The
father Matthew Raymond
July 1998
Having a father is like having a mythical creature: you grow up not understanding him—his habits, his reactions, his odd expressions, his strange epileptic fits, his extraordinary generative power—fully aware that he was made in some other time, when the world was different, the landscape, the people, the great cities rising up in his memory, stories in some vast connected body of experience to which you seem barely related, all the conflicts back then—among brothers, against parents, even between nations— laid out with great clarity and purpose. You marvel at his huge hard hands—such skin would never be yours—and those thin gray locks like archaic feathers, and his morning ablutions, his ritual of brushing and shaving and dressing, the sharp deliberate movements of his arms as he ties his tie, as he shoehorns his hard dry heels into his stiff black shoes, the same every morning. The way he chews his food at the table. The way he folds the newspaper. So original is his power that there is no father you could ever imagine him having, nor youth nor childhood nor infancy, as if he’d sprung fully formed from his own omnipotence. And so, like some tragic hero, inept and insane, you struggle against the imperfect bonds of his obtuse love, against his worried hope and repressed ambition. You seek to define yourself, to test your mettle in the slow fires of his deep obscure will, his unyielding strength, which as you grow you come to see not as strength but as weakness, as frailty, as humanity.
And thus he becomes real. The myth dissolves into mere novelistic uncertainty, into the common consciousness of maturity. And, as long enemies come to depend on each other, to admire and in fact require each other, so you are broken when they are gone. And when they die they become again like some absent god, legendary, longed for, storied . . .
All this I realize as I myself become a father, unable to explain myself to my own children. Because having a child is also like having a mythical creature, just as your own childhood hardens into a kind of dream-like myth. The child lives less in time, lives in a mythical time, time sloshes about him, moving differently at different moments. He floats upon it, swims through it, moves in oblong bent circles, some eternal. He gets lost in time. And so childhoods, like absent fathers, become myths, washing up on the shores of memory, perpetual waves that glitter evanescently against the dull over-foraged tick-tock country of mere day to day life. All we can do is remember.
§
After spending a long nearly penniless week in Paris and finally catching a cheap overnight flight from Orly to LAX, I spent the absolute last of my cash on a long memory-laden shuttle ride across the great L.A. basin, from the utterly contemporary airport down near the coast to the old Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, from which it was only a couple of miles’ walk to my father’s cottage. And how like an alien I felt sauntering among the sculpted lawns and gated drives of what I remember now as those elegant manicured mansions that lined the shaded streets around the hotel, although perhaps mansion is the wrong word. But my backpack felt conspicuous, and other aspects of my person would have as well, had I not lost all awareness, by that point, of my disheveled hair and unkempt beard, my utterly beaten shoes. I
want to remember fireworks, stars exploding and dying, the music of parades and the fanfare of a homecoming. But it was merely another bright hot southern California afternoon, a sheen of high cloud glaring across the sky and a gauzy golden haze fading out the familiar San Gabriel Mountains that rose above the city. A few Mercedes and BMWs cruised silently around the curves of those shaded streets and disappeared, and I noted how such wealth produced such silence: where was everyone? How was it possible, I wondered, to ascend to such affluence only to find yourself in such quiet? As if the true marker of wealth was its distance from ambient noise. After the places I’d been wandering for the past several months it struck me as a strange existence.
My father didn’t live among such riches, and I soon found myself passing along the grid of streets that ran up from Glenarm Street toward Colorado Boulevard and the freeway, streets lined with more modest homes and apartment buildings, fewer trees, more discreet lawns, some even faded to a sere brown, the curbsides lined with cars. My father had been living in a cottage on Marengo Avenue since his divorce from my mother was finalized a few years before, in one of those groups of bungalows that you find around L.A.: a hedge along the sidewalk behind which two rows of small houses stood facing each other across a grass-lined walkway, with a larger two-story house divided into apartments rising in the back. His was the last one on the right, under a towering pine tree that gave a good bit of shade, and before knocking I slung my backpack down on the narrow porch beside the potted plants and the wicker chair where I knew he liked to sit and have a drink on a warm summer evening. I think I’d sent him a note from Paris saying I’d show up sometime in the next week or two, though I was unable to give a specific date. So while my arrival was somewhat expected, there was also an element of surprise to it. I can’t quite recall our greeting that afternoon, neither his words nor mine, whether we embraced (in the awkward way that we’d developed once I’d
grown and left home, and since he’d become a bachelor) or merely shook hands, the great grip of his wiry arm sending his palpable joy straight through me. But if I close my eyes I can see now his wide gray-bearded grin through the screen of the door as he came forward to unlatch it, and I can hear his laugh, and I’m sure, for a brief time at least, that a genuine happiness enveloped us: myself in a state of worldly travel-worn bliss, having returned from long and distant wanderings to a place with which I was intimately familiar (the city itself, as well as my father’s house, though it wasn’t my childhood home); and he in the old age elation of welcoming his youngest child back to his retiring bungalow, the small house that he claimed—prophetically upon moving in—would be the house he would die in. Eleven years later I would make another arrival, late in the evening from the Burbank airport, to find one of my older half-sisters—my father’s first child in fact—helping him off the toilet in the small tiled bathroom of that house. I recall so clearly his smile then too, looking up at me from his shrinking face as he leaned on the sink and as I bent to put an arm under his shoulder to help him back to his bed. He couldn’t walk on his own at all at that point and was glad to see me. I suppose he knew what was happening. It had been a month since I had seen him the previous Christmas, and while during the holiday he had shown signs of rapid decline—barely able to walk without the help of a cane or one of his children, leaning on every wall and doorway as he moved around his house, his stature bending as if under a great weight even as his already thin body seemed to grow thinner and thinner—now, a month later, he was even worse. As I stepped into the bathroom to help him I saw that he had trouble raising his head and his normally light blue eyes had faded to a pale gray and they moved oddly in their sockets, one of them seeming to have come unmoored from its tendons and wandering off to the side. The lesions on his skin from the lymphoma had spread, mostly on his legs and arms but also on his torso, and though a nurse
had been coming every few days to change the wrappings, the blood and puss had soaked through and he looked like a mummy coming to life, astounded at his embalming. Nonetheless, when I arrived that night he smiled at me, both with acute pleasure at the fact that another of his children had arrived to assist with his care and also with slight embarrassment at himself, the indignity of decay and oncoming death causing him a mortification of spirit as well as of body, at which he could only give a wry laugh. After I had helped him to his bed later that night I sat in the little kitchen with two of my three older half-sisters and we discussed what was happening. Looking back now I see how naïve I still was, even then. His death was imminent, would happen in fact two days later, and yet until it actually came to pass a part of me thought it never would. Until we were there at his bedside, in that cottage, three of his five children—his oldest, his middle child, and myself, his youngest—holding his hands and listening to the dry rattle begin in his throat, until my sister looked at me across the bed through red watering eyes and drew my attention to how slow his breathing had become, to how long the inhalations were, the exhalations, the great gaps of silence between them, until she wept and spoke of all the memories that are lost when someone dies, memories of her own mother, who was not mine—until that moment I somehow thought (if I thought about it at all) that things would just go on.
