Chapter 35
As my aunt Ann sorted out Grammy’s effects, she supplied me with box after box of impeccably kept paperwork, and I became the keeper of the Schjeldahl family genealogy records. I’d like to say this is because of my reliability, but the truth was that no one else particularly wanted them.
Among the boxes of papers were folders that Grammy had kept on my father and me. My father had told Ann that he didn’t want his, but she didn’t want to throw it away, so I took both. My dad’s was labeled PETER SCHJELDAHL and mine ADA. His dated back to the 1940s, with Mother’s Day cards he’d given her in elementary school, letters from when he’d moved to New York, and clippings of his poetry and articles. Mine contained letters I had sent her over the years, Austin Chronicle stories I’d written, and copies of my report cards.
In my father’s folder, Grammy included pages of her diary from 1980, when I was four and she and my grandfather threw a birthday party for me and my parents at their Gramercy Park Hotel room. Our birthdays are all in the same week—my mother’s March 13, mine March 17, my father’s March 20. (Frank O’Hara’s true birthday, for the record, is March 27.) My grandparents ordered cake from room service, bought candles and balloons, and decorated the room.
My parents and I arrived “looking happy if a bit scruffy. Ada wearing a tan winter coat several sizes too large, a wool knit scarf, and the knit cap I gave her for Christmas. She had on an old-fashioned-type cotton dress, white tights, and black ‘Mary Jane’ shoes, and she proceeded to remove socks and shoes immediately and had a happy time romping and coloring in her coloring book … Ada wanted to take her gifts home wrapped but was persuaded to open them and we played the dice game a little. While the adults chatted she used up most of the tape to rewrap them … What an adorable, bright, and sensitive child!
“Peter looks gaunt and unkempt—hair long, w/beard and mustache. Says he lost 20 pounds when he quit drinking, but they both feel more energetic since they quit. [This was an early, unsuccessful attempt at sobriety.] We feel that he didn’t seem very happy—hope we misread him.”
In my folder was a letter from my father to his mother dated March 21, 1977. He described me at age one: “Her vocabulary is large but hard to understand; I think she may be speaking Chinese … ‘Cuteness’ department: Ada delighted and awed everyone at the party when her cake was presented. Predictably, she grabbed handfuls of the thick flowered icing. Less predictably, she proceeded to walk around presenting each of her guests with a gob of the stuff. The perfect hostess.
“Work & Worry Department: I keep plugging away at the early stages of the book, which more and more seems an absolutely colossal undertaking. The number of people I’ll be obliged to talk to easily exceeds a hundred, and there are mountains of papers and documents to ferret out and study.
“One real worry at this point is O’Hara’s sister Maureen, who controls the estate and originally picked me to write the book. She keeps promising cooperation and then withholding it; one of her many fears seems to be that I will treat her brother with something less than complete idolatry. Dealing with her has been driving me nuts. I have the warm support of almost everyone else who knew O’Hara and can only hope that this will help sway her.”
He did not sway her, of course, and neither did I, but between the two of us we were able to gather information about Frank O’Hara and transmit it. Between us, it took forty-five years, and this is not the way either of us envisioned it happening, but here we are.
As the pandemic continued month after month, New York City businesses kept shuttering and people kept moving away. I learned that Jimmy Webb, a major figure in the punk history of St. Marks Place, had died of cancer when the New York Times called me to comment for his obituary. The Times also asked me for a photo of my father for his prewritten obit. When he announced he was dying they teed it up.
When I heard that the Odessa Diner on Avenue A, where I’d had lunch with my father to talk about Frank O’Hara, was closing, I went and got takeout and asked the waiter who’d been there forever if the rumors were true. He said no; they were just closing for renovations. But he’d either been lying or mistaken, because it did close after all.
The Second Avenue corner shop Gem Spa, where my parents bought their newspapers from 1973 to 2019, said they were struggling. I went over and donated a box of books for them to sell and bought a bunch of merch, but they closed, too.
When I went to the city to help Blake move into his new apartment, I walked around our neighborhood in my mask and saw that some windows had been broken and others boarded up. The neighborhood smelled like plywood.
In January, I made my parents vaccine appointments the second they became available and drove them round-trip from upstate to the Javits Center so they could get their shots. My father said he didn’t feel different afterward because life was still nowhere near back to normal. But when I saw the needles go into their arms, I was so relieved I cried.
