Chapter 42
ONE NOVEMBER WEEKEND AFTERNOON, a few months after the wedding, Doug and I are talking in the kitchen. I don’t remember the conversation, how it segues back to my father. But I do remember him asking, asking again the second time in a month, “Do you think you’re ready to visit the grave?”
I don’t recall, either, what finally convinces me to go. Only that we are suddenly in the car driving the thirty some minutes to get there and that the day is cold and gray and colorless and, instantly, it seems, we are pulling into the cemetery, past the black iron gate, past benches and the small dark chapel, and Doug has turned the motor off and we are sitting in a pale blue Honda; the car, the seats, the dashboard the only color for miles. Even our coats, our gloves, our hats are gray. There is no one around. Not even a caretaker. Doug looks at me. I don’t look back at him. I know what he’s going to say, and I don’t want to hear it.
“Go on,” he says, gently touching my shoulder, leaning over me and opening the car door. A gust of wind blows, and the last of fall’s leaves brush against the door.
“You can do this,” he says.
I turn my body to step out of the car. My legs feel numb, like they may not work, like I’ve been in a wheelchair for years and am suddenly miraculously told “You can walk.”
“Go on,” he says again. I start walking in the direction I think I need to. My hands are in my coat pockets as I walk quickly, stumbling. I am looking for the tree I remembered my mother saying eight years before, “He’d like that tree. Wouldn’t he like that tree?” Was it a maple? An oak? How tall would it be now?
It’s cold, so cold. I pull my coat around me and look at gravestone after gravestone after gravestone. Name after name. None of them his.
Where was that stupid tree? If I don’t find it, can it not be true? After a few moments, I run back to Doug. He has taken his gloves off and is blowing on his hands. It’s so cold. I am about to tell him, “We should leave,” but he looks up at me and says again, “Go on, it’s okay, hon,” urging me with a nod of his head and those clear blue eyes.
I turn around. And again pass more gravestones. Not his. None of them his.
And then.
My father’s name, his birth date, the date of his death. WWII paratrooper. A small American flag.
And something else; someone has written something on a piece of masking tape attached to the flag. Three words.
“He left friends.”
In that instant comes the finality and inconsolability I’d feared; a sorrow so forceful that it pulls me to my knees. It is only moments before Doug comes running. He picks me up from where I have collapsed sobbing.
We stay what seems like a long time. The only sounds when I stop crying are some birds in the distance and an occasional car from far away. I see a tree nearby, presumably the tree, but I don’t recognize it. It’s been so many years. It must be taller now, wider; it’s a different season, colors change. Everything does.
It is clear that I have stumbled here without a map. And so these perfectly etched letters beside me are even more startling as they spell out my father’s name. As I kneel, trying to take it all in, trying to maintain balance in the unreality of it all, I think about his parents, and how if my dad’s friend hadn’t been there that day when the Japanese soldier took aim at him, it might very well have been them kneeling where I do now. That thought, that fleeting image in my mind of my grandparents receiving the news from some officer—who hadn’t kept walking to another house after all—but stopped at theirs, up the steps, to tell them that their son had died in battle, fills me with almost as much anguish as I feel all these years later being the one to wipe the leaves away from my father’s name. And I wonder, could his parents have survived that loss?
Some papers blow around in the wind, and as Doug and I sit down, I can’t help thinking if maybe I thought I would never find my father’s grave, that maybe I had never meant to, that I could just go on pushing against this loss. But as we sit there together, the light slowly leaking from the sky, I realize that each time I look at my father’s stone, my gaze stays a little longer until very lightly, very tentatively, I trace his name.
The sky grows darker and the chill in the air is relentless. I look again at the message on the masking tape, in the faded blue letters, and then we get up and turn to go.
Maybe I find some comfort in this message left behind. Perhaps there is some element of peace, at last, not only in the realization that I have finally done this, but also in the quiet and the recognition that I don’t need to be here to find my father.
The following summer, I begin to watch The Twilight Zone—surprised by the number I haven’t seen. I am sure I am doing this more to see my father than the actual show. I start with the first season episode, “Walking Distance,” the one about the need yet the impossibility of going home. It is the one that is the most biographical, the one my dad symbolically reenacted every summer when he drove from the cottage back to his hometown.
I randomly select another episode—this one titled “In Praise of Pip.” It is another of my dad’s stories on the theme of returning to the past, but this one has an achingly sad twist poignantly acted by Jack Klugman.
Klugman plays Max Phillips, a small-time bookie who knows he has been deficient as both a father and a man:
Submitted for your approval, one Max Phillips, a slightly-the-worse-for-wear maker of book, whose life has been as drab and undistinguished as a bundle of dirty clothes. And, though it is very late in his day, he has an errant wish that the rest of his life might be sent out to a laundry to come back shiny and clean, this to be a gift of love to a son named Pip . . .
In a spasm of remorse for his wasted life, Max gives money back to one of his unlucky clients. While facing the music with his boss for this act of kindness, he gets a call that his soldier son, Pip, has been wounded in Vietnam and is dying.
In true Twilight Zone fashion, Pip and his father get another chance together. Max, who has been shot by the crime boss, finds himself in a closed amusement park, the same one he and Pip always visited. There he sees his son as a little boy. Suddenly the lights of the park come on and the two of them relive simple pleasures, running through the park until Pip tells him, “The hour is up and . . . and I’m dying.” Once again, in real time Max offers God a trade; his life for Pip’s. In the final scene, Pip, in uniform and walking with a cane from his injury, is back at the amusement park, recalling with fondness how he used to come here with his late father.
The episode is filmed at the Pacific Ocean Park, the same amusement park on the Santa Monica Pier that my dad took my sister and me to.
What is so striking, so personal, and so moving about this particular story is some of the dialogue. In this episode, Jack Klugman says to his son, “Who’s your best buddy, Pip?”
“You are, Pop.”
Just like the words of my dad’s and my routine.
I watch this episode on a rented projector in a darkened room of our lake house one hot July afternoon and remain there a long while after the film has ended. Through the screen door I can hear the boats on the lake below. An occasional shout rises as a water skier falls and in response, a motor quickly shuts down. I hear the gulls’ cries in the ensuing silence and then someone shouting, “Okay, ready,” and a boat speeding away, transforming the water, reviving the waves slapping thunderously at the shoreline.
I am cognizant of all of the summer sounds in those moments and of this life that moves forward despite my absent father. I am still haunted by the void, by the reality of this empty space, and yet, these past thirty minutes spent watching this Twilight Zone have brought a reconnection with him in a most unexpected way.
In the episode’s closing narration, I watch my dad saying, “The ties of flesh are deep and strong, the capacity to love is a vital, rich, and all-consuming function of the human animal, and you can find nobility and sacrifice and love wherever you might seek it out; down the block, in the heart, or in The Twilight Zone.”
I find it in a darkened room on a summer afternoon. Something invisible, inaudible, and until now, quite mistakenly presumed gone.