Except for political matters, my father was a man of few words. But he carried on extensive conversations with himself in the bathroom every morning.
During the last years of the war, my father could be found more often away from home than not, or at best, sleeping a few hours before going back out to his night job at the war plant.
My mother would rush home from the office, market, fuss with us a little, and fix supper. Phyllis, Helen, or I would have put on the rice or potatoes already, and maybe my mother had seasoned some meat earlier in the day and left it on the stove with a note for one of us to turn on the fire low under the pot when we came home. Or perhaps there would be something left on purpose from last night’s supper (“Leave some of that for your father’s dinner tomorrow!”). On those afternoons, I didn’t wait for my mother to come home. Instead, I packed the food up myself and took off downtown on the bus, headed for my father’s office.
I heated each separate portion until it was piping hot. Carefully, I packed the hot rice and savory bits of meat stew or spicy chicken and gravy into scoured milk bottles which we saved for that purpose. I packed the vegetables separately in their own bottle, with a little pat of butter if we could get it, or margarine, on top. I wrapped each bottle in layers of newspapers, and then in an old towel, to keep the food warm. Placing them in a shopping bag together with the shirt and sweater that my mother had left for me to take to my father, I set off by bus down to the office, heavy with a sense of mission and accomplishment.
The bus from Washington Heights ran downtown and across 125th Street. I got off at Lenox Avenue, and walked the three blocks up to the office, past bars and grocery stores and small groups of people in lively conversation on the street.
Sometimes when I arrived, my father was downstairs in the office already, poring over receipt books or taxes or bills. Sometimes he was still asleep in a room upstairs, and the janitor had to go up and knock on the room door to waken him. I was never allowed to go upstairs, nor to enter the room where my father slept. I always wondered what mysteries occurred “upstairs,” and what it was up there my parents never wanted me to see. I think it was that same vulnerability that had so shocked and embarrassed me the day I peered into their bedroom at home. His ordinary humanity.
When my father came downstairs, I kissed him hello, and he went into the back of the office to wash his face and hands preparatory to eating. I spread out the meal carefully, on a special desk in the back room. If anyone came in to see my father while he was eating, I wrote out a receipt, proudly, or relayed the message to him in the back room. For my father, eating was too human a pastime to allow just anyone to see him at it.
If no one came in, I sat quietly in the back room and watched him eat. He was meticulously neat, placing his bones in even rows on the paper towel beside his plate. Sometimes my father looked up and saw me watching him, and he reached out and gave me a morsel of meat or a taste of rice and gravy from his plate.
Other times I sat with my book, quietly reading, but secretly waiting and hoping for this special treat. Even if I had already just eaten the same food, or even if it was some dish I did not particularly like, these tastes of my father’s food from his plate in the back room of his office had an enchantment to them that was delicious and magical, and precious. They form the fondest and closest memories I have of warm moments shared with my father. There were not many.
When my father was finished with his meal, I rinsed out the bottles, and washed his dish and silverware. I placed them back upon the shelf especially cleared for them, and covered them with the cloth napkin that was kept there for that purpose, to protect them from the dust of the back room. I carefully repacked the bottles into the shopping bag, and took the nickel carfare that my father gave me for the bus trip back. I kissed him goodbye and headed for home.
Sometimes no more than two or three sentences passed between us during the whole time we were together in the office. But I remember those evenings, particularly in the springtime, as very special and satisfying times.