Who is Joe Morris? A seventy-nine-year-old man fully conversant with the idea of happiness, especially his own. A retired lawyer (and administrative law judge for the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles) of little ambition or taste who doesn’t have an entitled bone in his body. His outfits—from the ski parka he used to wear around the house instead of a bathrobe to the gray vinyl loafers he used for tennis while he still played (and still wears today, even for dressy occasions)—are down-market at best. When you are as insecure as I am, you tend to believe that your father is a reflection of yourself. I want him looking sharp, and assess him with the eyes of a brutal teenager.
“Where did you get that?” and “Must we, Dad?” have been my laments for years.
Who is Joe Morris? He is the only real estate investor who ever lost money in the Hamptons. He is a man who would rather complicate than simplify. He has nineteen bank accounts and half a dozen partly organized bridge games that he has to monitor like an air traffic controller. He has discount cards from every oversize drugstore in America and frequent-flyer miles on a smorgasbord of airlines that don’t add up to anything, but keep accumulating on beds, tables, counters, or anywhere but the wastepaper basket. He is a man who tapes tennis tournaments and basketball games while watching them on TV. He is a man who gleefully mixes his prescriptions as if they were sundae toppings, and pushes them on you every time you sneeze. That’s because he likes to be useful and also have control of things. And when he sees someone like me, a little vulnerable and frustrated with life, it really revs his engine.
“Let me give you a bit of advice” is his clarion call.
Heaven help you if you’re his partner at the bridge table. Early in my parents’ marriage, when they still played together as partners, my father excoriated my mother so vociferously she turned bright red. She didn’t answer back. But she vowed never to play on his side again. Instead, she’d have to serve as peacemaker between him and whoever was unlucky enough to be his partner.
Joe Morris is a man who became an orphan at ten years old. My aunt Sylvia, his impeccably dressed and stalwart older sister, tells me that living between the homes of grandparents upstate and cousins on Long Island made him feel lost growing up, confused about where he belonged. “He never quite knew where he should be,” she says.
I wonder if losing both parents by the time he was ten makes him want to control as much of his life, including the people in it, as he possibly can. Maybe having no parents has also increased his need to be loved by as many strangers as possible. Is that why he talks to everyone and anyone he meets, even when they’re clearly not in the mood? He thinks it will make you happy every time he offers you something to drink or eat—the half a Little Debbie crumb cake from his overstuffed glove compartment, for instance, or the cocktail he’s invented of Amaretto and pineapple juice.
Years ago, when I was well into my thirties, unemployed, uncoupled, and living with my parents for a summer that lasted way too long, I was so bored that I went out to the driveway one day and inventoried his accumulation in the Chrysler Valiant he was driving at the time. In the front seat, I found a typed deposition from his law office, brochures from his tennis club, a schedule for a Chilean airline—although as far as I knew he wasn’t planning to go to South America. Also: a scrap of paper from a Marriott (his favorite hotel chain) with some of his scrawl on it, an old wooden Wilson racket, and a visor from the tennis club at Century Village, the retirement community in Florida. There were tissues in a box marked up with more of his barely legible scrawl—notes for a legal case on one side and an idea for a song parody on the other. I found a worn paperback novel, The Rabbi, with a Nedick’s coupon inside, and a wall calendar from the dry cleaner. Instead of cigarette butts in the ashtray, there were bank deposit envelopes. And wedged in by the emergency brake handle—a plastic cup with pencils, asthma inhaler, reading glasses, and a potpourri of pills, coins, and postage stamps.
I don’t know why I did this inventory. Maybe I thought that the best way to face what was disturbing me was to look straight at it. That summer I had been reading some short stories by Tennessee Williams, whose relationship with his father was also strained. “You will begin to forgive the world,” Williams wrote, “when you have forgiven your father.” It made sense but seemed an unattainable goal. But I kept trying. Anyway, it had been a clean moment for his car, I realize now. The worst may have been in the 1970s, when it smelled like decaying flesh. A veal chop had been rotting in his tennis bag.
“Life with Joe is irritating, but never dull” is all my mother ever said.
