Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [15]
He tells us stories then. Depression stories, war stories, slipping-out-the-window-at-night-when-he-is-a-boy stories, sliding down the drainpipe to gamble with marbles in his Pennsylvania river town. Stories of when he is a pilot, a Democrat, a union organizer, a businessman, a rascal, a Romeo. The son of a railroad worker, who, by daring and chutzpah, made good and married a beauty. He tells us the stories, he says, to teach us about life.
My father is not a vain man. A handsome man, yes, with the profile of a young Brando. People stop him on the street, mistaking him for Ted Kennedy, to which my grandmother replies, “Much more handsome.” He knows the effect, but he’s interested in other things. And only more so as he gets older: the rumpled raincoat, the frayed cuff, and shoes worn and resoled when he can well afford new ones. “You’ll understand when you have children,” he grumbles.
It wasn’t always so, a friend of my parents tells me later, when I am sixteen. I’m friends with her daughter, and we’re sitting in their Beekman Place kitchen as her mother rhapsodizes. “Your father … Now, your father was a catch.” I lean in and can smell the Scotch on her breath. Custom suits, white silk scarves, designer apartments, and parties. I’ve seen the pictures, and I remember the colored linen sport coats he used to wear. But it’s as if she’s talking about another person.
When I come home that night, he’s up late working, a single light on in the apartment. He looks up over his reading glasses, asks how my night was, and then goes back to his papers. I stand there in the hallway watching him, trying to reconcile the whimsy of white silk with the man bent over yellow legal pads by a standing brass lamp.
“Put your fingers together. Keep your head down. And kick.” We’re bodysurfing, and his big thing is timing. I hold my hands as if I’m praying, but flat out, with thumbs crossed and elbows straight, and I hear him. “It’s coming! Not this one!” We watch TV together late at night and guess the endings—that’s another thing we have, we’re both night owls. And now, in the water, we guess the waves.
There’s a home movie: I am small, and he flings me in the surf by an arm and a leg. It appears almost painful, but each time I run back for more, my face shining. With Bobby, this doesn’t work so well. He cries, imagining sharks. Aligned with my mother already, he sticks to the pool. “Respect its power,” my father says. “Never turn your back.” And I know, because he’s told me, that when the big rollers come, I need to dive long and low so I don’t get tangled in the break. If this happens, he says to hold my breath, make myself into a tight ball, and trust that the ocean will spit me back up. “It’ll be over soon,” he promises. “And I’ll be there.”
This is before a lot of things. Before he votes for Nixon, before the battles in high school, before he’s angry most always, and before the stroke that years from now will leave him childlike, without interest in all that drove him.
It’s when he takes me on night drives and tells me about love—the hometown girl; the wartime sweethearts in Paris, and the stockings and soap he gave them; the actresses and models at the Beverly Hills Hotel; the wild times on Fire Island. The ones who still, he knows, hold a torch for him. He keeps a shoe box, filled with snapshots of old flames, hidden in the attic. A secret I keep for him. One of the secrets I keep.
This is the summer I am eleven. I look up the sexy parts in Mary Renault books. I finish In Cold Blood when my parents aren’t looking and hide my journal under the footed bathtub in the guest room. I wear a rope bracelet and cotton bikinis with ties on the sides.