FATHERS AND SONS
Walsh, Lawrence
FATHERS AND SONS SKETCHES FROM A MOURNER'S NOTEBOOK IN A POLITICAL AGE BY LAWRENCE WALSH The subject is politics and the destruction it visits on private life. Our text is from a man of the...
...THROUGH the 1970s, my father's conservative acceptance of things as they were clashed with the spirit of Vatican II and the noisy arrival in his rich white parish of the social gospel...
...The greatest violence done to his view of things in those years had nothing to do with me, however...
...for Those in Peril on the Sea...
...It has enough trouble filtering out the primitive apprehensions of the race and controlling life's traffic of storms, sorrows, and seductions without the poisonous, cause-crazy fluids of politics clogging it in the bargain...
...A bunch of twenty-two-year-olds when the Baltimore was commissioned and added to the fleet...
...The O'Brien has two days to live...
...San Francisco is, on the clock of absolute time, preposterously near...
...The processional is of my choosing— Whiting and Dykes's heavy-handed, heart-tugging, damnably moving Navy Hymn (Eternal Father Strong to Save/Whose Arm Hath Bound the Restless Wave...
...This he would do without provocation, and quite in the middle of things, for the rest of his life...
...A cousin ran off 500 photocopies at a Sir Speedy and stocked the pews...
...preach and Coretta Scott King sing at a suburban synagogue...
...Nice gardenia in my mother's hair...
...I don't know, maybe a Mr...
...Note the period bathing suits...
...Consider the experience of his great-greatgrandfather Michael Walsh...
...I had begun to hope for fewer hairpin turns in my father's beliefs, probably because I had come finally to understand that he was an entirely decent, uncorrupted man, the sort who would—and did— complain when the IRS one year refunded several hundred dollars more than he figured he had coming to him on his tax return...
...It's Christmas Eve, and I've been plying the holiday gloom of the suburban malls in search of some quick-fix presents—perfume, neckties, the routine heartfelt wares...
...In the Japanese jet, Ezio Pinza is on the music tape's show tune channel, singing "This Nearly Was Mine" from South Pacific, What to make of the curious intersections of life and art, even this middlebrow mush...
...It is clear to everyone that my father is sick and won't get better, though no one can say what the trouble is...
...You there, the tall woman in the large hat, the reductionist...
...My father's position of honor has to do with his offhand remark to one old Baltimore party in a Christmas card that the plank owners might think about a reunion...
...Aboard is Jack Walsh, a thirty-one-year-old Philadelphia lawyer, father of one, and now a naval officer in the South Pacific...
...I am myself just out of Germantown Hospital after a fast drop of thirty pounds, and a week's feeding from an IV bottle...
...We'll find the O'Brien's split hull, work our way to his locker, and retrieve the sword...
...I get through customs the small mountain of japonaiserie I collected for my wife on the Ginza, and make for the pay phones...
...The renegade Berrigans, for years the objects of my father's opprobrium...
...My father's faith often came off as a forbidding sectarian affair of the gut...
...Surely there is something to be made of this by the Bulfinch of our time, whoever he or she may be...
...Start with the Jesuits, yes, but pause at the shrine of racial hurt...
...They were brass-collar Catholics in matters of faith and morals, but they did without the denominational trappings of popular imagination...
...THIS is a parenthesis in my father's decline, his last piece of real living before the cancer takes full charge...
...It's a cut above Levittown...
...The U.S.S...
...PHILADELPHIA IN the mid-1950s...
...This immigrant lug helped build by hand St...
...The Quincy shipyard, where the Baltimore's keel was laid, is around a bend and out of sight...
...In this first panel, I am briefly back in Philadelphia, at my mother's house going over the 1981 books and her financial order-of-battle as a widow...
...You want to plumb his theology (read: politics...
...I'll be held to account, if only by myself, for squandering such a sweet piece of luck...
...Every year, slightly to my horror, they'd find me like smart bombs—five pounds of chocolate-coated buttercream, with my boyhood diminutive curlycued across the top between the bunnies and roses...
...My father and I are posing for the Brownie, holding up an inflatable raft...
...Both men left Al Levine's house at the same time, car doors and trunks flinging open for folded wheelchairs, awkward maneuvers...
...No more demonology—ours is often as screwy and lethal as the Right's...
...Tell me about it...
...The young curate from church comes regularly...
...Many gleaming coils of purebred ordure below decks...
...The Berrigan brothers are the star defendants...
...Two Marines babysat my brothers Johnny and Tommy...
...The toasts were ninety-proof and worthy of Boccaccio...
...THIS slide is NOT worth a thousand words, considering the words that go with it Here it is anyway...
...The eggs always showed up...
...God's mercy, I abide by the facts: It's Erwin Knoll dissertating on Poland, m...
...Jack Walsh is in charge of Fala, the President's storied Scottie...
...WELL in this one it's July 1944...
