What My Father Looked Like
Part One
My father looked like a Harvard poster boy: long crimson scarf wrapped around his neck, shetland crimson pullover, furry crimson ear muffs clamping down his thinning hair, a strand of which was pasted across the top of his head. We trotted along Mount Auburn Street, a block below Harvard Square, where everyone, it seemed, was a student. This was 1974 and I was seventeen years old. I'd come for a college interview.
My father pointed at the students, at the chiseled brick dormitory buildings, at the takeout sandwich shops along Mount Auburn. "College," he said, "those were the best fucking years of my life."
He'd taken to cursing now that he and my mother had gotten divorced. Fuck, he'd say. Douchebag. And he'd look at me as if this were a bond between us, two guys who understood each other.
He pointed out the Lampoon Castle, where, on Thursday nights, members threw huge dinner parties and smashed their plates against the walls. Across the street was Elsie's, where once, my father said, he'd eaten a turkey club sandwich with Norman Mailer.
"Mailer could eat," he said. "I knew the guy."
"I know you knew him," I said. He'd told me about Mailer, how they'd taken the same Great Books course, how they'd both been members of Signet Society.
"Mailer could write and he could eat. And that's what we did. We ate a sandwich together."
A couple of students stood outside Elsie's, also wearing crimson scarves. I tried to see myself here -- wondered if I'd get in, whether this was me, a Harvard student like my father, like his father before him.
"You want to go here," my father said. "Right?"
"Sure," I said.
"Would you like to learn 'Fight Fiercely Harvard'?"
"What's that?" I asked.
"It's a fight song," he said, and began to sing and skip along the sidewalk, my father low-voiced and walrus-like. How we will celebrate our victory/We will invite the whole team out to tea (how jolly)/Throw that spheroid down the field and fight, fight, fight.
My parents had gotten divorced the year before, but this was a family trip, the three of us together. We stayed at the Sheraton Commander, off Massachusetts Avenue; a few blocks north was the Radcliffe Quad. Harvard had gone coed, but when my father and mother had been here, when they met, they were enrolled in separate schools, the men in the Houses along the Charles River, the women in the Quad. In the winter, my father told me, he'd trudge through the snow to my mother's dorm and stand outside and signal to her.
That was the winter of 1943. I can see my father standing in the snow, dormitory lamplight cast down on him. He couldn't keep a tune, but he liked to sing. He'd raise his arms and tilt his head to the sky and sing "Someone to Watch Over Me" below my mother's open window. That was my parents' song. After dinner, in our West Side apartment, they'd dance across the living room to the sound of George Gershwin.
Now we were eating dinner in Harvard Square. I had gone to the salad bar and loaded my plate. My mother was playing with her pasta salad. She was nervous, I thought; my father was too, staring into his water glass as if he was looking for something.
"Do you remember that winter?" he asked her. "Reading period, 1943?"
My mother nodded.
"Frozen feet and hot apple cider. I thought spring would never come."
"It came," she said, and looked away from him, but I thought I could see her irises dampen, and his as well -- the two of them nostalgic and regretful, back where they'd met, when they were young and the future was in front of them, when love made anything seem possible.
My mother rested her hand along my forearm. "Are you pleased with your meal, Hank?"
I nodded. "Good bread."
"Hank's been bulking up," my father said.
"I know," said my mother. "I live with him."
"He's storing up carbohydrates. Every time I see him he's more of a man."
It was true, I thought. I was six feet tall and 170 pounds; I was almost as big a man as he was. I saw him only occasionally now, and when I did, he'd greet me with a thump on the back, a squeeze of the triceps as if he were my football coach. Then he'd shake my hand. Sometimes I'd forget and go to kiss him on the cheek, and he'd get embarrassed and playful, and he'd start to shadow box with me; he'd stopped kissing me when I was in junior high school.
"Is there anything you'd like to do tonight?" my mother asked me. "Go to a movie? Just walk around town? We want this to be your trip."
"That's right," my father said. "It's your show, Hank."
