Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  A few blocks away, the model for another character once lived, a little girl named Lorna Lou Moeller, who, decades later, was transfigured into a very similar (though not identical) little girl named Linda. Linda and Lorna Lou are also dead. They died at age nine. Brain tumors. And so too with Mike Tracy, another early acquaintance who ended up in the same book under the name Nick Veenhof. This Mike—the second Mike—had been a mixture of bully and thug and occasional sweetness. After graduating from high school, Mike joined a motorcycle gang in the Twin Cities; a few years later, he was shot dead in a dispute with a rival gang. His funeral made big news in the Worthington Daily Globe. More than 150 motorcycles roared into town, filling the parking lot of a Presbyterian church, and, in an irony that would’ve tickled him, bad-boy Mike Tracy, troublemaker Mike Tracy, hopeless ne’er-do-well Mike Tracy, was dispatched into eternity with the celebrative renown of a war hero.

  In a way, as I stood in front of 1018 Elmwood Avenue, these and other people from my youth seemed to be there with me. In fact, they were with me, just as your own dead father is with you during moments of remembrance. Not the body, but surely something. An absent presence, maybe, or a present absence.

  * * *

  For the remainder of my stay in Worthington, I visited a half-dozen other familiar places, each altered by time but each also twinkling with the afterglow of history. I stopped in front of the high school, at the band shell in Chautauqua Park, and near a field of soybeans that still stirred happy memories. I drove twice around Lake Okabena. At one point, as I sat with the engine running on the town’s main street, I was struck by how stupid I had been not to bring Tad and Timmy on this return journey. I wanted them to see what I was seeing. More than that, I wanted them to feel at least a little of what I was feeling.

  In part, probably like many people of my age, I was under the melancholic spell of a long-delayed and long-feared homecoming. For decades, I had borne a knotty, cancerous grudge against this place. I still did. The citizens of Worthington, Minnesota, had sent me to war, and I took it personally, and I took it personally because it was personal. Back then, in August of 1968, there was not yet a national draft lottery. Luck was not yet an issue. Mathematics did not yet govern. In those grim days just prior to the Democratic convention in Chicago, hometown draft boards did the dirty work. One father chose another father’s son to go off to the other side of our planet and kill people and maybe die. Or it was that housewife and no other housewife—a housewife with a name, maybe Helen, maybe Dorothy—who circled the name of another housewife’s fresh-faced little boy—or a man who had very recently been a little boy—and then, after the circling was done, it was that living, breathing circler of names who scurried off to Wednesday-night bingo or Friday-night church suppers or Saturday-night square dancing. How monstrous, I’d once thought. How monstrous, I still thought. Circle the name of your own darling son. Circle your own name. Circle the name of your precious daughter and your husband and the guy in the cowboy hat calling your Saturday-night square dances. And if you’re so hot for war, what the fuck are you doing in Worthington, Minnesota? What the fuck are you doing choosing other people’s kids to fight a war you’re unwilling to go fight yourself? I used to yell these things, and many similar things, as I drove around Lake Okabena with a yellow draft notice in my billfold, and if Timmy and Tad were here, and if a Vietnam replay were in progress, I’d be yelling again and yelling louder and never shutting up—I’d be yelling at Tuesday-night country club socials and at Thursday-night meetings of the PTA—and if they don’t like the word “fuck,” they could get off their hypocritical asses and go do some killing and dying of their own, and if they don’t get killed, if they just get wounded, they can lie in some filthy rice paddy and mutter to the Methodists, “Oh, darn, I shouldn’t have drafted myself.”

  This fury may eventually go away. I hope not.

  But as I sat looking out at a Worthington that was no longer Worthington, it became plain that my lifelong bitterness, though still present, had been noticeably softened—even a bit shrunken—by an emotional fuzziness that was brand new to me. I didn’t—and don’t—have a name for it. A creepy feeling, but creepy was not the word. A kind of dread, but dread too was not the word. In part, I guess, the buzzing fuzziness in my head had to do with a realization that what happened to my hometown was also happening to me. We were both old and getting older. Nothing had endured as it once was. Out on 10th Street, the town’s main drag, the faces of passersby were mostly brown or black, a big change from forty years ago, and of course my own face had undergone some dramatic changes over those same forty years. And just as the names in the town’s phone book had been replaced by new ones, so had my own name—I had been Timmy back then, and now I was not. Nor, beneath the old-man skin and the abbreviated new name, did I resemble the 1953 or 1968 version of myself, so confident in my moral rectitude, so certain of my courage, so naïve and ridiculously romantic about what the world would deliver to me. On the plus side, I suppose, I could no longer hate the way I used to hate. I had to work at it. But neither could I love the way I used to love—lemonade stands and playing soldier and Lorna Lou Moeller and my father and myself and the future. It wasn’t that love was gone—it certainly was not gone—but love’s urgency seemed diminished, and its immediacy now seemed vaporous and far less promising. “Getting old,” my dad once told me, “is like sitting too long at a blackjack table. You hear the math chewing away at happy endings.” Then, a second later, stone sober, he said, “But what can an old guy do? Cashing in is suicide. It’s forever.”

