What a Father Leaves
On a June day when the world was at war, my father came into this life in a
simple wooden house on Tapley Avenue, in Revere, Massachusetts. He died,
without providing any advance notice, in a slightly fancier home on Essex
Street. A little more than sixty-six years separated that birth and that death,
a little more than a mile separated those two houses. Though he was an
ordinary man in many respects, he knew extraordinary sorrow at an early
age, and, later, extraordinary triumph, and among the tempers and memories
he bequeathed me was the conviction that it is possible to find a solid bottom
beneath those tidal sweeps of good and bad fortune.
His childhood was typical of the childhood of millions of first-
generation European immigrants in the first quarter of the twentieth century;
he was a small piece of a large family that was caught between the strictures
of the old world and the promises and possibilities of the new. His parents—
Giuseppe Merullo, a tailor, and Eleonora DeMarco Merullo, a housewife—had
come to America from poor hilltop villages in southern Italy, settled briefly in
Boston's North End, then married and moved a few miles north to the city of
Revere—the countryside then—where they bought a house and began to fill it
with children. My father was born in 1916, after Philomena and Carmen, and
before Gloria, Violet, Anthony, Joseph, and Robert, but no tangible proof of
his existence has come down to me from those years, no snapshots of him
as a boy, no school papers or early artwork, only scraps of anecdote passed
along by his brothers and sisters, who remain close to each other and to me.
His family was, by turns, relatively wealthy and relatively poor.
Giuseppe—Joe, as he came to be called—owned his own tailor shop and
lost it in a fire, owned one of the first automobiles in the neighborhood and
lost it to medical bills after a fall, owned the house on Tapley Avenue, lost it
in the Depression, then bought it back again in 1938. At one point in the
1930s, Eleonora had to sell her wedding ring to buy food, and the nearest
tailoring work Joe could find was in Rockland, Maine, a twelve-hour drive to
the north, in a car with no heater.
The streets were dirt, street lamps shone beneath crimped metal
hats the color of poorly cared-for teeth. The Merullo children slept two to a
bed, kept warm in winter by bricks that were heated in the coal stove, then
wrapped in a towel and placed beneath the blankets at their feet. The family
put up their own vegetables and made their own wine and root beer. The boys
tilled the garden, shoveled snow, smoked cigarette butts they found on the
sidewalk; and the girls listened to opera with their father on Sunday
afternoons, cared for the babies, learned to cook at their mother's shoulder,
were courted by boys from similar families on chaperoned outings.
The Revere of those days consisted of clusters of plain wooden
houses set among rolling fields, its politics controlled by men of English and
then Irish descent, its underworld run mainly by Jews, its three-mile crescent
shoreline (America's first public beach) fronted by amusement rides, food
stands, and dance halls that drew tourists from as far away as the West
Coast, its social life revolving around a synagogue and a dozen churches,
men's clubs, the Revere Theater on Broadway. Six square miles of salt
marsh and low hills a stone's throw from the metropolis, home to Italians,
Poles, Russians, French Canadians, Irish, English, Jews, Scots, Germans,
and a handful of blacks, the city was—unfortunately and perhaps unfairly—
known primarily for political scandal, underworld dens, and racetracks. In
fact, though, it was not much different from places like Brooklyn, Jersey City,
and South Philadelphia: a certain rough humility, an emphasis on family
loyalty and the vibrant, sometimes violent, life of the street, a brew of
American ambition and European tradition that would, in future generations,
bubble over into something more sedate and suburban, leaving room for
different immigrants, new dramas.
It was in that hothouse of hope and defeat that the seed of my
father's life sprouted. I know that he was a good, perhaps even a brilliant
student, that as a young boy he cared so much about his clothes that he
would take out his handkerchief and spread it carefully beneath him before
sitting down on a neighbor's concrete wall, that he was baptized Orlando and
went to school Roland, that he spoke Italian before speaking English but
carried no trace of accent into adulthood. Those are the few puzzle pieces
that survive. The remainder of his first eighteen years is a wash of American
history almost identical to the history of twenty million other Orlandos,
Patricks, and Sauls.
