My Father Before Me (17 page)

38

Our car tilted: it was too low on the driver's side. Otherwise, it was perfect—new and huge and lavishly appointed, a long low boat of a car, a 1973 Plymouth Fury Suburban station wagon, “honey gold,” as the manufacturer had it, with faux-wood panels on the side, luggage racks on top, a tailgate that could, as if by a bit of trickery, swing open from the bottom or from the side, and, best of all for us kids, a bench seat in the far back that faced the rear window, a prime vantage point from which to peer at places as they shrank from view and, by gleefully miming the act of yanking on a cord, to signal any trucker to blast his horn.

In the Fury, we would travel down the coast to Disneyland—or, as the youngest of us, five-year-old Erica, put it, “Dinneyland.” I know that she said this because I have the tape that proves it. Peggy was unable to make the trip, so Kevin took it upon himself to bring the sounds of it home to her.

On Kevin's lap as we sat in the car, or in his grip as we strolled the aisle of some souvenir shop, was the black-and-silver Panasonic cassette tape recorder he'd received for Christmas. In pushing
record
and
pause
and
stop,
Kevin was packaging our travels, making a shape for them, finding a permanent narrative within the larger, fleeting one. He was sixteen and had become the kind of person so thoughtful about experience that he could not help, in some ways, living slightly to the side of it; for Kevin,
to have an experience inevitably meant to observe himself having it and therefore to feel its joy or solemnity or horror but also its absurdity or strangeness or wonder. He was conscious of being conscious; he sensed how easy it is to act as though we understand what can't be understood. This was the boy who had called his minuscule family newspaper
The Daily Nonsense
.
He was
the boy whose preferred means of terror was to stalk me silently, slowly, from room to room, wearing Buster Keaton's deadpan expression, sitting when I sat, standing when I stood, walking when I walked. He was merely being; what was the harm in that? But I was thoroughly creeped out, while he was entertained. And then there was the dead hand. At any given moment, when I had annoyed him enough, Kevin would raise his long, pale, freckled hand and let it hang limp before my eyes. I couldn't stand it: the raw, simple grotesqueness of it against which there was no rebuttal.

This family vacation would be a beautiful trance, a dream: Dad wasn't working—he was just Dad at last—and we would have him, have both of our parents side by side in the Fury's front seat, or together at a restaurant table, or at the head of a parade of us clicking through the turnstile of some tourist trap; we would have them for as long as we wanted, for as long as it took to wend our way down the coast and back, for as long as it took to forget that things were ever otherwise. We were off to California, where gold glittered in the air and on the license plates, where the land of Mickey and Snow White lay waiting: the place where dreams became real, the place where, just by being there, you were happy.

On the first day, we drove south through Portland, then west to the coast, to Lincoln City and the Sea Gypsy Motel, a three-story building nestled into a kind of low hillside or dune. At ten that night, leaving our father and mother and sisters in their rooms, Kevin and I ambled down to the beach, to the expanse of packed sand black beneath the night sky. Kevin clicked on the recorder; he would begin documenting our journey here. Should we say something? We should say something.
With the waves roaring and the wind whipping into the microphone, we had to shout; we could hardly be heard as we narrated the facts that the waves were roaring, that the wind was whipping, that it was cold and, well, that was about it. “It's just Chris and I. . . .” Kevin announced into the microphone.

“And the
sea,
” I added mock-portentously.

We were teenage boys with a tape recorder, a deserted beach, self-consciousness, and an arsenal of dull satirical wit. That's what we were documenting.

The next day, late in the afternoon, after hours of snaking down the curves of the coastline road, our father said, “Here it is!” and drove the Fury across the state line.

“We're in California!” my little sisters sang. “We're in California!”

Our father's words are the first of his that are heard on the tape—the first of only a few. Throughout the trip, he seems to have concentrated, in silence, on driving: on gauging how far we could travel on this tank of gas, on ensuring that he was merging onto the right road, on calculating where the nearest exit was. He might have been enjoying himself, doing the private multiplying and dividing that he was so good at, letting his mind go where it would, regardless of what his children were up to behind him.