But that was later. The evening I arrived from Paris he was still his usual spry self. At that time the cutaneous T cell lymphoma was already beginning to erupt in welts and sores on his shins but in a minor and very manageable way. I’m sure we sat in his small living room that evening and drank wine, which he’d always been a strong believer in. I imagine he sat composed in his leather chair—his reading lamp burning above his head, his feet up on the ottoman—while I lounged in my long thin frame on the love seat
opposite. Those initial moments after my return seem moments I would like to live again, if only because I have trouble seeing them clearly. I don’t know that we were any more open with each other than at other times; but I imagine the feeling of comfort and of accomplishment was at its height. Did I share with him episodes of my journey? Did he even ask about where I had been and what I had seen, places he had never gone and never would? I was in my twenty-sixth summer, four years out of college, uninterested in a career, a chronic scribbler of poetry that no one ever read, a devotee of certain obscure writers, a moderate marijuana user; he was in his seventy-sixth, a child of the Great Depression, made a man at a young age by the crucible of World War II, a Roosevelt man, a Kennedy man, and I see now that he likely had little ability to understand me. He was, of course, glad that I was back in California, glad that I was under his roof; but I don’t recall that I could even explain to him where I was coming from, what I wanted, or that he even knew how to ask. Though we were much closer than we’d ever been, closer than at any point in my childhood or adolescence, I must have seemed in some respects like an alien, this tall reticent figure—taller than him, much more reticent— whose sensitivities he’d never quite gotten his head around. When he was twenty-six it was 1948, he was a couple of years back from the war, married, his first child already born, living in the same railroad flats of Astoria, New York, where he’d grown up. He’d often referred to the war as his “great adventure,” and I see clearly that it was: a poor kid, oldest boy of eight children, his father a crippled musician, his family on welfare, his mother—a proud and emotionally frigid woman—picking up the government handouts and transferring the food, out of shame, into bags from the grocery story before carrying them home. But the war was not only an exit from all that: it was, in a way, a coming to life of all the adventure stories he’d grown up reading: Robert Louis Stevenson’s tales of
the South Pacific, as well as Mutiny on the Bounty, Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick. I remember those books, and many others which he’d kept, lining the shelves of various bookcases in our house, and the N.C. Wyeth illustrations of those glorious tropical islands, clouds like kingdoms, storybook waters, pirates and wayfarers ranging across dreamlike landscapes of shadow and light. And I remember his chest of drawers, so much taller than me when I was a child, and reaching up and into the top drawer, among his redolent handkerchiefs and tee shirts, to find the old bayonet he’d kept, the smooth wooden handle, the heavy green sheath, the dull dark blade. And in the leather box on top, among his rings and cufflinks and tiepins, he kept a couple of medals and a headshot of himself as a young twenty-something, in his private’s uniform, the overseas cap tilted rakishly on his head and his jaw squared, his pose self-consciously intense, the put-on seriousness of youth, as if he had a clear sense of himself as the stoic hero of some storybook exploit. Or maybe the war had in fact already shown him things he couldn’t unsee, maybe the look is genuine. I don’t know when exactly the picture was taken so I can’t be sure, and my father didn’t tell us many war stories growing up. Once as a young child, too young to understand, I naively asked him how many Japs he’d killed. He merely glared angrily at me before turning away. But it was from that cufflink box, not long after his divorce, when I was still in college and he was living briefly in an upstairs apartment overlooking a parking lot and the back of another apartment building in San Gabriel, not far from my parents’ house which had recently sold, that he took a small cardboard ring box, handing it to me without looking inside. I opened it and found what looked like two small pebbles, misshapen little stones. You know what those are? he asked. I looked at them curiously. They were oddly familiar, with what appeared to be a rind of dull brassy metal along one side. What are they? I said. He took the box and
peered into it through his bifocals, his eyebrows raised in faint surprise at his ancient past. They’re teeth, he said, Japanese teeth. That’s gold. He pointed. We would use the butts of our rifles and knock them from the corpses we came across. He looked at me, trying to gauge my reaction, then shook his head. In disbelief? In shame? I wasn’t sure. We didn’t know if we would be alive or dead the next day, he said. Since then I’ve always had a vision of my father as a young man, younger than I was then, standing in the steaming jungle of some South Pacific island, a pack on his back and his M1 carbine hanging from his grim hands. He bends over the fallen body of an enemy soldier—a young man much like himself no doubt, driven far from home by desire, by ideals, by whatever convoluted circumstances conspire to send young men forth to meet their destinies—and he rummages through the pockets for any keepsakes of value. And after a quick word to his comrades, who are probably engaged in some similar activity nearby, he straightens up, plants his feet, raises the rifle, and then firmly slams the butt into the inert jaw: a gruesome thump, after which he pushes his dirty fingers into the soft still-moist mouth and fishes out a treasure, the dull glint of gold in his lined palm. A poor kid from Astoria, New York, on a jungle island half-way around the world, sending his checks home to his mother. And so perhaps that night, the night of my return, we got a little into our cups, as he might say. After sharing most of a bottle of wine he probably took me to some restaurant up on Colorado Boulevard and encouraged me to order anything I wanted, as if I was starved or malnourished. It was his way of showing both his affection, I suppose, and his pride at the comfortable pension that his more than forty years at New York Life Insurance Company had earned him. I’m sure we drank more wine. And afterward back at the house in the dark of evening, in his pajamas, he might have poured himself a glass of sherry or liqueur, sitting for a while
in his chair with the windows open to the cooling night. I’m glad to have you home, he might have said, looking up at me, his broad smile conveying a sincerity that spoke to his old-age loneliness as much as to his paternal pride. Though one of my sisters lived not far away, and though he would never have complained openly, he was often lonely in those years, as most of his children were far away and he lived alone, a prospect which I’m sure he wouldn’t have predicted for himself.