My father belonged to the generation of Americans we are now in
the process of forgetting, a generation that had the misfortune to make the
leap from high school into adulthood with the chasm of a world Depression
yawning beneath their boots. In 1934, he graduated from Revere High School
with honors, but there was no tradition of college in his family (his older
brother and sister had dropped out of high school to help bolster the family
income), no money for tuition, no clearly marked route along which his
ambition might travel.
In the farms that spread across western Revere then, he found
work with a produce company called Suffolk Farms, picking carrots and
cucumbers for twelve dollars a week. Over the course of the next few years,
he moved up to a public relations position, studied civil engineering in night
school, and when he'd earned his certificate, left Suffolk Farms for a job on a
surveying crew. "On hot days," he would tell me forty years later, "I couldn't
stand to be out there in my clean clothes while the other guys were sweating
with their picks and shovels. Some days I took off my shirt and climbed down
in the ditches with them and helped them out for a few hours."
That remark speaks volumes about him, about the confusion of
longing for better and loyalty to his roots that runs like a refrain through his
life. Even after he'd abandoned pick and shovel and surveyor's transit and
climbed up into the high, fragile branches of Massachusetts State
Government, he could not bring himself to leave Revere. He still met his
childhood friends at Wonderland Dog Track one or two nights a week for an
evening of modest losing, still seemed to feel as comfortable lunching with
judges and senators at Dini's in Boston as he did with city workers,
plumbers, and bookmakers at Louie's corner coffee shop a few blocks from
where he'd been born.
The remark speaks to something else, as well. My father was a
gregarious man, and cared—sometimes to a fault—what impression he made
in society. Like many Italian-American men, many men of all ethnic groups
and races, he was shadowed by a societal definition of masculinity that has
more to do with being brawny and tough than with any of the finer attributes.
He worried that his arms and hands did not look strong enough, he worried
about how he had dealt with and would deal with pain. Surrounded by war
veterans, star athletes, and street fighters, he was pricked by a nagging devil
of doubt because he was none of those things.
I am taking liberties here. He never said any of this to me. Such
tender introspection would have been as alien to him as corned beef to his
mother's kitchen. And yet, I have a storehouse of small clues that stand in
for his words. I see the footprints of that same devil on the carpet of my own
home. I see the strength to be taken from traditional masculine stereotypes,
as well as the wreckage they wreak in me, in brothers and cousins, in
friends' marriages. Once in a while, in the midst of a discussion of the roles
women have been made to play in our society, I hear an echo of my father's
voice: "Sometimes on hot days—"
In 1940, he married, and began working as a draftsman for a
Boston firm called Stone and Webster, his first real office job. The work
consisted of designing power stations and submarine periscopes, and he
liked it well enough. The following December, when America was pulled into
the war, he tried three times to enlist, but was turned down because of a
punctured eardrum, forced to watch as the world convulsed and bled and the
men of his generation went off to face their appointed sufferings.
For someone who felt embarrassed about working in a shirt and
shoes next to bare-chested men with shovels, the idea of being left behind
while neighbors went to war must have been next to unbearable for him. But,
other than to state the facts of his case—the punctured eardrum, the three
rejections—he did not speak to me about it.
As fate would have it, his own sufferings found him soon enough:
on March 26, 1942, his wife of thirteen months died in childbirth. Again, only
small pieces of this woman's life have drifted down to me through the shifting
seas of familial memory. In the few snapshots I have seen, she is a happy
girlfriend and then a happy newlywed, thin, dark-haired, pretty. I know that
she was waked in her wedding gown, that, in the weeks and months after her
death, my father's suffering seemed bottomless. "We would just be sitting
down to dinner," one of my uncles told me only a year ago, "and the phone
would ring. It would be the caretaker at the cemetery in West Roxbury, where
Vi was buried, asking us to send someone over there right away because
Roland was sitting next to the grave, weeping, and the caretaker wanted to
close up and go home."
