We were the offspring of men who belonged to what a television journalist would later call the greatest generation. But to us they were simply common veterans of their own generational war, just as their fathers had fought in a different war of their own, and we would likely be handed one for our generation. We did not really understand the place World War II held in history. And the greatness that is the temporary esteem with which little boys regard their fathers had long since withered. In 1963, before the presidential assassination, at the beginning of a popular music upheaval, during a rising civil rights movement, and with hints of a sexual revolution yet to come, three best friends were witness to small town scandals and personal trauma brought on by their fathers’ separate behaviors.
Robert’s father, an art professor, kept a private studio where he spent most of his time when he wasn’t teaching classes or holding office hours at the local, small college. When the college president found out that the private painting lessons he gave to female students involved sex he lost his job and his wife, and fled our curious little civil war tourist town for his native England. William’s father was so busy selling insurance to his golfing buddies and chasing their wives that he didn’t ever suspect that his own wife had fallen in love and was discretely sleeping with the celebrity son of a famous politician and World War II hero who had retired to our south-central Pennsylvania community. My father, highly regarded by most as an adult men’s Sunday school teacher, former coach, mentor to aspiring college graduates, and one to be relied upon in crises and emergencies, had spent the past several summers pursuing a PhD at Columbia University while secretly sharing an apartment and his bed with a female graduate student.
When my mother learned of my father’s NYC affair this, on top of his years of manipulation, physical threats, emotional outbursts, and jealousy toward any male friendships she developed, led her to apply for and subsequently accept a job as a social worker in New Jersey. She also filed for divorce. Robert’s mother had decided to send Robert off to boarding school to start ninth grade, and William’s mother was moving with her children to upstate New York to escape the small town gossip and protect the reputation of her (at this point former) celebrity lover. Knowing that my two best friends would be gone made it easier to accept the idea of beginning ninth grade at a new school.
I was not really surprised when my mother said she was divorcing my father, but I hated her for telling me, nonetheless, and I hated her for indirectly forcing me to admit that they were not happy together. A year or two earlier, when my mother’s college roommate, Grace, left her husband, my mother asked me if that changed the way I felt about Grace, and if I understood why married couples sometimes got divorced. A similar conversation took place between us when William’s mother made her decision to leave William’s father public, several months before my mother told me she was leaving Dad. I remember more than once coming home from school to find my mother weeping and when pressed for an explanation told me, “Oh, Michael, I married the wrong man.” There were nights in the year or so leading up to that summer when I would lie in bed and hear my parents in the living room discussing something with an elevated intensity. These discussions often escalated into sobs from my mother and loud profanities from my father. One night the cries and curses were worse than most, punctuated by the sound of broken glass, followed by a car driving off. The next morning my father’s forearm was wrapped from wrist to elbow and the sliding glass shower door in the master bathroom was shattered. My parents would each, months later, relate to me separately the details of that night.
We’d moved into that modern ranch-style house on a small hill three years ago from a modest two-story brick home on the other side of town, perhaps in the hopes that my parents could make a new start. The old house was one of three that were identical and were the last three houses on the north side of town before development gave way to cornfields, woods, creeks, and rolling hills. From my earliest memories until the second or third grade my best friend Stevie lived in the last of the three houses, while we lived in the first. In between were Mr. and Mrs. Trexel. He was a quiet, gentle man, but all the kids in the neighborhood regarded Mrs. Trexel as mean and evil. We were not permitted to walk across her lawn, even though it was the most direct route between my house and Stevie’s. Instead, we had to go the extra twenty or thirty yards out to the sidewalk that bordered the main street to circumnavigate her delicate grass. Naturally a rule like this was made for five and six-year-old boys to disobey, and Mrs. Trexel must have spent her hours waiting by the window just to catch us in the act so she could run out her front door and scold us. She always followed up her tongue lashings with a report to our parents, but we got away with the violation often enough that the challenge was worth the risk.
