The Magical Stranger (21 page)

Tupper's face broke into a smile. I wanted to believe him.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I
called Mom a few weeks after my flight and told her I wanted to drive out to Michigan and sift through Dad's things, maybe sit with her for a formal interview. Her response was chipper, in language cadged from TV commercials.

“Bring it on. Let's do it. ”

I was wrong-footed by her happy talk and enthusiasm to discuss our terrible years. I drove to Flint and began questioning my whole narrative. Maybe she had always been the sweet woman whom everyone loved. Maybe I'd just been a bad son, giving her grief and heartache when I needed to lessen her burden. Maybe I was remembering everything exactly wrong.

T
hings thawed quickly between us after I moved out of the house. I'd see her two or three times a year and it would be fine. Mom marveled at my academic success and then my young career. She framed my first articles and hung them in my old bedroom where I used to hide from her. The years passed and I became her first call when she needed some instant courage.

Terry joined the Army as a second lieutenant after college, emulating Dad in a way that I couldn't imagine. She was sent to Kuwait just after the Gulf War started in 1991. Mom was hysterical, weeping on the phone, terrified she was going to lose another loved one.

“I won't survive it, Stephen. I won't survive it.”

I took the train from Chicago to Flint to help her ride it out. Thankfully, the war ended quickly. She dropped me at the train station and told me she was lucky to have a son like me. I brushed off her words, telling her that I was glad to help, but on the train back I cracked open a celebratory Budweiser and stared out the window, turning her compliment over in my mind like a new treasure. It was as if all the years of fighting had never happened.

Her own world remained small and contained. Nancy urged her to go back to school—the government would pay for it—but she put it off, claiming that Christine needed her at home. Christine graduated from high school in 1995 and headed to the University of Michigan. I feared Mom would go to pieces living alone. But Mel died and her mother had nowhere to go. Mom took her in, a selfless act that gave her somebody to talk to. Eventually, she regretted the kindness—living with her eighty-year-old neurotic mother aged her before her time—but it eased my mind.

She eventually got a part-time job working in the Ralph Lauren section of a Flint department store, her first job in over thirty years. Sometimes I would pass through the Midwest for work, and I'd drive up to the Genesee Mall and surprise her. Her eyes would fill with tears and she'd clutch me tightly, her nails digging into my ribs like a drowning child grasping a rescue buoy.

But then I hit thirty-six, Dad's age when he crashed. I had dabbled with my grief and loss, mostly on November 28, the anniversary of Dad's death, pushing it away the rest of the year. Denial was less of an option as I aged. Anything could set me off. I was on assignment in a faceless city killing time on its generic boardwalk when I saw a black-haired young man helping his little boy pedal without training wheels. I burst into tears. I started going to Army-Navy games in Philadelphia and the Meadowlands whenever I could. The sight of the academy brigade marching onto the field filled me with pride and then sobs that I'd try and stifle in a press box bathroom stall. Still, I went back year after year. One night in 2003 or 2004, I caught the Denzel Washington submarine flick
Crimson Tide
on cable and was fine until the soundtrack started bleating “Eternal Father,” the Navy hymn played at Dad's memorial service. I wept for an hour.

The more I thought about Dad, the less I wanted anything to do with Mom. I replayed my childhood but began looking at it differently, a director sifting through footage shot by the second unit. Now I didn't see our long-ago battles as war between two superpowers. I walked the streets in my Brooklyn neighborhood staring at all the happy moms with their perfect kids in $500 strollers and was struck by a simultaneously banal and profound thought: Wait a second. She was the adult and I was the child. I was a boy with a dead father. Was screaming that I was ruining her life helpful? Did she really think that was right?

So I cut her off. Actually, it was more benign neglect. I stopped returning her calls the same day. Then I waited three days. Sometimes, I didn't call back at all. I lost interest in her squabbles with her mother and sister. I let the burden of Mom pass to Christine and Terry. My relationship with Christine remained close and important to me even if we didn't talk or see each other very often. That childhood bond, me looking out for her and her loving me in return, couldn't be broken.