§
My father slept in the smaller bedroom near the bathroom and kitchen and saved the larger back room for guests: his children, or sometimes his almost grown grandchildren who once in a while came for a visit. It was a bright room with a double bed and large windows, some of which opened out onto a lawn between his cottage and the larger house that stood at the end of the property. The yard was green and leafy, well-shaded by a large Chinese elm, and more and more when I returned to southern California in those days—after having left more or less permanently years before, attempting to finish my growing up in the north, where it was cooler and greener and somehow more conducive to reflection, contemplation, solace—I was made aware of how sultry the weather could be down there, especially in summer, when you could sleep with the windows open to the warm darkness and the pulsing of crickets would flood the night and lull you to sleep, and you might hear a neighbor’s conversation drifting across the driveway or over a fence, unintelligible and yet somehow soothing. Lying there that first night back in my father’s house, I was reminded of such isolated moments of my childhood and of the wide lawn of my parents’ house, the utter calm and comfort that Southern California suburbia could concoct: the white noise
of sprinklers in the evening, the smell of fresh-cut grass, a radio low in another room or one side of a telephone conversation regarding idle adult things that were no concern of mine.
The next morning I woke in that room with bright sunlight flooding the curtained windows. I lay a moment listening to my father in the kitchen, the kettle rattling on the stove, a spoon scraping a bowl. He’d been up for hours, I was sure, and I could imagine him at the breakfast table poised over the newspaper with his tea, as he had been every morning of my childhood. I seem to remember lying in the cool silence, letting my eyes wander over the bookcase that stood in the corner by the door, the spines of many of those volumes familiar from my childhood, though they were only a fraction of his original collection (Ivanhoe, Beau Geste, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, War and Peace, the collected works of Joseph Conrad in a series of leather-bound volumes . . . ).
My eyes then fell on the small desk between the windows which was adorned with various photographs: my own uncomfortable smile flashing out at me from my high school graduation portrait, shy beside my brother’s more radiant one; my much older halfsisters and their children—my father’s grandchildren—in various configurations, snapshots from family gatherings, group shots on front lawns; a picture of my aunt, my father’s older sister, with whom he was close, the only one of his siblings who’d also moved to the west coast from New York. There was no picture of my mother, of course. In fact, on the dresser in his own bedroom I knew he had instead placed an old black and white picture of his first wife, a photograph with which I was familiar but which, naturally, had not been on display when my parents were married. Now that they were divorced my father seemed to be returning, through a kind of tender nostalgia that I hadn’t known he was capable of, to some earlier time, setting things to rights that had been displaced or pushed aside by his marriage to my mother. His
first wife Betty had died, rather suddenly, in 1968 in New York, causing a domestic explosion of which I was a mere satellite, and her presence has hung strangely over my existence, and over that of my entire family, like a kind of silent doom through all our years. My father once described to me, in a letter he wrote in response to one of mine soon after my own parents’ divorce (the first and only letter I’ve ever written to my father), a bit about his first marriage, and about Betty’s illness and death, and though I had known the basic facts since I was a child, reading his account revealed a version of my father I hadn’t really been able to see, as if a small light had been turned on which illuminated a figure I hadn’t known was there and which, as I’ve grown older, I find myself only belatedly able to understand:
We grew up on 42nd Street in Astoria and knew each other as children—in a limited sense we were childhood sweethearts but never dated until the onslaught of World War II. By then I was eighteen and Betty seventeen. Strangely, we had the same birthday, April 16. Even stranger, Betty died on our birthday, April 16, 1968.
Betty was an Irish Catholic of her times, as was John, her brother. Saturday afternoon confessions, if not every week, at least once a month or you were in sin. Sunday mass on an empty stomach so you could receive the Lord’s body and blood without a taint of previous nourishment. Our wedding vows were administered in the church rectory and not in the church proper because I was not a Catholic. Mixed marriages they called them and they were frowned upon by Rome and very much discouraged . . .
The letter goes on to describe Betty’s personality, which he wrote of in very admiring terms, giving examples of the kinds of compliments friends would give him about her and subtly revealing a sort of affectionate pride that never showed itself when I was a
child. “She had a warm tender innocence, a wholesomeness that intrigued people and went straight to their hearts. Babies were her passion. She was not a take charge person, but inclined to shyness.” Near the end of the letter he surprised me by giving a stoic and moving account of her illness and sudden death. “Betty had always worried about cancer,” the letter reads,
She would read all the women’s magazine articles about female medical problems. I’ve always wondered if she had a premonition.
