When I brought Kelly home to meet my parents we were already engaged, but my parents didn’t know it. I had never been able to speak to my folks about Kelly, or about any boy I liked, and I suppose that should have been my first warning. But somehow through all of it I had an absolute faith: Mother might be difficult, but my sweet, gentle father eventually would make things right. So I brought Kelly home, and the trouble began.
We went up the walk and the day was lovely, and Kelly beside me was tall and magnificent. I remember looking up at him one last time to make sure his tie was straight and his usually wild hair still combed, and I was surprised to see him suddenly stop. He was staring at my house.
It was a beautiful house, something I never fully realized until I met Kelly. It was large and dark, set back among the trees; it had red-brick walls and white-shuttered windows, and shining white columns you could see from a long way off down Elm Drive. I remember the look on Kelly’s face, something startled and almost awed in his eyes. But all he said was, “Well, now. Pretty! Is it real?”
I smiled with pride—and then, remembering the orphanage in which Kelly had been raised, I felt a stab of pain. But instantly behind it came a thrill of new joy. In marrying Kelly I would give him at last a home of his own, and even more. He would have my father’s house as well.
We went into the house. They sat down together for the first time, all my loved people. And it went wrong from the very beginning…
For a long while I did not notice it; everyone was nicely polite. Kelly was on trial and we all knew it, but in spite of that I could not feel solemn. I sat bubbling with happiness at having them all finally together. I waited impatiently for that moment after dinner when we would all relax and Daddy and Kelly would go off together in the study to smoke and talk; and all the while I was dreaming grand dreams of the future.
But no one ever relaxed. And gradually, terribly, I came out of my dreams.
At dinner the three of them talked—oh, so very politely—but there was an unmistakable coldness in the air. They were using the same words, the same language, but it was as if they were talking to each other across huge distances.
Kelly began it by trying to be mildly funny. He mentioned some of his experiences in the Merchant Marine—he had been a sailor for a while, as well as a soldier—and Mother instantly withdrew. The stories were amusing, of course, but that was not the point. She made it silently but perfectly clear that she thought a grown man had better things to do than just pick up and wander off around the world.
I could see the words forming in Mother’s mind: undependable, unstable. My mother’s whole world revolved around dependability and stability. She had come out of the slums to marry Daddy. Poor, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Mother, who lived her life in rigid fear that the neighbors might think us “common.”
She interrupted Kelly rather bluntly to ask about his family. He told her about the orphanage. I was stunned to see Mother visibly freeze. No family? No family at all? She was sorry, of course, but that would never do. Kelly was quite out of the question.
I turned instantly to Daddy. With Mother I had known there might be trouble, but Daddy—
And I saw with a wave of warm relief and love that the business of the family had not bothered Daddy at all. But he was looking at Kelly with a curiously puzzled expression—friendly still, but curious—and I realized for the first time what an enormous gap there was between them.
Daddy was David Westbrook, Mister David Westbrook: plant manager, bank director, chairman of the Chamber of Commerce. A quiet, firm, absolutely honest man who worked much too hard and played very little. A man whom Kelly, like everyone else, instantly respected.
But Kelly—Kelly was a man from another world. He was from another generation, rootless, already a veteran, already battle-scarred, already in many ways older than any of us, but still wild-haired, my dreaming Kelly, my love. And he and Daddy had no common ground.
Nevertheless, Daddy tried. He was pleasant and patient and attentive. And then he asked very politely what Kelly was studying.
“Journalism,” Kelly said. He had by this time become very reserved and polite himself.
“Journalism? You mean newspaper work,” Daddy said without expression.
“No. I’m—I’ve done some writing.” Kelly had already had several short stories published. But how could something that had seemed so marvelous sound so silly and extravagant now?
“I see,” my father said.
“I have no particular message,” Kelly said hastily. “I’m not trying to reform anything or anybody. I just have a desire to—”
“I see,” my father said again. “And you plan on making a career of that? Of writing?”
“Yes.”
“You plan to work at it full time?”
“Yes.”
“Well. Good luck,” my father said. And that was the end of it for him.