"We could just sit here," I said.
"Don't you want to see Cambridge?" my father asked.
They were looking at me, just sitting and smiling, the way parents do. I liked seeing them together, liked watching them walk through town, even now, after the divorce, along the streets of Cambridge. I wondered what made love work, whether, despite the fighting, the little things were most important, the angles and fit of bodies, and maybe if they got a chance to talk, even just to sit here in the semi-dark, they might rekindle something. "Why can't we just spend time together?"
"That's what we're doing," my father said. "Spending time."
I knew certain things: that my parents had done what the rest of the country did -- they'd gotten married, then they'd gotten divorced; that my life was opening before me in ways I couldn't predict, everything fraught with possibility. I wondered where I'd be next year. And it occurred to me then nothing much mattered: I could go to college and never come back. I looked at my parents sitting across from me. We were together now, as we'd been until last year. I wanted us to go home as a family.
Part Two
We had two rooms at the Sheraton Commander, my father and I in one, my mother across the hall, and I could tell my father liked this segregation by gender, our door swinging shut behind us when we came home from the restaurant that night.
I stood by the window inside our room and looked down into the street. It was already eleven o'clock, but there was a stream of cars passing below us, everything diminutive and lit. "We could invite mom in," I said.
"Why would we do that?"
"Maybe she'd like our company."
"Boys only," my father said. "House rules."
He took hold of the remote control and flipped through the TV channels. He'd already checked out our room, the tiny bottles of shampoo along the ledge of the tub, the basket of fruit on top of the bureau. When we'd first arrived, he'd bitten into an apple, then left the rest of it lying in the fruit basket, where it had started to oxidize and grown brown. He'd bounced on one bed and then the other, trying to figure out which one had more spring. "Pillow fight," he said now, and grabbed a pillow and twirled it above his head. I stared at him and wished he'd relax and not try so hard, wondered why he couldn't just be my father, why everything between us felt mechanical.
He put down the pillow and flipped through the TV stations, stopping at a movie where a woman stood in her underwear getting undressed.
"Girls, girls, girls," he said. "You grow older, but you never grow tired of them."
I picked up the remote and flipped channels.
"You like girls, Hank. I know you do."
I didn't say anything. I had a girlfriend, whom I stayed with on weekends when her parents were out of town, but I didn't feel like talking about her with him. "We could watch sports," I said.
"Nah."
I got up again and stood by the window. I looked down into the street. "What were you like when you were in college?"
"At Harvard?" he said, and I could tell he was stalling, the corners of his mouth angling nervously to the sides. "I was a kid with hopes."
"We all have hopes."
"Real hopes. Creative hopes."
"You're creative," I said. "You're a creative lawyer." But instantly I knew I'd said the wrong thing -- my father, who made a good living, but who'd had dreams of being something else.
"Norman Mailer," he said, "is a creative guy." He sat up suddenly and leaned toward me. "You know, Hank, I could have been Norman Mailer. I knew how to write. I published stories in the Harvard Advocate. Hell, Mailer and I both did. I'm telling you, Hank, the guy was my friend. I knew him, we ate a sandwich together."
I smiled weakly at him.
"Do you want to meet Mailer?"
"Sure," I said, though I didn't think I did. I knew a little about Mailer, had read "Armies of the Night" in high school English class, had learned about Mailer himself, the booze and women and boxing matches, the run for City Hall. I'd once caught my father pretending to be Mailer, strutting about the living room of his new East Side apartment and referring to himself in third-person, as if he himself were on the podium in Chicago taking over the Democratic Convention in '68.
"Well, I'll see to it you meet him."
I wondered what would happen if we ran into Mailer: if my father introduced me to him, said hi-old-buddy and slapped Mailer on the back, only Mailer didn't recognize him, thought my father was just a crazy fan, not a friend from college, a guy he'd shared a sandwich with. "Mailer's a thug," I said.
"Hey," said my father.
I looked at him, a bloated shirtless man in front of the television set, gray strands of hair jutting out of his ears. "Can we go to sleep now?"
