My Father Before Me (16 page)

In a photo from this time, it is Thanksgiving. My father, at the dining room table, bends over the roasted turkey, gripping a long-bladed carving knife, scraping meat from a leg. His expression is one of absolute attention—attention to doing a dad's work. But he is a man in danger of losing his job, of losing the salary that has allowed him to build this house and feed, clothe, and educate eight children. He is at risk of losing the trust of his wife and the confidence of his sons and daughters. At his office and in his home, he is ill at ease. Now, at the center of our celebration, as he picks up the knife again for the ritual carving, is he thinking of these things? No one would know: he is not the kind of man to speak a word of such thoughts. He is the kind of man who, at Thanksgiving, knows his responsibility is to carve the bird and does so expertly. His hair is long, swept back on the sides, and hanging down over one eye. It has gone almost entirely gray.

36

My junior high school was a sprawling brick prison of a building, its parking lot crammed with portable classrooms to handle the overflowing swarms of platform-soled, hormone-addled children. It was there that my seventh-grade English teacher, a strict, stout German, circled our desks, a whistle on a string around her neck so she could squeal us periodically into submission. It was there that my reward for enrolling in wood shop was to be taunted daily by a squat, muscular black kid in a knit cap who roamed the room, stalking me, whispering that if I crossed paths with him after school, I'd regret it. It was there that I met Al, a fellow twelve-year-old with a long mop of brown hair and a sly smile that veered easily into a smirk. Al was of the opinion that the old folk song “Erie Canal” would be improved if it were entitled “Anal Canal.” He explained that for a long time he had been under the misapprehension that girls, unlike boys, had multiple penises, springing from their loins like a bouquet. Immediately, Al and I became best friends, and we stayed so until I went to college.

Al's house, unlike mine, was a glorious confusion, stinking of cigar smoke and boiled potatoes. His dad was an electrical engineer, a tinkerer, so there were gadgets scattered about the house, boxes of plastic or wood half opened, wires and springs dangling out. My own house was tidy and silent; my friends didn't go there. Al's house was a place
for lounging around, for clattering down the basement stairs, for blasting the stereo, while his mother smiled and foisted cookies upon us.

As I did, Al and his older brother, Kurt, loved music—but their interest was obsessive, their knowledge exhaustive and esoteric. I liked whatever was poppy and maudlin in the Top 40—I was big into Bread and Jim Croce and Gilbert O'Sullivan; Al and Kurt had given themselves wholly over to dark, weird English bands that specialized in ten-minute organ and guitar jams and released double or triple albums with names like
Lizard Tails in His Majesty's Wardrobe
and
Fables from the Lunar Zoo
. In the unkempt, cramped sanctuaries of their bedrooms—which they seemed not to be under any obligation to clean—were uncategorizable messes of albums and singles and cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes and speakers and turntables and tuners and coiled headphone cords. It was Al who taught me that vinyl records can be washed, carefully, with soap and water—a valuable tip if your collection, as theirs did, came mainly from flea markets. Kurt was a shy Brian Wilson type, holing up in his room all day with his cheap electric guitar, practicing riffs from Yes and King Crimson albums and writing his own songs.

I, too, was still writing songs, although my subject matter had changed. I was walking the school halls surrounded by girls who were different from what they'd been the year before. Suddenly they were lovely to look at and alluringly mysterious: objects of an intense, baffling desire. The girl who won my exclusive adoration was Cherie. She and I had been assigned by our homeroom teacher to take attendance each morning. At the front of the class, with the roster before us on the desk, pencils in hand, we stood side by side, bantering in our few moments together in the coded way of people who share an important and private project. She stood close enough that I took note of the way her chestnut hair curled as it fell upon her shoulder; I observed the tanned skin of her forearm. Her easy, bewitchingly crooked smile,
directed toward me, seemed an emissary from some far-off golden land, its fragrant air rich with mystery. I fell for Cherie hard—fell in love, I thought. What else could it be? The passion lasted three years, unrequitedly—lasted that long, probably, because it was unrequited.

Soon after she began haunting all of my thoughts, Cherie started going steady with Brad: handsome and unflappable, with shoulder-length wavy blond hair, a puka-shell necklace, muscles, and a pool. I didn't stand a chance.

Still, if Cherie declined to be the girl in my life, she could not refuse to be the girl in my songs. Her name was fortunate, since it gave me a rhyme for “marry.”

