1958

_My father stands in the doorway. I’m next to my mother with my cheek pressed against her grey wool skirt. “Go, go, go,” seems to be what they are saying, and they are angry. My mother is crying, so I cry also, afraid of things I don’t even have the words to name yet.

He goes. The house seems to relax. Now we all sleep in one room, and my baby bed is beside the fireplace. We seem to eat crazily: cold corn flakes for lunch when there is no money and steak for supper when there is. I learn that it is terrible that I need new shoes. It makes my mother tired and tearful. Needing anything is bad, so I stop needing anything.

My red-haired sister Allie seems to be in charge of what I learn about the world. One day we steal eggs from a nest she has found across the tracks at an old black woman’s house. Under her tutelage I learn who in town has new puppies or old dirty magazines in their tool sheds. Once on a summer morning she discovers our father’s car parked at his mother’s house, which is two blocks from ours. His mother will not speak to us, but she lets us in. He wakes up to find us staring down at him. We are wearing matching playsuits with giraffes on them.

“Don’t you like our new clothes?” we say, but we cannot get him to say our clothes are pretty. It has something to do with our mother being the one who bought them. I am three by now, my sister is five. I sit in a chair by the door while she sings him piano lesson songs and makes him laugh. He has a nickname for her, “Red.” I feel safer being an observer than a participant.

Another day my sister takes me to a little room in our house that has always been padlocked. She has picked the lock with my mother’s nail file. “Look,” she says, opening a tall packing crate, strewing the floor with the bright confetti of shredded comics. She hoists out a brandy snifter as big as her head. It has a circle of roses etched around its rim. When she lets me hold it, I drop it. Its shards will remain there on the wood floor for several years.

This becomes our secret, that we burrow and tunnel through boxes stacked to the ceiling. There are golf clubs in a leather bag fuzzy with mildew, and a rotting brown leather bomber jacket. Light, airy watercolors of the villages of Bermuda, fringed with oleander and hibiscus. Uncountable long-stemmed cocktail glasses, which we break having imaginary tea parties. We’re more accustomed to the cheap thick crockery from the local grocery store.

We pass the summer ruthless in the wreckage of our mother’s former life. We break the tortilla holder shaped like a floppy sombrero. More booty: a box of evening dresses, tulle- festooned, satiny-slippery. We fight over a green paisley one studded with green brilliants. I settle for the strapless pink and blue one with the rustling skirts. Damask napkins down my front: instant bosoms. Black lace mantilla over my head: Bat Masterson’s girlfriend.

We venture outside in our regalia, carrying champagne glasses for effect. The kids from the housing project in what used to be our grandfather’s peach orchard are not amused. “That ain’t yours,” one little boy says. “And it is a sin to drank.”

We know that we are poor, and that they are poor, but we live in a big white house, and they live in cramped little dark ones. We know that we are smarter than they are.

Our secret seems to be out. My brother investigates the room. By sundown he has used three sterling silver platters for BB gun targets and 78 rpm records for flying saucers.

“These are mine,” my brother says, pulling out two heavy wooden propellers. “They were on Daddy’s airplane. I remember them. They were on my wall in Bermuda.” He drives the propellers into the soft earth, like a conquistador staking claim. It seems to me that he has a bigger claim on the earth than I do, partly because he can remember more of the time that is pre-history, when our mother and father were capable of talking to each other.

Our mother, when she finally notices, simply makes us throw everything back into the room, and tells us to stay out of it. Of course, we don’t. A teak and bamboo teacart makes a terrific entry in a soapbox derby, and a burgundy damask and lace tablecloth is just the thing for a stray mongrel to have her puppies on.

Some months later, my brother calls me to come listen to a record he is playing on the record player my father left behind. I hear music playing, and what I remember to be my father’s voice talking.

“Daddy’s talking about being shot down in the war,” my brother explains, and I look into his face and wonder why he has bothered to notice me.

There is a big red book in our living room, with black and white photos of soldiers in it. Once my brother thumbs through it and shows me our father, sitting on the front row of officers, his legs crossed easily, squinting into the sun. For a long time, I am confused. I think that World War Two is still going on, that my father is there, and they play a lot of saxophones in the background there.

1963

_Sometimes my father comes to take us to a town nearby to eat at a restaurant called The Purple Duck. I love these times, because I can sit in the back seat of his Rambler station wagon, smelling his old fishing things in the back, hearing the conversation of my older siblings pass over my head. Their presence deflects his attention from me, and I feel safe watching them.

One early fall afternoon I come flying out of my third-grade classroom at 3:10, and I see the Rambler. I run up with my sister, and she explains that she has a piano lesson for the next hour. His smile fades, but he says he will take me fishing. He takes me to his brother’s pond, out in his little brown wooden boat.

