Stories for Boys: A Memoir (22 page)
Read Stories for Boys: A Memoir Online
Authors: Gregory Martin
When we spent time together, never once did there seem to be something else he would rather be doing. Even the thought of such a possibility occurs to me only now.
On the coldest of dark winter mornings, when it was too cold to bike, we sat in the warmth of the Chrysler and folded and rubber-banded newspaper after newspaper, and then he drove me house to house delivering them through the neighborhood. I didn’t have to ask. My alarm would go off, and he’d already be awake, downstairs at the breakfast table, drinking coffee, waiting, the car warming up in the driveway.
My father never wanted more from me than I could give. He never found my effort insufficient. I did not need to try harder, give more, or be anyway other than I already was. He was proud of me. He told me so all the time.
But I was not proud of him, not then. I was not grateful for his time, and I did not consider his sacrifice, on my mother’s behalf, admirable or important. I wished that he could be more like the fathers of other boys I knew – with their suits and tasseled shoes, their understated assuredness. The fathers of these boys were not out of work. They were not like my father; I could not even imagine them being like him. My father was not timid. He shook hands firmly; he looked people in the eye. But he was entirely unassuming. Humble. He radiated humility. He still does. But I was afflicted with striving, ambition, a longing to become “known,” and so I considered my father’s humility a flaw, not the rare virtue that it was. I did not consider my father ahead of his time in his unresentful willingness to support and encourage my mother as she became the first tenured female professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska, and then the first and only female full professor in the University of Nebraska’s College of Business Administration, as she took a job in the White House, and then with Congress, as she became one of only a handful of female Business School Deans in the country. I did not see my father as a fully complex character in his own right in our nation’s slow but inexorable pursuit of equality.
My father was always there, but I did not really see him. Or if I did, he was slightly out of focus – either because of my own adolescent embarrassment or because of his own calculations entirely unknown to me. I thought for many years as an adult that my failure to acknowledge him, to know and cherish him the way I cherished my mother, was my failure only.
My Father’s Fiction
FOR TWO YEARS DURING MY CHILDHOOD, WHEN I WAS nine and ten, my father did not hold a job but instead stayed home and wrote. He wrote science fiction. He studied craft. He went to a weeklong summer writer’s conference, where his teacher was the science fiction novelist Frank Herbert, who wrote the
Dune
series. My father met other writers at the conference and corresponded with them. He wrote daily, according to a schedule he set out for himself and followed. He did this while I was in elementary school, just as I am now writing, at this very moment, while Oliver and Evan are in elementary school. My father wrote in the office of our home on Stratford Avenue, in the room where that dog was barking behind the blinds on that July afternoon when Oliver, Evan, Christine, and I visited the house on our way to St. Paul. My father was disciplined. He completed a first draft of a novel. It was never published. He wrote short stories and sent them off to magazines. They were never published. I remember the rejection letters coming in the mail.
Dune
series. My father met other writers at the conference and corresponded with them. He wrote daily, according to a schedule he set out for himself and followed. He did this while I was in elementary school, just as I am now writing, at this very moment, while Oliver and Evan are in elementary school. My father wrote in the office of our home on Stratford Avenue, in the room where that dog was barking behind the blinds on that July afternoon when Oliver, Evan, Christine, and I visited the house on our way to St. Paul. My father was disciplined. He completed a first draft of a novel. It was never published. He wrote short stories and sent them off to magazines. They were never published. I remember the rejection letters coming in the mail.
My father never showed anything he wrote to my mother.
The drafts of those stories and that novel no longer exist, and so there’s no going back now and looking through them for clues, to try and piece together the themes and preoccupations my father returned to again and again. There’s no way now to see how he attempted to enact his confusion and alienation, his shame and duplicity, his humility, his humor, his wonder, his love and his sense of being loved and unloved.
I am unsentimental about “things” to a fault. I can fit all the possessions I treasure in a backpack. I don’t keep books I don’t like, even if I bought them in hardcover. There’s no single object, no thing, I can’t do without. I am always trying to find a way to throw things away while Christine is at work. I bury knickknacks and crap of all kinds in the bottom of the garbage and hope not to get caught. The emptier our house is the more I feel at home. I would make a good monk. I like the way light spills through open windows into empty rooms. I would sleep on a sleeping bag on the floor without complaint. More than once, I’ve suggested seriously to Christine that we sell our home and live in a yurt, off the grid, deep in the wilderness. I’ve been told by people I trust that this particular aspect of my personality is pathological.
But I wish I could have those manuscripts, those drafts of my father’s stories he wrote when I was a boy, during that time when he was the age I am now, the time when it was irrevocably dawning on him that he was not who he was pretending to be, that he had been in denial a long time, but that denial was no longer working. That time when so much of his life was good and happy and so much of his life was deception – and he knew it and kept going. What words, what sentences, did he put down then? What was the balance between action and reflection? Were the conflicts rooted in situations – a star likely to explode, a huge asteroid on a deadly trajectory, approaching the colony at terrible speed? Or were there more internal conflicts the char - acters faced, for which they had no good answers? What shape did these stories take? How did these conflicts play out? How did these stories end?
I’m aware that in a good story a character has to want something badly, and this character cannot get what he wants. Not really. He gets something else. Knowing this doesn’t make the loss of my father’s stories, thousands and thousands of words, any easier.
Suicide is Painless
WHEN I WAS NINE YEARS OLD, I RECEIVED MY FIRST rejection letter from Random House. I’d sent them a deeply affecting and darkly comic novel about a group of farm animals, far from home, working in an army hospital. The book was called M*U*S*H .
