It’s the summer of 1953. A young middle-aged man sits silently, sullenly watching a baseball game on a black-and-white television. A young boy can be seen behind him, staring at his father, as if memorizing him, the lines on his neck, the way he holds himself, the way he smells, somehow knowing one day the old man will disappear, if in fact he already hasn’t. The presence of a woman hovers in the room, maybe you can see the shape of her dress in the background as she busies herself in the kitchen. She is not happy, she is mumbling under her breath, knowing that her husband can hear her. There is a feeling of low-level dread in the house, like the sickening electric hum near a power plant. The man sits like a gravestone. The teams playing on the TV are the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. When something positive happens for the Sox, the man lets out a short burst of celebration, but quickly reverts to stillness. The woman clatters dishes in the kitchen, louder than necessary. She wants to be heard. The boy is unhappy. The boy wants his parents to get along. The boy wants his father to look at him. The boy thinks, If I can make them laugh, if I can make them laugh …
The boy has seen his father laugh at Milton Berle in a dress. The boy is afraid of Berle and thinks he looks like a psychotic rabbit, but his father doesn’t. His father is brave and not afraid of Berle. His father laughs in Berle’s face. The boy positions himself to the side of his father’s impassive eyeline and dances like a ballerina from one end of the room to the other. He has never taken ballet. That’s the point. He freezes the static smile of the ballerina onto his face, flutters his feet, pirouettes. His father pays no attention.
Now the boy walks in front of his father and does a pratfall worthy of Chaplin or Keaton. A really good one. He hears his mother laugh in the kitchen. He is hopeful. But his father stares straight ahead, watching the ball game. The boy retreats to his parents’ bedroom and throws a dress of his mother’s over his head, steps into a pair of high heels, looks in the mirror and wonders if maybe this is a bad idea, and then totters awkwardly back into the living room, unsteady as a newborn foal. His father stares straight ahead.
The boy goes back to the closet and opens a big suitcase marked “Vacation” and puts on all the scuba equipment he can find—bathing suit, flippers, mask, snorkel. He walks in front of the TV. A frogman, a fish out of water. His father doesn’t blink. The Red Sox score. The man applauds and stares straight ahead. The mother stares at the boy, who stares at his father, who stares at the TV—their connected gazes would form a perfect triangle, if his father would look at either him or his mother. But he doesn’t, and the triangle remains imperfect and open, leaking and bleeding. A phone is ringing. The man yells for his wife to get it. She responds by breaking a dish. He finally looks at his son, still standing in front of him in full scuba gear, and says, “Answer the fucking phone, will ya?”
Ted is awakened suddenly from this dream, his stoned sleep, disoriented. He realizes the strange sound that has jarred him is his phone ringing. He checks his watch. It’s three-ish in the morning. He fumbles for the receiver and croaks at it, “Boiler room,” because that always amuses him.
A woman’s voice on the other line, palpable New York Puerto Rican aka Nuyorican accent (Ted was familiar with this particular patois from his patrons at work). “Is this Lord Fenway Fullilove?” Jesus, Ted thought. Only his father tortured him with that stupid middle name. He was named after a stadium. Ted had always wanted to, but never gotten around to, excising that ridiculous nomenclature from his life once and for all. He never used it, sometimes giving the initials LF when a middle name was demanded on an official form. And when pressed he would say the LF was Larry Francis or Left Field, never Lord Fenway.
“This is Ted Fullilove, yes. Who is this?”
“My name is Mariana Blades. I’m an RN here at Beth Israel…”
Ted felt words rush out of him before he thought them; it was like the words were thinking him, speaking him.
“My father,” he said without a doubt and without really knowing what he meant.
“Yes,” said the nurse, “your father.”