My Life on the Road (5 page)

It was something I could never find the courage to tell my sister. It was something I would never forget.

Still, I thought I could get through the hospital procedures without breaking down. And I did—until I held my father’s worn wallet in my hands, its leather shaped to the curve of his body by years in his back pocket as he drove the road. I can feel it still.

I will never stop wishing I had been with him. I will always wonder: Alone in a hospital within sound of the freeway, would he have traded the freedom of the road for the presence of family and friends? Having lived his life in the belief that something great could be just around every corner, did he realize for the first time that no more corners could be turned?

Did he regret having raised a traveling daughter?

I
N MY CHILDHOOD,
I
think my father and I often felt as if we were alone on our journey. My mother was lying down in the trailer behind us, and my sister was often away at school. As the captain of a very fragile ship, he looked to me for companionship, just as he had when I helped him wrap and unwrap antiques. Yet I wasn’t with him in the end. Was this a fate created by his choices? By mine? By both?

I am left without answers. There are only questions I must answer for myself. What is the balance between home and the road? Hearth and horizon? Between what is and what could be?

I only know that I can’t imagine my father living any other life. When I see him in my mind’s eye, he is always the traveler, eating in a diner instead of a dining room, taking his clothes out of a suitcase instead of a closet, looking for motel
VACANCY
signs instead of a home, making puns instead of plans, choosing spontaneity over certainty.

Even his argument for persuading my mother to marry him was “It will only take a minute.” Going to a movie wasn’t planned. Instead of checking newspaper listings, he got in his car and drove around to look at every theater marquee within miles. It was years before I learned that other people didn’t just walk into a movie and stay until the story reached the same point again.

I remember him choosing the fastest highway, not the scenic route my mother was always arguing for. When he swung through a state where he had friends, he never called in advance; he just dropped in. He didn’t even make plans for the poker and chess games he loved so much, but found them by happenstance. He took comfort in not knowing about the future. As he always said, “If I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, it could be wonderful!”

When I imagine the sound of his voice on the phone, it’s only after I hear the words of a long-distance operator saying, “Please deposit…,” and the sound of coins dropping.

He was a sailor, not a sailmaker. He wouldn’t stay behind in a port or an oasis while ships or caravans passed by. He was always moving on.

I was twenty-seven when he died. I had lived and traveled in other countries, but hadn’t yet made traveling in this country my own. I think he knew that I was still regretting our wanderings. He could only have remembered me as a child with my head in a book, refusing to sing along with his cheerful renditions of World War I songs, asking him to drive slowly past pretty houses and wishing aloud that we lived there. I fear he knew my childhood hope that I was adopted and that my real parents would come and take me to a home with a canopied bed and a horse to ride.

In college, I tried to avoid the embarrassment of our atypical family by mining our odd life for stories like these:

In college, I told these and other stories as a source of entertainment, yet all the while I was hoping against hope that my father wouldn’t turn up on campus in his food-stained suit and dusty car full of boxes, his great weight causing the driver’s side to list downward like a ship. I was glad he was too far away to come to Fathers’ Weekend, where he would have been too different from the other fathers. I could imagine him falling into a snoring sleep after eating, or getting sentimental tears in his eyes when talking about money, or uttering cheerfully naïve comments like “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” about the McCarthyite accusations being leveled at two of my professors, though bravely ignored by the college.

From my classmates, I belatedly discovered that even outside the movies, families really did live in neat houses, take naps, have nine-to-five jobs, pay bills on time, and eat at a table instead of standing up next to a refrigerator. Just as my father had rebelled against the orderly life of his immigrant parents who had fled insecurity, I regretted insecurity and became vulnerable to the siren song of the conventional.

In the years after college, my father’s influence became ever clearer in the choices I made—for instance, to go to India instead of seeking a regular job—but I still wasn’t admitting it. Like many children, I had been drawn to the needier parent. Like many daughters especially, I was living out the unlived life of my mother. Like my father, I inhabited the future, the land of possibilities, but that was something we never talked about. There wasn’t time or place to explore what I think we both knew: that in our small family, we were the most alike.

For reasons of work and geography, we saw each other less and less in the years before he died. I never told him that I could see myself in him, and vice versa. I never thanked him for, say, stopping at endless horse farms, pony rides, and every palomino in a pasture, all to please a horse-crazy daughter. One summer he even bought me a horse of my own, though I was much too young and the horse was much too old. With the help of a neighboring farmer who told us what to do, my father helped me feed and groom him—until that farmer took pity on all three of us and gave the horse a retirement home.