“Poor Dad,” Erica said. “He always has to drive.”

Our mother, in the front passenger seat, turned around regularly to check on the five of us, to ask who was hungry, who needed a potty break. She was the cheerleader, the first-grade teacher by trade, the one who knew how to lasso kids' attention, the one who often broke into song: “California, here I come, right back where I started from!” On the third day, as we wove among the redwoods on Highway 101, she was inspired to lead the family in a rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” Not long after hitting the highway that day, we pulled into the parking lot of Trees of Mystery, a tourist attraction that was hard to miss: its entrance was marked by giant statues, higher than a house,
of Paul Bunyan and his trusty companion, Babe the Blue Ox. Paul, in rough black beard, red open-necked shirt, blue jeans, and boots, rested his ax on the ground at his left side while holding his right hand up, palm open: a friendly greeting or a warning to back off.

We climbed out of the station wagon, paid our entrance fee, and took to the trail that wound through the woods—among trees, we'd been told, so strange, so extravagantly large and queerly shaped, that they had to be seen to be believed. We passed a tree that, if we squinted and were generous with our imaginations, could be said to look something like an octopus. We saw the upside-down tree and the lightning-bolt tree. Standing before another, we listened to a recorded voice inform us of its astonishing resemblance to a kneeling elephant. “It looks like a tree with a lot of roots,” Kevin said.

Earlier, he had stood beside the road, recorder in hand, capturing the noise of passing traffic. What we are listening to, he whispered, in the awed, excited tone of a jungle explorer who has discovered a new tribe, are the exotic “sounds of California.”

A few hours later, our mother exclaimed, “There's the bridge!” The Golden Gate, its orange towers glowing in the afternoon sun, had appeared over the crest of a hill. We were approaching the city that, the last time our dad heard, was where his good-for-nothing father lived. His one short encounter with Nat had happened twenty years earlier. Since that time, how often had he thought about his father? Might he be thinking about him now?

Our dad broke his silence: “I haven't seen as much traffic the whole trip as I have the last hour.”

Getting closer to the bridge, he began to read aloud the highway signs, speaking deliberately and quizzically, mainly to himself, in the way that drivers sometimes do, with a mix of attentiveness and distraction: “Toll plaza. Auto toll fifty cents.” Then the bridge was under us, only air on either side of us, San Francisco gleaming to our left across
the bay, its buildings shimmering white in the sun, spilling over hills and down to the dark blue water.

For a moment, our father's voice changed, his goofy, deadpan Irish humor rising to the surface. “Boy, that's scary! You see that big city over there?
I
don't want to go to San Fran
cis
co.” But he did go, checking us in to a motor lodge in the Tenderloin.

The next day, with Kevin again toting around his tape recorder, some of us were growing weary of our brother's project, of the self-conscious drawing of attention to the reality of the reality we were in. My seven-year-old sister Kim, especially, seemed intent on enjoying her vacation without being documented doing it. “Kim,” Erica shouted, “watch out! He's going to tape-record your laugh!”

“Kim,” Kevin said, “why do you want me not to record your laugh anymore?”

Answering him directly while revealing that she understood she was expected to perform, she sang her reply: “Because I h-a-a-a-te it!”

Why couldn't we just
be
without explaining ourselves? Why couldn't we just talk without thinking about it, without knowing that our words might be remembered forever? Decades hence, would someone be scrutinizing our offhand talk, searching the tape for clues about us, imposing upon our words an unnatural weight?

“It's just a big nuisance to everybody,” I said.

Erica backed me up: “Dummy Kevin!”

“It's stupid,” I reiterated.

But Kevin was unrelenting. At Fisherman's Wharf, a few of us boarded a helicopter for a spin around the bay, over Alcatraz and back to the dock, and Kevin made sure the tape was running, recording the roar of the helicopter's engine, the
whup-whup-whup
of the blades, the complaint of a foghorn in the harbor. “Okay, Erica,” Kevin said as we rose, “what do you have to say?”