She would know. She was the one who had to put up with the dinner guests he brought home from the tennis court without giving her warning. She was the one who had to be delighted when, without so much as an advance conversation, he brought home a German shepherd puppy one year and a calico cat the next. And when there was a sale at the local dollar store, suddenly all kinds of things would be crowding her front porch. To this day he marks them with return-address labels, just in case someone feels inclined to steal his white plastic chair or cheap folding umbrella.
My mother’s sisters, Phyllis and Bev, still remember witnessing the aftermath of an incident twenty years ago, when he pocketed a bar of soap from Aunt Bev’s condo in North Carolina. My mother chastised him gently for taking something that wasn’t his.
“I’m warning you right now to leave me alone,” he told her.
“I’ll buy you your own bar of soap, honey,” she said. “Just put it back.”
“I’m going to divorce you, Ethel!” he roared as he stomped off to their car. Her two sisters watched with dropped jaws as she got in beside him. She was flushed with shame but stone-faced. He floored it in reverse and spun out of the parking lot, with my mother as his frightened hostage.
“All for nothing but a lousy bar of soap,” my aunt Phyllis told me.
Maybe his hoarding of things, like his extreme friendliness, is also a result of the childhood. Finally, as an adult, he had a home and a car to call his own and colonize in his own way. I don’t know why he’s such a sloppy dresser, when Aunt Sylvia always shopped for him at the best stores when he was growing up. And I don’t know why he’s such a happy boor at dinner. His table manners are as questionable as his jokes. For instance:
So the Pope and Bill Clinton both die at the same time and by some terrible mistake, the Pope ends up in hell and Clinton in heaven. When the mistake is found out, they run into each other while changing places. “How was hell?” Clinton asks the Pope. The Pope shrugs, winces, says, “Kind of hot, not so good. But how was heaven? I am so looking forward to being there. I have always wanted to meet the Virgin Mary.” And Clinton looks at him, shakes his head, and says, “You’re ten minutes too late.”
Joe Morris is a man who wanted to be a crooner his whole life. To this day he always has a song cued up in his heart, and like it or not, you’re going to hear it, and like it or not, he’s going to try to get you to sing along. For him there’s no occasion that can’t be sweetened by a song, just as there is no dessert that can’t be improved with one of the packets of Sweet’n Low he keeps in his wallet. When my mother, who was pretty and curvaceous enough to be nicknamed “Yum Yum” in her twenties, told him she was pregnant with my brother in 1955, they were in a restaurant on Long Island. He walked up to the pianist, asked for the microphone, and started crooning. She was both mortified and delighted.
Just Ethel and me
And baby makes three
That’s living,
Long Island Heaven!
Who is Joe Morris? A man who spent most of World War II performing little parodies of pop songs he wrote at his training camp in Amarillo, Texas. Then, the night before getting shipped off to Europe on a fighter plane, he ate six doughnuts and woke up with a stomachache that kept him from leaving the country.
“Wow, Dad, wasn’t that kind of disappointing?”
“That assignment could have gotten me killed, so I was actually very lucky.”
We are eating breakfast at his favorite diner on the highway around the corner from the old homestead. It’s a month after our visit to the cemetery, Veterans Day, the day he got married in a modest family ceremony to my mother in 1951.
“So you never left the country during the war, Dad?”
“I finally got sent to Iceland as it was ending.”
“Iceland? All your friends were in Normandy, right? Didn’t that bother you?”
“Why should that bother me?”
“Didn’t you want to be a hero, Dad?”
“Who doesn’t? But if I had been, then maybe there wouldn’t be any me, and then there wouldn’t have been any you, so things kind of worked out for the best, right?”
He slurps his tea with orange juice, chews his pancakes with his mouth open. This is no power breakfast. The coffee in this Greek diner is anemic, the French toast soggy, and the view of the parkway entrance across the highway dreary. But to him, this is all perfect. It could be breakfast at the Regency or the Ritz.
“I can’t tell you how much I love this diner,” he says. “Try the blueberry syrup. If you add just a teaspoon of orange juice, it cuts the sweetness.”