He turned to look at me once, quickly, and it was as though I could hear him say: This boy is a child. He may even be a fool. But whatever he is, he certainly is not for you.
The rest of the dinner was filled with silence, that icy weapon of my parents that I knew so well. Afterward, Kelly left as quickly as possible. I went with him to the door and I felt desperately hurt and wanted to go with him.
“Lovely evening,” Kelly said. “A real smasher.”
“Darling,” I pleaded, “we have to be patient. We have to give them time.”
“You owe it to them to tell them.”
“Not yet. I can’t. Please.”
“All right. But listen: They protect you, you protect them, everybody protects everybody and nobody grows up. But all right. You’re their only child. They have a right.” He turned to go, and then stopped and looked back at me over his shoulder. “Now, I would like a family myself,” he said gently, “but a man has his pride.”
I watched him go down the walk and then I whirled back inside, determined to tell them. But Daddy was in his study with the door closed. And Mother, in the kitchen, said, “A very nice boy, dear. But surely you know some others at school. Why don’t you have someone else out to dinner?”
After that my parents did not mention Kelly. They had expressed their disapproval; therefore Kelly did not exist. I was at that time twenty years old and my mother bought all my clothes and I was allowed out one night a week, on Saturday, and then only until midnight. So Kelly did not exist.
But eventually Kelly came back to life. They learned with a shock that I was still going out with him, and discreet inquiry revealed the alarming news that I was going out with no one else. And then during my spring vacation reality rose up and exploded. I went with Kelly all that week and came in very late. For the fist time in my life I broke my mother’s curfew.
They waited until Sunday afternoon, when I was due to go back to school. They waited for the long, cold silence to have its effect. And then my mother came into my room and announced quietly that she and Daddy had made a decision. I was seeing entirely too much of this Kelly. It would have to stop.
There was much more. They did not blame me. There were certain men who might seem “glamorously attractive” at first glance, but time would tell—and so on. I sat watching her dully, and behind her, through the window, I could see birds soaring in the clear spring air.
“I love him,” I said. “I’m going to marry him.”
Mother clutched at her throat, but she did not lose control. She forbade it, absolutely. Then she called for Daddy.
I finished packing my bag and put on my coat. Daddy came in to stare at me with grave, reproachful eyes. “Now what’s this? You’ve got your mother all upset.”
“It won’t work, Daddy,” I said. I had begun to cry. “I don’t want to hear ever again what I’ve done this time to make Mother unhappy. I’ve had it all through the years; all the places I couldn’t go, the friends I couldn’t have, the clothes I couldn’t wear. And you were right—it didn’t really matter. It made Mother happy. But not now. I’m going to marry him. I’m going to make a home for him.”
“Honey—”
“I’m going to marry him.” I picked up the bag.
“But how will he support you? How will you live?”
“I trust him. I believe in him. You might just once have some trust in me, and—” But I could not argue it anymore. I kept thinking of what a happy moment this should have been. I ran out into the open light of spring.
We were married in June, in my father’s house. All my relatives came, all the aunts and uncles. My father came up to my bedroom just before the ceremony and asked me one last time if I was sure. I kissed him and he led me downstairs. And Kelly came into the family.
They had accepted him. I knew it was because they had no other choice—but they had accepted him, and I thought all the trouble was done. Now it was only a matter of time. We would go home often, and he and Daddy would sit in the study and talk, and we would gather together at Christmas and all the other holidays. I set myself patiently to wait. But it was not to happen.
We settled down in a small apartment not far from home. Kelly began to work steadily on our Great Master Plan: first the short stories, for training, for discipline. And then, later on, when he was sure of himself and had learned his craft, there would be The Novel. He made very little money that year and had to take occasional odd jobs on construction crews to make ends meet, but we were idyllically happy.
We had our home, our lovely freedom. We went walking together at any time of day, often in the very early morning. Kelly had a great love for the natural world, for trees and the sea and the open sky. He took me with him into his own fresh, clean world. I went fishing for the first time in my life, and loved it. The only thing that was not perfect about that first year was my family.