In her forty fourth year, February 1967, she was not well. It was determined that she needed a hysterectomy, so the surgery was performed. A tumor was removed from the colon and no malignancy was found. Fourteen months later, after many months of back pains and worry, she reentered the hospital, having passed blood, and an exploratory surgery was performed.
When I saw the expression on the surgeon’s face as he gave us the report, I knew it was bad. Betty had inoperative cancer and it was only a question of time that it would kill her. Well, she never came home. She was conscious the morning of the operation, but she did not believe me when I told her everything was going to be alright. Her hospital bed was next to the window, looking down on a garden full of yellow jonquils, one of her favorite flowers. She stared at them for some time and then commented on their beauty. A short time later she was comatose and was put on oxygen to help her breathe easier. The cancer in her spine had traveled to her brain. The following afternoon she died having never regained consciousness. It was her birthday. Our birthday.
In the photograph on my father’s dresser, which that morning I pondered as I made my way to the kitchen, she is smiling rather selfconsciously, a hint of diffidence about her person, as if she perhaps didn’t enjoy being the center of attention but somehow hadn’t the
means to refuse to have her picture taken. She is pretty, I suppose, though it’s hard to tell from one photograph. I can recall only one other of her, another old black and white in which she and my father are dressed up at some social function or other, sometime in the early sixties probably. He, clean-shaven and freshly barbered, is beaming that broad enthusiastic grin of his (the one my brother inherited), and she is beside him with her more retiring smile, a string of pearls around her neck. In my memory of the picture neither are looking at the camera, but their attentions are drawn to different places: his to some engaging compliment, perhaps, off to the left of the camera, and she to some flattering gaze off to the right. The effect is that they seem surrounded by adoring fans. A shy elegance hovers about them, a genuine happiness, a look I can’t recall seeing in pictures of him with my mother, where his older grayer face, beneath a rather forced grin, usually conveyed some subtle preoccupation, some unexpressed thought, some clench about the mouth.
The other photograph he kept on his dresser, opposite the one of his first wife and in keeping with his retrospective state of mind in those years, was a portrait he’d had taken after he’d come home from the war. He is wearing his dress uniform, his Private’s stripes proudly stitched to the shoulder of the coat I remember pulling from his closet as a child and draping over my own shoulders, the heavy olive-green wool, the musty closet smell of it. It was one of the few things he would keep from the war, in addition to the bayonet and the Japanese teeth and, of course, his epilepsy, the onset of which occurred soon after he’d returned and which the doctors at the time assumed was a result of the numerous bouts of malaria he’d endured overseas, sweating out 108-degree fevers in various evac hospitals in Fiji and New Caledonia. In that coat in that post-war photograph he appears much more mature than in the one he used to keep in his cufflink box. Whatever horrors
of combat he endured are buried under an air of confidence, a kind of mild optimism lurking in his eyes. His expression is forward looking, accomplished, humbly proud. He had done right by his family and by his country and was about to embrace with confidence all the promises of American life. Whatever misfortunes awaited him, I imagine him thinking, would be few and utterly bearable in comparison to the past four years.
In the small kitchen I found my father with his newspaper and tea sitting in the narrow breakfast nook. The sun was filling the window over the sink and the smell of toast hung in the air. He offered to cook me oatmeal, put out some fruit and poured some tea, and I sat opposite him in the nook, looking up at the mirror hanging above the table, or rather looking at all the photographs that, over the past few years, he’d stuck into the frame. More family, mostly kids and grandkids, a few more distant nieces and nephews who must have contacted him in his later years, cousins of mine from back east who I knew by name but had never met. I see clearly now how, at that point in his life, he was in a more or less permanently reflective mood, constantly surrounding himself with mementos of his long life and ruminating on those memories as they wandered and wallowed and turned themselves over in his unhurried mind, and somehow he wanted me to share in that contemplative mood, unable to understand that at twentysix, having accomplished almost nothing, my anxieties about my own predicament were more than I could handle and they left no room for empathizing with this aging sometimes alien figure who was my father. And more and more I recognize a great sense of belatedness coloring my childhood and my youth, as if I was living in the epilogue of a long and strange novel that I would never truly be able to read. My father poured more tea and we sat and spoke idly of current events, whatever was on the front page of the L.A. Times—Serbian forces invading Kosovo, some Congressional
action or inaction, the Kenneth Starr investigation . . . As I sat there I noticed among the photographs of family one that clearly did not belong. It was of a dark-skinned late middle-aged man, graying hair under the mesh of a ball cap, his face turning away from the camera, a sleeping bag and a dull almost worn out backpack overstuffed with clothes lying behind him on a bus stop bench, a dirty paper cup gripped in his hand. Who is that? I asked. My father turned and looked up at the photo. He gave a laugh, his amused embarrassment, and explained that the man’s name was Carlos and he was one of the homeless people that my father had come to know from his morning walks. My father left routinely at six or six-thirty, while the city was still dim and cool, striding down Del Mar to Lake Avenue and then up to Colorado or Walnut, looping back down Los Robles or maybe through Old Town, stopping for coffee somewhere along the way, and in those days he always carried around one of those cheap disposable cameras that were available at the time. I kept seeing him, my father said, you know, and we started to recognize each other. I wanted to take his picture and he didn’t want me to, he said. He’d taken the photo down from the mirror and held it before him, peering through his bifocals at it. Somehow my father became acquainted with Carlos, had several conversations with him. The man even, at some point not long before my father’s death, showed up at his house, maybe knowing that he wasn’t doing well, or maybe noticing that he hadn’t been out on his usual walk for quite a while. According to my father Carlos was from Brazil and had a PhD in philosophy or economics or something. He’s homeless by choice, my father said, fascinated by such a decision. He’s extremely intelligent, I’m not sure if there’s something wrong with him up here, he tapped his head, but he knows things, when you talk to him he really knows things. My father, though a habitual reader—of news, of novels, of reviews—had never had any education beyond high school,
