I keep a close eye on my mental health, a constant vigil to make sure I am not straying off the lucid path. Because I figure insanity must run in my family. Why else would my mother decide, on purpose even, to have four children within the space of five years? It’s not like she was repeatedly knocked up against her will. She wanted a passel of babies. She told me once that my father had only wanted two kids, and figured they were done in nineteen sixty-one after my older brother was born. Then she made it sound like she was singularly responsible for my arrival, which she said was the end result of a bottle of champagne on the night of her third wedding anniversary. In my mind there was no mistaking her implication: she got my father drunk and had her way with him, in order to get pregnant. It seemed he kind of just gave in after that, and my little brother came along twenty months later. Yet it was my father who chose to marry this woman, a woman with a mind of her own. I didn’t find out how this came to be until a family history assignment in the seventh grade forced me to ask my parents to write down the story of their lives. It turns out it was the most impossibly romantic story ever told in the tales of uptight modern suburbia.
In nineteen fifty-eight my parents were both essentially spinsters, on the respective far sides of the marrying age; she, twenty-four, he, thirty-six. Previous relationships hadn’t turned out as planned, and they each had settled into a mildly swinging single life. My mom had never left High Point, North Carolina (Furniture Capitol of the World), and was working at MInnesota Mining and living with her parents and her older sister who had also not married. My Aunt Mary decided it was just as well that neither of them had gotten hitched, as they were now free to (respectably) do as they pleased. They set about breaking hearts and making plans to see the world.
My dad grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, a steel girder in the Rust Belt. He left it behind after high school to attend Westminster College in Pennsylvania. Upon hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy with such haste that his family had to travel to pick up his degree for him. His college education put him on a fast track to officer school and by the time the war was over he was wearing lieutenant's bars. He earned a master's in chemical engineering courtesy of the GI bill, and went on to live in groovy places such as Greenwich Village and Puget Sound.
These lives, belonging to strange people of whom I can barely conceive, are lived in black and white. My mom’s bears a strong resemblance to the parties on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet where Ricky sings and everybody dances at the end of the show. Dad’s takes place through an 8mm lens, peering through a smoky haze toward the stage at the Half Note.
My parents met that year on a blind date in High Point, where my dad was visiting his sister and her family over Christmas. They were engaged by the end of their third date, then corresponded for four and a half months, sending letters every day that detailed their Victorian-sounding love. They did not see each other again until the day of the wedding, where they exchanged rings that were inscribed “more today than yesterday.” When my father handed me his finished copy for my English assignment, I read with complete disbelief, finding it not dissimilar to some of my favorite Bronte sisters’ stories. This story did not belong to my parents.
As a child, I often engaged in a fantasy that my father was not my real father, but had been replaced by an alien, or possibly a government agent of some sort. I would lie on the couch, hanging upside down with my knees over the back while pretending to walk on the ceiling, and I would watch him, looking for a sign, some slip up that I could go to my mother with:
It wasn’t that I wanted a different father. It had more to do with synapses run amuck, probably from spending too much time watching The Twilight Zone and Lost in Space reruns, and needing to fill in all of the empty spaces. My dad was such a quiet, deliberate man. He rarely volunteered information. Our shared genes did not encourage one to ask questions. So I started making things up. But when he told me this, the story of how they came together, and thus how I came to be, I realized, for the first time, that what you see is not what you get. There is always much that lies beneath. And it’s often secured with thousands of titanium chains, fastened with an impenetrable combination lock.
I’m willing to bet my father’s wish for less progeny had more to do with this intrinsic conservative nature than a desire for fewer nippers running around under his feet. I think he secretly enjoyed living amongst the chaos. He entered our house through the back door in the evenings, grumbling “Fer cryin’ out loud” as he made his way around the dog and through the shoes, over the baseballs and empty Cheetos bags strewn about the living room, after a long day at work. Often, but not every evening, he’d pull out the bottle of J&B scotch and pour a heavy finger over ice, before he got out of his suit and took his second shower of the day. He’d watch the local evening news while he waited for dinner, after which we’d watch Bob Newhart or The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He’d make a rare comment on how young Mare had been when she started on The Dick Van Dyke Show, with apparent yet unspoken admiration for her grit as well as her girl next-door beauty. There was never a sense that he was anything less than satisfied.
