Fatherland

Father, father, burning bright in the questions of the night. What is you and what is me? Which is the movies? What is TV?

Images, vivid and faded, advance and retreat.

Our family begins in your family—you born in 1913, reared, like Mom, in Omaha. It was not white-clapboard, but the heavy dark-stone, brown-brick weighty Midwest.

Not so many years before, Irish immigrants drawn by railroad jobs could find no housing here. They dug homes out of earth, on open plains just north of Omaha. Folks called it Gophertown, laughed at people living in the dirt, put up signs: No Irish Need Apply.

But by century’s turn, the frontier had receded, the Irish rose, built their homes of wood and stone and here you are, a towhead tot, pointing off a porch, Gibson-headed mother Juliana bending near: “Vas is Das?” “Das is Der Moon,” her German braiding with the English braiding with the Gaelic of your grandpapa (driven here from famished County Clare). Your mother’s family stayed in Germany. Her father was a Prussian officer who laid down his rifle and command. “I can carry it no longer,” he declared, left Bismarck to his business, took up farming.

This was the blood that was mixed in you. Your charming Irish father, Dan, amassed a fortune, lost it in The Crash, began again. Sold Morton Salt by the boxcar, elected Town Treasurer over and over, known as a man of integrity. There’s that word again, your single most important, what we were to have above all else, integrity.

Juliana, taciturn and not of easy mouth, scrubbed and baked and reared three girls and you. Spoiled you, yes—but she and Dan imparted strict and stern Catholicism (for which a cross was once burned on your lawn).

Still, your spontaneity leaked out: you were a red-caped drummer in the eighth grade when my fourth-grade mother fell in love with you.

Betty kept it to herself, telling not even her best friend, your sister.

•••

By now, an Irish crime lord ran the town with his political machine, and Omaha was full of booze and smoke and dancing girls. And how will a man spare an Irish son from the vices of hooch and tobacco? He made you a promise when you were a lad if you’d keep to yourself and you wouldn’t be bad and you’d take not a smoke or a drink and stay clean, you’d get a gold watch when you turned eighteen. And so you did.

(As did we; how many watches now lie broken in our drawers? We all took up the smoke and the drink, living in a house of smoke and ash, smoldering flames, lazy streams of alcohol.)

You were a swimming and a diving champ: your yearbook has you, hands on hips, confident and body proud, though one day at the pool, as you bounced off the board and arrowed your hands, a flash of gold glinted your eye from your wrist: you plummeted down, your gold watch drowned.

•••

Death split your family landscape soon thereafter: pneumonia claimed your favorite sister, you in your twenties and she seventeen. This grief you never spoke to me, though I recall your teared green eye when someone said her name. Alice. I see and hear and smell a fragile dried white rose in a rosewood box.

What are the Irish? What are the movies? You loved Jimmy Cagney, longed to be a G-Man. Clean up Omaha corruption. You took the FBI test and didn’t hear for months and then heard no. A crushing blow.

You couldn’t fathom why ’til you remembered those two men in that bar, that girlie magazine they offered. You took it, and I see you by dim moonlight, sweat pouring down your Catholic brow from urgent heaving motions: shovel thrusting into earth, burying the magazine to get it out of circulation. Your version of integrity. The FBI thought differently: an easy man to compromise. You studied law instead.

•••

Kinda conceited, Mom said she thought you were. Thought she’d see if she could bring you down a peg or two. She grew in beauty, your kid sister’s friend: rich dark hair, dark flashing eyes, when you saw her on group dates, at picnics and the games.

“Sometimes I’d date someone else, just so he wouldn’t count on me for dates. But one night, as we said good night, I wore my green coat with the collar—big—I loved that coat—he took me by the collar of that coat and pulled me to him. Never proposed. Told me we were getting married.”

No Lent wait for you, but a February wedding on a crystal Midwest day, a wedding breakfast, and a honeymoon in Kansas City on a fifty-cent piece from your coin collection.

You tried to practice law, but your partner was an alcoholic, and in six months you only had two clients, neither of whom paid.

Your voice was good and you loved ballgames so you landed a sportscasting job, broadcast the games with Ronald “Dutch” Reagan.

“Nice guy,” you said, tapping your temple, “but not much upstairs.”

