Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (8 page)

IT’S A STRANGE DAY, ALYSIA SAYS

“It’s a strange day,” Alysia says, “A green

bug in my room & now this mushroom growing in the car.”

She’s right. Under damp newspapers & cigarette
butts, from the floor, protrudes a slimy brown thing.

Maybe I should get a new car or at least
clean it up, fix the windows like the kids say.

But how can I do this & still talk to angels?

Poets get absorbed in strange quests,

question not the creative regimen of poverty.

I wanted to meditate on this but before I could
a hitchhiker we pick up crushes the mushroom getting in.

Now the rain wants me I can tell by how

it licks & scratches at the window.

I get so tired of poems that look like this

but say absolutely nothing. Don’t you?

In Dad’s circle, poverty was not only acceptable but poetic and honorable, a way to “talk to angels.” Dad was trying to unlearn civilization at Cloud House, to shake off the order-loving conformity of his upbringing where no child spoke unless spoken to and no glass went without a coaster. In this space he was trying to create, mushrooms were magical, fantastic, the stuff of lyric.

But they weren’t for me. At French American, especially through elementary and middle school, our ratty apartment and car, and my shabby, ill-fitting clothing, became a liability, another way I stood apart. Right side up with Dad, I couldn’t help but be upside down in school. I learned to move between both worlds, to turn myself over as the situation required.

It would be years—at least until ninth grade, when I discovered rock music and drama class—before I saw my difference in the desirable glow of bohemianism. Even then, I never talked openly with any of my friends and extended family about Dad’s orientation. His sexuality was a secret I held on to long after it was useful to do so, a secret I held on to until the physical manifestation of his illness forced me to come out.

7.

E
VERY YEAR
summer rolled around, Dad would pack me up for another visit to Kewanee, Illinois, the rural town two and a half hours southwest of Chicago where my maternal grandparents lived. Beginning when I was three years old, I was flown from San Francisco to Kewanee for two months every summer. According to Munca, she and Grumpa designed the arrangement to give Dad a break and to spend time with me. Because minors weren’t allowed to fly alone before the age of four, Dad coached me to lie about my age, much as he’d coached me to not tell my grandparents about his boyfriends. I never understood why Dad didn’t accompany me on these trips, but it didn’t matter. I loved flying alone.

Around my neck I’d wear a badge indicating my status, “unaccompanied minor,” which opened up a world of privileges. Holding the hand of the uniformed stewardess, I’d board the plane first, visit the cockpit, and meet the pilot. At my seat, I’d be given a bag of toys: a lapel pin I could wear mimicking the shape and metallic hue of the real pins worn by the crew, airline-themed coloring books and word scrambles, and a tiny plastic maze with a ball bearing that you’d tilt from side to side until the ball rolled into a tiny hole. I drank chocolate milk through a straw and made friends with my seatmate. When the flight was over, the beautiful stewardess would return, taking me by the hand so that we would be the first to get off the plane.

I’d see my grandparents at the door of the gate, Munca dressed in her collared tennis shirt, no-iron khakis, and bleached tennies. Beside her, Grumpa would be sitting, looking off distractedly. She’d see me and wave her hand up and down: “Yoo-hoo!” Then she’d nudge my grandfather and he’d see me, stand, smile, and wave. After the stewardess delivered me to them, Munca would wrap her long arms around me and I’d be enveloped by the smell of her house: fine wool and cedar, Jean Naté bath splash, and just the faintest hint of mildew.

Once I was in Kewanee, the world of Dad would recede. No more rumbling Volkswagen with the ashtray that didn’t close. The ride in Munca’s Lincoln Town Car was as grand and as smooth as a cruise ship. Instead of magic mushrooms, there were magic windows that went up and down with the satisfying flick of a switch. The radio was always tuned to the local public radio station; orchestral music would fill the car, with Munca occasionally exclaiming when she recognized a composer, “Rachmaninov!”

In this clean, comfortable, climate-controlled vessel, I’d travel from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, past the tall fields of corn and the stench-making hog farms that made Kewanee the Hog Capital of the World, to the tan and white ranch house on the corner of Ridge Road. My heart would thrum with excitement at the first glimpse of the house and the rolling clap of the garage door opening to receive us as we pulled into the drive. My mind raced imagining all the house promised: bowls of steaming SpaghettiOs, small glasses of cold orange juice, long white carpeted hallways, color TV sets outfitted with cable in every room, and at bedtime, crisp linen sheets.