Because he was quiet, he was the kind of dad some kids might be scared of at first, as this sometimes came across as stern. But his real presence, which was warm and full of devotion, lay just under the surface; it was reticent, but you didn’t have to look too hard to find it. He was careful with his smiles, so when he finally relented and eased the muscles of his face up toward his rather largish ears, especially if he accompanied it with an appreciative short bark of a laugh, his simple happiness spread around the room like warmed chocolate syrup.
I’m not sure if this quietness was innate, or if it came with the blow that was levied against his family on July 4th, nineteen thirty-four, another story that was never spoken in my silent family. My eleven-year-old father spent that morning trying to convince his dad not to go to work at his second job as a night watchman that evening, but to stay home and watch the fireworks with him and the rest of the family. My grandfather was a tall and quite handsome man, and unlike anyone else I am immediately related to he appeared graceful and at ease in a photo my Aunt Ruth sent me upon request, once I was in my thirties and realized we had no pictures of him. He was a carpenter and a World War I veteran, first generation American son of Scotch-English immigrant parents. He met my tiny Scottish grandmother while in port in Rosyth during the war. He later picked her up at Ellis Island and married her exactly a year to the day after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. They worked hard to make a good life during difficult times and extra money was not taken lightly, so my grandfather did not feel he could refuse the work that was offered that July fourth. It was simply unimaginable that he would be murdered that night while taking a catnap on the couch at the all-night garage, shot by a man he knew, and sometimes worked with, when he came to steal the petty cash.
Yet this is a pin on a map of my father’s life, where the road took a sharp detour from the steady course he had been on, a classic one toward the American dream. I think a weight settled on him that day, a flat stone that found purchase on his chest, large enough to inhibit deep breathing, but not to kill. His family life became a Brownie portrait with a hole in it, into which they poured their devastation and then buried it deep in a dusty album in the attic at the bottom of a trunk, in order to find a way to move forward. They lived and worked and learned and eventually loved, but with silence, as if less words were some sort of barrier from pain. Dad stepped into the shoes worn by his father and became man of the family. It made him careful in the truest sense of the word, so who can blame him for only wanting the government recommended limit of two children.
And yet there were four. He eventually found himself in a big and messy house in a rural suburb of Houston with a constantly changing parade of neighbor children and animals traipsing through. There were sporadic efforts made to lasso it all in, my mom trying to poke us into helping in some fashion, but more often than not she would just yell at my dad to get us all out of there. She would then collapse in a chair and light up a Benson and Hedges menthol, propping her feet up on the desk in front of the built-in telephone in the breakfast room, and pick up the receiver. Leaning it against her shoulder, she untangled the twenty-foot cord, saying as we were filing out the door: “No, I told Tom, you have GOT to get these kids out of here, I don’t care where you take them…”
My dad was a literal man, not prone to hyperbole or misconception. He loaded us into the Country Squire with admonishments to buckle up, and drove into town to do what he needed to do. We ran errands, picking up nails at the hardware store (the necessary amount precisely weighed) or fertilizer for his roses at the nursery. I found these places infinitely more interesting than the Piggly Wiggly. They were full of ten thousand things of which I knew nothing, but in which I saw great potential. I rambled the aisles, creating purposes, usually medically related (my dolls were a sickly lot), for mystery items such as a hand-cranked vise or large tree loppers. Dad told the clerk to put it on his account, and loaded us back into the car. At this point he usually caved into our incessant begging, and took us to the movies.
We were allowed one kind of candy each, and a small coke, but we had to share popcorn. Dad tensed up and shook his head slightly as he pulled the bills from his worn brown leather wallet and handed them to the kid standing behind the glass counter, as if he had a hard time believing he was really handing over five dollars for all of this. My brothers and sister and I moved around the lobby, from poster to poster, scrutinizing the faces and the action, deciding what we must see next time. Dad eventually herded us all into the theater, pushing us down the row of seats so we wouldn’t hold anybody up, our feet sticking with every step.
There wasn’t always a lot to choose from in the early seventies, as far as kids’ movies went, so we often went to see what my dad wanted to see. The year I was eight we saw The Poseidon Adventure. Hell, upside down. I hyperventilated as I watched the credits roll while Maureen McGovern sang about the morning after. Images whipped around in my head as I tried to breathe, encompassing all of the new conceptions I had just sucked in: drowning, loss, sex and the fact that old people could still be in love. This was just the beginning of my education.
