Chapter 17

IT IS DIFFICULT TO imagine my father without a cigarette. It is his trademark. He smokes incessantly. In the car, the smoke wafts out of the sliver of space where the window is cracked open. At the dinner table there is always an ashtray pushed back and forth between my mother and him, although his habit far exceeds hers. When we watch television, the ashtray sits on his chest; sometimes I wave the smoke away and he apologizes, stubbing out the cigarette. During intermissions in plays or long movies, he works his way down the aisles, into lobbies, out the heavy doors, and there, on the street, beneath the neon lights, holding his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, my father blows the smoke into the sky.

My sister and I know smoking isn’t good for him and we both throw his cigarettes away. One day, I throw an entire carton into the fireplace. He arrives too late to pull the burning packs out. I think I am helping, but he is furious. “God damn it! What were you thinking?! Do you have any idea what a carton of cigarettes costs?”

I tell him, “I was just trying to save your life!” and hurt, I fly upstairs to my room. A few minutes later he quietly knocks on my door and apologizes to me. “Look, Nanny, I’m sorry. I know you’re just trying to help. Don’t get like this. Don’t smoke. Don’t fall prey to this God damn addiction.”

I often wonder if he would have succumbed to the alienation a smoker experiences today and quit, but back then smoking was much more acceptable. Certainly he knew, though, that he was gambling; his own father, also a smoker, had died of a heart attack at fifty-two. Although I continue to nag him, I never again throw his cigarettes out.

Many times he tries to quit; his Raynaud’s disease is causing increasing pain in his fingers. In a letter he writes to his close friend Dick Berg, he says: “No doubt you’ve heard rumors of my sudden onslaught of ill health. I won’t belabor it now because it takes a great deal of explaining. Suffice it to say I’m under medication now and I’m out of cigarettes and they tell me I’m much improved . . . It all has to do with some sort of vascular ailment in the extremities (not the extremities you’re thinking of, you schmuck!”).

And in a letter to me while I’m at camp.

July 14

Dear “Momma,”

You know what a God-awful typist I am. I’m way out of practice and I’m just beginning to use my hand again. No cigarettes for eight weeks—you better be proud of me, Pops!

But he is never able to stop entirely, and almost immediately is back to his three packs or more a day.

Despite the heavy smoking and complications from Raynaud’s, it does not occur to me, ever, that my father could be an invalid or that he will be gone while he is still young. Even following an incident a decade earlier, when after delivering a speech in Washington, D.C., he suffers chest pains and has to be hospitalized. The diagnosis is stress and fatigue; the doctor says he will be fine.

If there is something more serious or if health problems are imminent, I don’t know, and won’t know until many years later when my mother will say, “Your dad had to sit down after carrying his suitcase through the airport. He was out of breath.”

But even she is unaware of the time bomb within him, the fragility of his health, and is oblivious to what looms. He is traveling alone and doesn’t tell her until after the fact. By then he is on a perilous course, ignoring symptoms and well on his way to having what ultimately will be a very serious heart attack.

But that darkness is still light-years away.

For now, it is still the early sixties, and in a memory so palpable, so brilliantly clear, I don’t need even to close my eyes or search for a confirming home movie or photograph. I simply reach back.

It is summer. I am six or seven. My father and I are walking down to the beach below our cottage. It has rained the night before and the path is slippery. We need to hold hands—” paddles,” as he calls them. We are taking our time. My pink flip-flops are on the wrong feet, but neither of us notices until we get to the beach.

At the shoreline, he drags two lawn chairs over and places them side-by-side. He hands me my red pail he has carried down for me. I am going to collect stones with holes through them, lucky stones.

The sun is still warm for late afternoon, and the sky a cloudless, perfect blue, is broken only by the flight of seagulls passing above. They land on the dock in continuous swarms. My mother has tried to deter them. Earlier in the summer, she draped rope around the posts and tied on pieces of tinfoil. It worked for a while, but the birds are onto her now. They simply sit on the rope, turned away from the foil, shrieking to one another.

My father is reading a paperback novel. He is stretched out on the lawn chair. His knees are bent, and one arm hangs down, petting Michael. Every once in a while, he feels for his sunglasses on his head, puts them on, and looks out at the lake or up at the sky. “Daddy, I am going to put on my bathing suit,” I say, and go off into a tiny little room off the beach house we call the dressing room. I am pulling the suit on with some difficulty because it is still damp from yesterday’s swim. I almost have it on when I feel a piercing pain and I scream. My father comes running, “Nanny! What happened?!” nearly tripping on the stoop. I whip off the suit and there, on the floor, is a large black wasp. It has fallen from my suit but not before stinging me twice.

My dad grabs a fly swatter and hits it, over and over. I wrap myself in a towel, watching him and wiping away my tears. He picks up the wasp by one wing, says, “Little bugger,” and takes it outside. Then he hits it with a rock. By now I am no longer crying; my dad is taking care of things.

For the final retribution, he picks up what is left of this wasp and drowns it in the water. “Just let that little SOB try that again,” he tells me, holding my hand, as we stand there together looking out at the lake where the wasp has disappeared.

A week later all pain, humiliation, and subsequent itching I once felt are completely gone and I go away to a sleepover camp for a two-week session. The camp is not more than ten miles away but I hate it. I don’t know why I don’t ask a counselor to call home. I don’t know why I don’t leave. Those just don’t seem, for some reason, to be options. Perhaps I am afraid of disappointing my parents, who must have thought it was something I’d like, or be “good for me.” My father promises to go by on the boat every day. I look for him during swim time. I hold my hand up to shield my eyes from the blinding sun bouncing off of the glistening water, and I sit on my towel on the stones and wait. The timing, though, is never right, and we never see each other. Later, he assures me he drove by.

In Arts & Crafts I paint my mother a picture with stars and hearts and make a box out of Popsicle sticks for my dad. It sits on his dresser at the lake to this day. Unable to decide which color to paint it, I paint it every color available. On the lid, in a child’s big scrawl, I write “Daddy.”

 

 

Summer ends. We walk down the drive one final time. A few leaves have already begun to fall, splashes of color along the gravel, the irrefutable sign of a new season giving notice that we need to go.

The ritual begins, we close the cottage. Beds are stripped, sheets are thrown over lamps like ghosts, floors are washed, porch furniture dragged back in, and the windows and doors are boarded. Suddenly, once again, another year has passed and we are gone.

The flight back west is long. My mom brings little presents for us to occupy the time. Puzzles, coloring books, new crayons.

As is often the case, I have grabbed the seat beside my father. Jodi and my mother are across the aisle. I look at my dad; he winks and then returns to his book.

I remember the way the light from the small oval airplane window illuminates him that day. The way I can clearly see the tiny dark spot in his eye where he had been hit by shrapnel in the war. The plane shakes a little and I grab his hand. The pilot announces we have reached our cruising altitude, and the engines roar as we speed through the sky.

I look out the window at clouds close enough to jump into and think about all of us at the lake and the summer we are leaving behind. Leaning forward, I check in the seat pocket ahead of us for the new deck of cards my dad put there and then look over at my mother reading and my sister writing a letter, sketching horses in the corner. Sitting back, I rest my head on my father’s shoulder, loving these moments I have him to myself. I close my eyes and think about the game we will later play.