In the middle of the stack of tapes, I notice a couple with my name on them. I am a little afraid but also deeply curious. When I hit Play, I hear myself.
Ada—New York City—9/77
Ada: What’s that?
Peter Schjeldahl: It’s a tape recorder.
A: Yeah.
PS: Yeah. Tape recorder. It’s a button. Daddy’s. Daddy’s.
A: Daddy’s!
PS: Yes. Daddy’s tape recorder. You can’t have it because it’s Daddy’s.
A: Dad-dy.
PS: Uh-huh. Isn’t it nice? Isn’t that nice? Huh?
A: [Fussing.]
PS: [Sound of exasperation.]
On that tape, I’m a year and a half old. On another, I’m two and a half. My father and I sing:
Ada’s Bedtime—New York City—11/22/78
PS and A: Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do …
I’m half-crazy all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage
I can’t afford a carriage
But you’ll look neat
Upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.
It’s strange to hear my parents—whom I’ve known only as middle-aged or old people—as new parents in their thirties and to hear myself reciting nursery rhymes for them.
A: Jack and Jill went up the hill
to fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
and Jill came tumbling after.
Brooke Alderson: What about Humpty Dumpty?
A: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
BA: Terrific!
I rattle off “Wee Willie Winkie” and “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater” and “Hey Diddle Diddle” and “Jack Be Nimble” and “Jack Sprat”: But betwixt the two of them, they licked the platter clean.
It’s bizarre to hear my voice. It’s also exhilarating. I mean, I was still in diapers, and I knew the word “betwixt.” I was a genius!
In my toddler voice, I ask my father to play the tape back. He thinks I’m saying there are people in the tape recorder. He says there are no people living in the tape recorder.
In my baby voice I say I know that. I just want them to play the tape back.
From the vantage point of forty years later, having babysat countless children and raised my own verbose child, I can hear the frustration in my baby voice.
BA: There are not people in there! Ready? Let’s sing into it. Then we’ll play it back. Okay? It just tapes our voices.
A: When we play it back, Dad do it?
BA: [Mishearing my “we.”] They won’t do it!
PS: [From elsewhere in the room.] It’s a machine, Ada!
BA: It’s a machine. There aren’t people in there.
I think, not for the first time, that these are not people to whom parenting came naturally. Once I asked them how they decided to have a child in the first place.
“We thought your mother was pregnant and we thought, ‘Oh no! Not a kid! That will ruin everything!’” my father said. “But then it turned out she wasn’t pregnant, and we were sad about it. So we decided to have one on purpose.”
My mother disputes this and says they always wanted a baby.
They do agree that when she found out she was pregnant with me, they threw a big dinner party. While I was growing up, famous artists of the era huffed up those stairs to eat dinner around our table: Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Eric Fischl. At this one dinner they solicited advice on baby names. With the last name Schjeldahl, they wanted something as easy as possible for the first name. Jane? Daisy?
Ada Katz, known as “the most painted woman of the twentieth century” because her husband, Alex, made so many portraits of her, said, “I’ve always thought Ada was a nice name.”
So it was settled.
What strikes me most on these tapes I appear on is how charmed and surprised my parents seem to be by this small person in their midst. They had never known babies before. Neither had my mother’s friends, most of whom were gay men. She and her accompanist and best friend, Gary Simmons, called me the Christ Child. I had colic, which meant I was fussy for the first six months, but once that cleared up it was generally agreed that I was bright, kind, and quiet—no trouble, even in my frequent sickness.
Author Christopher Isherwood, in his diaries, recalled meeting me at a party at his home. He said: “One of the most agreeable children imaginable, neither sulky nor sly nor pushy nor ugly, with a charming trustful smile for all of us, she went off without the slightest protest and slept in our bed until it was time for everybody to leave.”
When I was three, my parents and some friends went on a hike through the desert in California. My mom recalls that they kept yelling at me, “Keep up, Ada!” And then she realized, at the end of a long, hot day, that I’d done all those miles of hiking on legs that were a third the size of theirs. And, can you believe it? Covered in sunburn and sweat, she didn’t complain once! A lot of stories about me as a little girl were like this—how independent, how uncomplaining, how good.
My father never did know how to relate to me. He tried some things that made sense and some that did not. When I was in kindergarten, he typed up a bedtime story about a stuffed animal called Doctor Bear. The same year, he showed me Judgment at Nuremberg. I was so traumatized by the movie’s graphic concentration camp scenes that soon after, when I saw a Hasidic man walking down the street, I shrieked and said, “Oh no! Will he be okay?”