He doesn’t give me a fishing pole to hold. When I speak, he hushes me. I sit facing him, with hands in the lap of the green party dress bought a few years earlier to go with my sister’s red hair. I am worried that he is angry at me for wearing the dress. I study the whorls in the varnished wood of the boat seat between us. It begins to get dark, and my back begins to hurt.

On the way home, he stops at an old well. “Bet you’ve never had well water before,” he says in a mild rebuke of my mother. He draws up an old metal bucket, and reaches behind the well and takes a dinged-up metal dipper, and hands it full of cold water to me. While I am drinking it, he says in his clowning around voice, “You’ll never drink water this good anywhere else. I’m tellin’ you like a friend. I used to haul so many buckets of water for my mama when I was your age, I felt like Paul Bunyan’s ox.” He studies my face for a reaction. “I’ve had water from all over the world, but it was never as good as this.”

When I’m getting out of the car at our house, he hands me the string of small, slimy fish he caught. “Give these to your mother,” he says, and closes the door and drives away.

This excites me. A string of fish is a joyous thing in the houses behind us, and I have seen the men come home and hand the fish to the women, who float them in red-rimmed white dishpans, then cut off their heads, slit open their bellies, and throw the little orange hot-dog-looking things to the cats. Then they cook the fish in big deep black skillets. I have even seen a big deep black skillet in the secret room of my mother’s house.

My mother scowls when I hand her the fish. “More workfor me to do,” she says angrily, and throws the fish, still on the string, out into the back yard. She curses our house, our clothes, our life. “He could have been a general."

1968

_MY mother decides to dose us with more truth as we get older: my father is not with us because he doesn’t love us. He loves to drink and dance with lots of different women. He once told her that he had better things to do with his life than to raise children. He has sudden unexplained absences, and he hangs around Navajo Indian reservations when he disappears. He was given a choice of retiring from the Air Force at the age of 41 or being court-martialed. That was the year we all crash-landed in my grandfather’s house in Georgia, in the little town where he and my mother both grew up. In a drawer in her bedroom are manila envelopes of old Defense Department photos: my parents greeting Eisenhower, Churchill, and Anthony Eden as they step onto the tarmac at Kindley Field in Bermuda, my father accepting golf clubs upon retirement. My father is saluting and serious in these; my mother’s face is seraphic as she beholds Eisenhower.

My brother and I press my mother for information. She tells us that she used to read the Bible when he was in the air. We ask her about my father’s separation and retirement papers, with all the details such as the women he was seen with outside bars and hotels, and the time he left the tanks empty in the planes when he flubbed an alert as Deputy Base Commander at Egland Air Force Base in 1957.

“Sounds like a set-up job to me,” my brother comments. He is 21, and a draft resistance counselor at the University of Georgia.

“The alert came through, and they couldn’t get the planes off the ground,” my mother shrugs, as if that is the only explanation needed.

My brother and I look at each other: the imaginary enemy was coming, and there was imaginary fuel in the planes: off with his head.

My brother is 4-F, having blown out an eye with a cherry bomb when he was seven, while my mother and father were attending the Army-Navy game. Now it is summer and he is home from college. He and the one other long-haired boy in town spend evenings on our front porch facing Main Street, discussing the act of war. My sister is in Savannah with my father for the summer. She is the only one who sees him.

One night as we sit talking on the porch a young man with short hair runs shirtless, shoeless, and shrieking down Main Street and into the woods. We begin to hear screen doors slamming up and down the street—the men coming out from their suppers and TVs to go see who is screaming in the woods—so my brother goes, too. We can hear voices, calls and shouts, in the woods for a while. Then my brother comes back.

“It was Mickey Vance,” he says. “He got drunk at the Two- Spot and thought he was back in Vietnam.”

“These people,” my mother says with a snarl, and takes a long drag off her cigarette. “They don’t know what a real war is. World War Two. Now there was a real war. This war is a moral atrocity.” She retires to her bedroom, with stacks of the Atlanta Journal and paperback Faulkner novels heaped in the place where most women would have installed a new man.

By the end of the summer my sister has returned, wearing long sleeves and pants, even in the swampy south Georgia heat. Her first night back, she and my mother sit in the kitchen crying and talking long after I have gone to bed. The next morning my mother explains to me privately that my sister’s legs and back and arms are covered with old brown bruises. She had been out in an elegant Savannah restaurant with my father, who became drunk and combative with the waiters. She became afraid of him. She called a policeman to drive her to his girlfriend’s house. He found her there, and beat her. When he sobered up, he bought her a new wardrobe and took her and the girlfriend to Hilton Head, to let the bruises heal.

“Don’t talk about it,” my mother tells me. “We are not going to talk about it again.”

