Park Avenue on my way to the first of these chats when suddenly, altogether unexpectedly, I felt a twinge of panic. Stopping, I pulled under the awning of a store front, out of the sun. Even prior to this, I had experienced another kind of panic. A few days before leaving Los Angeles, as part of my program to assault the big town, I had purchased a new suit—the only one I owned. Out there the suit had seemed completely right, but I had only to walk two blocks up Park Avenue and watch the men nod approvingly at each other ’ s snug-shouldered splendor (New York is the only city in the country where I have noticed this peculiar effeminacy) to see that it was unequivocally wrong, nearly disastrous. It was steelgray—in the bright sun it had sheen—and California-cut, with those wide, dandified lapels that run all the way down to one ’ s belly before a button can be detected; it had those monstrously padded shoulders, making my neck appear a lily shoot rising from a pile of papier-mâché boulders. Its effect was unalterably wrong, and I was walking along smarting somewhat from this sartorial deficiency when, as I say, I suddenly experienced something more provocatively wrong. I stopped because for the first time it occurred to me that certain false information in the résumé might elicit from the interviewer questions I wasn ’ t prepared to answer. Thus I removed a copy of it from my shiny new attaché case and started studying it. That was as close to the interview as I ever got, as close to that or any of the interviews my friends had worked so passionately to get me. For suddenly I saw my father as I had seen him last. Perhaps to the question, “ Born in London I see, Fred? ” I was suavely responding, “ Yes, chap, Pops was with our Embassy there; of course, we left London when I was only two, so I, heh, heh, heh, don ’ t remember too much— ” Whatever, it must have concerned my father, for he rose before me as I had seen him last—in his casket.
As Dr. D. was to remind me in the emergency room of the hospital so many years later, my father was “ tough. ” He was not a big man, standing five feet, nine or ten; but over that height was spread a solid one hundred and eighty-five pounds, a weight that he carried on hard, heavy, and lightning-quick legs, walking with the precise, pigeon-toed, and slightly affected steps of so many athletes. He supported his family by climbing telephone poles for the Niagara Mohawk (until he was fired for fighting); and when I think of him now, I think of rough-cotton work shirts open at the collar, a broad masculine face made ruddy by exposure, and a Camel cigarette dangling from the corner of his pensive mouth. There was nothing about him that did not suggest his complete awareness that he got his bread by the sweat of his brow and the power of his back. He seemed almost the prototype of the plebeian. Yet my father had more refined dreams. Like most athletes he lived amidst the large deeds and ephemeral glories of the past, recalling a time when it must have seemed to him he had been more Elevated, and this continual and melancholy look into the past had drawn his brows into a knot, giving him a look of unmistakable hostility. Moreover, in an attempt to more vividly re-create that past, my father drank—I was about to say too much , which would not be entirely accurate. My father could not, or so my mother recalls, drink even the most limited amounts of beer without becoming moody, argumentative, and even violent; and on one occasion he beat a man so badly that the man had to have pulled what few teeth my father left him.
The man himself told me the story many years after my father ’ s death. He was drunk and he bore my father no grudge. He implied that it had been his own fault. He said, “ I wanna see your ol ’ man was tough as said ” ; here he smiled the remorseful, tolerant smile with which one views youth ’ s intemperance. “ He was , ” he said. The man
As Dr. D. was to remind me in the emergency room of the hospital so many years later, my father was “ tough. ” He was not a big man, standing five feet, nine or ten; but over that height was spread a solid one hundred and eighty-five pounds, a weight that he carried on hard, heavy, and lightning-quick legs, walking with the precise, pigeon-toed, and slightly affected steps of so many athletes. He supported his family by climbing telephone poles for the Niagara Mohawk (until he was fired for fighting); and when I think of him now, I think of rough-cotton work shirts open at the collar, a broad masculine face made ruddy by exposure, and a Camel cigarette dangling from the corner of his pensive mouth. There was nothing about him that did not suggest his complete awareness that he got his bread by the sweat of his brow and the power of his back. He seemed almost the prototype of the plebeian. Yet my father had more refined dreams. Like most athletes he lived amidst the large deeds and ephemeral glories of the past, recalling a time when it must have seemed to him he had been more Elevated, and this continual and melancholy look into the past had drawn his brows into a knot, giving him a look of unmistakable hostility. Moreover, in an attempt to more vividly re-create that past, my father drank—I was about to say too much , which would not be entirely accurate. My father could not, or so my mother recalls, drink even the most limited amounts of beer without becoming moody, argumentative, and even violent; and on one occasion he beat a man so badly that the man had to have pulled what few teeth my father left him.
The man himself told me the story many years after my father ’ s death. He was drunk and he bore my father no grudge. He implied that it had been his own fault. He said, “ I wanna see your ol ’ man was tough as said ” ; here he smiled the remorseful, tolerant smile with which one views youth ’ s intemperance. “ He was , ” he said. The man
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