...O'Brien, a destroyer escort, is steaming to the rescue of survivors of the carrier Wasp, torpedoed just before the showdown battle for Guadalcanal...
...A generation later, my navai officer brother did the same, shelling the Hated Cong from a shore bombardment station in the South China Sea...
...On my left, dozing like a plant, is a Kyoto woman in her late fifties...
...THESE next four shots are in black and white...
...Here now "The Ad Hoc Committee to Promote a Reunion in Boston in 1981 of Certain Officers of the U.S.S...
...This he mumbled to himself, thinking he was alone...
...You can easily make him out, seated and wearing the dark cape...
...It seems a poor place to spend, as my father would before V-J Day, three and a half years of your life, so much time away from your pretty young wife, your infant sons, (there would be three of us) and your law practice...
...Wartime weddings were recalled...
...The "certain officers" are twenty or so of the ship's original complement—plank owners is the expression...
...To no small effect did the Jesuits take my father in hand when very young, and we all know about the Jesuits and the young...
...From Alfred Kazin: We kid ourselves all the time about our personal lives...
...Philip Roth has assigned it for his course, which I take...
...My father, here, for the first time, tells me about the sinking of the O'Brien...
...I am in the pulpit, reading the lesson...
...It is hard to plot the growth of my appreciation of things...
...A cranky turn of mind, a callow, bargain-basement Byron-ism, beer—all "helped" me see...
...The Friends of Jack Walsh...
...It breaks up and sinks on September 17...
...I'm "boy scouting again," in my father's view, on the rebel side in the Nigerian civil war as a field delegate of the International Red Cross...
...No problem...
...It seems to me, then, that the American Left must go to people, to all the "fathers," where they live...
...The Jesuits, ancestral grievance, faith-of-our-fathers: They'll get you a B + on the quiz...
...Some of the Japanese in nearby seats, men in their fifties or sixties, are dressed like golf pros, it seems to me...
...An overnight guest of theirs is gamely trying to set things right, cutting up with a camera...
...NOW we are six...
...But I wasn't done tweaking his religious and political glands...
...The passing parade of cabin attendants and Japanese businessmen is far more diverting than the in-flight movie...
...See me step with virile aplomb over the carry-on luggage of others and the bags of duty-free Scotch...
...The time for bear-baiting books, leftist preachments, and movies smuggled in as entertainment—or presents—is long past...
...He insisted long before that when it was his turn he wanted a pine box...
...A hell of a note...
...He was reading it, by God, the morning of the torpedoing...
...That my father had to miss it, or thought that he should, took my breath away...
...I'm fidgeting too...
...I've just thrown a fistful of rocks into the conversation: I have ripened into that most unpleasant life form, the American undergraduate...
...Disappointing, but an affirmation of something I cannot name or describe, but sort of respect...
...My father and I in a guest room of my parents' Chestnut Hill house...
...Jungians note well: I have grown up with a custom-made Excalibur myth of my own...
...But withal, I was conceived that night on . . . Mare Island...
...In a moment it's the O'Brien's turn...
...My mother has been in this movie before, of course...
...This may or may not have had something to do with his decision three years later to study for the priesthood...
...He was the gray eminence in the ward room, sort of a straw boss to the ensigns...
...I cling to those letters...
...Not very...
...Orwell's reading of his contemporaries' assault on "bourgeois values" is instructive: The British Left's dismissal of courtesy, "good manners," fair dealing—the tending of gardens, in sum—usually masked an anti-human contempt for plain civility, for a simple, uncut, man-to-man, woman-to-woman caring, for a real politics wonderfully free of abstractions, imponderables, apoplexy...
...Homely, commonplace...
...You'd have been on to something had you brought up religion...
...Most people (my father) are at once liberal and conservative, radical and reactionary, outraged and complacent...
...I wish only to say that I locate the onset of a great "political" bitterness between us to the time when we veered away from one another in the perilous search for grace...
...but I am pretty well grogged, so maybe it is just with what Fitzgerald called the exquisite manners of the drunk...
...I have cut the tedium of a trans-Pacific flight by padding about the cavernous fuselage in the paper slippers issued after takeoff from Tokyo...
...Long magnificent rays slant down to the saucer rim of the horizon...
...The Canadian Maritimes, the Transvaal, the Appalachian Trail, the A Shau Valley...
...He was in any case well sick of the war by then...
...Francis, stealthy as a Green Beret, looked on from the rhododendrons in the yard...
...My mother insisted that he could never have so insisted, and so I got him something decidedly not a pine box...
...With the ocean behind me and feeling about 2,000 years old, I am full of an unfocused but sober regret...
...now I stand out of the way of the many stewardesses—what a torrent of complaisant youthful beauty— bowing and salaaming right back at them, though mindful of my satanically happy marriage to a woman with Prince Val bangs (and soon a kimono) of her own...