"Sleep?" He pointed the remote at me. "What about Carson?"
"What about him?"
He stood up on his bed and did a practice golf swing. "We don't see each other much, do we, Hank?"
"No," I said.
"Well, here's our chance. We can watch Carson and talk."
"Right now?"
He nodded. "And tomorrow night, I'll take you drinking at the Hong Kong. They've got great Peking ravioli there. We can share a scorpion bowl." He pumped up the TV volume until I could barely hear him.
"We're going to drink together?"
"You'll love the Hong Kong, I'm telling you."
Part Three
At breakfast the next morning, he drew on his napkin: cross-hatches of buildings, pencil intersecting each other. He placed one hand firmly on the table and shielded his work from my mother and me, as if he were doing something terribly private.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Harvard." He placed the napkin in front of me. He'd sketched Harvard Yard: the outlines of the freshman dorms, the steps leading to the graduate library. "That's Weld Hall," he said, and pointed to one of the buildings he'd drawn. "I lived there freshman year. You will too."
"What if I don't get in?"
"You'll get in," he said. He leaned toward me. "You know, Hank, I've been thinking about something."
"What's that?"
"You owe your existence to Harvard University."
"He what?" said my mother.
"You and I met here. If it weren't for Harvard, Hank wouldn't have been born."
My mother put down her glass of juice. "If it weren't for a lot of things, Hank wouldn't have been born. If Columbus hadn't discovered America. If Hitler had taken over. If one of us had been mown down by a truck."
"I prefer to think of it as Harvard," my father said coolly.
He traced the path from campus toward the Charles. He drew the law school and placed a stick figure in front of it.
"Who's that?" I asked.
"John F. Kennedy."
Next to the law school he drew Paine Hall, where, he said, the music school lay, and placed another stick figure beside it.
"And that?"
"Leonard Bernstein." He put down his pen. "Now, Hank, I'm going to list some names for you." He made an exaggerated pause. "John Adams. Teddy Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. T.S. Eliot. John Ashbery. Leonard Bernstein. John F. Kennedy. Norman Mailer."
"What about them?"
"Harvard graduates. Every last one."
"There are crooks who went to Harvard," my mother said.
"Like who?" said my father.
"I don't know names. But you can be sure there are."
He smiled at her condescendingly. "Jack Lemmon, Gertrude Stein, William Randolph Hearst."
"Bill Bradley went to Princeton," I said.
"That's right," said my mother. "What about Bill Bradley?"
"You want Hank to go to Princeton?"
"I want him to go wherever he'll be happiest."
"Well," my father said, and crumpled the map into a ball. He tossed it from one hand to the other, looking aimlessly past us, until, suddenly, he fired it across the room over the heads of the other diners, where it landed in a garbage bin thirty feet away. "Bingo," he said. "How's that for Bill Bradley."
I went shopping with my mother later that morning. My father had gone to the admissions office to put in a good word for me. He knew the president of the Harvard Alumni Association and the dean of undergraduate admissions. My interview would be the next morning with the dean himself.
My mother and I wandered through the Harvard Coop, past the aisles of Harvard boxer shorts, socks and sweatpants, the ties and baby bibs, the t-shirts spelling Harvard in foreign alphabets. We took the escalator upstairs. There, I flipped through racks of posters: huge concert shots of Neil Young, Roy Orbison by the piano, photographs of Harvard Yard from the middle of the century.
"Would you like a gift?" my mother asked.
"Sure," I said. I had plenty of posters; I didn't need any more. But I liked the feeling of being there, the two of us together in the Harvard Coop. my mother standing patiently behind me.
"I shopped here thirty years ago," she said. "Cam you believe it?"
"What did you do for fun at college?"
"A lot of things. We attended teas and dances; we went to the theater when we could."
"You and dad?"
"In the summer, we'd go to Cape Cod. Dad got a convertible for his twenty-first birthday and we used to drive along the beach roads with the top rolled down. I liked sitting next to him while he drove, knowing someone was taking care of me."