But the sense of this grief has reached me only third-hand, and
only years after my father's death. Though I often wish it had been otherwise,
he did not talk about grief and tragedy with me and my brothers. Every once
in a while, during some poignant pause in the busyness of his life, he would
be alone with one of us and make a comment like: "Someday I'll tell you
everything. Someday we'll sit down and I'll tell you things." But what these
things were we had little idea, and the promised "someday" never arrived.
Perhaps in deference to his second wife, my mother, he never
spoke about his first marriage in our presence. I learned of it by a chance
remark. Playing in the backyard one summer afternoon, I was summoned to
the fence by our elderly neighbor, Rafaelo Losco, who handed over an armful
of greens for me to pass on to my grandmother. Rafaelo had another man
with him, a visiting brother or friend, and the man was running his eyes over
my face with such intensity I felt as though a blind person were fingering my
eye sockets and lips. "What is your name?" he demanded.
"Roland."
"Roland's son?"
"Yes."
"I've known your father forty years. I knew his wife when she was
growing up. His first wife, I mean."
I only nodded, and turned away with my armful of escarole, but
the words claimed a place in my memory. His first wife. I was old enough by
then—seven or eight—to know something about secrets, to sense that this
piece of information had been kept out of my reach for a reason, and I did not
mention it, not to my parents or grandparents or brothers or friends, for close
to two decades.
It seems peculiar now, that in all the times I must have been alone
with my father during those years, I never asked about his first wife, or even
let him know that I knew of her existence. It seems strange that he and my
mother, and their parents and brothers and sisters, conspired in such a
silence when it would have been so much easier all around to tell the story,
once, answer the questions, and be done with it.
But ours was a Catholic world in which marriage was supposed to
last for all eternity, and this was the 1950s and 1960s, when the ethos of
emotional confession had not yet broken the polished shell in which we lived.
And I believe there was an element of superstition involved as well, remnant
vapors of an ancient stew of belief and mystery: to speak of tragedy would be
to invite it. The closest any relative ever came to raising the subject was
when one of my father's sisters asked me, in private, what I thought
happened when people who'd been married more than once died and went to
heaven. Which spouse were they in heaven with, did I have an opinion? Had I
heard anything about this at Sunday school?
Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, the fact of my
father's first marriage lay in the deep, undisturbed shadows of our family
consciousness until the winter of 1978. In that year, I began knocking down,
piece by piece and without spite, the edifice of expectations my parents had
been erecting since my birth. I'd taken my college degrees a few years
earlier, and, after a stint with USIA in the Soviet Union, I'd turned away from
both an academic and a diplomatic career. With much fanfare, I joined the
Peace Corps, went off to a primitive island in the Pacific, then quit after less
than six months. Penniless, long-haired, hosting a menagerie of tropical
bacteria, I returned to America and found work driving a cab in Boston, a job
which seemed to crush the last of my parents' hope for me like crystal
beneath a greasy work boot. In the space of eighteen months, I had gone
from being a source of pride to a source of embarrassment, and in December
I put the finishing touches on that swan dive into dishonor by announcing that
I was moving in with my Protestant girlfriend.
As a boy, I'd seen a neighbor burst into tears at her daughter's
engagement to il protestante, but it was 1978 now, and such "mixed"
marriages no longer shocked Revere's papists. My parents had met Amanda
before my Peace Corps venture, and approved of her from the start. The
problem was not Amanda's religion or nationality (my mother, though
Catholic, was of English ancestry, so that could hardly be an issue) or even
the fact that we were having unblessed sex. The problem was that, by moving
in together, we were openly confessing to this unblessed union, making it
public, running up the flag of disgrazia for everyone in the family, in Revere, to
see.
There were harsh words that night in the house on Essex Street,
hurt feelings on both sides. My father, mother, and I shouted at each other
across a widening chasm, tore at the sticky filaments that bound us, took
turns pacing the kitchen, accusing. It had a different feeling than other
arguments, the words were sharper, the consequences heavier. I was trying
to embarrass them, smudge their good name. They were trying to meddle
with my happiness. After that night, my mother stayed angry at Amanda and
me for several weeks.