My sister goes to a Methodist revival that fall, the kind where for one week out of the year everyone is fixated on the idea of being saved from something terrible. She goes down the rabbit hole of religion, never to resurface in quite the same incarnation that we knew her.

One day as I am leaving school, I see my father’s new silver Chrysler parked in front of the school. He is waiting outside for us. My sister runs to meet him. I hang back by the holly bush that grows beside the bookroom. What will it be this time? I can see my sister chatting with him, animated. I step between two girls I hardly know, and I walk right past his car, pretending to be so interested in what the girls are saying that I have no time to notice that he’s there. And so he is out of my life for a few more years.

1977

_Now I’m twenty-one. I live alone in a little rented house on the edge of a cotton mill district, with the scrawls of previous tenants’ children still on the bare pine walls, and the apparently stolen tombstone of one James T. Hughes, late of the Spanish-American war, as the front stoop.

My father has cruised into my college town with his new Winnebago, and his old silver Chrysler for me. It is his one rite of fatherhood to give each of us a used car when we become seniors in college. It’s my turn now. I have come to identify him with Nixonian politics, the military industrial complex, male chauvinism, and all the other bugaboos of the decade. I have seen him perhaps three times in the previous ten years, and always within the safety of my brother’s presence. But now my brother is a newspaperman in Athens, Georgia.

He and his wife have invited me out to dinner. It’s as nice a restaurant as can be had in that town, with a lengthy wine list. His wife waits for him to tell the waiter what we will all have for dinner. I order a cheeseburger, so I can offend him twice over by ordering something inelegant, and ordering it myself. I am waiting for him to give me the line that he always gave my sister, that real ladies always wait to have men order for them. If he does, I will walk out.

My father makes a big issue out of ordering the most expensive wine on the list. I make a big issue out of not drinking any. I keep a closer eye on his highball glass than the waiter does. I know the precise number of blocks to the little mill house. I know the precise number of blocks to my boyfriend’s apartment. I know the drill that seems to have been dormant in me for a long time. I just don’t know precisely where the boundary is that my father has to cross before I will walk free of him forever. I even know the precise objects in my house I would crack his head open with if he ever so much as lifts a hand to hurt me. It is a fantasy I have had ever since my sister’s bad summer with him. But for the moments in the restaurant, I’m navigating under a different plan: always know my precise position: where the available exits are in relation to how drunk he is getting. Keep money and keys in pocket, not purse. Like any good guerilla, I know how to watch and wait.

He drinks prodigious amounts, but he doesn’t seem to get drunk. He drives me home and we say good-bye. I assume that it will be for quite some more years, and that the next I hear from him will be through his elegantly scripted postcards from places like Tempe or Gallup.

He shows up at my door the next morning, tool box in hand. “I have work to do here,” he says, and proceeds to nail shelves around. Bizarre places: thereafter I will think of him when I crash my head after brushing my teeth. He makes a pretty lamp out of a dimestore basket, hangs it over my garage sale table, and puts a dimmer switch on it. My mother’s anger is also in me; that he would think a dimmer switch to dine by is a necessity of life, when most nights I come home alone to wash the waitress smell of grease and nicotine off me so I can study.

He bumbles around my house, recognizes my refrigerator as one that used to belong to my mother’s mother, and hails it like a long-lost friend. I notice that he is not drinking. He quotes poetry to impress me, now that I am an English major. He used to be an English major, at West Point, he says, and this throws me. Nobody ever told me that.

I tell him about finding some old textbooks of his in my mother’s house, with fold-out maps of Civil War battle plans. He quotes poetry that I don’t know. He has to identify it for me. “Ever read Wilfred Owen?” he asks. “Sigfried Sassoon?” I shake my head. He tinkers with the lock on the refrigerator, while I hold the handle he’s removed. “That’s okay,” he says. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” He glances back at me to see if I know what I’m hearing and I don’t. It’s final exam week at the university and I am cutting class as we stand there.

“Uh, Dryden,” I say.

“Nope,” he says. “Don’t you do your homework?”

That night I pick up a box of greasy fried chicken, and we shove my books and papers aside to eat together, dirt-smudged and tired. I feel good, I feel easy with him. I feel like I am meeting myself coming and going. He grew up in the same schoolyard that I did, played house in the same crooked oak roots. “Garthel Vickers and I used to raid your mothers acorn piles and shoot them in our slingshots.” We both learned to swim in the Alapaha River by diving off the same cypress stump. We bicycled over the same sidewalks, bought penny candy in the same grocery store. We both tried to breathe the same air as my mother as long as we could, and then we left.

By the second nightfall, I have cut another day of exams, to accompany my father to the hardware store while he indulges in an orgy of shopping for me. Jumper cables, gas can, pliers, hammer, fire extinguisher, deadbolts, window locks, fly swatter, hibachi. Everything he seems to be appalled that I don’t pos- sess. His wife joins us, bearing a Porterhouse steak. He goes down the block to buy Scotch. She produces linen napkins, silver, and crystal that travel battened down in the Winnebago with them from Nova Scotia to Vancouver. “He wont eat with paper napkins,” she says in her martyrs whisper. “He gets very angry with me if....”

