My parents didn’t have a formal separation agreement until 1970, so for the first couple of years after they split up, Dad came to the Highlander on the weekends when he was able to. This schedule worked for him. I think being on his own was a relief. Being a part-time father suited him: he could have fun with us without the burden of too much responsibility and for a strictly limited amount of time.
Sometimes we stayed in the apartment, but only if my mother wasn’t home—she had a hard time being in the same room with him. On warm days we walked down to South Jamaica, Dad carrying me on his shoulders and my brother trying to keep up with Dad’s long, easy stride. If there was a good movie playing, we went to the Loews theater on Jamaica Avenue, an ornate 1920s movie palace festooned with decorative pilasters and finials and cherubs.
By the late sixties it had seen better days, but it still retained some of its classical grandeur. I was in awe of the gilt-edged seats, sweeping balcony, and massive red velvet curtains; it might have been sacrilegious to watch a movie like Jerry Lewis’s Hook, Line & Sinker in such a place. But I loved being there, especially on hot, cloudy days, when the three of us could sit in the cool dark air together and alone at the same time. And maybe Dad, for a couple of hours at least, could lose himself.
He also usually swung by to pick us up one night a week. Sometimes we went to the House, but it was better—easier, less fraught—when he took us to Dante’s, a little Italian place not too far from the Highlander on one of the quieter sections of Union Turnpike.
There was a sameness about those dinners that comforted me—we ordered spaghetti and meatballs, and Fritz and I fought over the jukebox. Not over the songs we played, which were always the same—“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” “Cracklin’ Rosie,” and “Sweet Caroline”—but over who got to put the coins in the slot and who got to push the buttons. Since we were going to keep picking the same songs to play again and again, it didn’t matter. “Take turns,” Dad said, sliding us some more change across the heavily varnished wood table.
If my mother and father hadn’t yet figured out a way to be in the same room without getting into a fight, my father and grandfather had figured out that there would be no salvaging their relationship at all. My grandfather had won, and Dad couldn’t move on. But there was still tension between them, which I could feel, even if I didn’t understand it, whenever we went to the House.
After a dinner that we’d eaten in the breakfast room, we moved to the dimly lit library, a room with no books, in which the family spent the most time. Dad sat with my grandmother on the love seat by the bay window, and I stood next to my grandfather’s knee while he taught me and my brother how to spell words like “arithmetic” and “Mississippi” backward and forward, or add long columns of four- or five-digit numbers that he wrote on a white pad of cheap scratch paper with one of his blue Flair markers. By the time he finished writing the numbers down, he had already solved the problem in his head. Like magic.