Our youngest sister paused. “I don't have to say anything.”

But later, with the bustle of a day of touristy thrills and searches for souvenirs almost over, with all of us relaxing at last in a restaurant, we felt more at ease with the recorder sitting on the table before us. Even our dad got into the spirit of the project, assuming the role of narrator. “We're at Borruso's Lighthouse,” he announced. “At Fisherman's Wharf.” Then he paused. Any more thoughts to share, Dad? “And, by the way, it's overcast. The weather is
not
very good.”

Our dad had been a good sport. He'd tried.

We took the fast route the next day, traveling down the interstate so we could make it to Anaheim by evening. We had seen Disneyland on television: every Sunday evening, in living color, Tinker Bell flitted onto our screen and, waving her wand, soared over Sleeping Beauty's castle. The place, amazingly, was real; we knew that—a few of our lucky friends had been there, and they'd returned with postcards and mouse ears to prove it.

“There's the monorail,” Kevin said. “See that up there? That's the monorail for Disneyland.”

“Where?” Kim complained.

I, too, was disappointed. “I don't see it anywhere.”

Then we spied, in the distance, beyond a barrier wall, the craggy white tip of the Matterhorn, the park's little alpine homage. We were there, truly there at last, although I couldn't help feeling let down. Could this be Disneyland if there was a Denny's across the street from it?

Our hotel, at least, looked sufficiently exotic. Shading its main entrance was a high white concrete dome of a canopy supported by four enormous legs; it resembled an alien spacecraft or a giant turtle gutted standing up.

And once within the walls of the park, we were indeed in another world. Riding in little metal gondola cars dangling from cables, we floated to Fantasyland. We took to the water in a jungle steamer, cruising past snakes and rhinos and cannibals and a hippo who rose, dripping, from the murk to roar at us. My father slipped each of us some dollars from
his wallet. I gave one of mine to an artist who had set up his easel in the open air. He would draw a cartoon caricature of me. It didn't take long. He squinted at me past the side of the easel, waved his hand across the paper a few times, then pulled the paper down and handed it to me. The boy in the picture was a stranger; his mouth was odd and toothy, like a woodchuck's. His hair, unlike mine, fell around his ears and down the back of his head in a series of waves. There was also a wave beneath him: he was riding a surfboard. I had never surfed in my life, never thought of trying.

In Tomorrowland, I waited with my father, Kevin, and Dana in a long line winding its way toward a giant microscope. We would enter that microscope—enter, we were promised, “inner space”: we would explore the parts of us so small that the naked eye cannot detect them. When we arrived at the front of the line, each of us was ushered into a small tramcar, shiny blue, like a pill, equipped with a metal safety bar to pull toward our lap. Then we were moving, one by one, into the dark eyepiece of the microscope. We heard a voice: our guide, a scientist, reminding us that, through the creation of the microscope, man “discovered the fantastic universe beyond the limits of his own meager sight.” We saw nothing; we were in darkness. Then, on the walls and ceiling around us, large snowflakes gradually appeared; or, rather, the snowflakes were not large—we had become smaller. We were shrinking, shrinking, we were hardly ourselves anymore, we were shrinking to the size of a snowflake, then the size of an atom, then smaller. We were almost nothing: a bit of black amid a swirl of light specks, uncountable orbiting electrons. To our side, lurking in the half-blackness, a dim, infinitesimally small particle of matter appeared. It was shaped, remarkably, like a man. No, it was a man: he was dressed in Disneyland coveralls and lugging a toolbox. He was walking alongside the tracks we were riding on, near the place where the floor met the mesh screen that simulated the microscopic world we were traveling through. He was heading toward a rip in the fabric to repair it. But it was too late: I had seen him. I had seen the rip.