Munca and Grumpa, both first-generation Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, had moved with their small children from Chicago to Kewanee when Grumpa found work as head radiologist at Kewanee Hospital. Munca was a stay-at-home mother but had a vibrant life of her own. She founded the local chapter of the League of Women Voters, played competitive golf and tennis at the Midland Country Club, and did part-time public relations work for the Kewanee Public Library. I asked Munca once, “Are you and Grumpa rich?”

“No,” she answered. “We’re comfortable.”

It was that comfort that I most looked forward to, fantasized about, in the months and weeks leading up to my summers in Kewanee. And for the most part, comfort is what I got. For the first few weeks I was the guest of honor. Munca would arrange day camps and play dates with the children and grandchildren of her tennis partners. She’d take me out for French fries at Hardee’s and Dilly Bars at Dairy Queen. I had my pick of twin beds in the back bedroom, Uncle David’s childhood room, and would move from one to the other at my whim.

Before bed, Munca would bathe and talc me. After I was dressed in my nightie, hair brushed and smelling sweet, she’d walk me to Grumpa, who would be reading in the den. When he saw me he’d put his book down on the couch. I’d bat my eyes and throw my arms around his big frame and plant a kiss on his cheek.

“Goodnight, Grumpa.”

“Goodnight, Bee,” he’d answer in his deep baritone.

Then Aunt Janet would arrive with her husband, Jim, and their two kids, Judson and Jeremy, for a two-week stay. I was put to bed on Grumpa’s office couch so my cousins could occupy the back bedroom together. Where each day had been planned around my alternating desires to swim at Midland or get books at the library, we now had this family of four to negotiate with as well.

Here, I thought, was a real family— the kind I saw at school and on TV, but one I could watch up close. I was fascinated. But though I was three months younger than Janet’s younger son and two years younger than the elder, I have no memory of Aunt Janet scooping me into her arms or helping me with my coat and shoes or tending to me in any way—unless, for some reason, Munca couldn’t do it herself.

I always sensed a discreet border. This is the Smith family: the two kids, a mom and dad, like a perfect square. And then there was me.

It was in these moments that I most missed my father. Dad could always make me feel better when the world outside made me feel strange. Dad was the one who loved me best of all.

But my dad was only a whisper on visits to Kewanee, a detail to negotiate among many details—arranging evening phone calls and then, when I was older, receiving his letters and cards, and locating stamps for the letters I eventually wrote to him. He never visited, not during the summers, not during Christmas. And I never heard him discussed or asked after. I don’t know if he wasn’t wanted in Kewanee, if he never wanted to go, or if both were true. But I do remember this invisible line that I crossed at the airport gate. San Francisco was our world, our fairyland, and beyond it, Dad was gone.

I loved summers in Kewanee. I was driven to the swimming pool each day, fed delicious meals and sweets at my leisure, bought new clothes at J. C. Penney’s downtown. I could watch TV whenever I wanted. Yet something always felt off. I didn’t know what was missing, but I couldn’t escape that feeling of missingness.

The pictures that hung on my grandparents’ walls and lined their desks and dressers told me what was wrong:

Here are Aunt Janet and Uncle Jim, posing with their young sons at the annual Hog Days festival.

Here is a nine-year-old Uncle David in a plaid shirt and a sweet smile.

Here is Alysia in first grade wearing a blue dress with a big white sailor collar and white plastic barrettes, which Munca always pronounced accenting the first syllable, BAR-ettes.

Here is a studio portrait of the cousins Judson and Jeremy looking like beautiful little dolls, in turtlenecks and plaid pants.

Here is Janet skiing down a slope in Lake Tahoe and another of Janet with short bangs in darkened silhouette, taken sometime in the 1950s.

Here is Munca smiling at a goose she’s encountered on the golf course and, a few pictures over, posing with a five-foot sturgeon she’s caught in Alaska.

These were funny pictures, loving pictures, pictures that celebrated adventures and milestones: graduations, travels, weddings, anniversaries. Here is what you did not see:

The picture of my mother at fifteen, shy-eyed, with unflattering bangs and braces. Her picture as a giggling two-year-old in a crinoline dress squeezed into an armchair next to big sister Janet. Her three-quarter profile, looking luminous in white on the occasion of her high school graduation in 1964. The sepia portrait of my parents in full hippie regalia—Mom in paisley, Dad with long hair, beard, and beads—as they look down on their newborn girl. Snapshots of Barbara with me. Snapshots of Dad with me.