My father was quicker to rebound. After we'd simmered for an
hour in separate rooms, I said I was going to take the subway into Boston
and spend the night with Amanda, but he offered to drive me, instead.
We left the house in silence, drove along Revere's dark streets,
acting out our epic of stubbornness. It did not occur to me that he might have
offered the ride out of anything other than his reflexive generosity, a trait I
took almost completely for granted at that point. In our culture, stinginess—
with money, time, or assistance—was second only to disloyalty on the tablet
of cardinal sins: why wouldn't he offer to drive into Boston and back at ten
o'clock on a Sunday night?
Somewhere in Chelsea he said: "I guess things don't stand still. I
changed my mind on Vietnam. I guess I'll end up changing my mind on this."
I said nothing, determined to win, for once, as I had seen him win
so many times. We were climbing the flat arc of the Mystic River Bridge, a
cold darkness beyond the windshield, harsh words still echoing behind us.
"You know this will lead to marriage," he went on, and I told him
that if this led to marriage, it would be fine with me. He gave one of his short,
tight-lipped nods. "She's a nice girl, a family girl."
This high compliment changed the air between us, and it began to
seem to me that something positive had come of our fight. We had somehow
knocked a hole in the too-respectful shield I'd put up around him, in the
notion of father-as-king that brings so much stability to Italian families even
as it nourishes the seeds of inadequacy in some sons and grandiose
imitation in others. The trick was to thrust aside that notion without trampling
on the man behind it, and we had somehow managed that. So I ventured a
step into uncharted territory.
"You were married before, weren't you, Pa?"
"That's right."
"What happened?"
"She died."
"How?"
"In childbirth."
For a moment I turned my eyes away, touched, embarrassed, by
the grief in his words, thirty-six years after the fact. It seemed to me then
that, in two short sentences, I had an explanation for everything: his temper
and frustrations, his fear that any telephone call might bring the worst
imaginable news, his penchant—almost an obsession—for attending wakes
and soothing the bereaved, his armor and distance and pride and stoicism,
his superb, sometimes dark, sense of humor, his faith that the universe was
ordered beyond any human understanding.
I had a key to him, at last. In love myself, the idea of losing a
beloved struck me in a deeper place than it would have on some other night.
I was watching him now across the front seat, but he would not
look at me.
"What happened to the baby?"
"The baby died, too."
"And then what was your life like?"
"Bitter," he said. "Until I met your mother. Bitter."
With that word, we buried the subject and never raised it again. In
time, relatives would help me fill in some of the details: After Vi's death, my
father withdrew almost totally from the social whirl on which he'd thrived. For
years and years he did not date. His easygoing personality hardened a bit.
He sought solace in his church, his brothers and sisters, a small group of
family friends. His parents sold the house on Tapley Avenue (he and Vi had
lived in the downstairs apartment) and moved a mile west to Essex Street,
and my father passed most of the 1940s that way, enveloped in a womb of
sorrow, loneliness, and defeat, while around him the world was again at war.
Very, very gradually he emerged. With the assistance of my mother (a lovely
physical therapist who spent two years at Walter Reed Hospital,
rehabilitating men who'd lost arms and legs in the war, and then volunteered
to work with polio victims at the height of the epidemic—in short, a woman
who'd had some experience bringing a bit of light into the lives of the
wounded and lonely) his bitterness faded enough for him to want to make
another try at building a family.
In 1949, he and my mother were engaged. He went into local
politics and was elected to the city council, ran for state representative two
years later and was narrowly defeated. On Veterans Day weekend in 1951,
Roland Alfred Merullo and Eileen Frances Haydock were wed, and, after a
brief honeymoon in Washington, D.C., they moved into the four-room
apartment above my father's parents.
In 1952, my mother suffered a miscarriage in her fourth month of
pregnancy. In 1953, she bore Roland, Jr., the first of three sons. In 1954, with
my mother and me waiting in the car, my father, who had been out of work for
the past several weeks, walked into the offices of the Volpe Construction
Company in Malden, without an appointment, and asked the boss for a job.
