I’ve tried to imagine your face when I would tell you our story. The one about how we never met and how I have many pieces from you collected and sorted. I picture myself walking to you at the shoreline and waiting until you see me. I play that tape over and over with no sound, our voices drowned out by the unrelenting applause of the ocean. I tell you everything too emotional and abstract to say to someone you don’t know, but still you understand it. You understand all of it.
When they came to collect my father’s body my mother stayed in the apartment. Rather, she continued hovering there in a nonstate, so in shock and heartbroken as to not be included in the census count. Two men carried his body out the door on a stretcher while we four children followed down the hall. It was another moment of everyone trailing our father but this time he wasn’t in front with his wool cap and cane. When we got onto the elevator and the door closed we each moved in closer to his body, now covered with a white sheet. Not looking at each other, we were at attention. All of us puffed up and unblinking; his parliament of owls keeping watch until we reached the garage where his body would be put somewhere to be driven somewhere else.
When they opened the doors to the back of the van my sister suddenly presented a photo, a large one I’d not seen her holding. In an inspired gesture of divinity she showed those two men my father’s picture and said
This is who he was, so that you will know who you carry in that van, which is not just a body. You will know what we are leaving when we turn and go
She tried to complete a sentence that began with “He was—,” but could not, and didn’t have to. Her inability to finish that sentence and the flush that filled her face as she looked for words worthy of him were enough to finish it for the men, who understood. One of them reached to touch her arm. My brothers shook their hands after they looked at his picture, whispering acknowledgments to us that they would remember his face and thanking us for letting them see it. They were full of grace. It’s hard to believe they’d ever removed a father’s body before and left four adult children standing helplessly in a garage. They were so sensitive and respectful that if it was their fourth father of the day, they deserved some kind of medal.
When they started to close the doors of that van that would carry my father’s body away, I knew part of him was in there still, in a plastic bag under a sheet. They were taking that away. I imagined hearing the van’s doors closing, what that would sound like from the inside of a bag. The sound he would hear from the inside of that bag was too horrible and he was alone. He wouldn’t know where they were taking him and worst of all, I explained as I tried to crawl and then stiffly force my way in the back of the van, worst of all I cried
my father is afraid of the dark
please don’t make him go by himself
it’s too dark in there
he will hate it
They pulled me away from his body. I kept trying to tell them I would be so quiet if they would please let me go too, but no one said yes and the doors closed. My sister tried to put her arms around me but I shoved her out of the way, not even the hurt on her face could bring me back as I ran after the van, I ran up the ramp and out into the cruel daylight. I was like a creature come from underground, it was too bright outside and the van drove purposefully, slowly through the parking lot just as you would while carrying a dead person, but I couldn’t catch up. It turned onto the main road and I howled and begged it to come back until I just stopped and blocked my face from the sun with both hands. I sobbed from somewhere that owned me. I had no more will but to attend to those sobs. There was nowhere to go now. I had no clout with myself. I managed small steps but every direction was bad. There was nothing forward. I was fatherless to the right, with no one as my eternal champion, and fatherless to the left. I rotated in a broken waltz in that hateful sunlight which clearly had no idea what it would never shine on again. I turned helplessly in my circle there on the only piece of earth that knew me without him, wailing in my hands and pivoting mechanically like the top of one of those music boxes he loved so much. Draining itself into dissonance until someone shuts the lid.
In photographs, the fog on the sound is so dense that it makes your workday plateau look like perpetual judgment day. Are you used to that? Do you ever look up and expect to see a spirit fly through the backdrop? Like my sister did in that moment, I wish I could produce a picture of my father for you. I’d show you the one I have of him eating your oysters while my brother and I sat on the coffee table in front of him. Our faces in the picture are serene. We are giving our father exactly what he wanted and probably for the last time. Getting them to that TV tray, though, had felt tantamount to launching the shuttle. I suddenly understood that they weren’t something you could just go and pick up.
I need to clarify for you exactly why I ran so hard to find them. Why I called everyone I could think of short of the Chamber of Commerce, and would have stopped at nothing to get a couple dozen oysters with whatever accompanying sauce. If you knew another part of the story, would you say I was acting out of habit? That I was still the little girl who felt it her position in life to shield her father from disappointment? That isn’t the picture I want you to see.
My father was a soldier. I imagine you understand isolation. After the parades and champagne, men who came back from World War II had internal wars to fight on their own. My dad found a way to go forward, but returned to battle five years later during the Korean War. If there is even a point to distinguishing levels of Hell, the combat he faced in Korea was more ruinous. The conditions were horrific. Korea was preponderant chaos and carnage; being hit in the face with icy wind and the raw body parts of fellow soldiers were more visions to follow him home, and my mother woke in the night to the sound of him screaming while he relived them.