Is there something to be said for being so content? He is essentially a happy man. Or is it just that he can’t be bothered to aspire to anything more than this? My whole life is about trying to leave a mark on the world in ways he never could. And my past few years have been consumed with failed pitches and proposals. I want things that are so far out of reach and beyond his imagination that I live in a perpetual state of aspiration. And what does Dad want? A toasted bagel, a good duplicate bridge game, and for me to enjoy his latest concoction.
“Um, no, thanks, Dad,” I say. “I’ll pass on the syrup.”
He shrugs it off—he’s used to my dismissals—but I can see he’s disappointed.
We leave the diner, after his long conversation with a waitress. There is no man on earth who loves talking to strangers as much as him. He has what used to be called a hotel face—that’s the guy who either knows or wants to know everyone in the lobby.
It’s nippy outside today, early winter, when the wind off the bay makes the south shore of Long Island damp and unwelcoming. Dad hates this cold, and his migratory hormones are rising. He’s counting the days until his return to Florida. In the parking lot, he fishes car keys out of his pocket, bringing up a half-sucked throat lozenge.
“Do me a favor, Bobby,” he says, as he hands me the keys. “Get the car for me.”
“Why, Dad?”
“I’d rather not walk in the cold. My hip is bothering me.”
“Oh, come on,” I say. “The car’s right there, just a minute’s walk. You have to walk a little. You can use the exercise. It’s good for your circulation.”
“Please, Bobby. Just get the car for me. Why do you have to argue?”
Why do I have to argue? It’s just that he can be so lazy. Joe Morris is a man who refuses to walk anywhere. He once refused to get out of the car in California to take in a redwood forest I desperately wanted him and my mother to see.
“I can see from here,” he said.
“Dad, please get out. I promise it’ll be worth it.”
“You go ahead. I don’t feel well.”
“Really? What’s the matter, honey,” my mother asked.
“I’m nauseous. I think it was the drive up here,” he moaned.
“Bullshit,” I said. “You just don’t want to walk. Come on, Mom, come with me.”
“I think I’ll stay here with Dad,” she said.
“No, you won’t. Come with me.”
I’d been living in mellow central California for a year, meditating, taking the kind of drugs that were supposed to give you some detachment and perspective in the late 1970s, before Prozac totally removed bad moods from the culture. But I was too angry to accept no for an answer. I walked her to the beginning of a path into the forest, well marked and unthreatening in the filtered light of a California afternoon. She hesitated.
“Come on, Mom,” I said.
“I don’t want to, honey. I’m worried about Dad.”
“He’s fine.”
“It’s not nice to leave him behind in the car.”
This was nothing new in our little Oedipal triangle. By early adolescence, I wanted her love as much as he did, and as the soulful son with artistic aspirations, I wanted to lead her to the enriching experiences he couldn’t provide.
“Let’s go back, honey,” she said.
“Okay, but first I want you to look up,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just look up.”
She did. Up above, the branches of redwoods rose into infinity, catching the sunlight like windows in a cathedral.
“See that, Mom? See how the branches are moving?”
“Oh, look,” she whispered. “It’s like they’re praying.”
It was a delicious moment. I had rescued her from him and his limiting ways. Not that she was so expansive. She was limited, too, the one who worried in contrast to his freewheeling spontaneity. She fretted each time I wanted to change jobs. She canceled plans because of snow flurries. She worried too much about the future. The wind increased, the trees swayed. Suddenly, Mom turned to go, breaking the spell. I stood, stock-still.
“You’re going back to the car?” I called out.
She turned. “I have to. You stay as long as you like. We’ll be waiting.”
I let out a sigh. My father had won. She was his captive. I still don’t know why I dragged him to that redwood forest. What was I thinking? The only thing nature does for him is make him sneeze. Mountains? A little too high. Beach? Too much sand for his taste. He has no idea what is good for him. And even though he’s old now, that doesn’t mean he’s wise. His Pavlovian response to my message machine beep is a captain’s log of superficialities—what he ate for dinner, where he played bridge, the plot of the movie he just saw, that goes on and on from here to eternity, or at least until his voice is finally unceremoniously cut off by the beep. My mother tried to tell him not to leave long, rambling messages. He told her to stop nagging him. He’s telling the same thing to me now, in the parking lot of this diner, where he is refusing to walk to his car. I stomp off to get it with the angry little steps of a five-year-old who can’t have his way.
