Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [26]
What did he think of Sheri? I wondered. How did he see her? Was she another piece of architectural foolishness, a schoolboy’s idea of a woman? He must have found her flimsy; he would have used more lathes, more plaster, more material. He had once told me that he liked Floradora girls, around 180 pounds.
The room was filled with examples of my father’s taste. It was his hobby to make furniture on the weekends in his workshop in the basement. He was always turning out end tables, side tables, and coffee tables. They were beautifully made, indistinguishable from the better furniture in stores, except that there was something heavy or chunky in their design, as if they were meant to be used by Floradora girls. They were too sturdy-looking, too indestructible. You felt they would last forever, that they would bury you.
Giving my father’s pieces away was my mother’s hobby. As soon as he made a new table, she gave away one of the old ones. The neighborhood was saturated with his tables; by now my mother was giving them to near strangers.
Because of the way Sheri talked, my mother assumed that she was a foreigner. She spoke to Sheri slowly and distinctly, without a trace of her strong New Orleans accent. She even began to sound a bit like Sheri. Anatole loved to play, she said. When he was a little boy, he was always playing. Carried away by the family album, she embarked on a history of my childhood.
I was waiting for my father to speak. I believe that he too took Sheri for a foreigner, and I expected him to come out in French or Spanish. He once told me that he had learned Spanish in Mexico when he was a young man. But he didn’t speak to Sheri at all; he was uncharacteristically silent. His eyes were narrowed and his lips pursed, as if he was meditating or shaping a thought, but he never said what it was. Perhaps it was Sheri’s position in my mother’s lap that put him off. He had changed his attitude and was looking at the two of them in a dreamy sort of way. Unless you kept him busy, he was always dreaming off.
He was not really a conversationalist—what he liked was to tell stories. He fancied himself as an observer, a commentator, a satirist. He was always telling anecdotes. But he couldn’t seem to find an anecdote in his repertoire to tell to Sheri. He couldn’t classify her.
He should never have left New Orleans, but my mother nagged him into it. He had left the French Quarter a popular man, but he got off the train in Pennsylvania Station, to find snow falling and no one there waiting for him. He lived in New York under protest, a protest he never admitted even to himself. He was ashamed to think that he had been pressured into leaving the city he loved.
We had to leave because my grandfather, my father’s father, kept seizing our life savings. He was the best-known builder in the French Quarter and he would take a down payment on a job and spend it on horses or women. Then when he had to buy materials, he would seize our life savings. He had persuaded his four sons to give him power of attorney, but my father would have given him the money anyway. And of course he never paid it back.
My father couldn’t get accustomed to New York City. Once, for example, he had a man on the job, sent to him by the carpenter’s union, who didn’t know how to hang a door. My father couldn’t understand how a man who didn’t know how to hang a