...I do not have Jack Walsh's proxy, and I am debarred from probating his political will, but I have a hunch, certainly a hope, that today, right now, my father would see the lie in "deterrence" theory, in the new national assertiveness, in the lunatic projects of Alexander Haig and Caspar Weinberger...
...Some questions, though...
...My parents would not ordinarily be caught dead there, but the Philadelphia Bar Association is holding its annual Bench-Bar Conference at the Traymore...
...QUERY • How photogenic is a deathwatch...
...The Baltimore is his second and last ship in the war...
...The Japanese submarine I-15 finds the destroyer in its periscope and hits it amidships with one torpedo...
...Take my good father, or any of the other old walruses who showed up last summer for the Baltimore reunion...
...The Sunday evening drill called for my father to drive me back to campus, slipping me through West Philadelphia's noose of angry negritude to Penn's crenelated battlements of the higher learning...
...He's a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, and he's installed us in postwar tract housing on Long Island...
...Seems the Irish ingrates set the tone by rioting over the exclusion from the public schools of the Rheims-Douay bible as an instrument of moral instruction, c. 1840...
...Dan is on, telling why he and the others burst into a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, smashed a few missile nose cones, and flung cow's blood around the place in witness...
...Great columns of smoke and spray...
...Let's close with a Christmas triptych...
...It was a night of . . . well, of sea stories...
...Japan...
...Seventy years, five months, two days...
...This is one of me snooping in his desk...
...He loved his Church and the United States Navy, but he despised the Knights of Columbus and the whole ruinous run of guts 'n' glory veterans' groups...
...Everybody doted on him the next day, though...
...Railway Express, runner—my God, even the United States Postal Service...
...As I say, the beer is free and plenteous...
...And here I am thinking ail this through, inexplicably building the outlandish , oceanic conceit of the Pacific as my family's living room rug, our mythic property— ours and ours alone...
...But now...
...Don't suppose I mean the Castro and Diem revelations—no, no...
...I'm chatting with the tuxedoed flunkies who serve the booze and the ricey swill at meal time...
...TO the Atlantic Ocean and the beach at Stone Harbor, New Jersey...
...I do not know my way around the New Testament...
...the correspondent later killed in Cambodia...
...a family friend, a Paulist priest we've asked to do the eulogy, finds me an appropriate passage from John...
...Roberts, something like that...
...This transpired in a downpour, for which rain I was grateful...
...He's in and out of a coma...
...YOU folks want a few more slides...
...Most of the men were ninety-day wonders, recent college boys hurriedly turned into line officers...
...The Presbyterian and Catholic chaplains were good sports to sit through an authoritative recapitulation of a long-running satyricon (Boston, the Canal Zone, San Francisco) studded with outrageous expeditions and carnal adventures...
...Neat, I said...
...The disputatious son of yore combs his father's hair, shaves him, massages his feet...
...Yes, he said, several...
...Next slide...
...With an imperfect understanding, I'm reading his letters to my mother from the South Pacific...
...Leslie-Ann Down strips for action, parental guidance here, and burrows into Sean Con-nery's bed...
...But there I go again...
...Do my father and I have representative significance for a world of fathers and sons, for a divided culture at the end of its rope...
...Have I raided the personal for the sake of the political...
...IN the foreground, my father's coffin in the aisle of Our Mother of Consolation church...
...Also eight or ten attestations of tree-plantings done in his name in Harry Truman Forest near Jerusalem...
...The war in the Pacific is going well enough that the fleet can spare a heavy cruiser for a few weeks...
...I bat out the obits for the Inquirer and the Bulletin, and otherwise start banging the drum...
...Leading the officers and men in prayer is Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...The last inning appears to be the President's, however...
...Let it be said that I am angry—after four months, the VA has not yet delivered my father's headstone...
...Well...
...That's the U.S.S...
...He's played his last game of golf...
...His contradictions were bewildering and all too human—and perversely attractive to me, though I never let him in on this, of course...
...This Sunday I also have with me a Modern Library edition of Anna Karenina...
...The theater patrons (unauthorized smoking materials everywhere in evidence) gave him a bad case of the creeps...
...But make light of the Church Militant, well, there'd be operatic scenes...
...His doctors have discharged him from Pennsylvania Hospital, sending him home to die...
...The book went down with the ship, and here's my father, with his other-worldly memory, thumbing through my copy with a kind of frenzy, to-ing and fro-ing, then fixing resolutely in mid-paragraph somewhere...
...The Easter eggs were something else again...
...We must all live with our pasts...
...Ocean travel does not agree with Fala...
...Is distortion inevitable when epochal themes and national experience are examined through such a personal lens...
...Neighbors, clients, classmates from grammar school through Penn Law, some of the Baltimore men and their wives, ward leaders, an indicted pol or two ("If you don't go to their funerals they won't go to yours," said Mayor Daley), and a number of strangers who later come up to the limousine to tell my mother that Jack Walsh had done them a good turn twenty, thirty, forty years before and this was the least they could do...