“He ate greasy chicken last night off paper towels,” I answer, slapping my cheap forks onto the table. She looks puzzled and betrayed. “He just drinks too much and I don’t think I can go on—"

“That’s why my mother threw in the towel,” I say. “He broke her nose twice.”

“The sun is now retreating over the yardarm,” he grins from the doorway. He begins to grill the steak, making a great effort to show me the correct way to do it, out of some need to impart something useful to me. “Just look at this woman,” he says, pointing to her. “Doesn’t she look just like one of those fine carvings on the prow of a Swedish ship? This is no ordinary woman you’re looking at. This is my mate.” He pulls her up to dance around the room to a Stevie Wonder record he has fished out of his Winnebago.

I watch him drink his way into the late hours, though I have another final exam the next day. He speech becomes grandiloquent. He tells me fantastic stories: how he delivered a baby in a taxicab on the New Jersey turnpike.

But you vanished when I was being born, I think.

But I have become a connoisseur of fine lies and a sucker for fantastic stories and grandiloquence, so I listen amiably, sifting out who he is by seeing what it is important for him to lie about. I have relaxed, I no longer keep my eye on his glass or the door. “Tell me about when you were shot down over New Guinea,” I say, companionably.

“Ancient history,” he says, waving his hand, deflecting the thought.

Soon they depart in the Winnebago, out of my life again. I am tired. I have had little sleep in three days, I go back to my professors whose classes I have been AWOL from, and explain that my father, an alcoholic, had showed up unexpectedly, and that I had chosen to spend the time with him. They let me make up my exams.

I get a postcard from my father some months later, in handwriting so stark, lean and elegant that it makes me ache to know the person who produced it: “The sight of 13 Winnebagoes belly up in an arroyo can give one a healthy ap- preciation of the value of the left turn signal. —Dad.” On the front: the Hotel del Coronado, resplendent in sunshine, clouds, and airbrushed stucco.

1985

_I am at this stage of divorce: I need a supervisor in my life, telling me that it’s time to eat or sleep, and that I am going to survive. My lawyer’s secretary has watched me ink over line item after line item on my divorce papers, the way someone might watch a fox gnaw off its leg to get out of a trap.

“Do you drink?” she asks.

“Not really,” I joke. “But I usually catch on real fast.”

“Well, come with me and Susie tonight. I know a guy you’d like a lot. He’s divorced, too.”

But I’m avoiding men. They might sense how like a recently sprung ex-con I am: suspiciously pale and gaping and blinking in the sudden light of their presence: gee, when did they take the tailfins off the Cadillacs?

I go to a little cafe around the corner where the men have learned that I will drink my two margaritas in solitude. I sit there wearing my first bikini tan in six years, the junkyard dog who is quieted by the proximity of the human species. But no real contact, please.

Then I go home.

I sit there in my first divorced dusk.

I remember that it was dusk that did me in in the first place, made me marry so I would have a man to cook for at dusk.

I sit like I’m washed up on an empty island somewhere, waiting for the Lilliputians to arrive. 

I call my mother. She can’t understand why I would leave a man who is neither a drunk nor violent, so she tells me about her new dahlias. I call up my brother, working late at his newspaper. “Shit, shit,” he repeats like a mantra. I call my sister, and ask her to tell me about Jonah and the whale, like, what exactly did Jonah do with himself once he got out of that belly. 

“He praised God,” she says, without missing a beat.

My own personal guess is that he found a small tight cave and stayed there curled into the fetal position for a while.

After several calls around the country, I find my father. He is at something called the Trophy Bass Lodge in Georgetown, Florida, where he goes when he and his wife have had enough of each other’s company for awhile. I can hear a jukebox in the background, a heavy honky-tonk beat, and the rich human complaint of the saxophones. I want to be there, with all the old men and their fish bait.

My father’s voice is all scotch-warm and wise through the eight-hundred-some-odd miles of telephone cable.

“In a divorce,” he says, “the potential for holocaust is real. But who you are has taken you this far, and who you are will take you any place you want to go. Just cultivate a sense of ironic detachment.”

He squires his sentences around like Gene Kelly dances with women: a masterful turn here, a droll pause there, an incremental repetition of the fun parts. “Hate is a form of mental laziness,” he says, and I know that he is referring to my mother who has nursed her wrath along with her dahlias for years. “It means you can’t grasp the big picture.” He lets that sink in. “There is a young woman here that I watch,” he continues. “She gets out in the middle of Lake George in the biggest goddam boat around. And she is the mistress of her own vessel. The rest of us old geezers just get out of the way. You got to be like that babe in the Bayliner boat. You can’t pay too much attention to that skinny cat playing that sad violin offstage—it’ll mess up your sense of comic timing. You got to be like that babe in the Bayliner boat. Ironic detachment.”