We went back quite often, and though there was always politeness there was never warmth. My mother’s air of martyrdom—which told us plainly that she was trying to make the best of this unfortunate affair—became increasingly unbearable. And the rest of my relatives, all of whom were much older than Kelly or I, were no better. They were all good, solid people and they took their cue from Mother. “Writing would make a lovely hobby,” Mother said to me several times, “but really, when is he going to get a job?”
And so my relatives all regarded Kelly with a sort of good-natured contempt. He was a dreamer—although otherwise apparently a quiet, likable, sober lad—whom my father would no doubt have to support, eventually, while Kelly lay around under fig trees smelling blossoms.
Kelly took most of this gracefully and I was proud of him, but there were some very dangerous moments. He was not one of them and he knew it. He had nothing in common with them and he did not mind being ignored in their conversations. He took a great deal of not-too-subtle kidding about being a “genius” and he smiled dutifully. There was only one thing that shook him badly, and that was when he began to realize that these people thought he spent his time doing nothing. His lifework—nothing. They thought you wrote a story at about the same speed you wrote a letter, ten minutes and done, nothing to it. No real “work” involved. And that, when at last he understood it, was the one thing Kelly could not accept.
It happened just once, near the end. One of my uncles pushed just a little too hard and Kelly was tired. I don’t’ know what was said, but that night I became aware suddenly of a dead stillness in the room, and I turned and saw Kelly beginning to rise.
I could not believe the look on his face. I remember thinking that he must have looked that way in the war. He did not say anything. He just got to his feet, that awful look directed upon my uncle. Kelly was a big man, but in that moment he was enormous.
He simply stood there, his eyes burning down at my uncle. I had the feeling that if he took a step the house would tremble. But he didn’t move. Gradually he controlled himself. He sat down and looked at his hands, and when he looked up again he was perfectly calm.
After that night no one mentioned his work again.
That was the only display of temper I ever saw Kelly give. Except for that one night he was patient; he endured. I began to see how much having a family, even my family, meant to him. And then I saw that it was more than that. The one thing that kept Kelly from leaving, the person who had given us our only happy moments in that house, was my father.
Daddy believed what the others believed, but he was unfailingly kind. From the moment we were married he never said another word against Kelly. He was working hard all during that time—he had begun to look ill even then—but he never lost his gentleness, that sweet, calm quality he had that made any room he inhabited feel always like home.
That he did not respect Kelly’s work we all knew; he was too honest a man to be able to hide it all the time. My father was an educated man, but his was a technical education. He read little besides books about stamp collecting or about the sea, and he had the practical businessman’s contempt for “dreamers.”
Yet I really believe he had begun to like Kelly. I don’t know how much he had once wanted a son—it was something he had never mentioned—but there were traits in Kelly—a boyishness, perhaps, and idealism certainly, that I could see my father slowly beginning to approve.
But Kelly confused him. I would watch him listen to Kelly, the few times when they were alone together, and he was always attentive and patient, but at the end he would have to shake his head with faint resignation and look away. He could not understand. There was work to be done in the world, a living to be made—and yet this boy sat back to spin daydreams.
And there was the heart of it. Kelly knew all this. He respected my father, but when you respect a man who does not in turn respect you, it can be very difficult for you to continue to respect yourself. That was the thing that held Kelly, and that was the worst pain. And it was that, in the end, that caused the break.
It came on slowly, but with gathering speed. It built up all that spring, in all the little things.
My mother began to come to me repeatedly—to me always, never to Kelly—demanding insistently that Kelly call her “Mother.” It wasn’t right, she said, for her son-in-law to address her as Mrs. Westbrook; what would the neighbors think?”
I told Kelly. He looked at me and did not say anything. We never mentioned it again.
Then there was the question of Kelly’s sleeping. He preferred to work mostly at night, because of the quiet, and he was generally up late. Therefore he slept late the following day. My mother thought this disgraceful. She visited us several times—I think primarily in order to find Kelly in bed and be able to frown about it. And one day Kelly rose up half-asleep, without humor, and informed her that in the future she would confine her visits to the late afternoons, as he needed his sleep.
She left and did not come back.