...Poor Jack...
...They overwhelmed, in the end, with their faith, their goodness, their most Irish acceptance of the irremediable sadness of life, their uncomplicated and unconditional love...
...We'll finish with this last one of me behind the wheel of my mother's maroon Chevrolet...
...I had in my father one of life's door prizes...
...It's politics that rules the roost, that makes much of our 'personal feelings' these days...
...This one's of the Atlantic City boardwalk...
...I've put together a slide show, WE are six and a quarter miles above the Pacific Ocean, in an east-bound Japanese Air Lines 747 as big as a high school gym...
...HERE we have a Quonset hut on Mare Island, in San Pablo Bay, a little north of San Francisco...
...The bride, then and now a striking woman, came in for the reunion from Kansas City with the groom...
...The next year, whole of skin, I flew from Saigon, seat of that bitter absurdity, to Los Angeles...
...few of them have met since September 1945...
...I rather think he would have been pleased, hang the circumstances...
...Our fieldstone house on Vaux Street, in East Falls, around the corner from Grace Kelly's brick homestead...
...In his locker on board is the bejeweled dress sword his mother and sister Marguerite gave him at his Annapolis graduation and commissioning as a reserve ensign...
...From the jet window, the Pacific now strikes me as profoundly sinister, as something foreign, appalling, and fundamentally inimical to men...
...My father promises that when the Pacific goes dry we'll load up the Hudson with sandwiches (and several empty peanut butter jars) and drive out to the Solomons...
...His vote for the oleaginous headwaiter running for President the November before wasn't so terrible a thing, really...
...But more than anything I want that headstone in place...
...It said everything to my father that Prince Hal got command performances from every bimbo who heaved into view...
...V-mail...
...I'll be damned if he doesn't find his place and take up where he left off twenty-three years before...
...He'd taken Anna with him when the O'Brien sallied forth from San Francisco in the spring of 1942...
...My Swedish and Swiss colleagues are amused, pen knives at the ready...
...What a sharp sense of misgiving I have about so many things on this mean afternoon...
...I once asked if the Baltimore brought down any kamikazes...
...But a remarkable thing: When I came into the kitchen with the birthday cane in ludicrously festive gift wrap, my father was listening to an All News All the Time radio station...
...I think it's the spring of 1972...
...my father...
...It's September of the same year...
...That was a long siege...
...This is my room at the Love All But Trust Few Bar and Hotel, in the village of Nnobi, Onitsha Province, the defunct Republic of Biafra...
...Late, before the day's last Demerol...
...No more bourgeois-baiting will do...
...I have missed mass or something...
...What reminders there were of Christ and Rome were nothing if not subdued, and strictly garden variety: A verdigris St...
...I trace the dissolution of my Catholicism to these times...
...Or I have invoked my shiny new humanism to deride some Catholic nostrum or tic...
...At home in Philadelphia, his twenty-two-year-old wife hears of the sinking from Lowell Thomas on CBS radio...
...At bedside, we sing upbeat songs from the new liturgy...
...The Walshes have driven down from Long Island in their green Hudson...
...I am a poor man's Hunter Thompson, whacked out on a witch's brew of violent chemicals prescribed for me, shaking rather badly...
...So far so good...
...But I will never get around to it...
...It's a generalized insult to the body...
...that JFK was, if Mrs...
...Back in my seat I was in a sad, dark, desperate communion with an ocean suddenly charged with personal meaning: What, or who, should I see bobbing in the water, in a Mae West and a coating of diesel oil, but...
...With a vaporous knot of laundry, a calculated slovenliness (preserving a certain pride of blood I often wore remnants of my father's uniforms, twenty years gone at the edges), and a lost-weekend growth of whiskers, I've come to strap on the feed-bag at my father's table...
...He flew in with my mother Saturday...
...My father loves Bob and Ray, but I'm still slow on the uptake...
...Love letters...
...The ship's bomb disposal officer (now a Seattle trial lawyer) stood to confess that despite the crash course he had in ordnance at American University early in the war, he never had the beginning of the hope of a glimmer of a clue how to do his job...
...Others rose, the booze coursing in their pre-sclerotic veins, to reconstruct the Iwo Jima and Saipan operations, the campaigns in the Gilbert and the Marshall Islands...
...Yay, team...
...The Secret Service agents are drunk throughout this cruise from San Diego to Pearl Harbor (FDR is headed there to parlay with Admiral Nimitz and General Mac-Arthur), and the care and feeding of Fala has devolved upon my father, the lieutenant-lawyer...
...Here, the squeezing is pretty easy...
...But here you see me at the entrance of Holy Sepulchre cemetery, trying to sneak the car out into the bumper-to-bumper traffic of Cheltenham Avenue and make away...
...It's not great, but everything is good here for these young people and their two little boys...