We agree to meet for a visit at Warner Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia, on his way to a West Point class reunion. He blows into the place in a slightly smaller Winnebago, his old one having been declared too large to be legal. He and his wife meet me outside the gates, to get me in. The sentry does not salute him; my father chews him out, indicating the colonel’s star on his windshield. The kid knows the drill and apologizes profusely.

My father is ready to hit the bar at the Officer’s Club as soon as he has checked us into to the VIP Suite. “He’s not well,” his wife whispers to me as we both stand at the same bathroom mirror applying makeup, dressing for dinner. “We talked about divorce all the way up from Winter Park. He just drinks entirely too much and I don’t think that I can go on—”

Shit, shit. I tune her out with my brother’s mantra. I am nervous. It has been many, many years since I have slept under the same roof as my father. I notice where all the exits are. I remember that my brother always parks his car head out when he visits my father, ever since the time in 1973 when he showed my father a joint rolled in flag paper, and had to make a fast retreat. Not because of the grass, but for desecrating the flag. I put my car keys and my money in my skirt pocket, and we head for the bar.

I explain to my father the problems my job, of milking the federal government for strategic studies money when you are a thousand miles from Washington.

“All you need are the ideas,” he points to his temple. “Nobody has a monopoly on the truth.” He has had three scotches to my one margarita, and his words are attaining that drunken cadence that mesmerizes me on the phone. I drink faster, to catch up to where he is.

“Ideas,” he says tapping his temple. “Go do your homework. Wars don’t start in Washington. Wars begin out in radioland. Do you know that? Do you know what I’m talking about? You know why I went to West Point in 1935? Because I was tired of giving my mama my shoeshine money to feed me with.” His wife’s face softens, and I wish in that moment to know all the things about him that she knows.

“You don’t need Jaynes, just get a map. Look for the places where the people are fed up with being unfed. Look for where the malcontents mass along the borders. Look at that dude out in that jungle, homo sapiens human being, and he suddenly starts digging Dallas on his neighbor’s satellite dish, and his baby needs a brand new pair of shoes. War. Two, five, ten years down the road."

“But I work for people who just want to make speeches about rivet patterns on Japanese Zeroes,” I reply.

“A Zero is a worthy thing to study,” he says. I sense that he is tired of the discussion. He waylays a group of pilots coming into the bar. “Lissen,” he says to them, at that stage of drink where you are open to whatever might flower around you. “I have a female member of the species homo sapiens human being here who is bugging the goddam hell out of me with questions about aircraft.” His voice has turned into a parody of Shirley Temple. “Do you gentlemen know anything about such things, and would you care to field questions for a while?”

It turns out that they are Thunderbirds. My father has to find out all their names, ranks, and hometowns. Only one of them is drinking, the one from Red Cloud, Nebraska, who almost bought it this afternoon when a bird flew in front of his intake vent right before he chandelled.

“Lissen,” my father coaches him, leaning forward, “lissen, Lieutenant Thackeray Phillips of Red Cloud, Nebraska.” My father points to the band. “You hear those funny noises in the air? Those little ruffles and flourishes and beating of tom-toms? That stuff is called music. Take a lissen to that stuff, man.”

The Lieutenant leans backwards, enduring his second indignity of the day—being told how to act by an old geezer. His politeness is standard Air Force issue.

My father is in his element, eloquent in the altitudes of alcohol. “And it is quite imperative that when you hear that stuff in the air that you get up and dance, shake a leg, trip the light fantastic. What are they teaching you in flight school? Get up and fly, man. There are females in the world languishing.” He gets up to demonstrate, pretending to pat the fanny of a stout woman dancing with her back to us, escorted by a dignified old general-looking fellow.

My fathers wife shoots me a look: help and I go dance with him. I am at that stage of drink where I can’t tell which is the soft-petaled thing opening, the universe around me, or me. My father is portly, but graceful. We dance, pausing only to have new drinks. The band does a cover of Springsteens “Pink Cadillac,” and we find that it is magical, to dance to a saxophone joke about Adam and Eve. If nobody can touch us, it’s because we’ve become the same person. I am him, young; he is me, old. We circle each other, smiling like Hello, me. Long time no see.

He can boogie like a college boy, or samba like a sailor, or float around as graceful as a glider, no feet, nothing to tie him down to earth. His wife sits patiently, looking exactly like something carved on the prow of a Swedish ship. The club is closing down; the waiters have all the chairs upside down on the tables. We have not only skipped dinner, we have closed the place.

