Closing Time (47 page)

We had a few memorable outings in the last three years I lived in Philadelphia. One day he phoned and asked if I would help him pick up a mattress he’d purchased for ten bucks from a student who was graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. This was right around the time Nixon resigned from office, hauling his fluorescently duplicitous hide back to the Golden State, where he would no longer be in a position to inflict economic ruin on my family. When we convened at the frat house, I noticed that he had brought along a roll of flimsy string rather than a length of sturdy rope. I offered to run to the hardware store to buy a clothesline, but he said not to worry, the string would do just fine, provided we made sure it was attached tightly to the front and rear fenders. We tied the mattress onto the roof and scooted out onto the Schuylkill Expressway. It was windy that day, and we hadn’t done much of a job securing the mattress, so as soon as the car hit cruising speed, the new acquisition came flying off the top. It landed directly in front of the car behind us, nearly causing an accident. The driver swerved and started honking his horn, mad as hell. In the rearview mirror, my father spotted a traffic cop about four cars back, so we took the next exit and hightailed it out of there. It was a very fine adventure indeed, culminating in my father’s trademark admonition “Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

He could be chummy enough when encountered on neutral ground, but behind closed doors the alcohol overpowered him. As he got older, he started calling in sick to work, often due to lack of sleep. He regularly stayed up all night listening to his barmy record collection, careening around downstairs, engaging in his soused Socratic dialogues with some unidentified, unseen co-monologist who may have been God, though it was not unheard of for Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes, to put in an occasional appearance. My mother, as always, lived in fear that he would one day burn down the house with her inside it, just as he had supposedly burned down the house with his little sister inside it as a boy.

One day, against all odds, after thirty long years of marriage, none of them terribly pleasant, my mother announced that she had finally had enough. The straw that broke the connubial camel’s back was my father’s electrifyingly stupid decision to quit his job as a security guard at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital just six months before he would have been eligible for a modest pension. It was the kind of insanely self-destructive gesture at which he excelled; since the prospect of nursing a nice little pension may have been the only reason my mother hung on as long as she did, there was no further reason to stay. She knew that she should have heaved him overboard years earlier, when there was still time to salvage something out of our childhood. Unwisely, she had waited until all the children were out of the house before severing her ties with a man she had never loved. We had long believed that money lay at the core of this decision—the specter of the Great Depression hovered over our household, with each of these scarred children of the 1930s deciding they would rather live in despair than in poverty—but perhaps not. Perhaps she never truly appreciated how utterly he dominated our existence, how completely he blotted out the sun. Perhaps she needed to have all the buffers between her and her husband removed before she could finally realize what a horror he was. It had been a mistake to marry him; it had been a mistake to have four children with him; it had been a mistake to stay with him for thirty years. Better luck next lifetime.

She was happy to be rid of him, and happy to be rid of the house itself, a dingy affair that none of us ever liked and that we’d grown to like even less as the neighborhood deteriorated. My mother, who throughout the worst times had always clung to an improbable aloofness, trundled off to live in a sun-drenched little apartment in a much better neighborhood, leaving behind her useless husband and our abominable next-door neighbors, the smut-loving detritus from beyond the Carpathians. I do not even recall how I learned of this decision, only that I applauded it.

After the house was sold, my father vaporized. For a while, so the grapevine reported, he was staying with his surviving sister, Rosemary, a pudgy neurotic who lived a few blocks away in a three-bedroom house whose Venetian blinds had not been opened since Prohibition. Then, later on, we heard that he’d moved in with my uncle Jerry, whom I had not seen since the night I requisitioned the contents of his wife’s medicine cabinet. Sometimes my father found a cheap room to rent somewhere; sometimes he would pitch camp in a men’s shelter; sometimes he dropped from sight completely. The Bedouin phase that was to characterize the last two decades of his life had begun.

My mother kept vaguely abreast of his movements during this period, as he occasionally checked in by phone. She never changed her number, nor did she move to a new address without telling him. But she made it clear that she did not want him coming around. She never divorced him; she never sought a legal separation; but emboldened by the moral flaccidity that swept through society in the 1970s, she did finally work up the nerve to pull the plug on their marriage. Without this national shift in morals and mores, she would never have had the courage to leave him. But by the late 1970s, everybody was leaving everybody.

 

I had cleared out of Philadelphia forever by the time my parents threw in the towel. I returned to France in 1976, tracked down an English-woman I had met and fallen in love with two years earlier, persuaded her to move to New York, then induced her to marry me. While Francesca worked her fingers to the bone writing continuing-education scripts for films produced by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, some of them directed by a man who had previously directed episodes of the Gothic soap opera
Dark Shadows,
I started making my way in the world. I wrote four novels and more than a hundred short stories. My fledgling attempts were not successful; no one was interested in the novels, and the stories were purchased almost exclusively by literary magazines that paid in copies or by skin magazines that would juxtapose a story about the Mafia coming after God for gambling debts with photographs of women endowed with implausibly mammoth breasts. These setbacks I viewed as no more than delays: I understood that editors were reluctant to publish anything by an unknown, no matter how good, until the newcomer had obtained the imprimatur of a major magazine, newspaper, or eccentric millionaire. Editors did not march until someone gave them their marching orders.

It took me ten years to secure a foothold in the business; success eluded me until I gave up writing fiction, switched to journalism, and received the official laying-on of hands from
The New Republic
and
The Wall Street Journal
. After all those years in the wilderness—once receiving nine rejections in a single day—I was cordially invited into the house of mirth. This was almost certainly because the zeitgeist changed, and the fifty-year-olds who had been rejecting my work because I did not write like James Thurber and Peter De Vries—masters of wryness—were replaced by thirty-five-year-olds with little appetite for the wry. The roadblocks along the way were of no consequence because Francesca and I were happy to be in New York and enjoyed each other’s company. For me, the thrill of living with someone who gave not the slightest indication of latent insanity more than compensated for the fistfuls of rejection letters I received every day.