I’d been determined to send my novel out, and my elementary school librarian had helped me look up the publisher’s address in New York and helped me draft the proposal letter itself. I remember her well. She was tall and thin, with dark, curly hair. She was older than my mother but younger than my grandmother. She was always suggesting new books for me to read. I remember showing her the rejection letter – the first letter I’d ever received on letterhead. The letterhead was red. I was trying my best to contain my disappointment, when she did something I will always remember, something I did not know was possible. She told me that the Sheridan Elementary School Library would publish my book. She helped me laminate the covers and bind the thin, wide-ruled gray paper with gold clasps. We glued a tan folder in the back, and on three-by-five blank stock paper, we typed up author and title and subject cards for the card catalog. We set my book on a small easel on a low shelf near the entrance to the library. Each day, I checked to see if my book was still on display, and one day it wasn’t. Someone had checked out my book. For a long time after that, I checked the card in the back of the book to see the names of the kids who were reading my book, the way one might now check their book’s
Amazon.com
ranking.
Amazon.com
ranking.
In publishing my book, my librarian was saying: I see you. I see how much time you spend here. You love to read, you love to write, you love books, you want to be a writer. Be a writer. I have never forgotten. What a gift, the gift of recognition. The gift of permission. Be who you are. It means everything, and when others who matter give it to you, it becomes easier, though never easy, to give that permission to yourself.
M*A*S*H WASN’T REALLY autobiographical, unless you count that once a week I sat on the couch beside my father and we religiously watched the television show
M *A* S * H
. We popped popcorn and arrived in the basement a few minutes early bristling with heightened anticipation. We sat raptly as the helicopter appeared on the screen, and we listened to the instrumental version of the show’s theme song, “Suicide is Painless.” I learned to play this song on the piano, sight-reading from my
American Movie Hits for Beginners
songbook. Before my voice changed, I sang along also, hitting all the high notes.
And I can take or leave it if I please
.
M *A* S * H
. We popped popcorn and arrived in the basement a few minutes early bristling with heightened anticipation. We sat raptly as the helicopter appeared on the screen, and we listened to the instrumental version of the show’s theme song, “Suicide is Painless.” I learned to play this song on the piano, sight-reading from my
American Movie Hits for Beginners
songbook. Before my voice changed, I sang along also, hitting all the high notes.
And I can take or leave it if I please
.
My father and I watched this show together for years. We laughed when Corporal (and later Sergeant) Maxwell Klinger dressed in drag but could not, could never, get his section 8. Maybe I understood, on some unconscious level, how much this hit close to home. Maybe my father studied me when I laughed. Maybe he said, “You know why that’s so funny, don’t you?” But I don’t think so. I don’t know if he identified with Klinger at all.
We watched as commanding officer and beloved, happy-go-lucky Colonel Henry Blake learned that he was going home in the final episode of season three. We watched him say his goodbyes. At the end of the episode, we learned that Henry ’s plane had been shot down over the ocean and he’d died. Maybe we cried. Maybe we could hardly bear our sadness for Radar, the incredibly competent company clerk and bugler, because Henry Blake had been like the father Radar never had.
We could not understand what Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan saw in Frank Burns, but we appreciated the dramatic irony of their righteous piety set against Burns cheating on his wife.
We watched when Hawkeye learned that his best friend, the cut-up Captain “Trapper ” John McIntyre, had been discharged while Hawkeye was on R&R in Tokyo. Trapper did not leave a note. He gave Radar a kiss on the cheek to pass on to Hawkeye. We didn’t know that the nickname “Trapper” referred to his being caught having sex in a bathroom on a train.
Maybe we laughed along with the laugh track during the episode where Hawkeye keeps asking what the initials in B. J.’s name really stand for, and B . J . keeps saying, “Anything you want.” Maybe I laughed – I probably did – but I could not have understood why.
In the scenes set in the E.R., there was never a laugh track. The series creators hadn’t wanted a laugh track at all. Now, on DVD, you have the option to watch the show without a laugh track, so if you don’t feel like laughing, there’s no laughter – yours or anyone else’s.
For years, my father and I watched Captain Hawkeye Pierce’s biting, quick wit, his deepening empathy, his dedication to his patients and to the show in which he was the star. Had we ever met a man so willing to grant us access to his emotional life? We watched as his simmering, erotic, antagonistic relationship with Margaret faded and their friendship matured and became beautiful. It’s hard for me to watch Alan Alda grow old, to watch him play other, less sympathetic characters in Woody Allen movies. I can’t even watch him as himself on
Scientific American Frontiers
, on PBS, as he takes us from the depths of the conscious mind to the outer reaches of the universe.
Scientific American Frontiers
, on PBS, as he takes us from the depths of the conscious mind to the outer reaches of the universe.
My father and I watched the show’s finale, on February 28, 1983, along with the rest of America. It was then the most watched television show in American history, with 106 million viewers. The show was two and a half hours long. I’d just turned twelve years old.
The Korean War is ending, and as the show begins we discover that Hawkeye Pierce has been sent to a mental hospital where he is being treated by Dr. Sidney Freedman, a gentle psychiatrist with a bushy mustache. Hawkeye has repressed some memories of a particular bus trip, and Freedman is helping him get them back. There was a soldier on the bus, and Hawkeye passed him a bottle of whiskey. No. The soldier was wounded and needed plasma. The bus stopped to pick up villagers and more wounded soldiers. There was an enemy patrol in the area. The bus pulled over. Everyone needed to stay quiet. One village woman had a live chicken that would not stop squawking. Hawkeye snapped at her. “Keep that damn chicken quiet!” The woman quieted the chicken. No. The chicken was a baby and the mother smothered her baby and now Hawkeye is sobbing.
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