and he was deeply impressed by degrees. There was a woman, he said, girlfriend or something, I don’t know, but she’s part of the reason—the main reason, actually—that he chooses to live on the streets. Later, after my father’s death, we found among his photos and papers a post-card, written in a careful clear hand, from Carlos, and also a copy of a poem Carlos had written, apparently for this woman he was in love with. The post-card crankily informed my father that he should keep his damn camera to himself, although it’s possible the note was tongue-in-cheek, and the fact that Carlos had, as I said, come to visit my father before his death suggests there was a mutual admiration, or at least an understanding. My father must have trusted him enough to have given him his address at some point, and Carlos, for whatever reason, gave my father a copy of the poem. Printed in the same flawless though somehow foreign handwriting, it was a lament for the loss of love, written in praise of the woman’s beauty and integrity, a commitment to her regardless of circumstance. It sat rather strangely, after my father’s death, among his family photos and financial papers. Oddly, there were other photographs of other homeless people that turned up in my father’s photo albums, which he’d begun keeping after my parents’ divorce, a kind of visual record of his strange new independent life. The albums were peculiar and my siblings and I talked about them and wondered at the strange inner life of my father that they revealed: somewhat chronologically among pictures of visits from his family—his kids, his grandkids, and his own visits to his sister in Malibu, his infrequent excursions back east or up north—were scattered poorly composed snapshots of street people, along with pictures of construction sites that he passed on his morning walks: cranes, earth movers, the steel frames of apartment houses or office buildings jutting up into early morning skies. A fascination with buildings in their embryonic states, a bold staring at the wretchedness of homeless men and
women with all their filthy cargo who stared back with sun-burnt grimaces or disheveled looks of confusion, a peculiar interest in whatever a man might see who walks the same circuit on a daily basis through a city that both grows and regenerates and thrives but also sweats and rots and stinks: all of this mixed in with the smiles of my family, often washed out by the bad flash of those cheap cardboard cameras he used, often poorly focused. When I look back through those albums now, or even as I’m sure I did on that visit, I have a strange impression of pride, curiosity, eccentricity, and loneliness. My father was no Cartier-Bresson or Winogrand; the street scenes he shot feel uncomposed, purely documentary, simple facts with no story to them; but taken together, and viewed alongside sisters and brothers and cousins and grandchildren, friends and relatives, they create an impression of my father’s life and concerns: meditations of anomalous isolated points and counterpoints of a man near the end of his days, looking back maybe, looking around, approaching the inevitable. Wondering how different it all might have been, perhaps, if circumstances had turned one way instead of another. Despite the poor composition of these photographs, my father had always had an eye for art, a fact of which I was reminded that morning as I took in, after breakfast, the variety of things he had hanging on his walls. He had a certain taste for exotic sculpture, indigenous African statuary, foreign masks, somewhat impressionistic paintings; he enjoyed having evocative things around him which stirred his imagination or impressed his mind in some way. And there was a surprising refinement to his taste. Above one of the loveseats in his living room was a large print of Monet’s Water Lilies, and on other walls throughout the house I want to remember other pictures, many familiar from my parents’ home before the divorce: a two-tone lithograph of a streetcar in red and black, a pair of elegant pen-and-ink
portraits of Native Americans, a small etching of a world map in mirrored silver, a Chagall print called The Accordionist which I’ve always thought of as somehow angelic with its recumbent yellow musician floating in a white void above a choir of blue figures, a large orange bird recumbent in the air beside him, the colors all sliding carelessly outside the lines as if the entire montage were in motion. It is surprising, then, to realize, as I did on that trip, that even though he surrounded himself with such loose lightdriven images, many of which breathed a spontaneity and a deep human joy, the sensibility that comes through in the pictures my father himself created in pen and marker throughout most of my childhood is extraordinarily exact, however fantastical they were: precise colorful and oddly imaginative drawings that could never settle themselves between animal or robot, sailing ship or space craft, planet or nebulae, but rather twisted on the paper somewhere in between. These pictures, which he was always pleased to suggest could be hung with any orientation at the top, and which he for some unknown reason stopped making after his retirement and divorce—despite all the free time he then had— were well known in the family and might be found still on the walls of the homes of his children and grandchildren spread about the country. The colors were bold and electric and always tightly contained within sharp hard lines that, though bowed and arched with a kind of stylish grace, rarely faded or became indecisive or suggested haste or confusion or doubt or carelessness. Perfectly articulated tails curved off of metallic-looking fuselages, eyes rose like suns above inverted lids that stretched towards the viewer to become the desert plains of distant planets, antennae jutted out from the windowed bulwarks of vessels that effected a whale-like elegance and seemed to be streaming through an empty cosmos or an endless sea. In none of the images he made was there ever a person or a face or a human figure, a fact that occurred to me only
later, when I pondered some of the pieces that had come to me after his death. That morning, though, I’m sure I admired some of these works that he must have had hanging up somewhere in that house. I can see myself standing before them, in the dim living room, in the bright bedroom, letting their elegant lines and eccentric suggestions take me back to my childhood, to the dark paneled family room where my father might be sitting at his desk with his pens and markers, imagining these other worlds and other creatures as the hard silence or the fuming echoes of my parents’ uncomfortable marriage lingered elsewhere in the house. That feeling surrounds me still, as I think back to that visit and try to recall how it ended. I don’t really remember how we spent the rest of that first day, or the days after, now that I think about it. My father’s life at that point had a narrow circumscribed quality to it that didn’t allow for much deviation from routine. Perhaps we went to the Norton Simon museum to look at the latest exhibition. Perhaps we went to the Huntington Library to admire the gardens. I don’t know. But before long, within days, a kind of boredom set in, a restlessness driven, I realize now, by the aimlessness of my existence, by the uncertainty that had become my defining characteristic and which the proximity of my father’s mute concern only exacerbated. We spent hours reading silently in his living room. We watched the news together in the evenings, commenting idly on events, agreeing politically as we always did. The longer I spent there, however, the less there was to hold us together, and therefore the less there was to say. A great many things had always gone unspoken between us, it seemed, but in that week a deeper silence grew up around me and my father as we exhausted the pleasantries of our reunion and as the question of what I was going to do next began to linger, unasked, behind our interactions. I recall one evening at a Thai restaurant in Old Town when I provoked, through my own unavoidable and
uncomfortable reticence, a worried questioning from my father. I can’t remember the specifics of the interaction, only the utter bleakness that was growing on me and that had me, there in the restaurant, for reasons I couldn’t explain, on the verge of tears. It had something to do with being home and with my future and with America and the feeling that everything was dead. What the hell’s the matter with you? my father said, as I sat there trying to choke back sobs, unable to speak. I don’t remember how that conversation ended, only that those same feelings were with me the next day when I borrowed my father’s car and drove up to the high desert city of Lancaster to visit a friend from college.