Though he was involved in the beginning of it, the Vietnam War was the end for him. He saw enough of a war he was opposed to and left the army before it was officially over. Almost forty-five years old and he’d survived three wars, been in and out of combat since the age of nineteen and the body bags from this war held soldiers not far from the age of his oldest son. He retired from the army and went to work as the manager of a bank. We moved to the suburbs with him hoping to always be home for dinner and never expected to hold a weapon again. Our house was the first I’d lived in not on an army base. We had a dog and a swing set, at the end of a cul-de-sac where kids rode their bikes and played statue at dusk.
An opportunity presented to be the justice of the peace for the county. He leapt at it, thinking a public service job would suit him better than the petty politics of the bank, but he soon discovered that this job had even more off-roads to corruption. After the army it became clear that he could not fit in with the world where accountability was something to get out of and rules there for bending. He refused to play politician and there was no elasticity in his morality. He didn’t care who you were, there were no favors.
One of my brothers had a friend who sometimes stayed over for days. He was like a brilliant hippie version of Eddie Haskell and an accepted part of the family. One night when they were in their teens, this friend and my sister were driving in his VW Bug on their way to meet my brother when they saw the red lights of a police car behind them. He realized he had some contraband in the car and started to panic, telling my sister to get rid of it. She, ever compliant, started pitching the contents of the glove compartment out the window. Once she found his meager stash, she thought the best place to hide it would be her purse. Certainly no one would look in her pocketbook? Right about then the officer appeared at the side of the car to find the small mound she’d created: a still damp men’s bathing suit, some Bob Dylan cassettes, and an empty Dairy Queen cup. He turned a flashlight on them, outshone by the beauty of my sister, who offered a winning smile while clutching her purse with white knuckles. He told them his intent was to inform them that they had a broken taillight, but he might need to have a look in that purse if she’d please hand it over. They w
ere busted. It came to light that the lovely girl in the front seat was the daughter of the justice of the peace, and the tall long-haired boy a close friend. The officer knew that with two minors he was expected to bring the kids home. He was too savvy to roll up to the station with the daughter of the justice of the peace handcuffed in the back of a squad car, but still this was awkward. My father was playing cards with the chief of police at our dining room table when the doorbell rang. He answered the door and saw the officer there with both teenagers behind him. The policeman nervously explained the situation, and said he thought it best to bring them home to let my father handle it. He was going on while my dad stood quietly, squinting at him, and then he nodded and said, calmly
Yes, thank you. Book them
And shut the door on all of them.
Dad was called on regularly to pronounce people officially dead. The job of “county coroner” came with “city magistrate,” and my mom recalls countless nights when the phone would ring and he’d sit up and sigh. He’d wearily go and stand over the mangled bodies of teenagers who’d crashed their cars driving drunk, or women stabbed to death by their husbands. The job was too much, and he was infuriated by the crookedness. He kept a log of people who offered him bribes, the paranoia and stress creating a pattern of him retreating in silence only to explode, usually at himself. A lower-profile job came up and he resigned, deeply relieved and optimistic for change. Sadly, this opportunity was tied to a contractor who held a grudge for a bribe not accepted. My dad’s ethics had cost the contractor money, and this guy wanted revenge. He had Dad’s new job cut without warning, and left him stranded. If he was out to punish my dad, he won.
My father was out of a job for two years. He grew bitter and paranoid, left with days that held nothing other than reading the paper and searching in vain for work. Too much time is a lethal trigger for veterans with PTSD, it can bring back the flavor of sitting in a foxhole and praying for daylight. There was nothing to distract him from a burning feeling of failure. Scrambling to provide for his family, he and my mother sold whatever they could to keep us afloat, they mortgaged and refinanced, maxed out every credit card. If his anger before was unpredictable, now it was pathological.
When he’d start I’d pull on his arm, pleading with him. “Don’t yell, Daddy, please, I’m begging,” I’d say. I’d put myself physically in front of him or take his hand and force him around to look at me. He’d sometimes stare past me in a kind of blackout, but if he heard me he’d come back to us like a sleepwalker who didn’t know where he was. I’d see the confusion and shame wash over him, almost the worst part of it. The shame alone made him hate himself. It made him see white. We might get up mid-meal at a restaurant and leave with everyone staring while he shouted at someone. I’d redirect him back in the car if he pulled off the road to get out and bang on the hood, spewing profanity and putting each family member in a different state of shutdown. I’d coax him away from terrified shop owners while he was shouting or even physically lunging at someone. A chair would be thrown at the middle of the dining room table and glass would break, food flying. I’d hear one of the familiar refrains and grow hot in my face, feeling light-headed when I heard him say
I’m the goddamned son of a bitch
All right, so I’m nothing, I’m dirt to everyone
Maybe if I were dead it would be better
I knew that in an hour the house would be silent and my mother would be sitting at the kitchen table staring off, her long spidery fingers moving a water glass back and forth. My brother would be locked in his room listening to music.
When I was old enough to notice that the changing placement of paintings in our house were hiding holes he’d made with his fist, I knew to move them myself when someone forgot. I tried to make the present moment sparkle but I was never a natural ray of sunshine. I knew that what he fought was bigger than him but didn’t understand that his distaste for the outdoors was the direct result of marching through inclement weather for days with an assault weapon in his hands while men were being shot dead in his periphery. I still don’t know what he saw in his dreams that made him wake up screaming, I only know that I heard him and then I screamed too.