"You miss him," I said, "don't you?"
"Sometimes. Overall he tires me out."
"He misses you."
"No he doesn't."
I looked at her leaning against the poster rack. She was a pretty woman; my father was lucky to have married her. "He told me he misses you," I lied. "He said it to me last night in the hotel room."
Part Four
At the Hong Kong that night, my father and I sat in a booth made for four. Our waitress placed a scorpion bowl between us.
"Ancient Chinese secret," my father said. He'd studied Chinese one summer at college and thought he was an expert on China and its customs. He'd chatted with the maitre'd when we'd entered the restaurant. He'd tried to order Peking ravioli in Mandarin Chinese.
"Tomorrow's your big day," he said.
I nodded. But I was thinking then that it was really his big day, that this interview, the whole trip, had been for him.
"Hank?"
I nodded.
"At your interview tomorrow, I want you to dance like Muhammad Ali."
"I don't get it."
"Be on your toes, think quick."
His face was ruddy; I wondered whether he was starting to get drunk. He looked at the waitress, who had brought us a plate of Peking ravioli.
"She's a fox," he whispered. "Do you like her?"
"I don't know her," I said. "How can I like someone I don't know?" I could tell he was waiting for me to smile -- to acknowledge in a gesture that there was something still between us. But I didn't smile. And I thought at that moment that I could grow to hate him. He was my father; I'd always hoped he wouldn't disappoint me. Now I saw how everything could turn to hate.
"Hank," he said, and looked at me differently, "sometimes I feel like I'm alone in this world, like I could evaporate from it just like smoke. Sometimes it feels like nobody knows me."
"I know you," I said. "I'd like to get to know you."
He laid his hands on the table. His fingertips were covered with pig grease. "I wonder what would happen if I suddenly died -- if I just collapsed in my apartment. I wonder how long it would take for someone to find me."
"You're not going to die," I said.
"I will. You'll see." He closed his eyes for a moment. "What do you think about, Hank?"
"In general?"
He nodded.
"I don't know. A lot of things. Sometimes I think about where my life's heading. I try to guess where I'll be in twenty years. But mostly I think about other things."
"Like what?"
"Like you and mom. I remember when I was young -- how you used to dance together in the living room after dinner. Sometimes I felt like I shouldn't have been watching you like it wasn't any of my business."
"It was OK," he said. He leaned forward slightly. "Do you know what I think about?"
"No."
"I've been having this fantasy. I'm an astronaut and I'm flying in my spaceship. I have food and fuel and unlimited time; the solar system is spread out before me. And the more I think about it, the realer it becomes. I'm going to take a trip and leave everyone behind. I'll start my life over from the beginning."
I looked at him then, but what could I say? That you can't start your life over? That even I, at seventeen, already understood this? I wanted to tell him I wouldn't let him leave me. But as I watched him sitting there, I knew there was no point. He was already gone. I could see it in his face; he was flying high above me.
At my interview the next morning, the dean of admissions told me he was proud of my accomplishments. He spoke blithely and without inflection, and I could tell from his voice he had no idea what I'd accomplished, that my principal accomplishment was to have gotten this interview.
"Hank," he said. "Are you looking forward to college?"
"Sure," I said.
"They'll be the best four years of your life."
He gave me a thumbnail sketch of Harvard's history: how the school was founded by Puritans in 1636, how it remained the envy of the academic world. "At Harvard," he said, "you ask someone what they want to be when they grow up, and do you know what they tell you?"
"No," I said.
"They say they want to be president of the United States. And do you know what? They're not joking. A kid comes to Harvard, Hank, and he just might end up becoming president."
Above the dean's desk were Harvard memorabilia: framed issues of the Harvard Crimson, a football banner, the dean's own diploma nailed to the wall.
Henry Kissinger, the dean told me, had gone to Harvard and had written an undergraduate thesis that was seven hundred pages long. "Seven hundred pages!" the dean said. "That's longer than a Ph.D. dissertation."