I never told my father how grateful I was that he was different from my best friend’s father. I had just witnessed my first humiliating clean-your-plate-or-you-can’t-have-dessert incident at her house. When I came home, I tested my father. We were eating in our usual haphazard way in the living room—never on the debris-covered dining room table that was used only on national holidays—and he asked me if I wanted dessert. I pointed out that I hadn’t finished my dinner. “That’s okay,” he said as he went into the kitchen for ice cream. “Sometimes you’re hungry for one thing and not another.” I loved him so much at that moment.

He listened to all my complaints about not going to school like other kids, yet years after his death, I realized that I’d also been spared the Dick and Jane limitations that school then put on girls. Nor was he around when I finally understood that having a loving and nurturing father made a lifetime difference. Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home.

It’s true that my father’s idea of childrearing was to take me to whatever movie he wanted to see, however unsuitable; buy unlimited ice cream; let me sleep whenever and wherever I got tired; and wait in the car while I picked out my own clothes. Salespeople were shocked to see a six- or eight-year-old with cash and making her own choices, but this resulted in such satisfying purchases as a grown-up ladies’ red hat, Easter shoes that came with a live rabbit, and a cowgirl jacket with fringe.

All I knew was that my father enjoyed my company, asked my opinion, and treated me better than he treated himself. What more could any child want?

Once I became a freelance writer, I also realized the value of his ability to live with and even love insecurity. He had two points of pride: he never wore a hat, and he never had a job—by which he meant he never had a boss. I knew I was my father’s daughter when I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan. My father would have done the same—except for the walking.

It’s said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. Each becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. My mother had performed the miracle of creating a welcoming world for my sister and me, even though she herself grew up in a hostile one. But her broken spirit could not help but let the darkness in—and I absorbed it during our long years together. My father and I lived together for far less time, but his faith in a friendly universe helped balance my mother’s fear of a threatening one. He gave me that gift. He let in the light.

A
S DECADES PASSED AFTER
his death, my father seemed so improbable that I sometimes wondered if I’d made him up. My mother died peacefully of heart problems just before her eighty-second birthday. I wrote a long essay about her called “Ruth’s Song: Because She Could Not Sing It.” I mourned her unlived life. Still, my father’s chosen life was less understandable. My sister was the only other witness—and she had left home when she was seventeen. My father’s friends were as spread out as his life, and were strangers to me.

When I got two letters about my father out of the blue, I was older than he had been when he died. These generous correspondents had known my father when they themselves were boys.

The first letter came from John Grover, by then a retired obstetrician. In high school, he had a summer job as a trombone player with the house band at Ocean Beach Pier. One Saturday night, the bandleader took all the cash the band had earned, leaped over the side of the pier, and swam away, leaving Grover and another teenage band member stranded.

“Your father saved the summer for us by offering us a place to stay and enough cash to help us get food,” Grover wrote. “In return, we acted as ‘guardians’ of the pier at night. We slept on a mattress placed on a dance floor under the stars…and he found day jobs for us in a cement-block manufacturing plant….I also played third trombone with several bands as they passed through on weekends, providing a little more cash.”

Before the end of the summer, Grover and his friend had found jobs as musicians with a traveling circus. Then they went home to finish high school.

Grover, by then in his seventies, wrote: “I’ve always remembered your father’s solicitude in helping two homeless and broke West Virginia boys that summer….It is interesting that I, too, went into a field important to women and women’s rights. I spent a large part of my professional career helping to make the care of pregnant women and women in labor more humane. I was also deeply involved with the birth control and legal abortion movements in the state of Massachusetts during the 1960s.”

At last, I had a witness to my father’s kindness. Though his solution to unjust rules was to ignore them, not change them, it was no accident that a young man he helped had grown up to help others. My father knew a good heart when he saw one. He himself was often dependent, in the timeless phrase of Tennessee Williams, “on the kindness of strangers.”

A few years later, I got a letter from Hawaii and another physician. Dr. Larry Peebles had grown up in Los Angeles, where his own late father, also a doctor, had been my father’s best friend. He was writing because he had just vacationed in Latin America, bought a few gemstones, and had a Proustian memory of my father that set him to reminiscing on paper. He kindly wrote to give me an unknown part of my father’s life.