The boss, John Volpe, future Governor of Massachusetts, Secretary of
Transportation in the Reagan administration, and Ambassador to Italy, gave
him a job, not as an engineer but as a worker in the gubernatorial campaign
of a man named Christian Herter.
There began an unlikely association that would radically change
the course of my father's life. Herter was tall, lanky, and wealthy, and
displayed in his speech, clothing, and posture all the entitlements and
credentials of what would later come to be known as the White Anglo-Saxon
Male Power Establishment. And my father was a big-chested, six-foot Italian
who had never spent a week outside his neighborhood, who had not been to
college, or to Europe, or even to Vermont, for that matter; a Republican in a
nest of Democrats; white and male but entitled to nothing and wanting
everything.
They became fast friends, and their friendship endured until
Herter's death in 1964. A strong orator, very careful about his clothes and
manners, my father was a natural on the campaign trail, a great asset in the
predominantly Italian-American precincts north of Boston. When Herter was
elected Governor of Massachusetts in 1954, he chose as his personnel
secretary a working-class Republican from a provincial neighborhood on
Boston's tattered northern cuff.
In any government, but especially in one as patronage-fueled as
the State Government of Massachusetts, personnel secretary is a position of
vastly underestimated power. Acting by the rules on which he had been
raised, my father found work for a long list of relatives and friends, filling the
agencies of state with men and women he knew and trusted, or simply men
and women who needed a boost in their lives, a steady paycheck, a safe
niche they could cling to until retirement age. In so doing, he accumulated a
huge bank account of favors, an account he would draw on unashamedly
later in life, finding summer work for nieces and nephews and sons,
interceding with judges, lawyers, cops, making a phone call here, pulling a
string there, tweaking and twisting and cajoling and sometimes shoving the
many-limbed beast of state power.
At some point in my early twenties, I turned my back on that side
of him, refused any further assistance for myself, cast a harsh eye on what
seemed to me then little more than nepotism. We used to argue about it from
time to time. When I interviewed for my first government job in the USSR, he
half-seriously offered to pull some strings for me in Washington. "You do
that," I said, "and I'll refuse the job if I get it."
"You don't think other people will be doing that for their own?"
"I don't care," I said, and I didn't. But how easy it was for me, with
my fancy education, to cast a righteous and condescending eye upon his
string-pulling, the survival-by-connection ethos in which and by which the
people of his time and place lived. And how clear it is to me now that solitary
achievement is not the only measure of worth, that all of us are constantly
engaged in a give-and-take of affection and advantage, doing favors and
having favors done for us. But I was headstrong then, and full of myself, and,
like many other twenty-four-year-olds, planning to remake the world
according to my pure vision.
In 1956, Chris Herter went to Washington as Undersecretary of
State (in 1958, when Dulles resigned, he advanced to the Secretary's job) in
the Eisenhower administration, and offered to bring his personnel secretary
along for the ride. But, for my father, Washington was too far from Revere,
from his brothers, sisters, and parents, from the faces and corridors he knew.
He respectfully declined the offer and seemed, in later years, untroubled by
regret. In 1958, the Boston Globe printed a picture of Secretary Herter above
a story suggesting he would be the party's nominee for president. My father
is standing beside him, gearing up, perhaps, for another campaign, revving up
old ambitions, ready to give Washington a shot this time. But Herter was
already in a wheelchair by then, stricken with polio and about to cede his
front-runner status to Richard Nixon. The rest, as they say, is history.
Before Herter left Massachusetts, he offered my father his choice
of several high-level if low-paying jobs in the state bureaucracy, among them,
head of the Metropolitan District Commission and Director of the Industrial
Accident Board. My mother talked him out of the MDC job, a prestigious, but
high-profile position that came under regular attack from one camp or
another: press, politicians, populace; he settled in as Director of the IAB.
It was a good job, and another man would have been content
there, with a corner office overlooking Boston Common, weekly trips to the
western part of Massachusetts to inspect safety conditions at state-insured
factories, S. S. Pierce food baskets at Christmastime from the managers of
those factories, extended lunch hours during which he'd prowl downtown
Boston's bargain clothing stores and buy suits and shirts for his friends and
brothers, whether they'd asked him to or not.