...They make a laconic journal of longing and apprehension, composed without the dishonesty of hindsight...
...He curled his lip, always the sign of rage, and socked me...
...There was grace at the beginning, benediction at the end, and the Boston gloaming throughout...
...See the portable radio on the curb...
...Of course they're right, of course they're right...
...Had some nice housebroken woman in a Villager outfit appeared at his door one day fifteen years ago to talk about Vietnam (he'd have offered her a Scotch, but the woman I'm thinking of would have wisely asked instead for a Dubonnet with lots of ice), she could have sat him down in the kitchen and got somewhere on napalm, tiger cages, carpet bombing...
...Into my pack went the egg, there to melt one day and ruin a roll of combat film...
...Retirement has been a cruel hoax after fourteen months...
...My father's runic script was absolute hell to read, so with twenty or more letters finding their way to me'each month, he kept me busy...
...This is the family's weekly set piece (or set-to...
...I think it is my thirty-fourth birthday, but the phenomenology of jet travel and the sleight-of-hand accountancy of the International Date Line are such that I am not sure of the day of the week...
...But the truth is, my parents kept their house free of the props of piety...
...You figure it out...
...My father did not die a rich man, a neat trick after fifteen years as a public servant in this city, believe me...
...And here comes this jackanapes of a son saying to hell with the whole thing...
...Not for him Whitman's "ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty...
...I'm rounding out my sense of the globe, getting the hang of two oceans, two coasts...
...I might have signed him up...
...No, Vietnam was not yet the voodoo-doll that so many families set upon, in bizarre variations on the Clausewitzian adage...
...Just husband and wife things in an awful time...
...Fun—as in heartbreaking merriment...
...My brother Johnny had by now gone off to partake of the nation's bracing new Asian adventure...
...This he would unfailingly do...
...Now, deep into my thirties, way up in the sky, I was as suggestible as ever...
...I went out to meet the world as a cub reporter at the Detroit Free Press in May 1967, and that's when the letters started coming...
...Catholicism by a man who bailed out of the seminary (bad, bad sin, that...
...A junior at Penn, studying English...
...Out we go, arm in arm, behind the box...
...Our text is from a man of the Left and a man of the Right...
...I squeeze morals and lessons—generic sentiment—out of most of what comes my way...
...to California to visit a son who is a graduate student in something at Berkeley...
...I'm on the phone with the family doctor asking him to come write out a death certificate...
...In the water, with a crushed vertebra from the explosion, my father calls out Terry, Terry, Johnny, Johnny—the names of his wife and infant son...
...I couldn't get the hang of his Irish preoccupation with the next world, with the eternal consequences of earthly trespass...
...Think on it...
...Nothing in the political lesson book is so elementary, so important—and so difficult for the Left to grasp...
...Exner was on the level, not only a lecherous low-lifer but also a lousy lay...
...And what of the Baltimore, the ship itself...
...I've brought my father a cane of English ash from Sorokin's World's Greatest Selection of Canes Store on South Eleventh Street...
...I am the last of his four children alive—my brothers died in road accidents thirty years apart...
...My father was the midshipman in charge of the Navy goat...
...My father and I raking leaves in front of #1 Ridge Road, Searingtown, New York, 1951...
...I look through my father's closet for burial clothes, then remove his Naval Academy ring and religious medals...
...You're wrong, you're out to lunch, you're excused...
...I do not like the person I must have been to 1) give my devout father, on his sixty-third birthday, Garry Wills's Bare Ruined Choirs, a biopsy of U.S...
...There was such a group, and it did what it set out to do last June, in Boston...
...At Annapolis, goatkeeping was an honor reserved for injured football players...
...My father has brought us home...
...It was some enchanted evening...
...No word of the crew...
...My father asks after Kitty and Levin, even Vronsky...
...He eventually decided J. Edgar Hoover was a thug, but found William Kunstler unspeakable too...
...The hut is married officers' quarters...
...The undertaker was a nice guy, but I felt I was in the clutches of the Lee Iacocca of the casket trade...
...It is mid-June 1979...
...that, and the status accorded him in the South Pacific as the old man of the group...
...The attentive, though, will make something of the PT-109 tie clasp...
...But enough...
...No hale anecdotes from my father on the good gone days of stalking the slopes across a million square miles of ocean...
...I'll admit to an urge to celebrate these sixty-year-olds, most of them well fixed in life and right-wing, but it would take great art or the abandon of a sloppy soul to get across a fair sense of the Boston meeting, to extrude from the toasts, the simple bare fellowship, the weepiness, and, Goddamn it, the zany good fun, some moral or message for the children of the revelers, for the Left, for the readers of this magazine...
...For the privilege, he'd fork over $25 in allowance...
...We are in the downtown Harvard Club, appropriately august, on the top floor of a bank tower with a great view of Boston Harbor...
