14. You Don’t Have To Be Quiet
The Year of Paying Attention
I just turned sixty-three. I invited my kids and their mother out for a low-key dinner, and on another night Sarah made a pleasing little fuss. I’ve been trying to recall my father at this age, living quietly with my mother in their nice house in a quiet corner of Massachusetts, on a cul-de-sac, his grown daughters moved to Washington, DC, his newly married son in New York. He’d long ago stopped doing what he truly loved, being a newspaper man. I was in first grade when his paper ran a promotional campaign — his serious-faced picture next to the headline, John Warfield Is Worth A Nickel. He wrote about politics, and five cents was what the paper cost. He gave it up for a better-paying job in PR, moving me and my sisters close to where he and my mother had grown up, a better house closer to Boston, taking the train every day, while my mother did all things motherly while working as a private duty nurse. I can recite the nursing shifts without thinking: three to eleven, eleven to seven, seven to three. My nightly job was to carry her nurse’s shoes to the basement and apply white shoe polish. My parents worked to give three kids good lives, private school and college educations, the advantages of a stable middle-class life.
He was well into his sixties when his New York granddaughters started showing up, the new grandfather now accustomed to retirement, his mortgage paid off, still mowing the lawn and snow-blowing the driveway and tending the yard, reading the Boston and New York papers and the newsweeklies on the screened-in porch, going out to lunch with my mother, the two of them coming down for Ellen’s christening, returning two years later to pitch in when Lizzie was born. He’d have the crib set up before we arrived for visits, and three generations would drive to the beach in Maine, stay in a seaside motel, go to a shack for lobsters, my mother with new swimsuits or snowsuits or little outfits for her granddaughters depending on the season. My parents’ mission had always been the same — take care of the kids, first theirs, then ours. Nobody questioned it, and I certainly failed to adequately appreciate it.
My father was in his seventies when I wrote him a letter, because I couldn’t bring myself to call him with the news, that I wasn’t living at home, for now anyway, but was staying with my friend Jim. There’d been a terrible argument, a fight. I don’t remember what details I included, but I let him and my mother know I was going to recovery meetings, and I was going to my new job at my new agency, and my wife and I were trying to work things out. I doubt I shared details about the fight we’d had, how it got very bad, how I had my hands around my wife’s throat, how she went to our friends in a neighboring apartment to tell them what had happened. I remember talking to my father after he got the letter, and how his voice was calm, serious, telling me that he and my mother understood what was going on, and that they wanted me to know they supported my efforts to get better. I don’t know how they would have reacted if they knew the whole sordid story. I don’t think about that, because I know how I’d feel in such a position. My father was ten years older than I am today when his son said he’d needed to move away from from his three- and five-year-old.
After couples counseling and a meeting with a child psychologist, my wife allowed me back into the apartment. There’d be no more drinking, no more pot. Our marriage stabilized. Within a couple of years we were doing pretty well. By now I was going to one particular meeting most mornings before work, and sitting next to a man named Hal, who was a bit older than my father. Hal was a retired Manhattan furrier and former Air Force pilot. He was slight and slow-moving, warm and funny — “I don’t think about that cold beer going down my throat; I think about the warm beer coming back up,” he’d say, and the room would laugh. Hal didn’t offer advice, just encouragement — “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,” he’d tell anybody who reached a milestone of any kind, so many days or months or years. He had a bad back, and a wife who sounded like a handful, although he never complained about either, outside of the occasional joke. My friend Jim and I would meet Hal for lunch, sushi near Gramercy Park. As we’d put on our coats, he’d say, “You two go ahead now, I can’t keep up with you,” and we’d dutifully stride away, feeling like we’d just had an audience with a senator. And I’d think, that’s how I want to be when I’m old.
After I told my father I was going to meetings, he told me about his own experience in recovery. I’d had a vague idea about this, from having poked around in his dresser drawers one bored teenage afternoon, discovering what I now know was recovery literature. I dimly recalled a period when a friend of his, Bernie, would drive over to pick him up, and off they’d go, I knew not where. My father had always been a solitary man, with few friends. My mother was the only adult he spent any time with outside of work. He didn’t golf, play cards, or socialize. He tended the yard, cleaned the garage and basement, cleared the storm drains, read the paper, watched football, all of it alone. Twenty-five years later, not long after I quit drinking, I realized my father and Bernie had been going to 12-step meetings. Now that I was in the fellowship, he told me of a few notable men he met there, men of accomplishment and industry, not losers, like we secretly thought we both were.
Now sober, my marriage back on track, I’d visit my parents, sometimes with my little family, sometimes by myself. “I’m going to a meeting — want to come?” I’d ask, and he always declined. Eventually I realized that my father had gone to meetings and stopped drinking, but after a few years had also stopped going to meetings. A few years into recovery, it dawned on me — it had never occurred to me that the program wouldn’t work for me. My father quit drinking and never started again, and things got better. Of course that would be my experience.
John Warfield was smart, and very funny, with a goofy streak that my wife and kids loved. He sent the girls crazy cards and notes. He acted like a lunatic to make us laugh. But he was a loner. He was alone in his head. When his job ended, his small world shrunk further. My mother, much more sociable, wanted him to go to lunch or out to dinner with her friends, but he wouldn’t. Maybe he couldn’t. I understand — until I began my own recovery, people terrified me. I did my best to amuse them, with drinks if possible, to disarm them, make them like me, and to avoid most of them when possible.
In my forties, I’d compare my father, alone on the porch reading the paper, with good old Hal eating sushi in Manhattan — both retired, both sharp and funny. And I’d think — I want my life to be like Hal’s. I learned there wasn’t much I could do for my father. We were alike in many ways, but different in one — I had lots of people to talk to about whatever was bothering me, friends I could confide in, who trusted me as well when they were scared or angry or confused. My father kept all of his worries battened down, and he didn’t hear how others were struggling, too.
When Hal got sick and went into the hospital, everybody went to see him. We knew he was dying, and so did he. A few of us sat in chairs around his bed, and he’d say, eyes closed, “You don’t have to be quiet. I like to hear you talking.” So everybody chatted and joked, embraced Hal, said hello to friends coming in and out. Hal didn’t seem overly concerned that he was dying, but then, he never seemed overly concerned.
When my father died, he was all alone, a note of apology written to my sister who, he knew, would find his body. She got rid of the pill bottles, and called an ambulance. Then she called me.
I want a graceful exit strategy. And if possible, I’d like to hear my friends voices around me.
Next week: As If I’d Seen A Ghost
