The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (6 page)

She brought the same approach to her dealings with Terence and managed to infuriate him regularly. Terence was always a smooth talker and a skilled bullshitter; there was an unspoken assumption in our family that Terence was smarter than any of us, including me. This, combined with his gift of gab, enabled him to make many provocative statements that went unchallenged. Terence loved nothing more than to shock people, a trait that later served him well as a public figure. The shock-resistant Amelia would have none of it. She was every bit as smart as Terence, she was as well or better read, she was unflappable, and that drove Terence nuts. Though she lived her adult life as a nun, she read widely and was actually one of the most open-minded people I have ever known. There was nothing that she could not or would not discuss. It was quite remarkable, really. Terence resented this, or claimed to; he didn’t like to be challenged, and he was so smooth that he could pull the wool over most anyone’s eyes. Amelia saw through all this and managed to get under his skin on a regular basis.

Though Terence would never admit it, I think eventually he came to respect Amelia as a worthy sparring partner. There is no doubt of Amelia’s affection for Terence; she was there for him at every important twist of his life, including the terrible summer of 1999, my brother’s last, a good part of which Amelia and I spent with him in Hawaii. Our beloved aunt, Sister Rose, the “old battle-ax” in Terence’s words, outlived him by three years. She died at age ninety in 2003 at her convent, surrounded by family and friends. There was more of Amelia in Terence than he would ever admit. She cut a wide swath, and, like Terence, there will never be another like her.

I have different recollections of our father’s brothers, Ed and Austin. I remember Ed chiefly because he had a large family of eight kids. As a young man, he attended various colleges in Colorado and then went to engineering school in Oakland, where he lived near Lake Merritt in the same apartment building as my parents. Following school, he left to work on the construction of the Alaska Highway during the War. He’d been barred from the military, classified as 4-F because of a heart leakage. The Al-Can project, as Canadians called it, was considered essential for national defense, and so he served that way. He utterly ignored the advice of his doctors to take it easy in light of his heart condition; he loved hunting and fishing, played hard, worked at hard jobs like laying track, and drank like a fish. After the war, he ended up with a high-pressure job in Seattle as a sales manager for a belt and pulley company. According to a new coinage at the time, he was a “Type A” personality. He was very strict with his kids and always seemed to be simmering with barely suppressed anger. Or so I gathered on the few occasions when we spent any time with him or his family. Accordingly, I made no effort to get to know him, preferring to stay out of his way.

As for Austin—Uncle Aut, as I call him—I became better acquainted with my father’s youngest brother later in life. Like his sister Amelia, Aut was smart and had a rebellious streak, but as a man he had more choices when it came to escaping the constraints of convention. Before the war, he started art school in San Francisco and became the bohemian of the family. He lived in a boardinghouse in Pacific Heights and earned his keep by helping the landlady with cooking and cleaning. Some of his roommates were fellow artists, others led different lives, but most were characters of one kind or another. Among his colorful housemates were at least two gay couples, his first encounter with gays—a real education for a small-town boy, and a step toward developing an unusual sense of tolerance that defines him to this day.

For a short while there, around the start of the war, all three brothers lived in the Bay Area. Aut’s brief memoirs suggest they regularly got together on weekends and did their share of partying. Our parents and uncles were not prudes. Dinners and ballroom dancing were favorite pastimes during the swing era with its famous big band leaders and singers, from Tommy Dorsey and Guy Lombardo to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. The McKennas clearly enjoyed their drinking, but they weren’t lushes. Had they been young adults thirty years later, I’m sure they would have been passing joints, dropping acid, and going to see the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane just as we did.

Once the war began, Aut’s boardinghouse days came to an end. He moved to Berkeley and, like our father, worked for a while in the Kaiser shipyards. Having registered for duty shortly after Pearl Harbor, he was biding his time. Through a lucky break, he got a job at a mine back home, not far from Salida. It was another “essential” defense-related job, mining fluorspar, a mineral used in steel manufacturing. Meanwhile, he waited to be called; like most everyone else in those days, he wanted to serve.