Are we going to be working this same material until he dies? If he goes from loving to furious around me from time to time, it’s only because he doesn’t know how else to respond to my nagging and cynicism.
We drive to the train station, passing the endless athletic fields of my youth. By the age of ten, I wanted my father to be like the other jock fathers in our community. He was great at singing in the car, teaching me jokes, and helping me make funny home movies. But I could see he was as uncomfortable as I was with a football or basketball. It took some effort to keep from being bullied in gym class. Well, like father, like son. He liked Ping-Pong. He liked tennis. Wimp sports.
When I was twelve, I was on the court with him at our beach club for a father-and-son end-of-summer tournament. It was a sticky night, and the bay smelled of seaweed. The lights were on, glaring white mercury beams overhead that might have been towering over a prison. My tennis whites were my uniform. I felt totally trapped. I wanted to be home watching the new fall sitcoms. It was, after all, the debut season of The Partridge Family. We weren’t going to win this match. Why did I have to bother going through such motions? I moped around the court, rolling my eyes. My father had an oddly good game based on annoyingly high lobs, drop shots, and dinks. Sometimes he’d even switch hands when he played, totally confounding opponents as he sent balls sailing slowly past them. He was always an encouraging and gentle partner. “Move up! Bend your knees! Watch your alley! That a boy!” He meant well. But his unsolicited coaching drove me crazy. I kept double-faulting.
“Throw the ball higher,” he said, with increasing intensity.
“Get back up to the net, Dad,” I snapped.
He would not. He needed to stand on the baseline and give me pointers. Our opponents were waiting, and so was the crowd of people watching us from lawn chairs.
“Leave me alone, and just play,” I said in a voice wavering between boy and man.
“I will when you stop double-faulting. Give me a nice high toss on your serve.”
I did and served better. We won a point. At the next, we found ourselves together at the back of the court, an awkward place. A ball came right to my backhand.
“Got it!” I called.
He poached it right out from under me and lobbed it too shallow. Faster than you could say “bonk,” an overhead smash humiliated both of us. Why didn’t he let me take that shot? The next thing I did—and I still see this in slow motion—was rear back and, with my well-honed backhand after years of lessons, nail him hard with my racket right in the center of his right arm.
“Oh!” the crowd gasped.
“Ow!” Dad cried. He dropped his racket and went hopping around the court like a turkey full of buckshot. More gasps from the onlookers. “Oh my goodness,” said Selma Weinstein as she stood up from her beach chair in shock. Mary De Luca put out her Kent in her ashtray and called out, “Joe, are you all right?”
He gestured at her with his hand, as if to say, Get away! I’m fine.
Sadly, I can’t even remember feeling concern for him. Just embarrassment at his reaction, not my behavior. I had not hit him that hard. And it was with a wooden racket, after all, not one of the new metal ones coming into vogue at the time. Why couldn’t he just smack me back in retaliation and tell me we were going home? Maybe if he’d been a tougher guy, I wouldn’t have taken such advantage of his gentleness.
“So then, nothing else to report?” Dad is asking at the traffic light near the station. Breakfast is already repeating on me with the unpleasantness of childhood memories.
“No interesting trips planned? Anything new with your social life?”
“Social life, Dad? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Romance, the usual.”
“Um, no, but thank you for asking”
“Okay, fair enough,” he says as we roll into the station. My train is already on the track. How many times have we barely made it to a train because he is so habitually late? How many times has he kept me waiting here when I’d arrive from the city? Is this why I’m always so late myself? I see him and am terrified he’s the man I will become. And because I’m good at blaming, I resent him for the bad habits he’s passed on to me.
“My train’s already up on the track,” I say, interrupting the plans he’s trying to make for next weekend. “I’ve got to go, Dad. Talk to you later.” I grab my bag and jump out of his car, slam the door, and run for the train, suddenly feeling alive again to the possibilities of my city life far from this stifling suburbia.
“See you, Dad!” I run and make the train as the warning bell rings and the doors close. From my window I watch his car leaving the parking lot and making a left turn toward the home where he now suddenly lives alone.
It is only as the train picks up speed that I realize I didn’t thank him for breakfast or extend a hand to him to say good-bye.