Things with Terry were more complicated. Being only eleven months apart, we waged a low-intensity conflict with each other for our first eighteen years over everything from
Star Trek
versus football on TV to who was Christine's favorite sibling. By high school, we were exhausted with each other.

We didn't bridge the gap as adults. Our temperaments were always different. She was controlled and quiet. Mom always thought there was a happy carefree part of her that shut down when Dad died and never returned. I was the opposite, a jokey drama queen always playing the fool. We'd go skiing together and the old fault lines would emerge as Terry, a former all-conference skier, tried to goad me down double black diamond runs by questioning my manhood. She'd roll her eyes at my hesitation and call me a wuss. I'd pout, wondering aloud why she was surprised by my lack of coordination after forty years of front-row observation. At the time, she owned a Range Rover, a Miata, and a motorcycle. One day at Mount Bachelor, I muttered under my breath that she was the real man of the family.

“What did you say?”

“Uh, nothing.”

We were just wired differently. But we were there for each other when we had to be. In 1993, she stayed with me when she came to Washington, D.C., for a gay rights demonstration, particularly heroic since she was still an officer in the “don't ask, don't tell” Army. We didn't talk about her private life, but we went to the Mall and looked at the AIDS quilt and walked for hours. We didn't say much, but I knew it meant a lot to her that I was by her side.

During my divorce, she flew out to Boston and helped keep me upright when I had no desire to do that. She was the first member of my family to call my ex an asshole. Whether it was true or she meant it didn't matter. I was still grateful.

I often wondered what Dad meant to her, or if she ever thought of him. Maybe she had put him away, the pain too great. But I was wrong. In 2013, Terry and her partner, Bari, prepared for the birth of their son. They arranged to have the Cesarean section on January 6, a Sunday. When the doctor asked why that day, Terry told her it was our father's seventieth birthday. A photo of Dad from flight school was kept in their room during the delivery.

Mom moved to Port St. Lucie, Florida, to escape Michigan's winters. A year later, a hurricane bore down on Florida and an evacuation order was issued. Mom was petrified to drive north with all the fleeing traffic. It was Terry who flew down and drove her to safety, not me.

I wasn't proud of myself. I didn't have the courage to have an actual conversation with her about these things, so she was left to wonder why her son was doing the slow fade. I did the minimum—calling on birthdays and Christmas and visiting once or twice a year—just enough so she had to ask herself if maybe it was all just in her head. Part of me reveled in leaving her alone with her doubts. But, mostly, I was ashamed.

I called her early in 2008 and casually dropped into conversation that I wanted to write something about Dad. There was a momentary pause, and then she squealed with delight.

“Oh, you go, boy! That sounds wonderful! I am so proud of you. I'll go through my phone book and think if I come up with names for you.”

I was confused. We had not talked about Dad for more than forty-five minutes in the past thirty years. Now she was fired up that I was going to write about him?

“You write what you want to write. You're owed that much.”

The year 2008 slowly rolled by. I watched with everyone else as Barack Obama took over our lives. He was everywhere in my Brooklyn neighborhood. His posters hung in wine bars and his face jumped out from T-shirts on toddlers rushing off to preschool conflict resolution seminars (or so I imagined).

As Obama and John McCain received their parties' nominations, my heart filled with dread. I'd been voting Democrat since I was twenty-two, but this was different. There are few things I knew with certainty that Dad would have done if he had lived. One would have been voting for John McCain, a fellow Annapolis grad and Navy flier. So I would do it for him. That seemed the least I could do.

But it wasn't that simple. I remembered my Chicago years, laboring for black candidates in lost causes, not far from Barack Obama's home. I remembered the tears I shed when they lost. When I worked for Alan Dixon, I had, inexplicably, helped draft the first Senate prayer given by a Muslim, Wallace Mohammed. There was a connection there, too.

I had friends who worked on Obama's staff and swore by him. But I was never a fan of a 2008 Obama candidacy; the Navy brat in me wasn't able to see past him as a line jumper, vaulting from lieutenant to admiral. I was supposed to profile Obama in 2004 for a magazine, but it fell through. I always regretted it—partly out of egotism, but also because I wondered if maybe I would see what others saw if I'd met him.