At about the same time Kelly also stopped being an errand boy. Mother had got into the habit, whenever Kelly went to visit, of putting him to work. I imagine she felt that, since he wasn’t doing anything anyway, she ought to get some use out of him. She had him mowing the lawn, washing the car, fixing broken lamps and toasters, and so on. Then one day Kelly refused. He said he was tired. And he was.
Those were some of the steps downward. Kelly told me afterward that every time he went into that house in those days he felt a little bit smaller, a little less whole. And yet he kept going back. Little by little they stole away his pride, but he kept going back. We were past the first year and deep into the summer when it ended at last. It ended when I became pregnant.
I rushed home with the news, dragging Kelly behind me, both of us burbling with absolute joy. It was more than the baby—it was that I felt now everything would be right. I thought that this was the last and most binding seal, Kelly’s blood mingled with mine, the unalterable purpose and substance of love.
We burst into the house, Kelly frantically trying to slow me down. But I had to tell them instantly, the news was so wonderful. And so I gave the moment to Mother, the perfect moment, and she destroyed it. She had to sit down. She actually almost wailed. “But what will you do?”
I turned to Kelly. He looked suddenly old; his eyes were sick. My mother went on to moan about foolish, foolish children, and called for Daddy. He came in from the study and she told him. I remember the awful urgency with which I waited for Daddy to say the right words. But he was silent. He dropped his eyes.
My mother went on about what we would do, where we would live. She said the apartment was too small for a child, and what would we do about medical care, and on and on. Kelly finally turned and went into another room. I followed him and held on to him. I could feel his heart beating hard through his shirt.
After a while Mother came in behind us and said she had talked it over with Daddy and they had it planned. They—and she said it resignedly—would help. They would take care of the doctor and the hospital.
“That won’t be necessary,” Kelly said.
“But how will you manage?” my mother cried.
“We’ll manage.”
“And you’ll have that child born in a hovel!”
“All right,” my father said suddenly. “All right.” He was standing behind my mother, and now he stepped forward. Kelly stared at him, waiting.
“Look,” my father said, “there’s a job open right now at the plant. Public relations. You can write for the company paper. Maybe some speeches. I think you can get it.”
“Mr. Westbrook,” Kelly said thickly, “Mr. Westbrook, I already have a job.”
“All right,” Daddy said again. He sighed. “I’m sorry to have to say it. But you’re going to have a baby. You’re taking on the responsibilities of a grown man. Isn’t it about time you cut out this nonsense and got down to work?”
“Daddy,” I said. “Oh, Daddy.”
Kelly looked down at me. He was closer to tears in that moment than I had ever seen him. “Honey,” he said, “it’s time to go.”
He walked toward the door. I ran after him and took his arm.
“Young man, you come back here!” I heard Daddy shout.
Kelly turned once. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. I held his arm and we went home.
Kelly saw my parents once more, at the hospital when Kevin was born. He said hello and they answered and he left. Shortly after that we moved up to the Cape, and it was several months before I went home again.
That was a wonderful year, and so was the year that followed. We were alone, really, for the first time. His work began to be easier for Kelly. He wrote a great deal more and began to sell almost everything he wrote. The odd jobs in between came to be, for the first time in our married life, unnecessary. We were conscious in those days of real progress, of growth. And if Kelly was growing more tense, and approached his work with a grimness he had never before had, I did not worry about it. I knew he was trying to accomplish much more than he had before; and beyond that, always beyond that, lay The Novel, which would be both the end and the beginning of his work. It did not occur to me that the time with my parents had damaged Kelly. We never spoke of them.
I went home rarely, only once every few months. My parents behaved as if nothing had every happened. My father came home from work early to be with little Kevin, and so those two at least were close—my father and my son. There were no arguments now; al the bitterness was gone. We would all sit in the living room and watch Kevin and smile. It began to be a pleasure to go home. And then, near the close of the second year I’d been away, I realized suddenly that my father was an old man…
I think that happens to most people. There is a time when your parents are huge and strong, lords of the manor; and then there is a sudden day when you see at last with shock the deep-lined faces, the uncertain movements, the weariness, the hair grown white and thin.
My father was old. It was no longer possible for me to have bitterness. I thought many times of mentioning it to Kelly but I never did, for Kelly had done with my parents.
And yet—they were all my people. They were my world.