§
The view of southern California from the freeway has often filled me with a kind of revulsion and dread, but that morning it seemed especially bleak, despite the fact that the sun was shining, the sky was perfectly clear, and the traffic flowed gracefully along the eternal gray ribbons of concrete that seemed, I’ve always thought, to hold the entire sprawling place together. The brown wastes of the mountains rose up around the 210 freeway as I went up through La Cañada and Montrose and then down through Tujunga and Sylmar where the rooftops of newer developments lay clustered along the verges of the dry hills in the distance, and I wondered who could bring themselves to live in those neighborhoods, which gave off such a feeling of impermanence and contingency and loneliness, empty as they were in the middle of the day, that I actually shuddered as I contemplated their repetitive lines and slate vistas. Here and there, near the edges of these developments, or in between them, could be seen a squat old ranch house, a corral with a few indolent horses standing dully in the heat, as if oppressed by the memory of what the valley
used to be. Going north on I-5 the desert slowly took over, and as I passed up California 14 toward Antelope Valley the landscape became more lunar, a wild inhuman desiccation rising up around the highway and the few paltry estates that lay scattered along it. Antelope Valley is a high wide plain that stretches north of the mountains toward the Mojave Desert and as I crested the rise on the edge of Palmdale I could see that municipality stretch out in its perfect treeless grid across the immense expanse like some kind of remote Martian colony. Everything seemed so still up there that morning, the few cars moving silently along the burning streets, the heat pressing down from the empty sky. I followed the directions my friend had given me along wide avenues that had only letters or numbers for names, past strip malls and isolated liquor stores standing forlornly beside vacant lots of sagebrush and Joshua trees, and eventually through neighborhoods where each house resembled its neighbor to a horrifying degree, some with green lawns and a spindly tree tied to a pole, others where the grass had died, the yard seeming to have surrendered helplessly to the desert’s implacable certainty.
When I pulled up in front of his house Gordon greeted me from the garage, which is where we spent the majority of the day, smoking pot and cigarettes and playing guitar. Gordon was about my height but weighed, I’m guessing, close to three hundred pounds, maybe more, and he wore the nickname he’d been given as a child—Gordo—as nonchalantly as his girth. We made an odd pair, my thin anxious interiority squarely juxtaposed with his sturdier indifference to larger questions; but somehow, after all the drunkenness and nonsense of college he was one of the few people with whom I still kept in touch. He could sense, I’m sure, the state I was in when I arrived, but of course young men (much like old men) don’t understand how to open themselves to empathy or compassion with each other, only bristle with a cool awareness, an
impatient evasiveness. And so, after our initial greeting, followed by the prompt and unquestioned cracking open of a couple of midmorning beers, his What the fuck’s wrong with you, dude? was casually brushed aside with a cagey Whatever, or an I don’t know, man, a terse Nothing, maybe a nervous laugh to move it along. What could I say? That my few years of wandering through far off places, among other languages, other economies, had brought me here, to these sterile exurban scapes of stucco and sod—a place I thought of at that time as cultureless, a product of pure unfiltered capitalism, carried forward by nothing but some bottom line and a few vague implied promises—seemed such a strange disenchantment that again I found myself inwardly shuddering, worrying a sharp knot of sickness in my gut. Gordo seemed to have no interest in where I’d been, in what I’d been doing. I don’t think he even asked. And, of course, what could I have told him? We fell, almost instantly, right back into the familiar glib patter and sardonic back and forth that characterized most of our interactions in college. What we talked about I couldn’t tell you— music, guitars, the few friends from college he was still in touch with. He occupied the lawn chair opposite the card table with the stolid certainty of a king on his throne, wise in his unknowing, drawing his power, it seemed, from the water heater behind him and from the tool bench, from the washing machine and dryer, and packing the bowl of his bong with certain careful refined gestures before passing the device over to me with a quick nod of the head. Come on, Denmark, he said, sensing my initial reluctance, you need this. He’d begun calling me Denmark years ago, soon after we met—a reference, of course, to Shakespeare’s brooding prince, whom, because of a certain ambivalent or morbid state of mind that even in college often settled on me and for which he had little patience, he thought I resembled. I was into my second beer at that point. It was nearing eleven o’clock and the heat outside the garage
was swelling. I suppose I didn’t care. Or maybe I wanted not to care, wanted the weed to authenticate within me whatever pretensions to casualness I aspired to. I took the bong, slowly exhaled all of the air from my lungs, then proceeded to light the bowl and suck the smoke up through the water. I released the carb and inhaled, coughing out an opaque sweet fume. After we each had taken several hits we began noodling around on the old acoustic guitars that Gordo had brought out from the house, very unscrewed versions of “Out on the Weekend,” (“See the lonely boys . . . ”) or maybe “Memory of Free Festival” (“Children of the summer’s end . . . ”), whose oddly configured chord changes kept breaking down under my increasingly clammy and self-conscious fingers. I’m sure Gordo and I had a few laughs as we banged through one chord progression after another. I think he ordered a pizza. Time, which before had stood at such sharp attention, unfolded, settled, resumed a languorous heedless pace, and eventually the day—hot, calm, quiet across the midday suburb—squandered itself like so many others had before it. By late afternoon, when it was time for me to be leaving, I felt pleasantly high, somewhat self-assured, a feeling which, as it faded, would carry me through the rest of the day and back along the late afternoon freeway, back to my father’s house. As I shook Gordo’s hand he pulled me in for a hug. I told him we’d hang out soon, but in fact it would be many years before we would see each other again. As I pulled away from the house he stood in the doorway of the garage with an impassive certainty, as if he was sure the day would bring him exactly what he wanted.