For a while, in fact, he was happy at the Industrial Accident
Board, and from the late fifties until the mid-sixties his life settled into a tame
pattern it had not known before and would not know again. He was president
of St. Anthony's Holy Name, a member of the Knights of Columbus, the
ITAM club, the Children's Hospital Association. On summer weekends, he
golfed at public courses with friends he'd known for forty years. He bowled
and bet the greyhounds and played whist for nickels with his brothers, made
the rounds of his sisters' homes for coffee and pastry on Sunday mornings
after church. In the vacant lot next door to his parents' house, he and my
mother built an eight-room, Colonial-style home, a grand structure by the
standards of our street. They took my brothers and me on modest summer
vacations—three days at Lake Winnipesaukee, a week at a friend's house
near the Cape Cod canal; they drove us to church on Sunday mornings, to
Little League games.
There were smudges on this idyllic tableau, the ordinary
frustrations and dissatisfactions of family life. His temper, short of fuse and
short of duration, could be triggered by something as small as a spilt glass of
milk, and our Sunday dinners were sometimes broken up by needless
argument. He was not as careful with money as he might have been: I
remember him hunkered down over a table covered with bills, puffing his pipe,
unapproachable. And he might have traded a few hours of his social life for a
few more hours at home.
But he paid his bills, and visited the sick, and came home sober
every night. And he tried, without ever actually apologizing, to make up for his
outbursts by taking us with him when he made the rounds of his sisters' and
brothers' houses, or by slipping us a dollar or two when we left the house
with friends.
My father protected himself with a kind of fake-gruff exterior which
could be funny or intimidating, depending on the context, and which
completely broke apart when his own father died, late on a June night in
1965. He summoned us to the table the next morning as we were about to
leave for school. I was twelve, my brothers nine and seven, and, while we
knew our grandfather was ill, we'd had no prior experience with death. My
father had had no prior experience bringing news of death to his children, and
when he sat in one of the kitchen chairs and gathered us around him, there
were tears in his eyes and, on his face, a sad twitch we had never seen.
"God called Grandpa last night," he said, after a struggle.
We had no idea what this meant, why God should be calling
Grandpa up on the phone, and why it should upset our father so much.
Washed, combed, and lit with the anticipation of one of the year's final
school days, the last thing we expected was that we would never again see
the man who had lived beneath or beside us every day of our lives.
"God called Grandpa last night," my father repeated. Now there
was more trouble in his face, and my mother was wringing her hands as if to
urge the words out of him, and his grief was so enormous and so pent-up,
that even without any understanding of death we had a sense of something
new and terrible invading our house.
"What do you mean, Pa?" I said, but by this point I was close to
knowing.
"Grandpa died last night," he managed, finally. The fake-gruff
exterior collapsed, the five of us huddled in its ruins, and wept.
Not long after that, the prestige and comfort of the Director's job
began to lose some of its appeal for him. Perhaps it was the fresh sense of
mortality he felt after his father's passing. Or perhaps there was some regret
there, after all, at not having gone to Washington. My father had had a taste
of the high life, a bit of fame and power, and perhaps, after a decade, the
Industrial Accident Board had begun to look like just another sinecure.
Since his carrot-picking days, he'd cherished the dream of
becoming a lawyer, and in the course of his duties at the Board, he'd rubbed
shoulders with lawyers and judges day after day. And so, in 1966, at the age
of fifty, he met with the Dean of Admissions of Suffolk Law School and
convinced her to admit him without an undergraduate degree.
For the next four years he rose at six o'clock on weekdays, left
the house at seven-thirty, made the forty-minute subway commute to
downtown Boston, worked at the Board until five or five-thirty, attended
classes at Suffolk from seven to ten, then rode the subway back to Revere.
My mother met him at Beachmont station and drove him home, set the table
again, cooked a second supper. At eleven o'clock, she went upstairs to bed,
and he went down into the basement room he'd refinished, and hit the law
books there until one or two a.m.