I do not know when I first saw the sickness in Daddy. It must have been there for a long while, even perhaps before we left his house. My father did not know about it himself until very late. He was the only one who knew how serious it was. He was at that time not quite sixty.
He began to come home from work earlier. Sometimes he did not go to work at all. He was very tired. He had begun to daydream, to talk about going fishing. He told me excitedly—the only time I saw him excited at all during that time—that he wanted to take a trip by boat to anywhere, just anywhere.
And so in this way the bitterness toward Kelly slowly died. It passed away the years, fulfilling the hope I had always had. My father saw me come to his house well dressed, happy. He saw Kevin bright and healthy. He came gradually to see that I was content, that Kelly was taking care of us. That was all he had ever wanted, to believe in that, and about Kelly at last he was at peace. If he had any regrets he did not mention them.
And my mother—this was the time of her most awful pain. She had come to accept Kelly without realizing it. In the end she drew him to her instinctively, because a great part of her life was going and she held on to what she could.
But all this Kelly did not know. I told him nothing of it because I thought my parents no longer existed for him, but that was not true. They were in him deeply and his wound was spreading all that while: In their eyes I am nothing, nothing. He began to have a sickness of his own, the sickness of a man who can no longer believe in himself, the sickness with which my parents had infected him and which only they, in the end, could cure.
It was on both sides of me, and there was nothing I could do. Aware now of my father’s illness, but not the seriousness of it, I watched the trouble begin in Kelly.
He could not relax. As the days passed he began to work less and to wander more, to lose sleep. The time for The Novel was very close and we both knew it, and Kelly faltered. It was too big a thing and he had looked forward to it for too long; and now the closer he came to it the bigger it seemed, until it became insurmountable.
In September Kelly wrote nothing. The days passed, the weeks; it was early October and he no longer even sat by the typewriter. He took long, cold walks down by the sea. We talked about it, but I was no help to him.
It was a time he had to go through. Perhaps every man goes through it at least once. He doubted not only himself—he doubted the value of his job. He was thirty years old and from a practical point of view he was approaching the time when it would be too late for him to begin anything else. How much of it was caused by what my parents had done to him and how much of it might have come out naturally in the course of time, I cannot know. But he was committed to his writing and now, looking back, it had begun to seem faintly ridiculous.
Had they been right, he thought, after all? Was this a job a man could have pride in? Was this a job a man could have pride in? A tale told here, another there, none of them ever as good as you thought they’d be, nothing world-shaking or even memorable…while other men built bridges or hammered steel.
Was my family right after all? And was Kelly a fool?
No. They could not be right. But in order for them to be proved wrong, his novel would have to be—enormous. He had to justify my faith, poor Kelly, and earn back for himself that clean, hard bit of pride that my parents had taken from him. And his goal now was not only a novel, but a great novel, a splendid, soaring thing that would light up the sky.
So he pushed on, setting himself to do the impossible. What he did was not good enough; it never would be. What replaced it was worse. After a time he wrote nothing. He probed his whole life for a meaning, a message, and came up with one thought: Life could be very fine, and the world was in many places beautiful. He could not write that. There was nothing profound about that. So he wrote nothing.
The days went by. The long, cold autumn passed into winter. And in early December my father underwent a serious operation.
I was not with him at the hospital. I was not told until it was all over. They did their best to protect me until the very end. They waited until Daddy was brought home, and then my mother called long-distance. She told me at last what was wrong with him, and that it was too late for the operation to help. She said Daddy had asked us please to come home.
I went to Kelly. That was the day of his choice. He said first that it was a family thing, that it was none of his business. He said they did not want him, they wanted only me and Kevin, that if he went it would only make everyone uncomfortable. He had many reasons for not going back; and behind them all the feeling that he himself had wronged them, that if he went back now there would be things he would have to say, things he was trying desperately not to believe. I knew what he felt and knew that there was no reason on earth for him to go back. And yet I knew at the same time that he had to.
He knew that too. And on the following day we went home.
We waited in the dark of the hall, at the foot of the stairs, while Mother went up to see if Daddy was awake. He had had a bad day and could not come down. It was late afternoon and very near Christmas. Through the window of the study I could see Christmas lights shining in houses down the road. I began to cry.
