Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  Twice over the past several months the boy has come to me crying. He can’t sleep. He goes over the horror in his head. He knows exactly what time knows. Timmy, too, will be a cat in the rain.

  I don’t know what to say to him, but I say, “Yes, I know.”

  * * *

  June 28, 2016, just after 6 a.m., and Tad turned eleven a few hours ago.

  I’ve been at my desk since just before 3 a.m. I sat down with the intent of writing a few lines to present to him as a little gift, not just for this birthday but also for birthdays to come, when he turns seventeen or twenty-one or twenty-seven.

  But what a struggle. Stop. Start over. Stop. The sentences are filled with goo and I’m ready to cash out. Permanently, I mean. Toss this bitch computer out the window and move to the Arctic and buy an igloo and enjoy the freeze. Hemingway had it right: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

  So, Tad, here’s my beautiful and profound literary gift. It’s the best I could do. Happy birthday.

  * * *

  My father was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 28, 1914; he died in San Antonio, Texas, on August 10, 2004. His name was Bill O’Brien. (In his youth he was called Willie.) Children loved him. He loved children. He was fun and he was funny. He spent hours throwing baseballs to me. He spent numerous Christmas Eves assembling model trains and Erector sets and Tinkertoys I would never play with. He presented me with large stacks of books from the public library. He sang beautifully. He read constantly. His eyes, unlike mine, were blue and backlit. He was a good man. I loved him and idolized him, but I was sometimes afraid he was going to kill me, and during my grade school years I crept into the kitchen late at night and removed the sharpest knives from a drawer and hid the knives beneath my mattress. I barricaded my bedroom door. I invented an alarm system with string and two little bells. But then the police came to get him. In the Turkey Capital of the World, surrounded by Lutherans, he sat in his favorite reading chair and swore at the police while my mother cried. I was eleven or twelve. This was the summer of 1957 or 1958, the summer during which my father had carried that fat book into my bedroom, the summer when the police came, two of them, to protect my mother and my sister and my brother and me, to protect us from my father, my unrequited love, who swore in embarrassment and in terrible fury in his favorite reading chair in our tiny living room as the police coaxed and said sir and as my mother cried—it was she who had summoned the police, it was she who had committed my father to an institution for the treatment of alcoholism, and it was she, too, who was afraid of my father—and so the police took him away and he vanished again for many more weeks that summer. He was treated for alcoholism. The treatment didn’t take. He came home, he tried, except it was chemistry, and things went on in our tiny house as they had gone on before and as they would go on for decades afterward, until he became an old man.

  If you have read “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” by Ernest Hemingway, or if you have read “My Old Man,” you have felt something—not enough, but a little—of what I felt when the police came to get my father and when my little-boy life caught fire.

  On the day my father died, having lived to the age of ninety-one, I was awakened near dawn by Meredith, who gently delivered the news. I said something like—although this is not precisely what I said—“Okay, thanks,” and then I went back to sleep. I had been imagining that news since I was a kid, just as my own son Timmy is now imagining the news for himself. I had imagined going insane. I had imagined crawling into my father’s coffin. But I went to sleep. It was not denial. It was not a means of escape. I was sleepy.

  A writer of stories does not only write about the world as it is, but also about the world as it almost is or as it could be or as it should be. In the days just before my father’s death, I could’ve and I should’ve driven the lousy seventy miles to a hospital in San Antonio. I could’ve and I should’ve taken my father in my arms. I could’ve and I should’ve said, “Dad, I love you so much.” I did not. But in a story, miracles can happen. In a story, my father can sit up from the dead and take me in his arms. In a story, he can say, “That’s okay, I know you love me.”

  Sentimentalism, I guess, but the alternative is silence.

  * * *

  The critics don’t care, Hemingway once noted, if you’re a good father. Readers don’t care either. Not at midnight, not as a last page is turned. Good fathers and good fishermen and good citizens and good anything—the reader doesn’t care, and can’t care, not as that last page is turned, because the reader is inside the story, exhausted by too much drink and too many dead bulls and too much longing for what will never be, which is partly the story Timmy and Tad will find inside The Sun Also Rises, but which is also the story they will find inside their own lives, not exactly, but inexactly, because they will absorb the story and then carry it with them into their own love affairs and their own longings for what will never be. That is why I want to talk to them now about Ernest Hemingway and some pretty abstract things about telling stories. I care about these things. I want my sons to understand what their dad cared about, and what he worried about, as he tried to write his own stories. The ordinary reader, who may not be interested, is invited to skip the next several pages. My children, however, are required to keep going.

  * * *

  What if I were to say there is no Timmy and there is no Tad? And what if I were to say I had no father? I would be lying, of course. There is a Timmy, there is a Tad, and I did have a father. Lying, yes, but telling the truth. The Bill O’Brien and the Timmy and the Tad in these pages are not people. They are not living creatures. To the best of my knowledge, the only way to put people in a book is to make a very large book and stock it with food and drink.