The dean asked me what books I was reading. He asked me if I had career plans, and if I wanted to travel. This was 1974, and he asked me if I'd lost faith in our federal government. Then he asked me my reasons for choosing Harvard.
I thought of what the dean had said about college, of what my father had said: the best years of their lives. And I wondered what had gone wrong for them -- what goes wrong for anyone -- what makes you wish you were someone you're no longer, someone you may never have been. I wondered what my father was doing right now. I could see him alone, waiting in our hotel room, my father with his hopes, with his plans for me. "I've decided not to come here," I told the dean. "I don't want to go to Harvard."
Part Five
On the way home from Cambridge that day, I rested in the back seat of my father's car. My parents sat quietly in front. I had my secret. And for the moment I felt like there was space in my life, like I was taking my own direction.
When I got home, I cleaned my room. I refolded my t-shirts and slacks; I cleared the stray papers from my desk. I closed the door and got down on the carpet and did fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups. Then I fixed myself dinner.
Later that night, I lay awake in bed. The sounds of the city rose around me. I could see my shadow along the walls, heavy against the plaster.
At 2:30 in the morning, I got out of bed. I put on jeans, a sweater and a light coat and tiptoed down the hall. My mother was asleep. I unlatched the front door and went down the stairs. I walked up West End Avenue and hailed a cab.
We drove across 86th Street, past Amsterdam, Columbus and Central Park West, winding through the park transfers toward the East Side. I watched the city laid out before me. The streets are never empty in New York; anyone will tell you that. Though I've noticed over the years what a lonely place it is, everyone cocooned and somnolent.
We stopped in front of my father's building, and I paid the driver and got out. I greeted the night doorman. Then I stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the 26th floor.
My father's not a man to let you know he's surprised, so he greeted me calmly and led me into his apartment. He was standing in his street clothes; all the apartment lights were on. We went into the kitchen, where the radio played. The TV sputtered in late-night Spanish.
I looked at my father leaning against the fridge. "I just wanted to see you," I said.
He smiled. "Well, here I am."
I surveyed him for a moment -- his balding head, his faded shirt collar, everything about him in the light. "I don't know," I said. "I was just hoping to see you."
"That's fine with me, Hank." He came over and poked me in the triceps.
"I took a cab here."
"Could you use some money?"
"I'm fine," I said.
"Food? I bet you're hungry, Hank. I could cook you up some food if you'd like."
"I'm OK."
He led me into the dining room. He had a set of French windows that opened onto a balcony, and he unlocked the windows and we stepped outside.
I leaned over the ledge and looked down. I could see the grid of Manhattan, the avenues and streets intersecting, everything at right angles, orderly. I found the Empire State Building lit to the south. To the west, past Central Park, I could see Rockefeller Center.
"I like to watch the planes," my father said. He pointed at a jet heading toward the airports. "Do you ever wonder how they work?"
"Planes?" I said.
He nodded. "Do you ever wonder how they fly?" He raised his arm and traced a path above him, dipping his hand like an airplane.
"I guess not," I said. I looked out into the night. I tried to imagine what someone would think if they saw us here, two guys on a balcony at three in the morning.
"Look," my father said. There was a cluster of people on the sidewalk below. "Can you see them?"
I nodded.
"How do they look to you?"
"Small," I said. "Like little animals."
"They look like mice," he said. "That's what I think. Some kind of rodent." His hands were veiny on the ledge next to mine; our pants legs flapped against each other. "We're high above the world, aren't we, Hank?"
I nodded.
"It's just the two of us -- you and me, Hank -- just you and me looking down on everyone."
I paused for a moment. Then I leaned over and kissed him on the lips. I kept my mouth there just for a second, but I could feel his body shoot up, saw revulsion cross his face. I hadn't seen that look before. And I haven't seen it since, though occasionally we still meet, and we sit opposite each other and share our silent disappointment. He stepped back from me. He raised his fists as if to fight. "How about it?" he said. He lunged like a drunkard across the balcony. "Let's box, Hank, you and me. Right here. The two of us."