“You mustn’t do that,” Kelly said. He held me and I stopped crying.
Mother came to the head of the stairs and motioned for us to come up. I took, a great hold on myself. Mother went away and Kelly and I went into Daddy’s room.
They had moved the bed over by the window. Daddy was sitting up in the soft winter light and I could not see him very clearly. But on the window seat I saw a ship. It was a small sailing ship, half-finished, the mast slim and black against the light from the window.
We went to the bed and Kelly put out his hand. Now all of it came together in that room at that moment, all the five years since the beginning.
My father raised himself slightly and took Kelly’s hand. He was trying to smile.
“Well, hello,” he said feebly. “Good to see you, Kelly.”
His voice was cracked and very weak. He had lost so much weight he did not look like Daddy anymore. I looked down into his eyes and he looked back at me and I was chilled. I could see the pain in him and more, much more—the love and the loss and a terrible urgency I couldn’t face.
Daddy gazed at me for a long moment and then his face was sure and gentle. “You look fine, honey, just fine.” He grinned painfully. “You’re all right, aren’t you? Everything’s all right?”
I nodded.
“You don’t need anything?”
“No.”
“You’re sure? That’s fine. I know, I know. You’re happy. That’s very fine.” A little of the urgency had gone away. Now he lay back, relaxing, and looked at Kelly. Kelly was standing very near the bed with his face tight and strange. They looked at each other over the gap of those five bitter years and saw with clarity that the five years no longer mattered.
The pain ended with that moment. There were to be no apologies ever spoken, no regrets, because neither had done anything he could truly regret: he had simply done what he had to do. And if it had led to unhappiness, that was all over and done. My father had worried for his only child, and my Kelly had gone valiantly on his own way. And here, meeting together at the end, they did not speak of it.
What remained now was only the legacy, the last gift each could give to the other, the final faith. I saw the agony growing on Kelly’s face as he tried to speak it. He wanted my father to know that I would be loved, that he would always take care of me. And then, trying to say it, he saw at last that it was unnecessary; my father already believed it, believed him.
“Big Irishman,” Daddy said. There was an enormous warmth in the room. “Doing any fishing?”
Kelly nodded, not speaking.
“Do a lot of that,” Daddy said. The urgency came suddenly back and he tried to raise himself. “Do a lot of that. Get out in the open as much as you can. Under God’s sky—”
He broke off abruptly and began to look anxiously about him, searching. “Where is that book?” he said. “Do you see a book anywhere?” He found it at last on the window seat. Kelly handed it to him, never dreaming what was to come.
“Do you know this?” Daddy said. He held it up, his hand shaking. It was a large red book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Daddy held it on his lap and smiled, and looked up at Kelly with an expression I did not understand. “You remember this. About Captain Nemo.”
“Yes,” Kelly said.
“I’ve been reading it. Last two weeks. First time since—long ago. And you know, all the drugs they’ve given me, al the medicine—this was the only thing that kept my mind off my—trouble.”
Kelly was staring at him.
“You see?” Daddy said. “Listen. This is a very fine thing. If you can do this, you do something—very fine. Don’t let anybody stop you, not ever. You give a man something he can’t get for himself. There isn’t time nowadays, you see? A man can’t—see the ocean anymore, the islands, all that. He’s always alone. He never has—anybody else’s eyes. If you can give him that…”
Kelly dropped his eyes. I knelt by the bed and took Daddy’s hand, but he was still watching Kelly, almost exhausted. And then he saw that Kelly understood. He lay back.
His eyes closed, and then after a moment they opened again and gazed sleepily at the ship by the window. The tiny prow was pointing out to the sky, as if ready to put out for the open sea. Daddy smiled and pointed to it weakly, but with pride. “See that, Kelly? Made it myself. The Bluenose. Remember her? Beautiful ship. Very fast. Little more now and I’ll have her finished.”
“A beautiful ship,” Kelly said…
We stayed for Christmas. Kevin got too many presents and we had a lovely tree. My father lived through the spring, long enough to read the first draft of Kelly’s novel.
First published in Redbook, July 1959