  Here, as the reader encounters them, Timmy and Tad and my father are type on a page. I have tried to portray them fairly and accurately, but in doing so I have omitted virtually everything. I have included only that which is necessary. And so it always is for a writer: almost everything is subtracted. Although I am attempting at the moment what is called “nonfiction,” and although everything I have written in these pages is pretty true—true in the sense of “happening truth,” true in the sense that these things were actually said and were actually done—despite that, despite actuality, I am nonetheless at the mercy of memory. Yes, Timmy did utter the word “shenanigans.” Yes, my father did enter my bedroom bearing a fat, heavy-looking book on a hot summer afternoon in the late 1950s. But faulty memory, or the passage of time, or both, or something else, has erased the detail. What had I been thinking or doing in the instant before my bedroom door swung open? I have no idea. It’s purely gone. It’s so purely gone, it never was. All of us, writers more than most, are left with the cruel and taunting illusion of memory. What we call memory is failed memory. What we call memory is forgetfulness. And if memory has failed—failed so colossally, failed so apocalyptically—how can we pretend to be faithful to it? How can we pretend to tell the truth? Is one small fraction of the truth the truth? Memory speaks, yes. But it stutters. It speaks in ellipses.

  Again, how much of yesterday do you really remember?

  And further, how much do you remember of March 23, 1998? Do you remember your worries that day, your daydreams, your meals, your conversations—all of them, any of them?—and do you remember if you cried, and do you remember picking out a head of lettuce at the Safeway, and do you remember that knockout cashier to whom, in rapt fantasy, you devoted a precious portion of your life?

  We lose our lives as we live them. Memory is a problem. Even more of a problem, much more, is that I am also at the mercy of my abilities as a writer, and at the mercy of recalcitrant, never-quite-right nouns and verbs. I am at the mercy of the bullying word “nonfiction,” which prohibits make-believe. I am at the mercy of my endurance, and at the mercy of my estimation of your endurance, and at the mercy of the demagogic rhythm of a sentence, and at the mercy of a spectacular image just off t
he tip of my imagination.

  What is important to me in all this, and what makes me seem to digress, although I’m not, is the problem of moving from actuality to art and from art to actuality. If it’s so treacherous to seek “real” people in the pages of nonfiction, then how much more treacherous must it be to seek “real” people in the pages of fiction?

  “Cat in the Rain” is an example. (Read it, Timmy. Read it, Tad.) The story can be—and often has been—interpreted through the lens of history. Hemingway’s wife Hadley becomes the “American wife” of the story. Hemingway becomes the story’s husband, George. In the world of real people and real events, which is the world in which the story was conceived, Hadley had been responsible for the loss of Hemingway’s sacred manuscripts; there was tension over that loss; there was Hadley’s guilt and there was Hemingway’s despair and emptiness. On top of that, still in the world of actuality, we know that Hadley discovered she was pregnant around the time Hemingway first took notes for the story, in February of 1923, and we know that Hemingway later bemoaned the pregnancy to his mentors Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He believed he was too young for parenthood; he believed his career and his art and his time to make art were in jeopardy. We know that Hadley very much wanted a child. We know that Hemingway very much wanted publication. There were other marital strains, too, among them financial worries, the age difference between wife and husband, and Hadley’s well-documented generosity of spirit in collision with Hemingway’s frankly declared ambition.

  Given these facts of the actual, real-world world, who could be surprised that “Cat in the Rain” has been received by critics through the lens of history? The facts tell their own spellbinding story. If “Cat in the Rain” is lifted from, and explained by, the actual, lived-in world, is not the story incidental to the history? Is not the story a pathetic substitute for the real deal? Who needs “Cat in the Rain”?

  Ernest Hemingway famously denied that his story was about Hadley. “ ‘Cat in the Rain’ wasn’t about Hadley,” he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald. “I knew you and Zelda always thought it was.” Maybe Hemingway was being disingenuous in his letter to Fitzgerald. Maybe he was writing in haste. Maybe he had been drinking. But there is also the possibility that he was telling his friend the precise truth as he knew and understood it: “Cat in the Rain” was not about Hadley, nor about Rapallo, Italy, nor about lost manuscripts, nor about anything else of the actual, lived-in world.

  In Hemingway’s defense, but also in defense of anyone who has toiled over a short story or a novel, I wonder if a piece of fiction had partially replaced reality—or created an additional reality—in the author’s memory. As words go onto paper, including the proper noun “George,” images appear in a writer’s head, and those images are as vividly real to the writer as anything in the so-called real world. Hemingway could see the imagined George. He could hear George’s thoughts. The proper noun itself—the mere naming—instantly distances a writer from his own being. The proper noun creates otherness. Type the word “George,” and Hemingway isn’t quite Hemingway, and you, the author, aren’t quite you. Type the words “the American wife,” and Hadley is a mile away. Add an adjective, add an adverb, and she’s half a continent away. Add a made-up detail, maybe a bit of dialogue, maybe a wart on her nose, maybe a nervous laugh, maybe a trip outside to pick up a wet cat, and Hadley is no longer on or of planet Earth. She has vanished completely, and the author is now in the company of a new and separate living creature, and the creature is not Hadley.