My father and I sit down a minute, oblivious, admiring each other’s funny freckly hands. “I have your hands,” I say, and there is a very thin membrane of something tough inside me, holding back a lifetime of tears waiting to spill on his calluses. We vow that if all else fails in my life, we will simply go into the fish bait business together in Key West.

“Look at this,” he calls when we are walking back to our rooms. He jumps up on a three-foot-high retaining wall that scallops the sidewalk we’re on. “Can you do this?” He walks it all the way back, agile as an alley cat. He is seventy and has had more scotch-and-sodas than I could count. I am thirty, have had three margaritas, and I want to curl up on the sidewalk and lay me down to sleep.

When he kisses me goodbye the next morning, I smell the fresh scotch. He’s still cruising along holding altitude, coasting over the tops of the heads around him.

Later I describe it all to my mother, omitting my margaritas.

“He used to do that every weekend,” my mother says. We are standing in her prize dahlia bed. “He broke my nose one time because I asked him for money to buy groceries.”

I cut her off before she can get to the part where I am conceived in what essentially amounts to an act of rape, and where he disappears for three weeks when I am due to be born, and how she almost dies having me, and how he beats her up when I am two weeks old. I know it all already, and keep it filed in the same place in my mind where he, in perpetuity, beats my sister Allie in an elegant pastel Savannah apartment, or burns my brother’s hand with an alabaster cigarette lighter, to teach him not to disturb the symmetry of the coffee table items.

“She was talking divorce, as usual,” I say.

“I really feel for that woman,” my mother surprises me. She’s been doing a lot of that lately, now that I have joined the sacred sisterhood of the divorcees. She prunes off a dried dahlia. “I used to pray that he would die,” she says. “I used to pray that his plane would crash.”

I want a drink, I think. The potential for holocaust is real.

When I get back home my father mails me a photocopy of a letter, dated June 1942, that he wrote to a Santa Fe woman, reprinted in an Albuquerque newspaper. It described to her the last moments of her husband, his navigator, one Winston Eight Horses, late of the Navajo tribe and the Battle of the Coral Sea, after they were shot down by a Japanese Zero off the coast of New Guinea. He told her how much the man had loved her, and named the precise latitude and longitude of the spot on the sea where the plane went under.

I want a drink when I have finished reading it. I have several. I sit in the wisteria and drink my margaritas and listen to Benny Goodman. Pretty soon I feel like I’ve got squatter’s rights to the stars, and I can handle the massive dose of history that I have been given. He knew the drill. Know your latitude and longitude the moment you begin descent. Try to pry that member of the race that Custer conquered out of that fuselage, the one who was telling your white face where to fly.

1986

_When I walk into my mothers hospital room, my brother takes one look at my face and thinks up a phony excuse to walk with me down the corridor. We wander without really knowing where we are, and I tell him that the doctor used the word “terminal” and in that moment I understand what it must be like to bayonet someone who’s been trained not to flinch. I tell my brother everything the doctor has told me, everything from the futility of surgery to the availability of little old polyester ladies who have no better thing to do than come keep the death watch and plump the pillows. He takes a long, even breath. “We better get in there,” he says, “Or she’ll start getting paranoid.”

We weave back through the sterile honeycomb of labs. “Look,” he whispers, eyeing a shrunken old white lady asleep in a wheelchair, twisted into the fetal position. She is clutching a pink plastic baby doll. They have matching lipstick, fire-engine red, and matching wildly thatched hair. “Dada art,” he whispers to me. I love him fiercely, proud to be breathing the same air that he breathes.

Back in my mother’s room, he turns in a passably good performance of the man he was a few moments before. “Jesus, Mother,” he teases, rummaging through a Whitman Sampler someone has brought to her. “You’ve hogged all the goddam Brazil nuts.”

A few days after Christmas when I am trying to answer my mother’s mail, I find a lush expensive Christmas card from my father. To her. “Wishing you a joyous and peaceful Nativity,” the card reads. No note, just a signature. I study the illustration on the card, a blue and silver and green sketch of a Bayliner boat hauling a freshcut tree across a frothy glittering lake. Maybe ten seconds elapse before the scream makes its way up out of me.

She can’t hear me, though. She’s already floating on Demerol. “Look at that,” she says to me, indicating the wine- colored asters that are blossoming on the backs of her hands. Her eyes say it all: I am old, can you believe it? The phone rings. She is oblivious, enchanted by the antiquity of her own hands.

It is my father. Ah, I think. Nice little bit of closure here. He will talk to her. He will tell her he is sorry. She will tell him she is sorry. They will not die hating each other.

“There are certain documents I must have,” he says, breathless at some automatic-pilot alcohol altitude where the air is thin. “You need to know the truth. Ask and it shall be opened unto you. Ye shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

She is sitting on the side of the bed, picking at the buttons of her nightgown, convinced that they are pills she is supposed to take.