My father showed me how to look up big words in his huge dictionary, how to keep a baseball box score, and how to throw a punch, which he encouraged me to do if I was bothered by the older playground bully. When I was in first grade, he taught me how to touch-type on his IBM Selectric, my brow furrowed and my tiny fingers searching for the letters without looking down.
And from elementary school on, every time I was at the base of Central Park and saw the bronze Augustus Saint-Gaudens statue of General Sherman, I would think of a line in O’Hara’s poem “Music.” When he looks at the statue, he sees the angel leading Sherman’s horse into Bergdorf’s. I never would have thought of that if my father hadn’t given me Lunch Poems.
But I’m getting distracted. I need to get back to the tapes. I need to focus on Frank O’Hara and stop thinking about my own childhood. I pick a tape that I think will be good: Hal Fondren. I soon learn that Fondren, who shows up often in O’Hara’s poetry, was a gay air force veteran from Kentucky with whom O’Hara threw regular cocktail parties at Harvard.
Hal Fondren—12/19/77
Hal Fondren: You had ten dollars and you bought two bottles of gin or three bottles of gin and a bottle of vermouth and offered everyone martinis. They went quite a long way because we knew a lot of freshmen, and a lot of the boys brought freshman girls who’d never drunk a martini in their lives.
Peter Schjeldahl: It went a long way.
HF: It went a long way. There was usually enough for me and Frank to get really loaded.
They usually had enough Cinzano vermouth left over to have an aperitif before lunch the following day. The sounds of ice tumbling into glasses and lighters flicking on—and the very relaxed tone of Fondren’s voice—make me think he and my father were drinking and smoking throughout this interview.
It makes me wonder how my father felt interviewing all these war veterans. He told me many times that when he was called up for Vietnam, he’d taken every drug he could get his hands on and then showed up to the draft board and tried to cooperate. They threw him out like he was trash. And, unfortunately, he played the part of a deranged addict too well. It took him a while to feel normal again after that performance.
In any case, it doesn’t come up, and the interview goes somewhere none of the others have. Hal Fondren may have been the only Harvard friend from that time whom O’Hara took home with him for a visit.
HF: It was a very strange experience, actually.
PS: Tell me all you can remember about it. [Clock chimes. Fondren laughs.] I’ve yet to make contact with the family and childhood friends, and he rarely talked about it.
I’m riveted. I can’t believe I’m actually going to get to follow Fondren home with O’Hara to Grafton. I turn the volume up and push my headphones closer to my head.
The trip began auspiciously enough. O’Hara picked Fondren up from the train and took him out to a series of bars on the way back to the house. They couldn’t drink at home and so they’d better do it on the way there, O’Hara said. Their new discovery was India pale ale, so they drank a few of those.
When they arrived home, they sat with Maureen, then a young girl, and had a lovely dinner made by O’Hara’s mother, Kay, whom Fondren found lively and attractive. After scarfing it down, O’Hara announced that they had to leave again to go see some friends in a show at the Red Barn Theater. When the show got out, O’Hara said he was leaving with a girl but that he’d meet back up with Fondren at the Grafton town square a couple of hours later. Fondren was dropped off by a couple of people at the square on time, but O’Hara never arrived. It began to rain. Fortunately, Fondren had a good sense of direction, so he figured out the way back to the O’Hara home.
HF: I found his house, which was dark and completely locked up. All the doors were locked. The garage door was shut, and I could see that the car was in the garage. I even tried a couple of windows, but everything was locked. And then presently a light went on. Someone obviously heard me trying to break in. It was Frank’s mother.
She said, “Hal? Hal, is that you?”
I said, “Yes!”
She already had the coffee pot plugged in and was prepared to have a long discussion.
She said, “What on earth happened?”
I said, “Well, I don’t know what you mean. Frank took this girl home after the play, and I got a ride with a couple of his friends who brought me back to Grafton.”
She said, “Who?”
Well, that was sort of a sticker. Of course it wasn’t a friend of Frank’s at all who brought me back to Grafton. And I said, “Well, I can’t really remember their names, but it’s beside the point … What happened to Frank? Did he get home?”
She said, “Well, he’s very drunk, and the car’s all smashed up.”
I could only see the back end of it through the garage door. It looked perfectly all right to me, but as it happened the front fender was caved in a little. She poured us out some black coffee and she said, “Are you boys drinking a great deal at Harvard?”
I said, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t think we drink any more than usual. We usually just drink beer except when we have one of our famous cocktail parties, where we drink martinis. Ordinarily we can’t afford anything but beer and you can’t go very far on that.”
At daybreak the next morning, O’Hara went into Fondren’s room looking like death and said, “I can’t remember how I got home.”
