I have become my father. After all these years he’s been gone. After all the wrongs I did to him. Only two big ones. But that’s enough.
With my emptiness I think of him and realize that was him, too. Empty. This is what he felt.
“How long has he been deaf and dumb?”
It’s what you could say back in those days and get away with it. That’s what a visitor to my grandparent’s house said on a Sunday that was raucous with thirteen of us or more as it always was—and with my Dad always silent. The visitor could not know my Dad was silent by choice.
Smoking Camels, watching baseball, football, or hockey on my grandparents’ washer-sized black and white TV, in the swirl of voices and relatives he was silent. He was silent and unreadable while he watched the Tigers, the Lions, the Red Wings on TV.
Oh, Tony? He’s just quiet.
It’s what my mother would toss off with a sneer like it was a joke, as if he were a joke. Why didn’t someone stop her? Why didn’t I? But my Dad’s withdrawal was constant, complete, and so it became the standard ignored by us all.
Now I know it was abandonment of a very special kind. It was his cloak of protection from it. I know because I wear it now. I feel it like a sheath that covers up the giving up. He could have been a baseball player, a talented third baseman. Could I have been someone who doesn’t cry in the same hollowness as his? Now, anyway, now that I think I finally know it.
Dad was different with me when we were alone. With his little girl-child he showed himself in wry smiles and in a sense of humor that he revealed only to strangers. To waitresses, to gas station guys, he was the man who engrossed them with a story, a joke, or with a sly observation that would always made them laugh. They liked him a lot, I could tell.
These strangers greeted the good guy Tony with smiles. He was smart and easy-going and took the time to engage with them, to be with them in a way that meant they were more than just workers to him. He revealed a different self to strangers. I know now how much he needed to do that. And I remember how he always made them laugh. The strangers liked him a lot, this good guy.
My Dad was a different person. He had a different side he showed when there were no family “sides,” and without my mother. He could show this different self, his buoyancy, with the pride he took in his cars. He loved his big orange and white Buick Roadmaster, a roomy creamsicle of a car.
On Saturdays, our day, he would take me out with him. We were always in a hurry to get to the Ramona Theater on Gratiot and Seven Mile Road on the east side of Detroit. Always precise, my Dad wanted to be there on time, enough time that he calculated we would need to get popcorn and whatever else I wanted before the Newsreel and the Coming Attractions started.
I looked forward to those Saturdays. And one time I egged him on. The big creamsicle Buick was new and powerful.
How fast can it go, Dad?
We were hurrying to see Them, that movie about the giant thirty-foot-tall ants with piercing screeches that created havoc in the California desert. And did they ever! I loved it. Dad took me to see a new movie every Saturday. The ticket-takers and candy counter people smiled when they saw him. It had to have been a relief for him to escape Mom’s parents’ house that was our hub, and to escape my mother’s brittle self-absorption. But the rest of her family, no matter her sneers, liked my Dad. I could tell that, even if they mostly ignored him.
They had to respect his good position at General Motors where he was a Production Engineer. It’s what made him so precise. He could plant flowers in the yard exactly ten inches apart—by eye—and you could measure the distance later with a ruler and see he never made a mistake.
But he hadn’t gotten his engineer’s training from any college. His skill came from the Ford Motor Company’s Trade School. It was because his father, Grandpa John, worked at Ford. In those 1950s they offered training to the eldest son of their longtime employees. But Uncle Herman, Dad’s older brother already had a job. So quick-thinking Grandma Mary (my Dad’s side Grandma Mary) made them hear her at the interview.
I have another son!
And so Tony, my Dad, got that valuable training and the enviable ability to provide better for us than other men in the family. He did better than Uncle Herman who ended up being a cab driver all his life. And better than Uncle Bill who worked hard with his hands at the smelly United Rubber tire plant down on the Detroit River, just across the water from the green respite of Belle Isle. But my mother nullified Dad’s good job, and undermined any envy, by spending him into debts she hid for years.
Our family was not just Dad’s and not only “us” in a nuclear foursome. Because we were Italian, grandparents were always at the top of any family tree. No one ever questioned that my older brother always lived with our grandparents on my mother’s side. And Dad’s family? We’d visit them only on Sundays, and only for our second Sunday dinner. It showed my mother’s opinion, not concealed, that Dad’s family was secondary in importance.
On Sundays my mother would talk nonstop through the car ride back to our upper floor duplex that was just around the corner from her parents’ house (the house that was our real home). She spent that time, and more, complaining. She had so many things to vilify about everyone and everything in my Dad’s family. Never anything good. My father and I would sit in silence through her acid monologues about my aunts and uncles on that “side” of the family, Dad’s side.
The pasta was dry. . . Do you see what she does her eyebrows! . . .When is that other one going to get married? . . .It’s a good thing you don’t bother playing with those kids, just stay at the big table with us. . .
I remember my Dad’s hands on the steering wheel during those rides. I hear his hands.
I still hear their skintight rub, the rustle and squeak of them as he clutched them hard in a close-fisted grip. I knew then, and hate myself now, for my silence and not comforting him. I knew then but would not admit it wasn’t that he loved his car and was caressing its handsome steering wheel. No. It was his way of releasing that he burned inside with rage in that tense, raspy rotation of his fists, those tight clenches on that steering wheel. His silent withdrawal. Giving up. Again. Withdrawal into the emptiness of rage.
I learned this. It is self-defense.
It hurt him. It hurts me.
And I’m just figuring it out, finally, why I need to make strangers laugh with such affection. Just like my Dad did.
Beautifully observed, Roberta paints pictures with words, and we are immediately peeking into these remembered moments , as though parting fine clouds and pushing our faces into these emotionally charged almost claustrophobic visitations.
Roberta been reading this and all I can say is yes! My version and observation of our family ( grandma Mary) is the same but different- always loved your dad - he always had a wink and a grin for me ❣️