Eventually inducted at Fort Logan in Denver, he endured basic training in Missouri, which nearly killed him, he admitted, and got assigned to a topographic battalion in West Virginia. He caught another break when it came to light that he was an excellent skier, a sport he’d pursued as a kid. The army was then forming a mountain battalion modeled after the Finnish ski units that helped to slow a Soviet invasion of Finland launched in 1939. Aut was able to leverage his knowledge of skiing and cartography into a transfer to the Tenth Mountain Division, which became famous for its exploits in defeating the German troops in the Apennines of northern Italy in 1945. His wartime experiences had an enormous impact on his life. Over the decades, he kept in touch with his buddies from that era and treasured their friendship. For a person like me who has never been in war, it’s almost impossible to understand how important those experiences were for him.

All this happened well before Terence and I were born, at a time when settling down to have a family was the last thing on the minds of these young men. The war abruptly severed them from the past and profoundly altered their futures, to the point where what they began afterward were virtually second lives. Things were never the same again.

Aut returned and married his first wife, Mary Lou, in 1948. They settled in Denver, where Aut ran the graphics department at a local ad agency—a stressful job, like his brother Ed’s. On our rare visits he seemed grumpy and short-tempered, at least to my eight-year-old sensibilities. He probably would have been quite happy teaching art in a small college; but the pressures of earning enough to support his three adopted children and achieve the postwar American Dream led him to pursue what was perhaps a less satisfying career in management at various companies.

Aut’s first wife, Mary Lou, died of cancer in 1976. Eleven years later he remarried and retired to Hawaii, beginning what might be called his third life. Following Terence’s move to Hawaii in the early nineties, I traveled there fairly often to see him, trips that grew more frequent after Terence learned of his illness in 1999. I’ve continued to visit Hawaii at least once a year to teach courses, often visiting Aut, whom I know much better now than I did as a boy. He’s a great guy, one of the most open-minded and mellow people I know. Aut has forged a new identity as a local artist of some renown in Kona, and a beloved figure in the local arts scene, where he’s known as Mac. He and his wife Fran are, to me, exemplars of what it means to be elderly, vibrant, and engaged, both locally and, through the Internet and television, with the rest of the world. They are living proof that misery and loss of cognitive functions aren’t inevitable with age. The rest of us should be so lucky.

I’ve talked about our mother and her family, and our father’s family as well; let me try to address the enigmatic figure of our father, Joe. According to Aut, our dad grew up reading adventure novels and longing for a glamorous life. Again, as with his storytelling, I detect shades of the father in his sons. He missed out on a lot of active life as a boy, being rather sickly. When he was eleven or twelve, he contracted a severe case of rheumatic fever following an episode of strep throat. In the mid-1920s, there were no antibiotics, and his prolonged illness kept him out of school and bedridden for months at a stretch. Although he eventually recovered and led a normal life, the residual damage to his heart caught up with him in his early sixties when surgeons replaced his leaky heart valve with a pig’s.

His long childhood convalescence may have been a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it left him more bookish than many of his peers. Though our father never had the benefit of a college education, he had a lifelong passion for reading. During his illness he discovered the novels of Zane Grey, which he loved. He also devoured a lot of early science fiction, a genre that, thanks to him, had a huge impact on Terence and me. His favorites included the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially the Tarzan and Barsoom books, the latter set amid a doomed civilization on Mars; and the early Tom Swift novels, a series created by Edward Stratemeyer in 1910. In my preteens, I became similarly enamored of a second series that began in 1954 and featured Tom Swift, Jr., the elder Swift’s brilliant son. The closest analog to Tom Swift, Jr. in pop culture today may be Tony Stark, the hero of the popular
Iron Man
movies starring Robert Downey, Jr. Stark is smart, technically savvy, rebellious, handsome, and sexy, with oodles of money and plenty of cool toys, not to mention babes. The Swift series put less emphasis on girls, but their heroes represented the same fantasy ideal for our father and me that Stark surely does for young males today.

