The Remembrance of Our Misdoings : Part 4

The Black Veil
by Rick Moody

(Page 4 of 5)

We were gathered around the fireplace, the kids, in Darien, one autumn evening when my mother explained that she and Dad couldn't get along anymore. His recliner, next to where we stood, was empty. To one side of the fireplace, the irons, the bellows. Wood smoke wreathed us. My mom was wearing plaid. I wasn't surprised by the direction of her remarks, though I had never seen any acrimony. There was a predictability about the whole discussion. A leaden disquiet to the scene. My brother was the only one who spoke up initially. By then he was a chatterbox. Don't get divorced! Don't get divorced! How did he know the word, since we were the first in the neighborhood to achieve that milestone? And though he stuttered much of the time, there was no stutter now. His plea was articulate and sad. My mother looked helpless. I tried to conceal myself behind my sister throughout the discussion, and this became my strategy later: Don't draw attention.

Mom journeyed south of the border and secured the paperwork, brought back certain gifts. I received a pair of ornamental spurs (they are somewhat rusted but still intact). My sister received a Native American hand drum that split along its length after a couple of New England summers. My brother's gift is lost to time. While my mom was in Mexico, Dad was in San Francisco, on business, or that was what we were told. Actually, he was banished. He brought me back a bar of Ghirardelli chocolate, a gigantic, monolithic chocolate bar weighing in at a couple of pounds. Therefore, we were rich in material distractors from the trouble of separation, but we were not distracted in full. When my parents' travels were over, so was their marriage. We anesthetized ourselves for days at a time. With television. While my parents drank. My mother slept on the couch for the next few weeks. They governed us in turns. Then we moved out. My mom and the three of us moved out, and there were the months of wrangling over visitation, child support payments. The bickering of lawyers. I had stomachaches. Just the words macaroni and cheese could produce a stomachache in me. All-beef franks. I could vomit over the idea of all-beef franks. I was the kid with the constant stomachaches, the kid who swilled Maalox and chomped Gelusil. And since my father was recovering from an ulcer himself, he not only identified with my woes but offered remedies and made dietary recommendations. Cream of Wheat and white toast. Mashed potatoes and chicken soup. It was an early bonding experience.

The arduous visitation schedule began, and we were in my father's company two Sundays and one long weekend a month and alternate holidays and August. We drove back and forth across Fairfield County on thruways. I knew every hill on the Merritt Parkway. I knew how many overpasses there were between Stamford and Darien. Lovely stone overpasses from the school of George L. Dunkelberger. On the first or second of these weekend visits, my father, at a tollbooth on the interstate, explained to us that he couldn't understand why my mother was doing what she was doing, and in the middle of offering this opinion, my father found that he could not go on. He covered his face with his hands. The car was stopped. People behind us swerved to change lanes. They honked. He wasn't the guy who had yelled at us about the noise. There had been a metamorphosis. He was in a bad spot. My mom was in a bad spot. My father had no idea how to cook for himself. His own parents were infirm. He had expenses: he was making $33,000 a year and owed a big chunk in child support and to my sister's private school, which later became three private schools. We lingered at the tollbooth, impeding traffic, in a stillness.

Fathers have a hard time quitting smoking.

He smoked Kents, a brand that doesn't seem to have the profile now it once did. He lit one then, in the car, fumbling with the lighter. I loved the smell of cigarettes newly lit in enclosed spaces, the perfume of sulfur followed by the ribboning of tobacco smoke, clouds lingering like halos around smokers, the meditativeness of cigarette paraphernalia. All suggested for me, as the New York City subway token once did, the seriousness and gravity of adults. The theatrical business of grown-ups. Ordering a coffee regular, putting on cuff links, lacing up wingtips, putting stamps on envelopes, presenting a credit card. This was the world I longed for when I was a kid, in the backseat of the car at the tollbooth. I didn't want to be a passenger. My brother and sister and I tortured my father by crushing whole cartons of his Kents, knocking the cigarettes out of his mouth, intoning quotations from antismoking propaganda we'd seen. Then all three of us became smokers. When my sister died, many years later, she was still hiding her smoking.

Fathers, unmarried, will pursue girlfriends.

The first girlfriend he presented to us was like an insoluble problem — like the existence of God, the location of the soul — upon which you founder in your undergraduate course work. My father arrived to pick us up one weekend, and the front seat of the red Firebird, the front seat over which we argued so relentlessly (only to cede it time after time to my sister), was occupied by this woman, this blonde, not our mother, our small, frail, indomitable mother, and this woman was going to treat us so well, in ways we never deserved nor understood, because it was so sad how much trouble we had been through, us kids, and we were so cute, and we would ignore her as a matter of course and we would constantly measure her against our mom, waiting for her to disappear so that we could move on to the art of making the next girlfriend feel just as miserable, holding all of these perfectly generous women in the dungeon of our contempt, inducing them to come to our Little League games and then upbraiding them for it, in our black, disconsolate moods, displayed for anyone who walked into the middle of our remorse and tried to soothe it with respect.

Fathers tell stories. Fathers are responsible for the very shape of storytelling; all stories issue from the mouths of fathers, and all laws about stories, including laws about the number of examples that will suffice to tell stories, how many times it is permissible to repeat jokes, and the role that rhythm plays in the deployment of anecdote.

For example, stories about working in the body shop, and how the one guy came in with the brand-new sedan complaining about an awful scuff on the hood, and how my father got up onto the hood to buff away the offending mark, to make the sedan shiny and new, only to leave a foot-wide circle on the hood completely free of its paint job. Or the stories about summers working in the psychiatric hospital, the catatonics, the hebephrenics and their laughter, the schizophrenic guy upon whom you were not to turn your back because he would pick up his lunch tray and attempt to break it over your head. Or the tales of Maine — my father's friendship, in Waterville, with the son of the driver of a Hostess truck, how they were allowed to ride in the truck and sample the baked goods, cupcakes, Twinkies, sweetmeats; how, after changing elementary schools for the fourteenth time, my father hid in a packing barrel to avoid going to school while my grandmother had the police combing the neighborhood looking for rapists, abductors, pedophiles. Or tales of army life during the Berlin Crisis, my father launching howitzer shells, my father, married with two kids (my brother wasn't born yet), getting ready to ship off to Berlin, where the Soviet and NATO tanks were parked headlight to headlight. Stories that were not always funny; stories that often had fear as an unstated dimension: my sister, outside Fort Bragg, North Carolina, swimming in a local creek, surrounded by water moccasins; my father, as a kid, deciding to take his skiff across a harbor to one of the islands off the coast of Maine during the preliminaries of a hurricane and getting lost, fogged in upon the water, so that he might very well have motored accidentally out to Europe — until he ran smack into some rocky Maine beach. Stories that got repeated until they acquired the mythological status of shaggy-dog stories, stories at which you smirked and cringed, so that in long car rides you would beg him to alleviate the tedium of unchanging landscapes with the one about the guy who would break the tray over the orderlies' heads. Fathers appear to us to love us without condition if only we can interpret their complicated language. Fathers move over expanses of time, across abysses of generations; fathers move across impediments, opening out, softening, becoming unguarded, giving away the rules of fathers to younger, angrier men; fathers, over time, become solicitous and kind, regretful and warm, sensitive and, even, gentle.

Copyright © 2002 by Rick Moody

About the Author

Rick Moody is the author of Demonology, Purple America, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, The Ice Storm and Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award. He is a past recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Moody has contributed fiction and essays to most major publications and has been widely anthologized. He lives in New York.