§
I got a cup of coffee at a drive-thru and sipped it in the car. The L.A. sun dissolved before me in a bed of golden smog as I descended back down the 14 and the I-5 and its light burnished the
barren hills around me, that time of day that could turn even the most inhospitable scenery into a gauzy dreamscape. The traffic flowed easily and the car felt like an extension of myself, humming along, content in the journey, oblivious of the destination. It was almost dark, but still warm, when I pulled down the narrow driveway behind my father’s row of cottages and parked his car in the old garage. I wasn’t very high anymore but felt a strange serenity flowing through me, as if my trip to Gordo’s had purged me of some afflicting toxin.
In the living room, already in his pajamas, my father was reading under the lamp that stood over his chair while the classical music station played softly from the radio on the other side of the room. He greeted me with a smile, asked how my day had been, offered me a glass of sherry, which he often took in the evenings. Oddly, I accepted. It always struck me as an old man’s drink, but, as I had decided that this would be my last night there, I thought I should share a moment with him. He poured out two small glasses and we sat sipping, he in his leather chair under the lamp, me on the love seat opposite. The awkwardness that had gone between us in the past few days seemed to hover in the air still, but there appeared to be a tacit agreement, as always, that we wouldn’t address it, and the restraint of our conversation allowed the gentle pulsing of the crickets to filter into the lamplit room. He had been reading through the whole series of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels for the second time and we spoke briefly about them: the doctor and the captain, the long voyages, their conversation, their music, the sailing terminology . . . When I think about my father’s reading and the quiet enthusiasm with which he spoke of certain books, it all seems shot through with the romance of the sea: Stevenson, Melville, Conrad, and in those last years, O’Brian—and often the image of a sailing ship, or some version of a sailing ship, in his own pictures: billowing sails against a cresting wave in a rather modernist-looking painting
from before I was born, the strange science-fiction ships that drifted through the drawings in marker that as a child I watched him make . . . He loved those O’Brian books and would go on to read all twenty of them a third time before he died. It seems in the last ten years of his life he read little else, and I sometimes like to imagine what pleasure he took in O’Brian’s sentences, with their careful elongations, clauses unfolding from each other in elegant sophisticated turns, like the waves of the sea itself, or like, in some ways, the lines of my father’s own drawings: precise and certain yet full of movement, one unspooling from the next, slowing time down to a meditative graceful pace. My father was inarticulate about so much, and yet I’m sure he felt the artistry and intelligence at work in such sentences, like the following one from O’Brian’s final unfinished and untitled manuscript, which he was working on when he died; in it, Stephen Maturin, the ship’s doctor and Captain Jack Aubrey’s great friend, just as they’ve passed through the Straits of Magellan and immediately after he’d dressed the wound of one of the ship’s boys who’d nearly knocked himself out weilding a heavy maul, has sat down at his writing desk in his cabin to finish a letter to his “dear Christine”: “At first sitting down he had meant to tell her, with what skill he could command, of the extraordinary beauty of the weather and of the Strait, generally so forbidding: he should certainly have spoken of the favorable wind that had allowed them to keep top gallant sails abroad ever since the morning watch; but above all he should have dwelt upon the happiness that filled the ship, homeward bound after a very long arduous and most uncommonly dangerous voyage, a well-found ship commanded by a right seaman, a well-liked, deeply respected fighting captain who, moreover, was soon to hoist his flag.” Or this one, from page 114 of the sixteenth book in the series, The Wine-Dark Sea, whose protracted description of the weather I can imagine my father dreaming his way into, seeing himself there at
the railing, in some more adventurous time, at the crest of some courageous moment:
While the forefront of the squall enveloped them and for quite long after its extreme violence had passed on ahead, time had little meaning; but as the enormous rain dwindled to little more than a shower and the wind returned to its strong steady southeast course, the men at the wheel eased their powerful grip, breathing freely and nodding to one another and the sodden quartermaster; the sheets were hauled aft, and the ship, jetting rainwater from her scuppers, sailed on, accompanied for some time by low cloud that thinned and thinned and then quite suddenly revealed high blue sunlit sky: a few minutes later the sun himself heaved out of the lead-coloured bank to larboard.