  I’m pretty sure he thought about it. I’m pretty sure he thought about it for decades.

  * * *

  Around noon, as my final stop, I pulled up in front of 230 11th Avenue. Before me was the house in which my parents had lived from 1960 until they checked into a retirement home a quarter century later. Here I had spent my high school years. Here my father’s alcoholism had gone from bad to horror. This was my hanging tree.

  For a while I just sat in the car, half hoping for some closing benediction. The day was still sunny, still weirdly silent. I didn’t know what I was doing there or what I was waiting for. Maybe a ghostly glimpse of my dad. Maybe the two of us playing catch on a summer afternoon. But of course he was gone now, and so was the town I grew up in.

  30

  Pride (III)

  As I’ve discovered to my discredit, a father’s pride involves the abandonment of reason, sometimes unconsciously, other times just shooing it away. A reasonable man, for instance, might acknowledge to himself and to others that his children have their weaknesses and their strengths, their successes and their failures. A reasonable man can certainly cheer as his son’s three-pointer drops into the basket, but he might also leaven his joy by recalling the boy’s six or seven previous bricks and air balls. Likewise, as a graduating daughter delivers her valedictory oration, a reasonable man might be expected to bear in mind that all across the country on that bright June day, thousands of other valedictorians are delivering their own earnest and mind-numbing orations.

  I have reluctantly concluded that fatherly pride, my own included, requires a kind of temporary insanity. Not necessarily the raving, froth-at-the-mouth kind, but rather the sort we display on the Fourth of July as we celebrate our nation’s virtues and eradicate its shortcomings. Few Fourth of July speeches touch on slavery. Few dwell on Jim Crow laws, lynchings, robber barons, McCarthyism, My Lai, the fate of the American Indian, the Mexican-American War, secret bombings, or the deaths of a few million Vietnamese.

  These omissions, as with a father’s omissions, are understandable. Who but an ingrate would sabotage his country’s birthday party? Who but a lying liberal would insist on fidelity to fact? And who but a terrible father would catalog his child’s vices as the birthday gifts are unwrapped and as the candles are blown out?

  The pride we take in our country and in our children may well rank high among the seven deadly sins. But if pride is a sin, i
t is the hiccup of sins. It is not a committed sin. It commits itself. It is an unsought, unbidden, and frequently unwelcomed condition of being, and it is a crime only to the extent that mental illness is also a crime.

  Still, we feel pity for the insane. We do not burst our prideful buttons inside a lunatic asylum.

  It’s the button-bursting that has me worried. As if propelled by rocket fuel, I’m launched into mindless delight at Tad’s successful navigation of a third-grade spelling quiz. I cannot stop talking about it, not with friends, not with strangers: how a seven-year-old hula-hooper spelled “equilibrium” even while his father cannot seem to grasp the word’s essential meaning. So what if Tad keeps inserting a z in the word “miserable”? So what if a million other seven-year-olds have correctly spelled “equilibrium”?

  The unseemly thing about pride, I tell myself, is not its involuntary presence, not the reflexive hiccup or two, not the occasional burst of joy, but rather its unfiltered, unrestrained, and unqualified public expression. As Sophocles wrote in his great tragedy Antigone, “Zeus hates the noise of a bragging tongue.” A modest half-smile may be forgiven; a top-of-the-lungs “Bravo, Tad!” may not be. Restraint of expression—the containment of madness—is in part what distinguishes the Gettysburg Address from the music of John Philip Sousa. It’s not that I don’t love a good tuba. It’s not that I begrudge a country its fireworks. But a prideful, chattering, immodest father is no more tolerable than the forgotten piety of Edward Everett or the disagreeable harangues of any black-and-white, all-or-nothing, crown-thy-good patriot. “America the Beautiful” sounds great against purple mountains and fruited plains. It may sound not so great against a backdrop of dead children at Wounded Knee or Washita or My Lai. Again, no offense. But might not, and should not, a reasonable man seek ways of acknowledging virtue without ignoring vice?

  If delusion is part of pride, and if the erasure of reality is part of delusion, the association of pride with madness is not as far-fetched as I had imagined before becoming the father of Timmy and Tad. A major tributary to pride is the love we feel for the subjects or objects of our pride—love of country, love of children—and I am not alone in believing that love too can have aspects of the deluded, the unreasonable, and the outright nuts. “Crazy,” Patsy Cline crooned a few decades back. And a few centuries before Patsy, another reputable songster noted in Romeo and Juliet that love “is a madness most discreet, / A choking gall and a preserving sweet.” In the centuries between Cline and Shakespeare, plenty of other balladeers and poets and heartsick novelists have bewailed (and sometimes celebrated) the abandonment of reason in the name of love. It continues today with every quarter turn of the radio dial (Bono, U2). Only a few minutes ago, somewhere in the English-speaking world, Jack said to Jill, “Hey, I’m crazy about you.”