...My father gave away a bride named Teddy at one of them at the Fairmount in San Francisco...
...My father sang Richard Rodgers's music with a spelunker's baritone from the time of my earliest memories until he was too sick to sing or do much of anything else...
...Here as well are my brothers Tommy and Johnny, and the unnamed baby sister...
...Somewhere along the line he's become a Stevenson Democrat...
...The commuters and shoppers give no quarter, and I steam in neutral with National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" for company...
...He looks happy—my father, not the goat...
...My father warred on the Pacific...
...Letters, aerograms, exhortations, Steve Carlton's e.r.a.—these were one thing...
...Dial Philadelphia collect—I have only some yen and travelers' checks—but my father is already at work...
...the jarheads boiled the babies' nipples and bottles to a fare-thee-well, and the dovecote stank of burnt rubber when my parents returned by ferry from the em-barcadero...
...When my father is alert he is all solicitude for the nurse, my mother, visitors...
...In an hour the station wagon pulls up and two men wheel my father out through the garden and past Francis, attentive as always from the bushes...
...and 2) prey on his good will by dragging him downtown to some art house to see I.F...
...My father and I, for reasons that still baffle, played rougher games on a field entirely of our own design...
...Seems to me this was the New Deal at its best...
...My father is quietly perishing...
...So it has been a disastrous retirement...
...Drunk before noon...
...My father conceived a violent dislike for brave Brother Kunstler...
...Less than a day before I had had a Big Mac in Hiroshima, just a few blocks from where genshi bakudan hit...
...But if it ever informed our practice, it might save us all...
...Our different argosies—mine made in the penultimate year of the Carter dispensation and bankrolled by the Japanese government, his in a serious time for the planet and paid for with his health—only bring home more of the unhappiness I have introduced to my father's life, more of which to come...
...My father was essentially immobile by mid-June and, sure he'd spoil things for the others, refused to appear...
...Well, I learned to like Bob and Ray and was the youngest kid on the block to know that Joe McCarthy was a rotter...
...I send my parents some bamboo placemats...
...We all take on an Oriental aspect in old age...
...The films themselves sent him into a pluperfect fit...
...Not for them Robert Moses's Everyman Avalon at Jones Beach...
...You think you know what divided fathers and sons in the middle of this, the American century, do you...
...My invective is general, state-of-the-art, pointless...
...I was bewildered by what I took to be a Tory reading of the Sermon on the Mount...
...What to say about a reunion of warriors in these times of war preparations...
...He voted for Richard Nixon against George McGovern, but read and liked The Autobiography of Malcolm X ("Hell of a book, hell of a book...
...Divorce and hospitalizations from a wasting disease of my own (my father and I go halvesies on cortisones and Demerol) make me a poor bet to succeed...
...In six years the back injury will leave him a cripple with a bad list...
...The human heart, Hawthorne's "foul cavern," is not always the place for public doings...
...Still, I am off on the morbid march of imagination thirty-four-year-old birthday boys are heir to at the raggedy-assed end of the Me Decade...
...What hurt, what mattered, was all the girlie stuff, the press's retrofitting onto the Frostian age of "poetry and power" of an audacious priapism...
...They are drawn on a secret account, all made out to charities...
...I want to tell him something important, something I figured out between Tokyo and California...
...Must all emotion be gobbled up by politics...
...The Ibos are in the middle of their famously photogenic disaster, the relief planes fly a nightly gauntlet of federal MIG interceptors, but here comes the 1969 egg in the Red Cross pouch...
...They are not a gathersome cadre...
...Even though I'd caddie for him, our outings in the last year were rapidly pared down from nine holes to five to four to two to none...
...By the spring of 1982, I believe he would have thought the idea of a Reagan Presidency a good joke carried much too far...
...Long live the middle way...
...On a muggy Friday night in August, the best, most self-forgetful man I have ever known dies without a peep while my mother and I are in the next room...
...He never passed up an opportunity to expatiate on the "frivolous tenor" of my life (more in the manner of Polonius than Lord Chesterfield, though not much more), but mostly he reported on his golf game stroke by stroke, the feckless Phillies, my mother's accumulation of master points, his luncheon outings, the heedless breeding of my friends at home (the more heedless the better, he would argue), Philadelphia politics and how it had finally come to disgust him after twelve years as county Register' of Wills, Common Pleas trial judge, and Federal hearing examiner...
...On a Saturday afternoon in autumn, we're listening to "Monitor" on NBC...
...no place to blast the hell out of perfect strangers, and of course no place at all to die...
...The creases in the faces of the elderly connect me to my father's own ancient face...
...They reached me in far-flung precincts, through all the years of Homeric wanderings and numerous high-risk jobs, in seasons of conspicuous hardihood, romantico-literary humbug, and downright seediness—Michigan, Vietnam, North Carolina, England, Nigeria, Israel, Arkansas, New Hampshire, Nova Scotia, Vermont, New York, West Virginia, Kentucky, Texas, Washington, South Africa— through six newspaper jobs, extended inspections of three foreign wars, and college teaching posts in five states, through a decade and a half of what seemed to him aimless, hopeless migrations...