For quite a few years, the family had little contact with my father. His vanishing act suited us just fine; we would have been perfectly happy to never hear from him again or to read one day in the papers that he was dead. We did not feel sorry for him; we did not feel that he was entitled to our compassion, our sympathy, our cash. He was gone—and good riddance. Francesca, compassionate by nature, would sometimes encourage me to contact him, but I sloughed off these suggestions. Keeping my father at bay was almost a medical precaution; with his ingratiating Irish smile and beguiling demeanor, he could make you forget why you did not want him around in the first place. First he got into your house, and then he got into your heart. This was why I was always willing to send him money I did not expect him to repay but did not want him coming anywhere near me. During one five-year stretch, I saw him only once. He phoned us from the Port Authority around dinnertime, asking if he could stay the night. He was on the way back from a retreat at a monastery an hour north of Manhattan, but a heartless bellboy had filched his wallet while he was showering in a seedy hotel, and as luck would have it, he did not have enough cash to cover the return trip to Philadelphia.
The Case of the Purloined Portefeuille
was an old standby; I first heard him use it three decades earlier when describing an incident that had supposedly transpired at the North Philadelphia train station. This was at least the fourth time I’d heard him recount the story, each time embellishing it a bit, sometimes claiming that he had caught a glimpse of the thief ’s face, another time reporting that the thief was accompanied by a swarthy confederate to whom he passed the swag. We took him in for the evening, fed him, gave him some cash, then sent him on his way in the morning. He did not ask if he could stay a few days longer until he got on his feet, and not even my indulgent wife bothered to suggest that he do so.

The evening of that unexpected visit, father and son went out for a drink. After the usual preliminaries about the worthless Phillies, he said that he would have really appreciated it—indeed, would have interpreted it as a sign of respect—if I had consulted him before asking for my wife’s hand in marriage. In slipping effortlessly into the role of the elder statesman, the wise, knowing patriarch to whom a measure of filial deference was due, he had somehow mistaken himself for the marquis of Tavistock or the fifth laird of Culloden. But then again, he had always been susceptible to periodic bouts of brain fever, during which he attempted to rearrogate to himself that vast array of paternal rights he had long since abdicated.

The years came, the years went. He was living here, he was living there. Did he work? Was he well? I had no idea. I was getting on with my life. His long absences transformed him into a harmless mythological creature; when the rest of us would gather at holidays, we could trot out our very finest material:
Remember the night he fell on the floor and broke his glasses, remember the night he fell off the fishing boat, remember the night he ripped the NO PARKING sign out of the sidewalk and hid it in the basement, remember the night he threw the beer bottles through the window?
We talked about him as if he were already dead; such wishful thinking was rooted in the hope that he would kick the bucket before reaching the age when he might expect one of us to take him in, because even though none of us was ever going to open our doors to him, one of us would have to draw the short straw and tell him that.

To our universal amazement, he picked himself up off the canvas and made an epic comeback. He got his drinking under control, found himself a cozy little apartment, landed a job as a doorman at a swanky apartment building across the street from the art museum. Now he was pulling down a decent salary, solid benefits, the works. Then something even more remarkable occurred: Around the time my daughter was born, in 1983, my parents reunited. This came as a shock to the rest of us, as it certainly seemed at the time they’d split up that the rupture was final.

It was not. Prepared to give the old reprobate another shot, forever hoping that the goodness abiding deep within him would one day burst forth in full flower, we thought this was very uplifting, almost sweet. Throughout this interlude, we were beguiled into thinking that our parents’ tragic saga might have a fairy-tale ending after all. “They look so cute together!” one of my sisters declared. They did, indeed. The prodigal had returned from his sojourn in the fleshpots of Gaza, and there would be much rejoicing over he who had been lost and was now found. A weak and sinning man had been saved by the love of a good woman, and thanks to my mother’s prayers, the intercession of the Holy Angels and perhaps a bit of sub-rosa backstage intervention from the Lamb of God Himself, we might all live happily ever after.

Of this delusion we were promptly disabused. A few months after their rapprochement, my mother tossed him out onto the street, this time for good. In her recapitulation of events, my father, as soon as he had found a place to hang his hat, was back to his old tricks: stealing money from her pocketbook, tippling on the side, playing the music he wanted to hear at the volume he wanted to hear it, dictating what they would eat and when they would eat it, where they would go and how long they would stay. He was already skating on thin ice when he nixed the idea of visiting the casinos in Atlantic City two to three times a week, as this was the only place my mother ever truly felt wanted. Then one day he went a step too far: He left the gas jets on in the kitchen, with no flame burning, before shambling off for his morning constitutional. This suggested that he was oblivious to reality—losing his marbles—or had his eyes on her insurance money. Either way, he was more trouble than he was worth. Sayonara.

Before the final breakup, I visited my parents with my newborn daughter at Easter time. My father was now just this side of sixty, no longer young, but not yet old. We gathered at my mother’s apartment and had a gay old time. Mom, in the bubbly phase of her manic-depressive cycle, was in high spirits, and my father was his usual loquacious self; he could always turn on the charm. Somewhere along the line he asked if he could speak to me privately. I assumed he was going to hit me up for a loan. This did not bother me. I had lots of money by this juncture, and his demands were invariably paltry. We stepped into the bedroom, and suddenly his expression turned serious. It reminded me of the times he would take off his glasses and put on his sanctimonious letter-writing face. It was the face of rehearsed, choreographed gravitas. It was the face of the world-class Celtic ham.