I hadn't a clue how to interact with girls. How this could be so with all the females in my house—my mother and six sisters—I don't know. Maybe it was that my early model of womanhood was idealized and untouchable: the Virgin Mary—exquisitely beautiful, eyes downcast, with an air of knowing something I was yet unworthy to hear. Girls seemed to be a separate, prettier, superior species. It was almost impossible to imagine them as living in actual houses, sitting down to dinner with parents and siblings, watching TV, sleeping. To the best of my understanding, they did not shit.

I had learned about love mainly from pop songs, which might be why I was under the impression that someone you desire is obligated to desire you back. When I heard that Debbie, who was Cherie's best friend, had a crush on me, I was flattered—also disappointed, not just because the wrong girl was showing an interest in me but because now, as I understood it, I would have to be her boyfriend. For a while, I tried it. I met Debbie after school every day and held her hand as we walked the two blocks until my route home split off from hers; I bought her a cheap metal necklace with a heart pendant and paid an extra dollar to have her name and mine engraved on opposite sides; when anyone took me aside and conspiratorially asked if it was true that Debbie
and I were going steady, I admitted that it was—and I was proud to do so. I had a girlfriend, an official one. I was in the game. I was not regarded entirely without interest by the opposite sex. But I couldn't keep up the ruse for long. I would have to do the brave and honorable thing: I wrote Debbie a note explaining that it would be unfair of me to continue going steady with her, considering that it was really her best friend I was in love with. There would be no negotiation, no trial separation, no mutual effort to rekindle whatever fires might have burned in our first days. I folded the paper multiple times into a small, tight square and, during a break between classes, as Debbie passed me, smiling, in the hall, handed it to her swiftly, with an apologetic, compassionate frown.

I was out: the breakup was clean, with no conversation—perfect.

37

Every waking moment, Cherie flitted at the border of my thoughts or sat smack in the center of them, but I never mentioned her to my mother or father. She seemed safer hidden. Or I was safer. If I were to talk to my parents about this puzzling, consuming desire, I might be judged. I felt pre-accused. I knew that what I felt for Cherie was essentially shameful, or my weakness in the face of it was. Maybe it was the family's Catholicism that made me think this; maybe it was my mother's emphasis on spotlessness, on orderliness of home and of heart; maybe it was the tension in that house, the feeling that the family was teetering at a cliff's edge, so anything unpredictable, anything outside of our established pattern of behavior, any candid expression of raw, unresolved feeling, might upset it. Anyway, how could my mother comprehend what it felt like to be a teenager in love?

And my father? I don't think it crossed my mind that he might advise me in matters of the heart, or in any matter concerning my murky interior world. I remember him then not as a teacher, a guide, a disciplinarian, or a comforter. I remember him as a body—as pieces of a body. He had grown a beard, and the gray hairs in it had gone yellow from his continual exhaling of cigarette smoke. His fingernails were yellowed, too, and his thumbnails had become oddly dented and grooved: he kept picking at them nervously, unconsciously, with the nail of his ring finger.

Although we children were unaware of this, he was continuing to fail at work; his bosses in Japan had tolerated his erratic performance and counseled and supported him as well as they could, but they were running out of patience and debating whether it was time to stop giving him another chance and then another. While trying to hang on to his job, he was also having to tend to his grandmother. A few years before, she had briefly remarried, but her second husband had died, and she was living alone in a retirement center. One spring day, walking on a downtown street, she fell—she probably fainted. Diagnosed with severe heart trouble and showing signs of dementia, she was given a pacemaker and, with my father's consent, placed in a nursing home. My mother was bringing in a small salary to help support the family, but there were still six children in the house, and there were Grandma Carey's medical expenses to deal with, and my father—the central breadwinner, the believer in discipline, industry, and self-­reliance—must have been growing dizzy, maybe even desperate, wondering if he was adequate to the demands his life was placing upon him.

To me, he was still just Dad, which meant, most important, that he sometimes surprised us kids by taking us to a ball game or the lumberyard or the boat show. I had little interest in boats—and our family was surely not in the market to buy one—but my father didn't mind wandering the big annual boat show downtown, admiring the gleaming white luxury yachts, climbing aboard them to examine their sleek decks and nifty control panels, saying, “Hmmm,” and “Interesting.” What I found interesting—my sole motivation for attending—was whatever big promotional gimmick was being sponsored by the Top 40 radio station I listened to. One year the station brought in a world-record-holding high-diver to astonish the crowds by plunging a hundred feet from a platform into a small pool. Another year it carved out a two-ton chunk of Alaskan glacier and shipped it to the boat show to be gazed upon with wonder.