“You have not always been told the truth by your mother,” he says and I see her smiling beatifically at “Wheel of Fortune.”

“I have to go help Mother,” I say. “Nobody has seen those papers in years. I’ll look and call you back tomorrow.” But he hasn’t heard anything I’ve said, because he hasn’t stopped talking. He is still talking about the truth setting me free as I put the phone back in its cradle.

I try to persuade my mother to lie back down, and the phone rings again.

“This. Is. Your. Father. Speaking. You. Do not. Hang up. On. Your. Father,” he is saying, full of what registers in my mind as rage and hatred.

I slam the phone down. Come on, come on, old man. Your moment with me has come.

The phone rings again. It is his wife, ever sweet-voiced. “He asked me to see if I could get you on the line. There seems to be some problem with the line,” she says.

“It’s not the line,” I say.

I write my father a letter that night, my kamikaze rage burning me up before I finish: Last time I heard phone conversations were intended to be dialogues, not monologues. If you want conversation with me now it will be sober, and you will do me the courtesy of listening when I tell you something. You never stuck around long enough to notice it, but I am the toughest and meanest of your offspring. I am the most like you. If you give my mother one moment more of grief during what is left of her life, one of us will live to tell about it, and it wont be you.

Soon I go next door to my aunt’s, and ask her to come show me how to give a bath to someone who can no longer move a muscle. She is a nurse. She says, “I remember the first time I saw you. You were nineteen days old. You all were a sorry-looking sight when you stepped off that plane. Your mother had a black eye from where he’d gone after her—”

“Why?” I ask.

“Some trouble they had in Bermuda. He didn’t think that you were his baby.”

I want a drink. I want altitude, solitude. Solid alcoholtude.

In the last days my mother goes back in her mind. She welcomes Winston Churchill, she has tea with Queen

Elizabeth. The pain intensifies and she goes back to 1921 or so, calling for the old local doctor who took her tonsils out. Go tell Dr. Moore, she beseeches me, her face full of bewilderment at the war that is being fought inside her. He will fix me. She goes further back: A, B, C. One, two three. She goes back to an infant’s rosebud-mouthed whisper, and then she’s gone.

My brother and I break the seal on a bourbon bottle before we ride out to the cemetery to show the funeral home man where to dig.

1988

_I come to, in my hospital room, to the sound of my new husband’s voice. He is cradling our newborn daughter in his hands, crooning to her, “What are we going to do? Your mother cant stay awake, and she walks like an old Chinaman.” I know that I am smiling at him, but I don’t know much else, except that I have recently acquired some horrific memories, and there is a thin, thin gauze of drug between me and immense pain.

I swim up out of the Demerol long enough to hear him singing to our daughter, easing her troubled passage into earth because Mommy is momentarily blotto. The nurse is holding her out to me. My first sight of her: tiny hands clasped like a mezzo-soprano in a mouse opera might, and it’s like they are giving me my very own papoose to have, and from it are issuing whimpers of bewilderment at being born into the species homo sapiens human being, the bright lights, the big loudspeaker. But she seems to know who I am, and where to go for lunch.

My husband stands by to catch her if I am too woozy to hold her, and I push the blanket aside to inspect her fully.

She has my father’s face.

It’s like a fist of love slamming up through me, slowly through the Demerol. It’s like the heel of God upon my neck, to give me back the same configuration of face I’ve always feared, to give it to an infant I love with ferocity. It’s like being inducted into some secret chapter of species homo sapiens human being.

I uncurl the little fists. The thumbs are my husband’s, a familiar arc in miniature. “Look,” I say. “She’s has your hands.” I am quite relieved by this.

My husband calls my brother and sister to tell them of the birth. He does not call my father, because I don’t want him to. In the first year of my daughter’s life I don’t want to see or talk to my father for reasons that don’t have anything to do with me. I have this child, and she is too helpless to know where the exits are. Every time I look into her face, I see my father as an infant, too, and I feel like I am learning to love him from his own infancy. But I feel an obligation to my daughter to filter my father out of her life the way I stopped drinking coffee and alcohol.

I do not question why I must do these things, and my husband doesn’t question it. I seem to be flying on instruments anyway. I can hear some other woman’s baby cry in the supermarket, and the milk will rush into my breasts, staining my blouse. I cannot read newspapers; they will pipe wars and rumors of wars into my house. One night after several weeks of awakening every hour or so at night to nurse the baby, I dream I am the ragged mother coyote I saw once, milk-swollen, trotting oblivious alongside buzzing traffic, in transit either to her babies, or her next meal, or lost.

1990

_My father’s wife calls a few days before he dies. “Don’t let him know that I called you,” she says. “But can you please call him? He has talked and worried about you all day. But don’t tell him I suggested it. He get’s so angry if—” she trails off.