I followed the campaign without joy. McCain seemed like a lost, tragic hero more than a plausible president. Watching him give his St. Paul acceptance speech, I was struck with sadness—his moment had been 2000 and that seemed long ago.

Still, John McCain felt like kin in some sense. I mentioned to a few friends that I was considering voting for him, and this admission was met with stony silence or the kind of condescending New York chuckle that greeted the revelation that I really liked the film
Love, Actually
.

I bit my lip all fall. I watched the markets fall and McCain's botched response remove the last doubt that he was going to lose, perhaps badly. I avoided political conversations for the most part but found myself at a friend's house watching the last debate with a group of Ivy League policy wonks and literary types. The McCain trashing began early. I left after the seventeenth joke about his strange facial expressions, telling my host that I didn't have a problem with people not supporting him, but the vilification of a man who spent longer in a prison camp than Obama spent in the Senate wasn't how I wanted to spend my evening.

I called Mom on the way home. She could hear the rage in my voice. She let me babble until I ran out of steam.

“I know, son. McCain suffered like we suffered. Other people are never going to understand that. You vote the way you want to vote.”

A week or so later, I went to vote in an old, beaten-down Brooklyn school. The line was so long that I was able to concentrate on the excitement on the faces of African Americans as they entered the voting booths with their children. I was envious of their joy. I wondered if the past was really past.

Finally, I entered the booth, closed the curtain, and stared at the names. I stared so long that I could hear folks behind me begin to grumble. I delayed by flipping the switches for all the Democrats in local offices. My finger went to McCain-Palin, but I didn't flip the switch. I moved my hand over the Obama-Biden switch, then flipped it, pulled hard on the main lever, and departed. I could barely breathe. I called Mom to tell her what I had done. She crackled with laughter.

“I did too! Maybe the future will be different. Sugar, it's worth a try.”

I didn't know what to make of this new version of Mom. Was that all I needed to do, talk about Dad, and now she was all touchy-feely about our history? Is that how little it took? If so, why did we wait so long?

I
arrived in Flint on a low-ceiling, humid summer day that reminded me of my miserable teenage years. The house was not the same. Mom had sold the place in Flushing when she moved to Florida, but once Christine started having kids, she couldn't bear to be so far away and bought a small ranch-style home in Grand Blanc, about twenty minutes from where I lived as a boy. Some things had survived the move; models of Dad's planes still rested above the fireplace next to the flag presented on behalf of a grateful nation.

Mom had adopted the characteristics of an old woman living alone—the too-large television left on for company morning, noon, and night. She hobbled around on an artificial knee, a little uncertain on her feet. Her mind was sharp but her health wasn't great. She had endured an angioplasty a year or two earlier. At the hospital, Christine and I looked on slack-jawed when she told the nutritionist that she would still be cooking with Crisco and it wasn't open for debate. Watching her cook me rigatoni—one of her heart attack specials that I loved—I was struck by the thought that she would die, and not at some abstract point in the future but maybe before the decade was over. Somehow, the thought had never occurred to me before. My battles with her, now mostly in my memory, seemed as necessary to me as oxygen. I couldn't imagine it ending.

I lay awake that night in her spare room like I do most nights before a big interview. I decided what questions I would save for last, an old strategy to get what you can from a source before things turn ugly. In the morning, she made me eggs and bacon with some Pillsbury biscuits—my favorite childhood breakfast—and then she settled onto her sofa with her VAQ-135 mug. Mom's poodle, Ollie—her fourth child—curled up in her lap, sighed, and then slipped off to sleep.

We started with the day they first met. She told the familiar story of meeting at a dance after the 1961 Oyster Bowl game between Navy and Duke. The rest of their courtship went according to legend, except when it didn't. She began making the five-hour drive to Annapolis with other girlfriends dating midshipmen. The girls would stay in “drag houses,” local homes chaperoned by widows and matrons. I asked her what she first saw in him.