I found these pictures only by plundering the depths of my grandparents’ closets and dressers. Sometimes I asked to stay home when everyone but Grumpa went to the Midland Country Club. With him reading in the den, I’d busy myself in the back of the house. Digging beneath plastic-sealed winter wools, I’d find old shoeboxes stacked with Polaroids and snapshots, tied with crusty rubber bands. Another box in the back bedroom closet was heavy with framed eight-by-ten portraits, which loudly click-clacked as I searched through them. Only in these dark and musty spaces (how I loved the smell of these spaces!) did I find the set of pictures taken when Barbara first brought Steve home, and those of the solo visit in 1972 when she posed with me on the porch of the old Roosevelt house.

What the pictures on display and those hidden made plain was a certain truth: my parents never occupied the same space as the rest of the family. For a brief time, they, with me, formed a family, but they weren’t a part of
this
family. The black-and-white portraits, in faux bamboo wooden frames, depicting my mother growing up were removed from the walls of my grandparents’ home after her death. Any framed pictures of me—hanging on the wall in Grumpa’s office, or set on Munca’s desk or on the dresser beside her bed—were of me alone.

Just as my parents didn’t appear in the physical space of my grandparents’ home, they never came up in conversation. There was no acknowledgment of September 7 as my mother’s birthday or August 28 as the anniversary of her death. No one hid this information, but no one marked these dates in any way. Neither did anyone describe how my mother took her stuffed animals and comic books to Smith College, or recall the time she flushed a half-eaten Christmas fruitcake down the toilet on the Amtrak ride back to Northampton because she couldn’t stop herself from snacking on it. I learned these stories from Uncle David when, as a young adult, I joined him on quiet walks or drives past the old house.

It confused me. If the family didn’t want Dad around, what did this say about him? And if I loved him and missed him and painfully longed to be back with him, what did this say about me? About us? Was there something unsavory in our world, our San Francisco? Or was there something unpalatable in the story of my parents?

It seemed that my relationship to my mother’s family was clouded by the tragedy of her death, especially as I got older and the resemblance between us became more pronounced. At thirteen I cut my hair boy short, as my mom had once worn hers. This prompted my aunt Janet to warn my grandmother before she saw me. She thought the haircut would upset Munca. This reaction thrilled me; if I couldn’t remember my mother, I could at least look like her—this lost twin, my other half, my doppelganger. But perhaps I was a walking reminder not of someone Munca loved, but of something that went wrong, of lingering questions. If Steve hadn’t been gay, would Barbara still be alive? If he hadn’t been gay and had also held a steady job, a
real
job, could we have been as comfortable, as whole, and as picturesque as the Smith family?

It all seemed like a big mistake: something that shouldn’t have happened.

Years later, Munca visited me in Paris during my junior year abroad, what she’d call “a successful trip.” After an afternoon wandering the Luxembourg Gardens we settled in for tea at a nearby café. Sitting at a narrow table in the window facing the street, I told Munca how important my father was to me. She nodded. “It’s not that I don’t like Steve,” she said. “I just wish he’d never married Barbara.”

I understood. Barbara deserved the life of comfort enjoyed by her older sister. She deserved to be living in a fine home in Kansas City, or Lake Forest, or Saratoga, with two kids, two cars, and a dog named Pokey. “Just divorce him,” Uncle David remembers Munca yelling into the receiver. “Divorce him, Barb!”

But the truth is, my mother wouldn’t have been happy in the suburbs. She loved my dad and wasn’t shocked by his interest in men. My parents believed, as did many members of their generation, in revolution—that the rules of family needed to be shattered and rewritten, that there should be room in society and marriage for sexual curiosity, even transgression. But what business did she have leaving her two-year-old to fetch a boyfriend out of jail, a boyfriend who was also her patient?

Sometimes I imagine a world where my mom never met my dad. Or had met him and quickly left him, finding a brilliant Emory grad student with whom she could build her life. She might still be living today. She might be enjoying a distinguished career as a psychologist with the big family and the house full of animals she always wanted.

But then, where would I be?