After those two years of waiting, he found another job but the same patterns repeated until he retired, stopped feeling obligated to impose his moral code on the world. He was tired now and welcomed the experience of having nowhere to go, nothing to police. He started to look at the world as a place he’d barely missed being wiped off of countless times. As the rage receded, his marriage became the focus. When my mother became briefly but gravely ill, it was as though someone shook him awake. I think his relief over not losing her helped him heal. One morning, late into his seventies, my mother remembered him being flip with her in front of a neighbor. Later on she saw him sitting staring out the window with one hand on his knee, looking unsteady. She said, “John, what’s wrong?” and he said
Aw, hell, I feel like I wasn’t respectful of your opinion. I hurt your feelings in front of someone else and that was wrong, I’m sorry
Their generation didn’t quit on a marriage so easily, and they had a sacred love, private in a way that belied its obvious passion. It was only theirs. The tenderness in one glance was so intimate that you almost had to look away, even after sixty-four years together. More than one of his fellow soldiers would pull her aside after the war to tell her that yes, men had ways of coping but her husband was one of the only ones who never strayed. She would just blush when they told her how “you could ply him with booze and he would only go on about how he’d hit the jackpot with you.” He was a flirt and loved women, but wouldn’t tolerate or stay friends with a man who cheated. He said that sure, he understood temptation but didn’t respect succumbing to it.
“Before I met your dad I had no idea that men like that actually existed,” one friend said to me, and I heard that more than once. Those who met him in later years only knew him as unfailingly sweet and open, someone you could talk to about anything. Here was the man who found the interesting “fascinating,” the amusing “hysterical,” and the sad “heartbreaking.” The rage from my childhood nearly vanished, and the positive, inclusive man was the one we could count on seeing when he opened his door. He was nearly healed but I meanwhile still had no idea what a normal level of emotion was in either direction. Was all that passed down? Did it soak into my subconscious, or was I born with it, a birthright? If terror creates adrenaline, does the fear just evaporate, the stain coming out in the wash? That cortisol was in his bloodstream. Meta-analysis shows that shock changes the size and structure of your brain, and I am half him.
The study of epigenetics says that the response to a traumatic event can be handed down as distinctly as the color of your eyes. Fear and rage can be ancestral. We love watching soldiers return home, their wives and children leaping into their arms with embraces and kisses that won’t end. I myself have stood against a wall at the airport basically spying on a group of soldiers as they begin to deplane. I know those soldiers couldn’t leave all that horror on the airplane, and some of what they had to bear may be handed down to their children. This isn’t to take away from free will and all the heroic and damning aspects of accountability, it’s just to suggest that genetic markers can’t be wiped clean after traversing through Hell. If the science of heritability is correct you could be born afraid of things you’ve never seen and can’t even name.
Near the end, when he was ill and all of us were on the couch next to him, telling jokes to cut the tension, my mother came in and put her hand on his shoulder, asked him if he needed anything, he said
Aw it just feels so good, to see them all sitting there together and laughing
He put a hand up to her face and lacking the strength to lift his face to her, he said
But you are the best medicine
My father took a level of pride in his children and grandchildren that was nearly freakish. The boys on my brother’s football team thought my dad wor
ked for the high school. They didn’t know who that guy was who showed up at every scrimmage and every away game, even when it was snowing. He would stand there, staring at my brother, who left the bench just once when he intercepted a pass and then ran in the wrong direction, only to be tackled by his own teammate. He was crushed but shared such a good laugh with my dad that it seemed like his blunder was better than scoring the winning touchdown. He was back at the next game, never bored, in the same way that he was when he came to town to see me in a play for opening night. He’d shyly ask if it was possible to come back for the matinee, after which he would make it clear that if they needed help filling the house that evening, he was pretty sure he was available for that show, too. Birthdays were thought out months in advance. He’d pull me aside and say, look what I got your mother for Valentine’s Day when it was not even Christmas. He didn’t need a holiday as an excuse, though. My mother was heartbroken over the city tearing down her childhood home, where my father had picked her up for their first date. He drove over and dug, with his cane, through the refuse at the site until he found a brick representative of the house. He had the address carved into it and placed a picture of the house on top so she’d have something tangible to remember it by. He would sit around and think of things like that, what would make others happy, and then he actually did it.
When he first got sick he knew he had to tell us. My mother asked, what do I tell them and he said, tell them the truth, but
Damn, I just don’t want this to upset their lives at all
He was very ill and I’d come in to help. We managed, after days of trying, to reach a monk in Mysore, India, who would give him a blessing. Daddy called himself an Episcopalian but was very interested in Eastern philosophy and Judaism, and open to most everything, really. Skyping with the monk, he grew so weak that he hunched over and rested his head on his cane while still attempting the chant of “om mani padme hung.” The monk asked him how he was and he tried to pull himself upright, saying
Dear Mr. You Page 15