Perhaps, like me, my father thought himself born for another century, when travel was more a slow movement through time and time moved at a more human pace and the world was less a virtual dream and more a mapless eternity to be wandered through. I sipped the sherry and suggested he might do some traveling in his retirement, that he go back to Fiji and the Solomon Islands, a trip he occasionally expressed an interest in, revisiting the sites of the miraculous war exploits of his youth, experiencing the sea he’d spent so much of his life reading about. I’d like to, someday, he said, but then immediately, with a slightly self-conscious smile, he let the idea drop, and I knew that there was nothing left to say about it. I sometimes wonder if it would’ve been painful for him to return to those places. Though he would speak with a nostalgic fondness of those islands, and of the native peoples he encountered there—their smiles, their songs—he was not, as I’ve said, one to discuss the war in much detail. Maybe there was some lingering guilt or shame that he couldn’t bring himself to revisit. I thought again of the little box of gold teeth.
And so the conversation stalled. At some point, after a long pause, I broached, without looking him in the eye, the subject of my leaving. I think I’m going to head up to Santa Cruz tomorrow, I said, I can stay with some friends up there. I didn’t clarify that I wouldn’t be returning any time soon, but he must have understood. He nodded. And then he leaned forward and said, Why don’t you let me drive you. I demurred. Over the last several years, after traveling through Mexico and Europe and Morocco, I’d become accustomed to buses and trains, and although that wasn’t the most convenient way to get around California, I preferred it. I liked the idea of journeying among strangers, and I liked having to adapt myself to some predetermined schedule over which I had no control, as if I was dependent upon the tides or waiting for certain stars to align, plotting timetables and transit connections in distance places; it gave some dimensions under which I could operate and seemed to liberate me from the oppressive burden of absolute freedom. The other more obvious reason, which didn’t come up, was that I needed to get away on my own, away from my father, to be free of the silent concerned questioning that lingered always behind our interactions. You don’t have to do that, I said, I’ll take the Greyhound. He didn’t like this idea, but the mute tension between us withered away his protests, allowing the crickets to again fill up the edges of the silence in the room. We just sat, absorbing the moment, our ineptness awkward yet familiar, a radiant dull guest who would not speak and yet would not be dismissed.
That stubborn quiet, as I write about it now, reminds me of another, the last, even more potent: eleven years later, over the Christmas holiday and a month before he died, we sat in that same room, in the same positions, he in his leather chair under the lamp, its limited glow the only light in the room, and myself on the small love seat at the edge of shadow, the dark cold of late December pressing against the windows outside. His doctor had
recently told him his cutaneous T cell lymphoma, which he had been living with and managing for several years, was spreading aggressively. His body was deteriorating, and fast, and he needed help to just get around the house, to prepare food, to bathe himself, jobs my older sisters had begun taking on. Sitting there in the dimness of his quaint little house, in that stilted but familiar silence—a silence that these days I sometimes long for—he spoke without looking at me: Well, Matt, he said, pretending to adjust one of his bandages, his tone conveying a kind of refracted fear, do you think I’m dying? The moment seized up before me: I did not rise to it. Nervously I brushed the question aside, suggesting that we not jump to conclusions, that we wait and see what the latest round of medical tests would reveal. We somehow couldn’t look at each other, embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment, afraid, each of us, of so blunt a truth. I realize now that he was seeking some comfort, perhaps trying to make light of what he clearly understood to be a grim situation, knowing that ultimately there was nothing to be done but face the inevitable. Looking back, I see that in fact it wasn’t really a question. It was a statement. It was an attempt to make some final connection, to occasion a moment in which he could crack the fragile shell of stoic manliness that he had, his whole life, embodied, however imperfectly. If ever there was a moment to say goodbye, that was it. But I was unable to face it. I was unable to speak in any honest way. And then it passed. I turned away, to some mundane task, no doubt, pouring another glass of wine, or stepping into the kitchen to rinse off the dishes. A month later, on an unseasonably warm and sunny late January day, he would exhale his last long breaths in that same house, in his own bed, with some of his children gathered round. I don’t remember saying goodbye that next morning, although I’m sure we did. Perhaps a somber breakfast in his sunny kitchen. Maybe a polite question about whether I’d forgotten to pack anything. I hope I gave the old man a hug, but I’m not sure. He
probably gave me some money, not a lot, but something, a check for a hundred bucks maybe, to get me through until I found a job or settled myself or whatever. He almost certainly offered to drive me to the bus station, and I’m sure he was disappointed at my refusal. In retrospect I don’t know why I couldn’t have given him at least that small pleasure, but I didn’t. I recall hoisting my backpack and walking out of his courtyard, turning a moment to wave, to catch his preoccupied smile before I stepped past the hedge and went on up through the shaded streets towards Old Town. The bus station was somewhere up near the freeway. I had to wait a few hours to board. Unlike in other countries, no one looks good in an American bus station. No one strikes up a conversation, no one even nods or acknowledges another’s presence. Everyone seems to be at the end of their story, looking like the most abject stranger—trying, of course, to appear to have a plan, a destination, a face in their mind toward which they are moving, but seeming nonetheless to be merely circling some drain: harboring an illness, an uncomfortable pallor to their skin, or perhaps fleeing some bent memory that lingers like a dark cloud behind their eyes. A cigarette idly burning between their fingers. Crappy shoes. No luggage. At that age I found such places interesting, freeing. I could be another hard luck traveler with a broken heart and an empty wallet, the carefully wrought figure in a proper country song, part hobo, part dreamer. In truth I was still just a kid—uncertain, yes, and anxious, but still young and rather naïve, hopeful, in some impractical romantic way, about what my future might hold, with my father’s money nestled securely in my pocket. When the bus came I climbed aboard and moved toward the back. There were hardly any other travelers, as usual, and we all sat as far apart as possible, exiled from each other, locked away in our lonely stares, our falling gazes, our heads lolling complacently as the vehicle rumbled out of the parking lot, swung on to the street, and eventually gathered speed as it entered the freeway.