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Home?
Daddy died when I was six and now, twenty years later, not only do I love him still but I believe he loves me. I need to write what has happened and more, to explore the memories behind this riddle that has made me what I am. I have grown naturally in spite of struggling to live in his grave. Many people have helped me and hung on to keep me from disappearing. Now I am here, stronger than my dreams, but with my dreams behind me urging me to write.
New York has so many people in it that no one can run from the fact that they're human. Lives come and go like traffic. It has been my privilege to be raised in Manhattan where, locked behind unmoving tears, I could always hear the tapping of feet on the street.
Mom, my sister Lucy and I were often forced to function emotionally as a unit. Longing for that guy, who'd left, sank us daily into the ground, and we'd meet together like the tip of a pyramid. Mom went through more than Lucy or I but did not show it. She kept a bank of sweet caring available that we would draw from and draw from still. Lucy, whose name means light, has an artist's sense of beauty. For Mom and me, Lucy's spirit is more beautiful than anything she ever made. As for myself, stubborn to the core and determined not to grow up without a father, I faced into the darkness, holding conversations. That's what I'm doing now, knowing that others can read my words.
*** Sometimes I want to crawl into eternity through the spackled stars that shone against the strange sky of the linoleum floor in my first childhood room. How large my father's face was when I was a bundle in his arms, staring at the constellations of his expressions and smiling when he smiled, frowning, smiling again, all in a rhythm with him.
We would play for hours on that expanse of orange floor, watching the airplanes land and take off in my airport, or following the train as it circled round and round in my toy top. I would wait down the hall outside his little office with the wet copier machine, his big green chair on wheels, and dictating machine that recorded on soft, plastic discs of perfect indigo. He would come down the hall to my room and the magic would begin as this mound of white-shirted man sat on the floor with me.
I didn't know many words but we had little need of them. He would stare at me and I would stare at him and we would go about our work, the serious business of play. Later I had a garage with an elevator and we would laugh at the fragile toy cars skidding down the curling slide. After Dad became ill, I don't remember him sitting on the floor with me. My favorite pastime became sitting in the alcove of my soft window, with stuffed animal friends piled beside me, staring into the quiet, brick-walled alley where nothing would ever happen more than a passerby beyond the gate. In occasional rages I would go to the other window, which faced the world, and try to smash it with my fist, amazed that something as delicate as glass could be beyond my strength to break.
*** The beach on Shelter Island's Ram's Head stretched around a bay and a strip of it was ours. Summers or weekends, the barnacles and the small active life beneath the dock and beyond the pebbles would be there for us. Lucy and I never tired of sorting through shells to find those little doors on them, the ones that opened to how hermit crabs' spiny legs stretching out.
Catching blowfish from our neighbor's boat, I was lucky the first time and reeled one in. Blowfish get fat when they're threatened so they can seem big and scary. Their little mouths pucker like a trumpet player's. They made a hollow sound if you dropped them on the deck all puffed out with air, and they'd even bounce a little. It feels bad being cruel to a blowfish but they're such fun when they're round fleshy balls.
On a Sunday morning, Dad and I would go to the living room where the big moose head looked down over us with its antlers. Dad would stride over to the chest by the door and select from its top drawer our khaki caps for the day -- his big, mine little. My favorite pair had an embroidered patch identical in both sizes, of the mighty swordfish writhing out of the water.
We'd pick up two newspapers at the Island store and wait on Uncle Nate's porch to give him his copy when he got up. Dad's body seem to hum and whir when he was thinking, and sitting quietly next to him, it was easy to catch vibrations, like touching a car's hood while the motor was running. I remember hours swinging with Dad in a hammock stretched between two trees. I remember the birthday party Mom gave me at which we had a cowboy and horse and many games. I remember the hurt feeling, after the party was almost over, when two older boys used water pistols to destroy paper ribbons stretched between trees, but I joined in, tearing down signs and shooting down ribbons with my friends.
I remember the peacefulness in our small rowboat. Curling metal, twisting freely, held the strong oars; curving wood like a basin with water in the bottom, held Dad and me. The two of us would be together, alone, and I would observe the little things of life. He would wear a T-shirt and shorts and I would feel very much a part of my physical body, a feeling that vanished after I got fat from pain and fear like some blowfish being used as a ball.
*** I am susceptible to despair. The emptying of life is something I'm familiar with. While at Shelter island one time, dad returned home from a trip to Venezuela and gave me a string and wire figure of an Indian with a bow and arrow. Later Dad also gave me an American Heritage book on Indians. I'd look at the pictures. The faces on the cover are especially dear to me. Although I sold the book rather than carry it around, I kept the cover which was actually a box the book fit into. I've cut out the cover into a large cardboard square and taped two pictures of Dad to the back of it, one older and one younger, about my age now. I keep this out where I can always see it.
Something incidental to Dad's illness, of which I was not aware, affected me and I would have nightmares. I would wake up in bed and know something was wrong. The radio would announce that the aliens from outer space had landed and taken over the world. I hid in a closet's top shelf hoping they would pass by without noticing me. They never did.