You and your budding family moved as teams engaged you. Then one day, “He came home, threw his hat on the bed, and said, ‘Betty, I’ve joined the Navy.’ Well, yes, it was a shock. But we knew there was going to be trouble. ‘Better to enlist,’ he said. ‘Officers’ candidate school. Better salary.’

“Ninety-day wonders, they called them: family men, successful men, they wanted steady men, and in three months he came out second Lieutenant, an Ensign, the gunnery officer.”

Not a man behind a little Cagney pistol, now, but a man behind the men behind the big artillery, sailing the Atlantic, the Pacific, four long years of love letters in our attic, and the photographs: you as hero, earnest, crisp in navy whites in the brilliant sunshine of the nineteen forties; you on deck in a bomber jacket, binoculars pressed to your eyes; you and Mom dazzle-eyed in a tropical nightclub when once you got leave; and one of mother, proud and war-bewildered, with the children: Kako five, Pogo three, and baby Tom, fruit of the night at the tropical nightclub.

You told no tales of combat. Your two most vivid stories of the war were born of intuition.

The first happens on a moonless starless night at sea with your radar broken. A craft approaches like a floating German sub; your men want permission to fire, sir, but it just doesn’t feel like a sub to you, but better safe than sorry, sir, if we make a mistake, no one will blame us, she looks like a sub, sir, but something tells you not to, so you don’t, but all night long you sweat and toss and turn. By dawn’s early light you see it is a load of refugees, a boat with some old busted mast that silhouetted like a periscope, and everybody celebrated. It wasn’t Guns of Navarone, but you saved their lives.

(I think, though, of those huddled on the lifeboat. They knew what they escaped. We took refuge in the Church, refuge in the Army, refuge in career, refuge in solitude, refuge in others, refuge in travel, refuge in alcohol, refuge in food, refuge in art, never knowing what regime we fled.)

Your other story was a dream you had at sea. You dreamt your mother died. When you call, you find out that she had, at just the very time you had the dream. What powers of sight and intuition you could have nurtured.

The souvenirs of war you brought back home belonged to someone else: a German rifle, a Nazi helmet, with Nazi blood on it, and a bullet-riddled flag from your sister ship that looked like the national anthem itself. You named the room in our basement which housed these “Allied Headquarters.”

With a black crepe frock from Paris for Mom, back you came, to broadcast games again and a radio show of wisdoms and cheer. My father’s voice.

Here’s a photo of a you I never knew: with other men standing with a wolf pelt under the wing of a Piper Cub, parka fur flapping, like Gable in a Yukon picture. Dad oh Dad I am desperate to know you.

Back you came, Gibraltar, to rule our grand rambunctious parliament of dinner, our huge table, edged with eager us, tipping in the carven chairs, yearning to solve the very sound of the tree falling by itself in the forest, to come to the Nature of God.

A stone too heavy for us to lift. But we would try.

•••

I see your foot in a green-gold sock rubbing the dog: one of countless moments of unconscious and anonymous affection. I smell the evergreen scent of martinis. Great spirit, gentleman, wizard, tree, all wrapped up in Robert Young, to me. The love, the love, the love, the love the almost unbearable love.

•••

It seems the feeling was mutual. I found this letter from you among the family papers:

May 23, 1959

To my children, all of you—older and younger—

I felt the urge to tell you I have had a wonderful life. I doubt that God has been so good to anyone. He has given to me and to you what can be the finest life in this world. Just to be Roman Catholic in the United States—the greatest and finest country in His world and then to give us as Irene once said. Enough, not too rich, not too poor—actually it has been more than enough and so has everything else. He has given me so always so much more than I could ask—your mother, so much more than a wife and mother, so very much more. You—all a man could want as a father—I’ve had more delight and satisfaction in these last years than any man deserves. Each of you has made such a happy contribution. There is no way I can tell you how you have added to my almost total earthly happiness—perhaps content is a better word—but you have, each one of you. Why life has been this way for me and so different for so many millions of others, I don’t know. Perhaps because the Lord has made me an instrument by which you can and must contribute yourselves to His world—not all of you in the Religious Life as you have done, Kako, but in distinct and separate ways. Each must find his or her own. But I want each of you to know that you had a happy—and sometimes bewildered Father. It has been a wonderful life thanks to God—your mother and you—Dad.

•••

If only we could stop the story here.