  My point is not that we should lock up fathers and patriots and Romeo and all the other madness-afflicted lovers of the world. Straitjackets are not the answer. Instead, what has been pestering me over the past several weeks is that I am in danger of becoming what I most despise: a shameless hypocrite, a zealot, a reality-obliterating Fourth of July tuba player, a man blinded by his own pride and love, a man who would fly an airplane into the Twin Towers for the sake of Timmy and Tad, just as others would do the same in behalf of Allah or Yahweh or the unconditional surrender of Japan. I would kill for love, and I would kill out of perverted pride. It’s crazy, I realize, to think that my children are more sacred or more deserving of life than those I would kill to defend them. How could a reasonable man believe so? But then the answer screams at me down the ages—because they are mine!—which is the scream that has been screamed by children-loving madmen for three thousand children-slaughtering centuries.

  I’m ashamed. I should be ashamed. Up to a point, fatherly pride is cute, something to chuckle about with other proud fathers, but when it intersects with religious and political and cultural pride, it can and often does become murderous.

  Consider the poet Wendell Berry: “How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don’t kill any children for my benefit.”

  Consider Gandhi, who reputedly said: “There is no such thing as ‘too insane’ unless others turn up dead due to your actions.”

  Just a moment ago, I opened a desk drawer and pulled out a photograph taken in 1969 in a village along the coastline of Quang Ngai Province. A vanished version of me squats beside a Vietnamese girl of maybe seven or eight. I’m smiling a compassionate, beaming, children-loving smile. The girl is also smiling. All is peaceful. My weapon is slung over my left shoulder.

  * * *

  * * *

  This photograph, with its Norman Rockwell innocence, could hang in the Pentagon as an advertisement for the benign, purehearted, rescue-the-world values of the American soldier and of America itself. Next to it, however, a second image appears. This is a memory photograph, and in it there is another Vietnamese girl, a bit older than the first, but the second girl lies dead in a rice paddy. The right side of her face is gone. Her mouth is open. One eye is half open. She had been caught in the middle of a two- or three-minute firefight. Moments earlier, during that short exchange of gunfire, I had fervently intended and hoped to kill, mostly because I was terrified, mostly to stop people from killing me, but as always there had been no visible enemy, only trees and bushes on the far side of a rice paddy, and so I had fired without aiming—without so much as the thought of aiming—just hosing down the whole green world before me. When the firefight ended, no one in my company had been injured. We found no enemy bodies and no blood trails. There was only the dead little girl. For a while I thought nothing. Then, after a second, I thought: Well, the world must be a better place. Because that’s what wars are for,right? That’s why we kill one another. To make the world a better place: “madness made of logic, principle turned frenzy” (Sophocles again). These thoughts were in no way cruel or callous. They were bitter thoughts. I hated myself. At that instant, as I looked down at the dead girl, the world did not seem any freer, any happier, any more democratic, any more just, any more tolerant, any more civilized, any more decent, any more loving, or any less endangered than it had seemed a few minutes earlier. The world felt evil. And I had made it more so. I had gone to the war and participated in the war out of the purest pride. To safeguard my reputation as a good son of America. To avoid small-town censure. To avoid ridicule. And so I had hosed down the green living world, and a little girl lay dead in the sunlight, and now my reputation-loving, ridicule-fearing pride was intact for some future Fourth of July. How can I, or we, celebrate such evil? How can the tubas keep playing? Madman pride—that’s how.

  31

  Pacifism

  Lately I’ve been worrying that Tad and Timmy might someday want to follow in my footsteps as a soldier, ending up dead or in a wheelchair. And so, at dinner one recent evening, I told them that I neither expected nor desired any such thing. “Just because I do something,” I said, “doesn’t mean you should do it.”

  “Like smoking?” Timmy said.

  “Excellent example.”

  “Or like swearing?” said Tad.

  “Right. Another good example. I mean, what if your father happened to be a bully? Would you start beating up teachers?”

  “Not too badly,” Tad said. “Not like you.”

  * * *

  A couple of years back, out of the blue, Timmy asked if I considered myself a pacifist.

  “Yes,” I said. “Unless some terrorist or burglar broke down the door and threatened to hurt you.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Anything,” I said.

  “Even kill the guy?”

  “Well, first I’d try to talk to him.”

  “But what if the guy’s totally crazy and really mean?” said Timmy. “What if he has a gun or something? Would you try to kill him?�
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  “I guess so,” I said.

  Timmy looked at me for a second. “What kind of pacifist is that?”

  “The father kind,” I told him.

  32

  Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (II)

  It is June 20, 2016, and today Timmy becomes a teenager. What I’ve feared for thirteen years has occurred: my son knows he will not have a father one day. Sometimes he forgets what he knows, but he does know.

  Back in 2003, when the first frail lines of these love letters were written, I had wanted simply to tell my infant son that he was adored by his father and that I yearned to be with him forever, always present, despite knowing that it cannot and will not happen. Biology is implacable. Hearts go still. And now Timmy’s thoughts are where mine had been in 2003. He has noticed that the fathers of his friends are a generation younger than I am. He has noticed my deafness and gray hair, my Swiss-cheese memory, my difficulties on the basketball court.