He was right, though, that nothing really changed, certainly not when it came to him and me. And how much longer did he have to live? Still, no one could say. Nearly two years after his “six months” prognosis, my father was the same as he’d been for most of that time—tired, weak, skeletal, still holed up in his office writing and smoking and talking on the phone to Spencer, taking too much of his prescriptions, and rarely leaving the house.
The last time I was in their apartment, my mother and I stood in the demolished space. From the center of the room, we could see St. Marks Place out the front windows and Ninth Street out the back. In spite of how long it would take to rebuild and how much it would cost, I felt a rising hope. In the empty space that once was my bedroom I thought of all the books I’d read there as a child, the guys I’d slept with in high school, the things I’d written or scotch taped on my walls. Those walls and all their words had been chucked by workmen into dumpsters below.
Maybe one day Oliver or Oliver’s children will sleep in that room, or other people’s children will. Maybe one day the building will fall down entirely and something else will rise in its place. When that day comes, my father will be gone and I’ll be gone, too. Will it matter, anything we did or thought or felt? In Frank O’Hara’s “Rhapsody,” he describes lying in a hammock on St. Marks Place sorting his poems.
What is worth remembering about Frank O’Hara, about my father, about anyone? What I heard in what Maureen said was that her brother should be known only through his work, with that work occasionally subjected to quiet, measured attention from experts, published in chapbooks and anthologies. I gathered she didn’t believe that stories like the ones I’d found on the tapes—gossip, hearsay—had any value at all.
We leave behind more than our work, though. We stay behind in memories people have of us rolling around in the snow on Sixth Avenue, throwing dorm-suite cocktail parties, having food fights with children, swimming in the ocean at night.
I hoped that my father let me have those tapes because, at least on some level, he wanted me to know him in his imperfection. I think of myself as open and generous, but I wouldn’t want to expose myself like that—with no editing, no restrictions, without even listening to the interviews first. As a brand-new father, he tried to pay tribute to his favorite writer. When he failed, he admitted it.
He stayed with his family even as most of the men in his circle left theirs. In the end, so what if he didn’t know my teachers’ names? So what if he’s not like the fathers in sappy songs, the kind playing catch with their kids in slow motion on Super 8? Let other fathers sit at the head of the dinner table, drive cars with calm authority, practice moderation. This reckless, mercurial, occasionally mean father gave me New York City, touch-typing, National League baseball, and Frank O’Hara.
My father believes his work is his only legacy. I know he’s wrong. Whether or not he values it, my father has done more with his life than write. He had me, for one thing. And one day I will leave behind not only my books but also my son and my stepson and my godchildren and my house and the memories held by my friends. I took what I needed from him—a sense of the power and importance of writing—and I added to it a belief that it’s possible to be good as well as great.
I can’t stop returning to that bedtime tape of my father and me as a baby, the one in which we were both struggling to be heard and seen and loved. How ironic that as two writers we have always had such a hard time making ourselves understood to each other. Just like the figure in O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster,” we cast off with such promise; then our ships get tangled in the ropes.
There have been moments when we waved from opposite shores or when, briefly, our boats drew close. After one of our movie nights, my father sent me an email that read:
If I weren’t your dad, I’d wish I were. Or your brother or poker buddy or grocer. Anything, to know you.
Reading that, I was moved but also wary. These moments of tenderness are so often like the night we played cards forty years before that meant so much to me but nothing to him. If these flashes of affection were all I ever got, could I let them pat out my rage like a fire blanket? It had to count for something that one morning after a night that seemed like any other, he could say, with poetic economy, what I’d always wanted to hear: he liked having me around.
Perhaps I have been spending so much time with these tapes because they are evidence of something I need to hold onto: In those rare moments when we weren’t misunderstanding each other or battling for control, our voices sounded sweet together.
Ada’s Bedtime—New York City—11/22/78
PS and A: You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll be in—
A: Daddy, why do you want that? [Pointing to tape recorder.]
PS: Oh, well, I just thought it’d be nice. I’d like to sing with you.
A: Why?
PS: ’Cause it’s fun. … Let’s try “Loch Lomond” again. Sing it together?
A: Yeah.
PS and A: O, you’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, / and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye, / But me and my true love will never meet again / On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond!
PS: Yippee!
A: Yippee!