I liked living on the edge of town. Rock Creek flowed along the northern edge of Stevie’s yard. In the summer we looked for tadpoles, turtles, minnows, and crayfish in the slowly flowing stream. In the winter we could pick our way through the exposed rocks on ice skates and work our way east upstream for miles. The Jacobs family owned a field across the alley behind our back yard. One summer they planted wheat and when it grew to overhead height we made trails leading to clearings we created and hung out in for hours. The field served as a baseball diamond when it wasn’t growing crops, and when my father wasn’t in New York he called together any willing parent, along with all the neighborhood kids, for regular after-dinner baseball games that lasted until it got too dark to play. My father loved to pitch. Mr. Glenny, the State Game Protector who lived just to the south of us, was the regular catcher, and the kids took turns at bat and rotating through all the field positions. I got a lot of practice hitting against my father when he was pitcher, and I became pretty good. When I became old enough to play Little League I was used to how fast he pitched, which was a lot faster than kids my age could throw. This would have been an advantage, except that I knew my father had enough control that he would never hit me with a pitched ball. When it came to batting against a pitcher my own age, I did not have that confidence. I developed an irrational fear of being struck by a pitch, and started the habit of “putting my foot in the bucket.” It’s a habit I never overcame and this disappointed my father. In fact, I’m sure my father went to his grave regretting that I never met his expectations for me as an athlete.
When my father wasn’t in town during the summer no other father took the reponsibility of organizing these nightly games. We were left to our own devices to entertain ourselves without adult supervision. We typically played hide-and-seek after dinner and we liked to run behind the mosquito sprayer when it came around. We loved the smell of that kersosene and thought it cool that we could hide in the cloud it produced. Even the adults trusted that something designed to poison insects would not harm humans.
Stevie’s father was a football coach at the local college, where my father had also coached before moving into administration. Their friendship dated back to their days as college students, and Stevie’s mother and my mother were also best friends. Stevie’s mother contracted cancer during the time we were neighbors, and when she became sick enough that she couldn’t care for Stevie and his sister they were sent off to live with Stevie’s father’s mother. When Stevie’s mother died less than a year later, his father moved to a nicer house a few blocks away. We remained for a few more years in the same house where we were living when my younger sister Beth died from influenza a few years earlier.
The country suffered an epidemic of the Asian flu in 1957, but Beth died the previous year. I remember leaving for school in the morning when the doctor was at our house. The last thing I saw was his lifting the tongue depressor from her mouth as she lay on the living room sofa. He wiped a long strand of phlegm and mucous off the depressor as it was still attached to her throat. Later that day, around mid afternoon, my father walked silently into my first grade classroom, came over to my desk, picked me up, and carried me out of the school building, across the playground, into the car, and drove me home without speaking a word. At home I looked past my weeping mother who was surrounded by consoling friends, trying to spot my little sister. I asked where she was but got no answer. Not until my grandparents arrived several hours later did I receive an explanation for what I already knew was true.
I guess my mother hoped moving to a new, nicer home that was not associated with the double tragedies of the other side of town might help her feel closer to my father, too. I don’t know when or how she learned of my father’s other woman in New York, but he had since stopped his pursuit of a PhD short of a dissertation, been promoted to Dean of Students, and presumably no longer had contact with his NYC lover. Still, her knowledge of the ongoing affair, summer after summer, could not be forgotten, and his other behaviors continued to push her away. She spent several unhappy years in the new house listening to Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone and Felicia Sanders on her new stereo and discussing literature with English professors from the college. She took two part-time jobs – one at the college library and one recording passages from text books for a blind student.
I don’t remember my parents spending another night under the same roof after my mother announced they were divorcing. My father was gone for weeks at a time, sometimes staying with friends in town, sometimes with his parents in eastern Pennsylvania, sometimes visiting old friends in other parts of the country. He would come back to the house when my mother went to New Jersey to make plans for her move – finding an apartment, meeting with her new employer, making arrangements for my sister and I to get registered for school. During those periods when I was with my father he started telling me about vague health concerns he had, hinting that he might have to have surgery. He also began telling me about my mother’s unstable mental condition, a condition that only he and a psychiatrist in Baltimore that he had referred my mother to knew about. He also told me about confidential conversations he’d had recently with some of my mother’s childhood friends who knew her father when he was the minister/superintendent of an orphanage, and had a reputation for cruelty. His need to tell me these things, over and over again, and his impatience with me when I became restless after hearing the same information from him hour after hour, started me looking forward to moving to New Jersey. Knowing that my two best friends would be gone also made the thought easier, as was the desire to avoid having to tell anybody about any change in my family circumstances.
The day before my mother, my sisters and I were set to move to New Jersey the son of a friend of my father’s came by the house on his bicycle and told me he was sent to take me to his house where my father was waiting to talk to me. When I got there my father handed me a note telling me he needed surgery to removing a growth from his lung and that he and my mother agreed that I was to stay with him for one school semester while he recovered.