That same year we saw The Legend of Boggy Creek, we saw What’s Up, Doc? and The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. The next year we saw Westworld and Paper Moon. I was terrorized and titillated beyond my comprehension. My father’s disregard for our ages or sensibilities seems out of step with his conservative nature, but I think he was just trying to make all of us happy, which was often a daunting and disappointing task when faced with our four disparate personalities, as well as my mother’s. Yet as I look through this kaleidoscope of time, I can clearly see that this is what he worked for, trying so hard to reclaim the familial bliss that was yanked from his grasp on that night so long ago. I’m pretty sure this is why he gave in to my mother’s wishes for a brood, and most everything else that she and said brood desired, especially at Christmas.
My brother Scott and I began checking the mail every day around mid-October, when the bus let us off at the end of our driveway, waiting for the first of the toe-tingling signs of Christmas: the JC Penney catalogue. We traded it back and forth between our rooms on a hard-fought timeshare arrangement, devoting many more after school hours to Christmas lists than homework. Soon it was Thanksgiving and when the Advent calendar was thumbtacked just above the key-shaped rack by the back door I knew my dad would be dragging out the boxes of the big C-9 lights that would adorn the front of our house the next weekend. I was so impatient for Christmas to come. So much so that when I found a rare moment in which I was completely alone in the house, I sprung into action. Making my way through every possible hiding place, I became a pudgy little cat burglar, detailing what everyone was getting for Christmas, especially me. My mother despaired when she discovered my badly disguised intrusions, wondering aloud why I wanted to ruin Christmas for myself.
What neither of us really understood was that I was actually trying to prolong the magic of Christmas morning. I am a Capricorn, the most practical and pragmatic of signs. I went to bed at night and dreamed of Christmas morning, comfortably sorting the known details into place. I even knew my mother would still manage to find something to surprise me with, probably hiding it in the car or at a friend’s house. But ultimately none of this had anything to do with presents. It had to do with our home bursting at the seams with music and paper and turkey and love, it had to do with that rarest of moments: my family being loving and loud and happy and expressive.
My older brother Jimmy was usually the first up, and sent the dog in to wake me; early, and after little sleep. I often lay awake late at night and it was no different on Christmas Eve, although that night my ears were pricked for Santa, not the monster from Boggy Creek (okay maybe a little for the monster from Boggy Creek), even though my sister had informed me of Santa’s lack of existence long ago. The others were just waiting until they heard movement, then we all gathered around the tree at the top of the stairs and opened presents for the dog and the cats, making as much noise as possible in order to make our parents get up, minutes seeming like hours.
My father ducked as we bowled him over, vaulting down the stairs as soon as he hollered “Merry Christmas!” Mom clicked the lever for auto-play on the turntable; Andy Williams’ Happy Holidays was usually the first album to drop, although it could as easily have been Elvis or the Beach Boys. She then put the Sara Lee coffee cake in the oven and cooked Brown and Serve Sausage while we opened our bulging stockings, which always held a toothbrush and an apple and an orange to offset the more sugary delectables. When we dove into the presents, which occupied two thirds of the first story of our house, it began to slow down. You could feel the appreciation of the moments. We’d stop and eat, look at each other’s things, trying to put off that moment when the last present, hiding beneath a huge pile of boxes and wrapping paper, had been ripped open and revealed. There was still the giant Christmas dinner to follow, resplendent with all-American turkey stuffed with bread dressing for my Yankee father, but the mood had begun to dim, the loss was already being felt. The thousands of carbohydrate-laden calories led to a sleepy evening that bled into days of less and less Christmas until Valentine’s Day rolled around and it seemed appropriate to start looking at the calendar and counting again.
When my grandfather died, an unspoken agreement was made, to keep the horror inside a locked steel vault and forget about it. My aunt told me, when recounting the story, that “all of us became like islands unto ourselves.” We were certainly not the first family to be given this legacy of stoicism. In fact, as Scots, we were predisposed. Yet tears and elation have an immense strength of their own, and always found their way out on Christmas morning. It was really the only time I ever saw this kind of excess from any of us, especially my father. He was happy enough in this life of restraint, I think. A love expressed quietly seems to have more weight, and it lingers. I have no doubt that he absolutely adored my mother, though I never saw them express it beyond a clockwork peck on the lips, mornings and evenings. And I can look back, and see his eyes looking back at me, so much like my grandmother’s, and mine, and I know he adored me, too.
My siblings and I all grew into similarly restrained people, who now find indirect means of expressing ourselves, and we do it well enough. In reflection, I think perhaps if his father hadn’t been killed, my dad might have lived his life as a joyful man. Instead, he became a quiet one. Something tells me this is all part of the natural balance of the world. The joy still lived inside my father, under a lid, in a box, that was just waiting to be unwrapped.