39

The next day, Kevin and I were sitting in our hotel room. We shared the room with Dana; our parents and two little sisters occupied another room down the hall. Dana rushed in, looking stricken. She had come from our parents' room. “We're leaving,” she stuttered. “Mom is leaving. And all the girls. You're staying with Dad.”

“What?” we said. “Why? What happened?”

“I don't know. I'm not sure. Mom's mad. Dad did something. I don't know. I don't want to go!”

Our mother appeared in the doorway. “Kevin, Chris, there's been a change. I'm leaving with Dana and the girls. You're staying here with your dad. Dana, pack your things.”

None of this is on Kevin's tape. He didn't bother to use the recorder that day.

It happened within minutes. Our mother and sisters lugged their suitcases into the elevator, and the door closed.

Our father walked to our room and sat on the bed. He spoke to us weakly, as if deflated, defeated. “I can't talk with your mother right now. Kevin, I need you to go down and tell her that I want her to come back.”

What had happened? Why couldn't he talk to her himself? Kevin left the room and went downstairs. He found our mother and sis
ters outside on the sidewalk, waiting for the airport shuttle. “Mom,” Kevin said, “Dad wants you to come back. And I want you to come back, too.”

Our mother was sorry, but the answer was no. The shuttle came. She boarded it with our sisters, and they were gone.

Our father did not tell us what had happened, neither then nor later. Did we even ask him? Probably we didn't. Our family had become the kind—how does such a thing happen?—that can be sundered suddenly, without explanation. Everybody suffers, and no one says a word.

Instead, the males of the family roamed a ghost town—the replica of an old western outpost at Knott's Berry Farm, the second-best amusement park in Anaheim. We did what a dad and his sons do on vacation in California. Through the bars of the town jail, we gazed at Joe, the life-size carved wooden figure of an inmate, forlorn in his cramped cell, ankles shackled, cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth. The trick was: he talked.

“Where y'all from?” Joe asked.

“Seattle,” we said together.

“Well,” he drawled menacingly, “y'd bitter skedaddle back tuh Seattle.”

Instead, we stuck around. We toured the wax museum: we gazed at Elizabeth Taylor, eerily unreal, stilled in mid-gesture. Rudolph Valentino, Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe. W. C. Fields, fixed in an expression of irritation.

We drove to Marineland, where, in line for the dolphin show, I stood dressed in my summer costume—the one that, awkward and wary of myself, desperate to seem one of the crowd, I hoped made me look like an undorky teenager: cutoff jeans, sandals, mirrored sunglasses, a yellow fishing hat, and a tank top advertising Heidelberg beer. A stranger ahead of me, maybe a college boy, turned his head and grinned at me scornfully. “O-h-h-h, yeah,” he taunted. “Don't
you
look cool.” He had found me out, he thought. Maybe he had. I kept my mouth shut, pretending I hadn't heard him, twisting in my fist my souvenir booklet, crimping its cover photo of a killer whale surging up from blue water.

Then we drove our big golden Fury—far bigger than we needed now, with only three of us in it—to Hollywood. We took a sightseeing tour, straining to glimpse, through tree limbs and high fences, the mansions of the stars: Gregory Peck, Judy Garland, Jack Benny, and “an actor known for his blue eyes,” the tour guide hinted before naming Paul Newman. We toured Universal Studios, boarding a bus that wheeled us through the parted waters of the Red Sea, although the parting looked more clumsily mechanical than divine. We passed the house in front of which Suzanne Pleshette, in
The Birds
, was pecked to death. We spied—washed by sunlight, looming on its hill—the
Psycho
house.

Finally, with a hundred other tourists, we were ushered into a theater—we would see how a real movie scene was filmed: a bank robbery. Better, we were told, a lucky few of us would perform in the scene. The tour guides needed volunteers. A few people raised their hands—some men and women, a couple of children—and were waved down to the stage. “Come on, folks. We need more. How about you, sir?”

