HERE’S SOMETHING I truly believe: a man should be able to walk through the front door of his childhood home without knocking. I was thinking this as I clutched the ring of the brass knocker on my father’s front door. I may have spent the first eighteen years of my life here, but it was never my house. It was always his house. And he never let me forget it.
It was six years ago, at my mother’s funeral, that I had last laid eyes on my father.
It hadn’t gone well. I had just buried the most understanding parent a man could possibly have. When the service was over, I was left with a stern, distant, conservative father who had no use for a lawyer son who leaned the other way. After the funeral luncheon, after all the deviled eggs and potato salad and baked ham had been consumed, after the Baccarat punchbowl had been washed, dried, and put away, my father had an extra glass of whiskey and began to pontificate on the subject of my “Washington shenanigans.”
“And if you don’t mind, what might those terrible shenanigans be?” I asked. “How have I disappointed you?”
“Believe it or not, son, y’all don’t have a lock on every form of human knowledge in that Yankee town you now call home,” he said. “The news does travel down to Mississippi eventually. And everybody I know says you’re the most progressive young lawyer in Washington.” I had never heard that word pronounced with a more audible sneer.
I didn’t answer. All the way down on the train, I had vowed to myself not to react to his temperamental outbursts.
“Your mother enjoyed that about you,” he went on. “Your Yankee free-thinking ways. But she’s gone now, God rest her soul. And I can tell you this, Benjamin. You’re a fool! You’re up to your knees in the sand, and the tide’s approaching. You can keep trying to shovel as hard as you can, but that will not stop the tide from coming in.”
“Thank you for the colorful metaphor,” I said. Then I went upstairs, packed my valise, and went back to Washington.
After that I heard from him only once a year, around Christmas, when a plain white envelope would arrive containing a twenty-dollar bill and the same handwritten note every year:
“Happy Christmas to yourself, Meg, and my granddaughters. Cordially, Judge E. Corbett.”
Cordially.