After consuming all those pulp adventure novels, it’s little wonder that our father, his health restored, left Salida shortly after high school in 1933 to seek his fortune. That quest took him to Delta, where, as mentioned, he sold shoes and fell for an older woman, two years older, my mother, Hadie Kemp. He was twenty-two when they married in 1937. Seven years later, he’d find himself in a B-17 flying missions aimed at crippling the Nazi’s industrial base.

Our father never talked much about his experiences during the war. His reticence stemmed from the fact that his combat experiences were traumatic, as they were for many soldiers; the horrors of war would shadow my father for the rest of his life. No wonder he was reluctant to discuss events that must have seemed best forgotten. During the 1950s, he developed vitiligo, a skin disease he described as an “allergy to sunlight.” He always wore large hats and long-sleeved shirts to minimize his exposure to the sun, which for an outdoorsman was a major inconvenience. His skin became mottled with large white patches amid normally pigmented skin, and sunlight would exacerbate this condition. Vitiligo struck me as mysterious at the time, but a minute’s research on the Internet reveals a wealth of information about this autoimmune disorder. Its exact mechanisms remain unclear, but some say that stress and trauma may be triggering factors. He may have had a genetic predisposition to the condition that his wartime ordeal activated. As the decade wore on, his symptoms gradually faded.

What didn’t fade, however, was his new determination to seek “normalcy” at any cost. After the war, he seemed to retreat from his former devil-may-care persona. He still loved adventure novels, but he wanted only to settle down and live quietly. In this respect he was not alone. The craving for stability was common among his generation, and especially among those who had fought in the war. The goal was not to stand out too much.

On the cultural level this found expression in
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
, the 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson that later became a movie. The story chronicles the postwar experiences of Tom Rath and his wife Betsy as they struggle to find happiness in a material world bereft of spiritual meaning. I don’t know if our father was familiar with either version, let alone whether the story spoke to him. I rather doubt it, though I’m pretty sure our mother read the book. I do know my father’s war experiences deeply influenced him and, in turn, his relationships with Terence and me. He viewed himself as an average guy, and that’s what he wanted to be—just one of the herd. This rather unappealing archetype was held up to Terence and me as an ideal throughout the 1960s and sparked many an argument. The last thing we wanted to be was average or normal. In fact, the counterculture was a reaction against that ideal. Like others in our generation, we were busy rebelling against the conformity that had stifled creativity after the war. We wanted to celebrate our individuality. We wanted to be unique, creative, one of a kind. Average was boring; boring was death.

But average is a statistical fiction; there is no such thing. The irony is that there was nothing average about our father. He was unique in so many ways—ways that directly influenced who his sons grew up to be. For reasons that remain unclear to me, he chose not to take advantage of the GI Bill, the 1944 law that guaranteed college tuition for veterans. Being a few years older than the average returning soldier, he may have felt that he’d seen and survived too much to resume student life (which never particularly appealed to him). Nevertheless, he continued to learn. A pilot, a woodsman, a lifelong reader, an avid follower of popular science and science fiction, he was an interesting person, and yet a person determined to hide his light under the cloak of normalcy, almost as though he was afraid his friends might discover he wasn’t the good conformist they thought he was. This self-deprecating attitude, this denial even to himself of his uniqueness, drove Terence and me up the wall. We had many fierce arguments about it, arguments that only hardened positions on both sides, reinforcing our determination never to be average guys, and never, ever, to be like our father.

I now have more perspective on how history, largely in the form of war, left its mark on all of us. My parents came of age in an era dominated by World War II, and the looming specter of global conflict, followed by its horrific reality, had a lasting impact on how their lives unfolded. But after Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s invasions of Poland and France, it was clearly a just war, a “good” war their generation had to fight. If you were able-bodied, you enlisted; it was the right thing to do. You rearranged your plans and made the sacrifices that most everyone else was making in order to save what amounted to human civilization. The young had little choice but to put their private dreams on hold until this horrific bit of geopolitical business had been dealt with. That imperative limited the options that were available to my parents and their contemporaries, even as it shaped their enduring attitudes and worldviews.