The tour guide was looking directly at us. My father pointed at his chest questioningly. “Yes, you, sir. Don't be shy. Come on down.” My father rose slowly from his seat, stepped into the aisle, and walked down to the stage. He joined the other volunteers as they huddled around the director for instructions. We didn't hear what they were saying. Our father's role turned out to be minor; as the heist unfolded at center stage, he stood to the side, holding the receiver of a prop pay phone. The other bank customers, including a woman and her children, stood with their hands in the air, while he bent his head furtively toward the receiver. “Help, help. We need help,” he whispered repeatedly into his cord connected to nothing.

Afterward, we took to the interstate and headed toward home. We would not be driving along the leisurely coast road this time. Within a day, we were in Medford, Oregon, at a Travelodge. It had been four days since our mother and sisters had left us. Our father sat at the edge of the motel bed, the phone in his lap. Then he called his wife.

Kevin and I, preparing for bed, watched him from the corners of our eyes; we heard snatches of conversation, but not everything. As he spoke to our mother, our father sounded calm. He must be apologizing, I thought, although I knew not for what. Our parents, from what I could hear, were being reasonable with each other. He told her we'd be back in two days. We'd be home, and maybe all would be forgiven. Maybe all would be forgotten.

By the next day, we had made it to Portland, where we stopped for one final night—a movie night, our father said. At a downtown theater, we saw
The MacKintosh Man,
about a British agent pretending to be a jewel thief who sounds like an American even though he is trying to feign an Australian accent. As I watched, I just kept thinking he was Paul Newman: I knew those blue eyes, and I'd just seen his house.

The next day, after three hours of driving, our dad pulled the Fury, still stubbornly leaning to one side, into our carport.

After that, my mother remembers, the house was peaceful for a while—my parents got along, and my father was attentive, in his way, to her and to us. Neither of my parents explained to us what had happened at Disneyland, and we didn't ask.

For decades afterward, we children, grown up, with our memories becoming murkier and murkier, occasionally spoke of that sudden sad moment in the hotel. What had happened? It says something—about our pathological discretion or politeness or cowardice—that we talked only among ourselves, speculating, without broaching the subject with our mother. Had our father said something to her, something so hurtful that she had no choice but to pack her bag and leave? Dana
remembered him, throughout the trip, singing snatches of a song: “She walks, she talks, she moves like a cannibal.” What song was that? At least based on my own efforts, it is to this day unsearchable on the Internet. Did our father make it up? Who was like a cannibal? Our mother? Every time he broke into song, was he speaking of her, letting her have it? That was Dana's guess: maybe our mother had finally had enough of that damn song.

Finally, forty years after the fact, I asked my mother what had happened.

“He hit me,” she said. “I don't know why. It started and was over in a second.”

They were in the hotel room, standing near the closet, talking—my mother doesn't remember about what—and he slapped her. He had never hit her before, and he never did again. For an unforgivable moment, he became someone else, or maybe he became himself at last, some angry part of himself that he had become expert at hiding.

Why had she demanded that our sisters return home with her but left my brother and me behind with our father? Kevin and I, over the years, had considered whether she needed us to keep an eye on him. Maybe she didn't trust him to be alone so far from home. No, she said, she just didn't want to rob us of the rest of our vacation, and she thought we were old enough to stay. She didn't fear that our father would prove an untrustworthy chaperone; he had been a responsible father up to that point.

And the phone call from the motel room in Medford? That was when he apologized, right? No. He did not apologize then, she said. And he didn't later. He just came home.
Neither of them ever said a word about it
.

As for Kevin's project of documenting the sounds of our vacation, he tried to keep it going. The day after our mother and sisters flew home, he started recording again, but we were ready by then for
the whole thing to be over. It's there on the tape, in its final seconds. “Okay, Chris,” Kevin said, “where are we?” It was as if he were returning to a narrative—some logical, coherent one—that had been briefly interrupted.

“What?”

“Where are we?”

“Chris,” our father said, “I think we're going to have to get a red light for Kevin's nose.”

“Why?”

“So it will go on when he pushes the
play
button.”

He didn't have to worry. Kevin didn't push the button again.