Or the horrible museum. I would be driven up in a white Oldsmobile. The guards let me in. The exhibits were made of neon knotted into subdued shapes. I would be forced down the main hall to a little end room seemingly harmless enough. On one side was a window and on the other side a wooden chest. Mom and Lucy would jump out of the chest shrieking, smash through the window and run laughing across the lawn beyond.
Or the wooden cupboard across the room from my bed. I would dream that I'd look behind it and see Indians or skeletons, and then run to my bed and beneath the covers. Slowly they would emerge and come towards me. The leader had a hatchet, and if they made it to my bed while I was in it I was done for. At first when I'd move, they'd stop, but later that didn't work. They were in procession and would move slowly, chanting, over the orange speckled floor. Now, at 26, I am determined to meet them in the center of the floor.
*** One morning Mom stood with Dad in the hall, in front of his office, and Lucy and I said goodbye to him. I was six and my head reached his stomach. I wished he would take me with him.
The bed in Mom's room was big. Mom came home one night before Dad's death, from a comedy; she told Lucy and me how this army doctor in the show looked out of his plane at sheep that had escaped and were running wild all over his army base. The three of us jumped up and down on the bed like frolicking sheep, as light as clouds. One day, I walked into this room and Mom told me to sit down. She told me that Dad was at the hospital and would not be coming home.
In the next few years one of our favorite games was to hide, the three of us remaining under the sheets of the bed and telling stories such as "The Three Bears." It often made me think of bears and how they hibernate from the winter until spring's thaw.
On the morning of Dad's funeral I was insistent: I had to have a teddy bear. Since I didn't own one this required swift action on my behalf. Mom was swayed. I saw the perfect bear, "Teddy," in a toys-and-books shop on Lexington Avenue. We bought him and I returned home pleased. My plan was that I would embrace this toy throughout the funeral service and somehow survive. At the funeral hall, I had never seen so many men, all talking, wearing suits, being serious, tearful and subdued. The thought that I was going to grow into one of these was shocking and exciting. The thought that this would have to be accomplished without Dad made it seem fantastic and unlikely. The worst thing about a funeral is that it means more to those who didn't live with the dead than it means to the bereaved family. It is difficult to be in the same room as the loved one's body and give it, as a token, the respect due the departed. I held Teddy to my shirt and was determined to keep Daddy's memory and spirit alive inside me.
Lucy and I were taken away that afternoon by the loving mother of a school friend. We all contributed to the effort to play distracting games until the adults came back from putting Dad's coffin into the ground. Later, we went to the cemetery when Dad's headstone was unveiled on the grave. It was a flesh-and-rose colored stone, rough-hewn around the edges and noble, like the man.
Lew Merrill, my father, had won our family battle. Given six months to live when I was two, he fought and made four and a half years of it. Thanks to his long fight, I have a father I can remember and love. Cancer in his lungs was beaten by double doses of radiation, but the cancer reappeared in his brain a year or two later. Time doesn't mind being beaten because it wins in the end.
*** The sun rose slowly above the green couch in our den. Or was it setting? Or, since it was painted by an Eskimo artist, was it an Arctic sun, just hanging there for six months at a time? Looking back years later, I see it as the morning sun. Beneath it Dad and I would watch the world enter our lives through the television. His big head was like some planet itself, and I knew that I'd grown big when I could hug his neck and almost touch my fingers round the other side.
Pictures of a life lived long ago, pictures that hardened until I became so tired that I couldn't see are now moving and reminding me. At the New York World's Fair, father walked beside me beneath the hollow globe, which was iron and as high as a building.
The family conferred and it was settled: if I was to see the wax museum Dad would have to take me quickly through, then rejoin the group. Behind the mysterious glass, down the dark maze of halls, reigned poised Cleopatra, gold snake crowning her head. And Superman, dwarfed, flying through the air, fist-outstretched against a furry monster taller than a skyscraper. I held Dad's hand and wished we had more time. We would soon be home, and by now I knew that home would only include father for a little while longer.
With my Brownie camera hanging around my neck, I took pictures of the World's Fair. Monsters of tires and steel were a playground, and dinosaurs were in two exhibits, but the giant inky octopus in the undersea tunnel was the worst. Beneath one of its arms of malice a diver was crushed. The shifting diamonds simulating water did not slow, stop or take any human form. The fairgrounds seemed to me the whole world in miniature.
Now my story goes on to years past Dad's death and still I can not explain the face of sorrow that came over me as a child. What was I feeling in those pictures where I appear? How am I to understand this face that is still my own somewhere deep inside? A face that has known arms of love and arms of malice -- raised with war on TV, the Earth from space, and suffering faces lodging protest. Heroes of rock-and-roll were to die and heroes of civil rights. The head of our half-divine president was spattered against the seat of his parade automobile. Pictures of the world's immense truth have wounded many more besides myself. The pain of loss is a collective problem.
A sculptress made heads of Lucy and me in clay and then bronze. Our young faces, each supported by a thick pin, rest on wooden cubes. The New York World's Fair was stripped of its fantasy exhibits and beside the highway to JFK Airport, green grass stretches for lazy acres between the surviving monuments.
THE END
© 1984 Philip Merrill all rights reserved
Philip Merrill |