to walk to school.
“You’re not old enough,” my mother told me when I was six and asked to join my friends. “I don’t care what your friends’ parents allow them to do,” she said. “You’re not their son.”
Her concerns were no different from those of any other mother. She wanted to be confident that I’d be careful crossing streets, that I wouldn’t talk to strangers, get lost, or do any number of things that parents worry about. With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect that my mother was also reluctant to let go of her youngest child. I was in a hurry. I wanted to walk to school sooner rather than later. Eventually I found a way to do it without waiting for my mother’s permission.
Elm trees and dense woods encircled our property. My brothers pointed out trees with branches bent down to the ground that they said had been tied off as trail markers by Indian war parties. I imagined certain dirt paths were ancient trails that wound through woods that were all dusky shadows and splashes of sunlight until they emerged from the trees and became highways unfurling toward the interstate.
The woods were my ally. The bushes at the end of our driveway obscured me when the school bus stopped to pick me up. My mother, keeping an eye on me from the kitchen window as I waited, could see me approach the bus but not get on it. One morning, when the bus driver opened the door to take me to the third grade, I told him I was walking. As he drove off, I darted into the woods and onto a path.
Alone, I made my way to school, careful not to be noticed when the path twisted around a neighbor’s backyard. I could see the family eating breakfast through the glass doors of their living room. I was free of restrictions but scared, sure that somehow my mother would find out. My breathing sounded very loud. Leaves crunched underfoot and I shuddered at the noise. I looked behind me, certain someone was there. I hurried on, the dense brush restricting my movement, until I broke through and reached the road in front of Avoca East Elementary School. It was early and the sun had not yet cleared the tall brick building. I crossed the street and joined the mayhem of children scrambling out of a bus and ran with them through the parking lot into the school.
I didn’t walk to school every morning. I wanted to, but I worried that if I did, the bus driver would eventually stop coming by and his absence would give me away. Once or twice every couple of weeks, however, I’d tell him to go on without me, and then I’d disappear into the woods.
When I was ten and entered the fifth grade, my mother allowed me to walk to school. I don’t know why. My brothers had had to wait until sixth grade. Perhaps I had worn her down; certainly I was persistent. Or perhaps she had finally accepted that there would be no more children after me, and that holding on to me would never fill that void, because she could not prevent me from growing up.
I sauntered out of our driveway and onto the road in full view of everyone, swinging my arms as if nothing else mattered. I looked back and saw my mother watching, her face small in the kitchen window. I waved. The sounds of my footsteps bounced off the pavement. I smelled cut grass drying in trash bags. I overheard people talking as they stood by their idling cars. Some waved, glancing at their watches. Dogs barked and ran to the ends of driveways before being called back. I kicked at stones. I walked on, following the road.
That day after school, I determined that I would leave home when I was old enough. It would be an impossibly long wait, I knew, until I was an adult and free to do as I pleased. Once the moment arrived, however, I wouldn’t delay a second longer. I told my mother of my plans.
“That’s a fine how-do-you-do,” she said.
I kept my word and left home at eighteen. I could not have imagined I’d return at fifty-three to care for my mother.
After she died, her body was cremated. Her urn stands beside my father’s on a table in the living room of our empty house beside a photograph of Butch. My parents will soon be interred in Santa Maria Magdalena de Pazzis cemetery in Old San Juan, where my mother’s family is buried.
Michael and I have yet to sell the house. I’m glad. I’ll miss it when it’s gone.
I still live in Kansas City. I freelance and work temp jobs when I don’t. I’m used to living this way. The furniture I brought with me from my parents’ house includes the kitchen table, the one on which I first wrote to Dale Titler. His letters and the letters from Alfred Franklyn, H. E. Hart, Rupert Radecki, and other World War I veterans fill a box in my closet. I don’t recall all the details of Richthofen’s final flight anymore. I concluded long ago that it was not important who shot him down. His short life made the Red Baron the stuff of legend. Now he is lost to me within the meandering contours of my own life, lost so often on journeys that at times seemed to lead nowhere but in their own way, and with their own veiled reasons, have brought me to this moment.
The habits of my parents have become mine. I awaken at 5:45 in the morning as they did, and walk my dogs. A few joggers share the silence. Far off I hear the wheeze of commuter buses gathering volume. The humid fragrance of watered lawns hovers around me this spring morning. Inside some houses I see the outlines of people shuffling around their kitchens. Through open windows I hear the chatter of television programs announcing the latest traffic and weather reports.
The street twists around Troost Park, looming out of the dark beneath fogged streetlights. Shadows cling to me and stretch away as my dogs and I submerge ourselves in the tall grass, tramping a path toward a stand of white oak. The woods beckon. I hear only the crunch of dry leaves beneath our feet. We move beyond the fringe of lights and the constraints of the dawning world around us.
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks to all the staff at Skyhorse Publishing, especially editor Caroline Russomanno for working with me on this book. Additionally, my thanks to former Skyhorse editor Jerrod MacFarlane for taking on this project in the first place.
To the many friends and colleagues who read and critiqued these essays. I especially want to acknowledge Jesse Barker, Eve Talbot, Chris Jerome, Heather World, Scott Canon, Chuck Murphy, Roland Sharillo, Susan Curtis, Joanne Fish, Lucian K. Truscott IV, and Dale Maharidge.
For Sandy Weiner who experienced many of these stories with me and encouraged me to write them down.
Finally, my gratitude to the Titler family for welcoming me into their home and sharing details about Dale. He remains for me, as does my brother Butch, a guiding light.
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Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost Page 20