...it will match my brother's (Lt., USN, Vietnam), bookending the rest of the family...
...Yes, and what else is new...
...then to the undertaker, the one who buried my older brother six years before...
...an infant sister lived only a week...
...Inside the gates, where I am on sadly familiar ground, I've spent a hard ten minutes at my father's grave...
...In Vietnam, one best saw what I wanted to see from the bay door of a helicopter moving above the stricken landscape...
...These revolting things from Mar-quetand's in Philadelphia would arrive by helicopter, relief plane, dhow...
...Death of a U.S...
...What does this law grunt and machine pol know about Literature...
...Baltimore, and it's anchored in Alaskan waters...
...My father is the damage control officer...
...Television will enter our house in another two years, and it's from the lighted box that I will take my earliest understanding of the war, what my father did in it, and why the limp...
...I have dealt here in home truths, literally and figuratively...
...Religion, religion...
...I filled in for him Friday...
...What does it mean that I have seen fit to wrestle my private grief to the ground in a political magazine...
...True dog's body work it is: Everyone wants a lock of Presidential dog hair...
...Baltimore (CA 68), a.k.a...
...My father was a man of obstinate ritual and routine...
...Below, the Pacific is all shimmering flagstones...
...It was the first time in the new war that the Navy Department announced a combat loss before notifying next-of-kin...
...I've arranged to come pick a coffin in the morning...
...When the Baltimore reached San Francisco, my father had her rush out to be with him...
...But that we live in such an age is a fact...
...The church is mobbed...
...I am in a business without a capacity for the vague, the inarticulate, the ambiguous, the tentative, for irony or surprise, let alone mystery...
...While America sleeps, or eats and argues, he's working the logarithms and trig problems of naval ballistics off Quang Ngai...
...The accordionist played "Anchors Aweigh" as we packed the two old men into their rental cars, and I just lost it...
...You might find this obvious stuff, and maybe you'd be right...
...It is the earliest evidence of a newspapering bent...
...The mawk-ishness was there, all over the place, but great good fun was paramount...
...Roosevelt rewarded the Baltimore with a Presidential leave in California...
...Stone's Weekly and Hearts and Minds...
...Kunstler is still news, a good draw—the Chicago Seven fiasco is somewhere in the appeals stage—and the younger lawyers have invited him to speak...
...Now I was raising my pinkie for another Kirin many thousands of feet above the world's greatest expanse of water and the boneyard of the Imperial fleet...
...its steel sides ended up in an Illinois cornfield as shielding for a cyclotron...
...Cancer of the pancreas...
...My father sent them for the next fourteen years, five or six a week...
...But he was an insurance and pension freak, and the numbers look good for my mother...
...Religion is the opiate of the people...
...I learned that on the eve of the commissioning and departure for sea trials, my father organized a party and produced Sally Keith, "Queen of the Tassles" (the main act at the old Crawford House in Scolly Square)— Sally Keith and her mother...
...We've sat down to roast lamb, the meal of the Book, and here we are, my father and I, at one another's throats over who knows what...
...No mystery, no gut-spilling in journalism, just conclusions, kickers, and trench-coated tough talk...
...First, my parents' kitchen, my father on his seventieth birthday in March of last year...
...Jim Young, the Paulist, is of the Church's growing peace confession and just the man for Emerson, who lamented in 1850 that his was not an age when priests raised wooden chalices and spoke with golden tongues as they once had but instead drank from golden chalices and wagged wooden tongues...
...He and the ship's surgeon, confined to a wheelchair with Parkinson's disease, sort of held court, sick and badly frazzled though they both were...
...A journalists' junket—ten days of auto factory tours and bleefings at federal and prefectural ministries—had sensibly and reflectively ended there...
...Weeks before, when I was made to understand that my father wouldn't last the summer, I decided on the Navy Hymn, and only through a main-force effort, a visitation of unwonted sense and restraint, held back from telling him what was in store...
...This was before Vietnam fouled the nest...
...In 19671 went west, to Vietnam, to witness the central event of my generation, to take in "a great affair of the Earth...
...Destroyer as the Wasp Burns in the Pacific," tolls the caption to a front-page photo in The New York Times five weeks later...
...Only the Philadelphia Walshes sprang from its primordial ooze...
...For my father, as for many millions of other men and women of his disposition and experience, the shorting out of John Kennedy's neon monument hurt more than anything else in those hurtful times...
...In suntans and in the starboard congregation is my father...
...Twenty years later, I would overhear friends of my father who knew nothing about the war injury whisper...
...My father had time for the world, his preoccupations to the contrary notwithstanding...
...It was scrapped in Portland in the early 1950s...