At Suffolk, an average grade of seventy was required to pass. My
father's average in his first year was sixty-nine. Suffolk gave him the choice of
repeating the year or failing out of school. He repeated the year, moved his
average up ten points, and made steady, unspectacular progress through the
rest of his law school career. By the time of his graduation in 1970, he stood
in the middle of his class, a B student, age fifty-four, with a family and a full-
time day job as his extracurricular interests.
What a deep and resonant triumph it was for him, that graduation.
What a party we threw. His mother, siblings, and in-laws came, all forty of
our cousins, old family friends, new friends from law school, monsignors and
mayors, bricklayers and hairdressers, neighbors who'd lived within shouting
distance of us for thirty years on Essex Street without having any idea of my
father's secret ambition. He rarely drank, but he drank that night. For the only
time in my life I saw him slightly tipsy, dancing with my mother in the cellar
room where he had spent so many studious hours.
When the celebration ended, he took a week off to putter around
the house, then returned to work at the Board, studying at night and on
weekends for the Bar Examination, which he took for the first time that fall. A
score of one hundred out of a possible two hundred was required to pass; the
examiners told him he had scored "in the high nineties."
Still working full-time, still maintaining the house and showing up
at our baseball games, he took the bar a second time, and failed again. He
failed a third time and a fourth, at six-month intervals, and by then even his
closest friends were counseling surrender. You've made your point, they told
him. You did something almost nobody else could have done at your age. Let
it rest. But, for better or worse, he was not the type to let something rest. Not
even close to the type. His customary response to those who advised him to
give up the chase was a not very facetious: "Go to hell."
The twice-yearly notice from the Board of Massachusetts Bar
Examiners had come to be a terrible ritual in our home: the buildup of fear
and hope, the arrival of the letter, the bad news, which my father took
stoically, clamping his teeth down on the stem of his pipe, staring out the
kitchen window in a gray-headed, 220-pound silence, ashamed beyond any
speaking of it.
The fifth such letter was delivered in March of 1973, on a dreary
Saturday morning. My father had just taken the curtains from the living-room
windows, my mother was in the kitchen washing the floor. Steve, Ken, and I
were doing a fair imitation of dusting when we heard the mailman's tread on
the front step. I retrieved the mail, saw the letter from the Bar Examiners,
handed it over to my father, and retreated. He stood at the window in the cold
spring light and turned the envelope over twice in his hands, preparing
himself, stretching out those last minutes of hope. My mother waited in
absolute silence in the kitchen. My brothers hovered near the top of the
stairs; I stayed in the front hall, spying.
With an engineer's precision, he slid his letter-opener beneath the
flap and drew out a single sheet. He unfolded it with one hand, scanned it,
then looked up and out at Essex Street with an expression I could not read.
Defiance? Anger? Reluctant surrender? For half a minute he stared out at the
cars at the curb, the tilting telephone poles and rusting TV antennas, and
then he pushed three words up through his throat in the general direction of
my mother: "El, I passed." My mother shrieked, we ran to embrace him, we
wept, we shook his hand, kissed him. For the rest of that day my brothers
and I floated around the neighborhood in an ecstasy of pride and relief.
For several more years the sun of good fortune shone upon him.
His many local friends sent him what law business they had, wills mostly,
small troubles. One or two of the companies he'd worked with put him on
retainer. He resigned from the Industrial Accident Board and accepted a part-
time job as a Workers' Compensation Specialist at Revere City Hall, trying to
sort out the truly injured from the professional fakers, wrangling with the city
council on which he had once served, then, at home, earning more money in
an evening than he'd previously earned in a week.
During the years of my father's law career, I was building up my own small
business, a one-man painting and carpentry operation in northwestern
Massachusetts and southern Vermont, three-and-a-half hours from Revere.
Too poor, at first, to afford a vehicle, I kept my tools in a knapsack and rode
to jobs on a ten-speed bicycle with my handsaw twanging and bouncing over
the back wheel.
For six dollars an hour I replaced panes of glass, scraped and
painted the soffits of old garages, patched ceilings, peeled up tile from rotted
bathroom floors. Nothing puzzled him more than this lifestyle of mine, this
freedom and indigence. Here was a son who had earned both a bachelor's
and master's degree from an Ivy League school, who had worked for the
State Department behind the Iron Curtain, who, in his late twenties, held
credentials admitting him to the choicest precincts of the non-Revere world.