  In this sense, the storyteller’s imaginative labor can be described as the willful obliteration of self and as the willful replacement of self with a piece of art. Knocking on Faulkner’s door: “It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books . . . He made the books and he died.” And it was Faulkner, too, who described his life’s work as an effort “to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.”

  For a writer of novels and stories, the real and remembered world combines with imagination, and that combination combines with language, and that combination combines with the inner eye and the inner ear and the inner heart to produce wholly new, wholly individual, and wholly unique spirits in the head: an American wife who is not Hadley and a husband named George who is not Hemingway and a story called “Cat in the Rain,” which is completely and only about itself. And although the story may well have been launched out of real-world pain, and probably was, it is still the case that lost manuscripts and unwanted babies were transmuted into a new dream reality titled “Cat in the Rain.”

  * * *

  As a personal matter, I want Timmy and Tad to know what was happening in their father’s head during those hours when I sat writing in my study all evening. I left one kind of reality behind. Including you, Timmy. And you, Tad. It was a kind of betrayal, I suppose, but both of you disappeared for a while, and your mom disappeared, too, and so did I. Fact blurred into fiction and fiction blurred into fact. For all of us, but especially for a writer of stories, memory fades, and reality fades with it, and the imagined people and events in my stories became, over time, as real as reality, just as my dreams are real, and just as your dreams are real, because they are real, for who in the history of our planet has ever dreamed an unreal dream?—the dreamed dream, your dream, is a real dream, is it not? For my part, as I travel at light speed toward the grave, I realize that my collision with Vietnam occurred half a century ago. It’s almost all forgotten. It’s not even a dream. The names, the faces, the shaggy little villages, the endless sweeps of obscenity and monotony and humidity and greenery, the endless terror, the endless uncertainties—will I die here, will I die there, will I die with the next step or the next step or the next?—the land mines, the scary firefights—those long and numbing marches up into the mountains and down into the paddies and then up again into the mountains, the pranks, the horseplay, the ghosts, the nights, the mumblings of the freshly dead, the things I thought, the things I said—it’s almost entirely gone—all those unoccupied ticking seconds of my life that had once been so intensely occupied—gone and gone forever—as gone as a soap bubble winking out at the bottom of a sink—as gone as my father is gone and as gone as I will be gone—and now, especially at night, my made-up stories are what I have instead of memory.

  This, as nearly as I can express it, represents my experience—and, I suspect, Hemingway’s experience—on the contested frontier between actuality and story. For the writer of fiction, there is enormous fear of biographical determinism. Determinism of any sort, but particularly biographical determinism, seems in the writer’s view to demean and sometimes to deny the faculty of imagination, which for the writer is where stories get made. Artistic playfulness cuts against determinism. As does whimsy. As does a sentence’s insistent call for musicality. As does a character named Jack, let’s say, who, completely unbidden, suddenly blurts out a marriage proposal to a baffled duck. What do we do with miracles? What do we do with the inexplicable? Do we comb through history in search of love-sick ducks?

  Even these early-morning sentences, including this one, represent the limitations of biographical determinism. The literary historian and the writer see differently. The historian cries, “There is your father!” and the writer cries, “There is your father!”

  And so, Timmy and Tad, if a man is defined at least in part by the things he thinks about, these are among the thoughts I’ve been thinking in those hours when I should have been thinking of you.

  33

  Home School

  Our lesson for today is titled “Outrage.” The bullet points for discussion are these:

  If you support a war, go to it.

  Unless, of course, you support a war only to the extent that other people—but not you—should die and kill.

  If you speak out in behalf of a war, put your blood where your belligerence is.

  Unless, of course, you don
’t mind the word “hypocrite.”

  Dead bodies are heavy and awkward to carry. Also, the smell of death can be unpleasant. This is the case even if the dead are very freshly dead.

  The death-smell will one day be pumped into the nostrils of those who support wars. It’s only fair. It’s the Golden Rule. Therefore, inhaling the death-smell will become a popular fad among Christian war apologists.

  Unless, of course, Christian war apologists support war only insofar as they will neither go to it nor smell it.

  One day, also, television networks and internet providers will offer photographs and video clips of war casualties, twenty-four hours a day, nothing else, just the dead and the mutilated, and this programming will become an overnight sensation among those who cry out for war.

  Unless, of course, they cry out for wars that they will neither visit nor smell nor look at.

  A bullet can kill the enemy.

  A bullet can manufacture an enemy.

  If your bullet strikes a father’s child in the head, you have manufactured an enemy.

  The ratio of dead children to manufactured enemies, however, is never one-to-one. Each child also has a mother. Maybe an uncle, too, and a brother, and a doting grandmother, and a few cousins and sisters and playmates. The Pentagon will one day generously agree to provide a daily ratio of enemies killed to enemies manufactured.

  Blowing up houses also manufactures enemies, especially if the blown-up house is yours. The Pentagon will be factoring this statistic into its future daily summary.