The boat show with the fish: that was the last one my father took me to. For weeks, rapt, I had been listening to excited announcements on the radio about the fish I would receive for free if I attended. This wouldn't be just any fish: it would be a golden koi, the most valuable pet in Japan, the disc jockeys said—prizewinning koi, they announced, sold for as much as twenty thousand dollars. As soon as I arrived at the boat show, taking no chances, I slipped into the line of people awaiting their fish. When my turn came, there were still plenty of fish left—the station had secured ten thousand of them to give away. I was handed a plump, sturdy plastic bag filled with water, a little slip of a golden fish within it. For the next hour, as I walked among the boats on exhibit, I gripped the top of the bag with one hand and supported the bottom carefully with the other. On the ride home, my father behind the wheel in front of me, I sat, my priceless fish on my lap in its plastic bag, and read again the mimeographed note that had come with it:

You now are the owner of an extremely valuable and enjoyable animal. This fish, of Oriental ancestry, will bring you years of happiness with proper care and attention. Your fish will become so tame you can feed it by hand. We sincerely hope you will build a nice pond in your yard so that you may eventually add to your collection and receive the maximum enjoyment.

I did not imagine that I would be building a pond, but, once we arrived home, I did find, in a cabinet, a glass bowl adequate to my needs and transferred the fish and its water into it. The koi, getting used to its new home, looked listless. Throughout the evening, I checked on it, peering at this new member of the family, this delicate pet I would care for in exchange for years of happiness. The fish continued to move sluggishly. Then it didn't move at all. It rose to the surface of the water and floated there, its belly to the ceiling.

Mine was not the only koi that reached a swift end—almost all ten thousand of them died within a day. Their plane trip from Tokyo over the Pacific had been long and the shift in climate sudden, so they were handed to their new owners fatally dazed and frail. They didn't stand a chance.

My father was barely hanging on. Then he fell: in June he was told to collect his things and turn in his key. He no longer had a job.

He had worked at Alaska Lumber and Pulp since before I was born. His severance package was generous: he would be given his full salary for another six months, until the beginning of the new year. When he told my mother the news, she put her arms around him and said, “This is a good thing. There was too much pressure in that job, too much work—it was killing you. Now you have six whole months to find a new job.”

Our dad would be home; he would have no reason to stay away. He could begin again—we all could begin again. If the job had been the problem, there was no more problem. In the weeks following the firing, he seemed happier, and so did Mom. They even seemed to enjoy each other. Dad would start looking for work soon, but, in the meantime, this would be a summer of rest and of fun. We planned a two-week family vacation for August—we would travel in our new station wagon down the coast to Disneyland. On the Fourth of July, a few weeks after my father had lost his job, my parents wanted a quiet, leisurely celebration. We boarded a ferry and crossed Puget Sound to a little harbor town, where we would stroll around, duck into a few shops, and stake out a spot on the sidewalk to watch the parade. As my father drove us through town, my mother sitting beside him, I glanced toward the front of the car and saw something I had never seen before: my parents were holding hands.

One Sunday morning at Mass I saw another new thing: my father, robed, standing behind the lectern, the entire congregation watching
as he served as that morning's lector. He kissed the Bible, set it down gently before him, opened it to the day's chosen verses, and recited them slowly, steadily, as if he were a man whose daily habit was to contemplate Paul's letters to the Thessalonians. He looked like someone else's dad. Had my mother encouraged him to do this, reminding him that it was time he offered himself in service to his church, to the faith they shared? Or was it his idea, part of his project of winning her trust or of persuading himself that he was a changed man?

Another Sunday, the whole family sat together in a pew, as usual. A guest priest was at the altar, assisting in the celebration of the Mass—he was a visitor for the weekend and had begun work the day before, hearing parishioners' confessions. Not long after the service began, things began to feel odd. This priest didn't seem familiar with the liturgy; he mumbled his way through much of it and interspersed Latin into parts of the Mass that had long been spoken in English. Also, there was something wrong with his hair. Was that a wig?

By the next day, the visiting priest was in jail, two stolen guns and blank checks with our pastor's name on them having been found in his belongings. He was a con artist and convicted check forger who had recently robbed a gun store in Alabama. For years, in cities around the country, he had impersonated a priest. He couldn't help himself, he said. It gave him “satisfaction as a human being.”

The following Sunday, one of our parish's priests, a real one, explained to the congregation what had happened. Father Englebert emphasized that, although the visitor was fake, the confessions he'd heard were real: they counted. God's powers are strong enough, he assured us, to work even through an impostor.