And what was he doing? Living in the woods rebuilding porches for old
Vermonters, reading at night in the Williams College library because he and
his wife could not afford to heat their apartment, nailing up clapboards in the
freezing cold.
My claim that it was all temporary, that I was pursuing a writing
career, made little impression on him. "When," he said to me during his one
visit to the country, "are you going to take responsibility?" I thought of
reminding him of his days climbing down into ditches, his pursuit—stubborn,
illogical—of a life that suited him, in spite of the odds . . . but I made a joke
instead, biding time it turned out I did not have.
The last time I saw him was in Revere in the summer of 1982.
We'd bought a vehicle by then, an old repainted Sears van which he'd found
for me at auction. Amanda and I had driven down to celebrate his sixty-sixth
birthday, and I'd spent part of the weekend scraping and painting the front
entrance of the house so that it would be more presentable to his clients. On
the morning we were to head back home, I came down into the kitchen and
found a hundred-dollar bill on the table and a note. Tender phrases were never
a specialty of my father's. He was not a rough man by any means, but
neither was he comfortable with the more delicate aspects of human
relationship, not, in any case, where his sons were concerned. (When I was
going out on dates in my college years, he would watch me combing my hair
and spraying deodorant, would hand me the keys to his Pontiac, slip me ten
bucks, and say: "Be careful"—the closest we ever came to a father-son talk
on sexuality.)
Tender expressions were not his specialty, but that note was filled
with tenderness. How glad he and my mother were that we visited, how
grateful for the work I'd done, how much they loved Amanda, and so on. All of
this folded around a hundred dollars, the equivalent, in those lean years, of
my weekly income. Amanda came downstairs and I said to her, "Look at
this, will you? My father, huh?"
I didn't realize that he had not yet left for his job at City Hall, and
was standing a few feet away at the back door, staring out into the yard. He
made a small coughing sound, and I saw him, and we went through the usual
ritual of me refusing the money and him refusing to take it back three or four
times before I finally folded the note and cash into my wallet, thanked him,
and kissed him good-bye.
For two months the note remained there. One day in July I
decided I was being sentimental or superstitious—unmanly traits—and threw
it into a trash barrel on a beach on Long Island.
Two weeks later I was painting a house in Williamstown, up on a
ladder in the bright morning, when I heard a car pull to the curb and saw my
wife get out. Amanda crossed the lawn and stopped at the foot of the
ladder. "Be down in a minute," I said. "Just let me finish this piece of trim
before the sun comes around."
"Come down now," she said.
"One second, I just—"
"Come down now, Rol."
I climbed down and stood facing her. "Bad news," she said.
He died in his sleep, with no sign of the struggle that had marked
so much of his life, and for months and months after his death I dreamt of
him regularly—straightforward, extremely vivid dreams that did not require the
assistance of an analyst to interpret. In one, he was sitting in the back seat
of a white limousine, at the passenger side window, and I saw the limo pull
out of a driveway and sprinted after it, waving and waving, calling out, "Good-
bye, Pa. Good-bye. Good-bye!" But he was looking straight ahead, smiling,
and didn't see me.
Now, a few years shy of the age when my father decided to attend
law school, I occasionally dream of him still. Sometimes we argue,
sometimes I tease him about not visiting us. He often smiles in these
dreams, but rarely speaks. Each year that passes, each incremental
diminution of my own powers, brings a sharper understanding of the force of
his will, the effort and self-belief and self-sacrifice and pure stubbornness that
can be read between the lines of his resume. I have, it turns out, inherited a
portion of his discipline, but what matters more to me is his gift of a sense of
perspective, what he would have called his "faith," a certain spiritual or
psychological ballast that holds a person close to some center line, even
amidst the greatest victories and the deepest bitterness. I keep a framed
photo of him on the wall in the room where I write, and say a word to it from
time to time, when things are going very badly, or very well.