...In the middle one, I'm out in the garage, sifting through his papers...
...Navy Log and Victory at Sea coached me in the iconography of the Pacific theater...
...There was a thirty-second reprise of the Plowshares Eight trial in Norristown, up the road from my parents' neighborhood...
...Anything but...
...Certainly, though, I can lay off politics, the ad hominem, Good German stuff...
...I had been in these air lanes before...
...We've not had a political brawl for many months...
...I don't understand what sorry straits the Truman Presidency is in, that Joe McCarthy is abroad on the darkling plain, and what it means that my father is defending a man prosecuted for alleged Communist Party activity...
...Mind you, this is the same man who took his wife and children in 1958 to hear Martin Luther King Jr...
...Twenty years later, I will churlishly beard my father for not telling the court that whatever his defendant's beliefs, they were beside the point...
...He's back in private practice and getting into politics...
...My parents and I are seated at the Sunday dinner table, staring disconsolately at a leg of lamb...
...Many, many more mass cards have come since the August funeral, since I decamped town for Wisconsin and the Lord's work at The Progressive...
...The night before, they went for drinks at the Top of the Mark...
...The father-son torque was more costly in our household than in most...
...The reunion was in two parts, cocktails and dinner Friday night at the Harvard Club, and an early supper at the home of one of the organizers in Lowell the next afternoon...
...He said yes to private schools, European vacations for his family, tennis and guitar lessons for his sons, war, Russian novels, a law firm full of agnostics if not something worse (like Episcopalians), martinis...
...It is not clear what good I can do, though a prehistoric compunction drives me...
...There is no Tolstoyan sweep, nothing about the hateful Japanese and how good it is to close with the enemy and destroy him...
...His opinions of the unchurched were severe and damnatory...
...He voted for Hoover in '32, received his Naval Academy degree and a handshake at graduation from Roosevelt in '33, and showed his gratitude by voting for Landon in '36...
...He is toothless and lame, and I cannot jolly him along, though it seems to be my job to try...
...We left Tokyo only hours before...
...He got the guy off...
...I was a soundman and cameraman for CBS, in and out of the field with George Severtsen...
...I bullied and pestered with promises of a room at the Parker House, a wheelchair at Logan Airport, and a tactful reminder of his obligation to report to Boston...
...that is how I did my seeing, often enough feeling a kind of moral vertigo...
...Never talk that way, he said...
...I know that I could have reached my father through the side door of good manners...
...Up ahead on the screen The Great Train Robbery grinds on...
...The cumulus clouds comport with the usual written descriptions: They scud...
...Well, I am not the man for the job...
...My father, at thirty-three, had a family, a law practice, and varsity experience (the O'Brien) to his credit...
...The Solomon Islands, the afternoon of September 15,1942...
...Fare segregation has me packed into the mortifying church pews of tourist class, yet I have not only a window seat but also, because I am in the row immediately to the rear of the first-class compartment, lots of leg room and easy egress to the helical stairs leading up to the "observation lounge" and the w.c., which is better than a poke in the eye, given JAL's largesse and the steady supply of meritorious domestic beers...
...I learned for the first time that the Baltimore shelled Japanese shore batteries above Camranh Bay in the spring of 1945, some of the same stretch of Indochinese coast my brother and his destroyer trained guns on twenty-two years later...
...Aj Washington and Moscow cheerfully set about to commit cosmic arson, the stakes are such that we on the Left had better work up some new pitch, and, as they say, at our earliest convenience...
...And from Irving Kristol: We live in an ideological age—that is to say, an age in which human passions and frustrations find expression in politics rather than, as was once the case, in religion...
...A shot of the fantail on a Sunday morning...
...I ask you: What is more wearisome than the anti-church sniping of the lapsed Catholic...
...Off to Hawaii go the Baltimore, the President, Fala, and my father, coming up for air...
...We may deplore this phenomenon, wish it were otherwise, and hope it will eventually pass...
...What's of most interest is a wad of canceled checks thick as a club sandwich, hidden in the dust and impedimenta of his career...
...Also there's a framed commendation from Bull Halsey I'd not seen before, and a photo of a goat and mule in the care of some college bloods at Franklin Field at half-time during the 1932 Army-Navy game...
...The Biafrans don't know what to say, and neither do I. Just a year before, in Vietnam, an egg caught up with me at the Danang Press Center...
...1953, 1954...
...I just can't say...
...Michael's church in Kensington (Rocky's neighborhood, by the way), which church was presently torched by the Know-Nothings...
...Those are my parents in the sun, outside...
...He was too sick last year to buy me a Marquetand's egg (and he now had no secretary to fetch and carry for him...
...She is going Lawrence Walsh is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...Cancer of course is what has been going on...
...The plane passes over Golden Gate, and, exhausted, gives up the ghost at San Francisco airport...
Vol. 46 • May 1982 • No. 5