My father has ripped out his IV tubes a week before, and thrown his TV through his window. I dial the hospital number that she gives me, at the appointed time when she will be there to act surprised and hand the phone to him.

Who is this weak old man I’m talking to? He acts like we just saw each other days before. The truth is, we’ve each been locked into our respective aeries of outrage for so long, we hardly remember what the original fracas was.

He tells me he understands why I haven’t brought the baby to see him. “You’ve got a good thing going,” he says, already sambaing with the angels at 200 cc’s of morphine a pop. “I didn’t want to spoil it for you,” he says. “Man. Woman. Baby. Winter. Fire. There is probably nothing else, sweetheart. Nothing else but love.”

He mentions the time I walked past him in the schoolyard. The tears are like acid in my eyes.

I keep waiting for something that feels like apology from him, for what he did to my sister. He seems to be fishing for what feels like apology from me. He tells me how he used to park his car a few blocks down from the house to watch me ride my tricycle up and down the sidewalk.

I do not believe this. I am no longer a sucker for a good story.

“You used to stop and make imaginary phone calls in the crepe myrtle bush,” he says.

The crepe myrtle bush.

There is no choice but to believe.

It is a terribly frightening thing, to feel the cold floes of old anger loosening, creaking.

Within days I’m sitting with my brother and sister in a cemetery in Savannah, and even though I am expecting the salutatory gunshots, they give me the confusion of fight or flight. I want to rise up and gore the enlistees with their own bayonets. When they fold the flag and give it to my brother’s young son, as per final instructions of the deceased, I want to scream, No, don’t fill his peaceable little head with your dreams of aerial ascent.

“The sun is now over the yardarm,” his wife says, back at the motel where we are staying. She produces a silver flask of scotch. I keep trying to get my brother and sister to listen to a tape of Clifton Chenier doing “In the Mood.” As if that will evoke our father’s presence. They don’t want to hear it.

So I hang back like a junkyard dog in my expensive dress and my high heels, sorry that my father was not around to take it all in. He would have loved the spectacle: the opportunity to chew out the soldier in the honor guard whose left shoe was not spit-and-polish perfect. He would have marveled at the nicest piece of Dada my brother and I have ever seen: a funeral wreath of red, white, and blue carnations, shaped like a B-17. From the old geezers at the Trophy Bass Lodge, Georgetown, Florida. I am sorry that he is not here now to have a drink with us after we have taken off our shoes.

-It wasn’t a B-17, was it, I would tell him. It was a Flying Fortress.

-Oh, really?

-Well, your brother told me that your name is in this book called Heroes of World War II, and—

-I made that up.

-I figured. Never could locate it. So I looked up the Battle of the Coral Sea, matched your dates and coordinates with what I found, and figured out that you were one of the scouts sent out looking for the Zeroes. You were three miles out of Port Moresby at eighteen thousand feet when one came at you. He wrote in his bomb report later that he knocked out your tail and your left wing. All of the crew were alive when the plane pancaked, but he kept strafing you. You told a Melbourne newspaperman who interviewed you that every time he came back over, you would dive as deep as you could, and think of all the women you had to get back to. When the Zero left, you swam to shore, alone. The natives passed you from tribe to tribe until you made it to base. It took two weeks. You weighed ninety-eight pounds and had dengue fever.

On the morning that your father got the telegram saying you were missing in action, your brother, a C-240 transport flyer home on leave, just happened to read in the Atlanta Constitution that you had made it back. That was the first time he ever saw your father cry. The second time he saw your father cry was later when your baby brother, a tail-gunner on a B-25 was shot and killed by MP’s outside a Negro nightclub in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing arrest after going AWOL. He was eighteen. You all called him Red, and he had enlisted when he was 16. When they found out his age they had sent him home, but he just enlisted again in the next county.

You were given the Silver Star for gallantry in action. Red was given a quiet soldier’s burial, with none of your other three brothers present. You all told your mother he’d been killed in combat, and she never knew the difference. You were all flying bombing missions or talking airplanes down out of the sky on radios, or trying to fly food into the Pacific theatre. You were a local luminary, the light of which blinded you and Mother both to the fact that the potential for holocaust is real. Did you know that she used to read the Bible and pray while you were in the air?

-How do you know all this?

-I do my homework.

-Then you ought to know that a B-17 and a Flying Fortress are the same animal. Not bad, though, for a dame. It was more like ten thousand feet than eighteen. I musta lied.

-Tell me about the time you threw the TV through the hospital window.

-Ancient history. Lissen at that music. Mercy. I refuse to believe that a child of mine cannot learn to samba. Come here.

And I’d come there. And I’d look at him and say Hello, me. Long time no see.