Fondren said, “It was all that India pale ale.”
O’Hara had chased the IPAs with a number of cocktails.
That was the only significant interaction Fondren remembered having with O’Hara’s family until graduation day in 1950, when the drunk one was O’Hara’s mother.
HF: She had a couple of drinks. That’s why I know that Frank had never mentioned her having a drinking problem at all.
PS: Did it make for a noticeable change in her behavior?
HF: Yes, it did, and it was all very unfortunate. So we somehow got through this dismal lunch.
PS: How did she behave? [Sound of children playing outside. Long pause.]
HF: I can’t remember exactly. She just seemed to get awfully drunk and started talking about personal family history in a way that I don’t think she would have—
PS: Maudlin, abusive?
HF: Yes.
PS: All of that?
HF: All of that. She was very maudlin. And she kept picking on Frank.
And, well, it wasn’t very entertaining for anyone else.
PS: Accusing him of not—
HF: Well, of not paying any attention to her and never coming home.
[Clock chimes.] The usual mother’s tirade.
PS: And how did Frank take it?
HF: Frank was just embarrassed. He kept saying, “Oh, shut up, Mother,” which didn’t have much effect. I’m rather vague about it now because I heard so much about this later when we lived together in New York.
My father taught at Harvard for a little while. When it came time for me to go to college, I attended McGill in Montreal and the University of Texas at Austin, two schools that gave me nearly full scholarships. I received a fine education at both. Life in Austin was fun and easy compared to life in New York. I drove a little Ford Escort, ate breakfast tacos, studied Sanskrit, paid almost nothing in rent, and got a work-study job cataloguing the D. H. Lawrence collection at the Harry Ransom Center archive.
I dropped my father’s surname and started using my middle name, Calhoun, as my last. The second I did it, I felt like I could write without bearing the burden of my father’s name, and I became a frequent contributor to the Austin Chronicle. I liked UT. But in exchange for graduating with barely any debt, I failed to develop an Ivy Leaguer’s never-been-punched-in-the-face swagger.
My father asked me to cook for the Harvard kids when they visited, and he held court with them at the dinner table while I cleaned up. One summer when I returned from college to the St. Marks apartment for a couple of weeks, I discovered that my father had given my bedroom to Matt, one of his Harvard TAs, for weeks as a bedroom and art studio. Matt had thoughtfully taped tarps over my closet. I let Matt keep my room, and I slept on the couch. He and I eventually became friends, but he was the only one from that group that I could tolerate.
Once at a gathering in my parents’ living room, one of them approached me in between my serving duties and asked what I was reading.
I suspected he was only asking so he’d have a prompt to show off what he was reading.
“Encyclopedia Brown,” I said, correctly sensing that the mention of a children’s book series about a boy detective would stun him long enough so I could get away.
For twenty-six years, until just a few years ago, my parents would throw a massive Fourth of July party in the Catskills. My father said that everyone who heard of it was invited. The fireworks display was phenomenal. He enlisted a crew of friends to help him set it off. Together they lit up the mountain. Tents with potluck food filled the gardens. After the fireworks show, there was a bonfire by the pond.
At one of these fireworks shows, Neal was struck in the neck by a firework and for a year had a burn scar shaped like the Philippines. Another year, our friend was shot with one while holding his one-year-old. The baby was fine, if scared, but our friend’s arm was burned. At yet another party, when the bonfire was lit, fireworks shot out from it in all directions, causing parents to dive to the ground, pushing their children into the grass to keep them from getting hit.
“Unbelievable! What idiots did this?” my mother yelled, collaring teenagers. My father was conspicuously silent. We later learned that he was the one who’d hidden the fireworks in the bonfire, as a fun surprise.
“You know what your motto is?” I told my father. “Safety third.”
At the final party an ambulance had to be called for a man having a heart attack and two children almost drowned in the pond, two thousand people attended. The line to the five porta potties stretched all the way down the driveway.
A few years before, I’d walked into my room hours before the party to find a random stranger changing into her bathing suit; she acted like I was in her way. Once attendance passed a thousand, the house became too chaotic a place to put a little kid down for a nap, so for the weekend we rented a room at the nearby inn that was now run by my mother’s best friend and former accompanist, my honorary uncle Gary. When I told my father the plan, his response was to disinvite us. He said, “You obviously hate the party, so you shouldn’t come.”
For years, he’d invited everyone he knew to the party—his Harvard students, his colleagues at the New Yorker, all his oldest and newest friends. He even put an invite to the party in a published essay so that all his readers would know they could go, too. I was enraged that everyone who’d ever heard of the party was invited but that year I was not.