By Joan Fiset
When the time comes,” we say, referring to a moment inevitable as a comet’s return. Positioned within the stellar ether, this someday seems as though it will never be now. One evening in early November my father brought in the birdfeeder from the small patio in front of his apartment. Rats had been eating the birdseed. He sat down to watch the news and open his mail when his heart seized like a fist then stopped. He fell forward onto the coffee table. He was there when the phone rang, me calling to say Christopher and I would be there Friday morning to rake the leaves in his patio. He was there when Wilma Sanders knocked on his door — peanut shells scattered on the carpet around his feet, the circus clown hanging upside down from the hallway ceiling.
I had last seen him the day before he died. We had lunch and returned to his apartment. It was Election Day; he dropped me off at my car, then headed off to vote. I remember his waving hand.
His teeth were loose, four front teeth and he looked ashen, had trouble walking, could barely shuffle. He lit up a cigarette. I asked, “Have you considered quitting?” He had chronic emphysema. The infinitesimal air pockets in his lungs one by one were turning to cement. He looked at me in a familiar way. A regretful smile, one I’d seen before.
Slogging. Pulling a dead weight, perhaps a beached whale, up and up a neverending hill. His exhaustion was palpable and inhabited me despite the jar of homemade pickles I’d set on his kitchen counter. The gifts I offered were imagined anchors that never took hold toward a day where we all breathed easy.
This sense of hauling, of carrying far more than my own weight as an integral part of my reason for being began to speak in its own language. That day I could only pat its hand, nod my head in the presence of the deep sigh that rose up from a swamp of sorrow – no doubt the locus of his often repeated observation, “There are serpents under the waters.”
Four in the afternoon. Silver gray clouds, bright light, my fourteen-year-old son raking the neighbor’s leaves. My husband drove me to my father’s apartment.
We traveled to Bellevue and I looked out the car window as if this weren’t happening, as if it hadn’t happened. Not my father no longer in the world.
Swirling light, clouds all pewter and streaked with gold, yellow leaves, black black branches; I looked out the window dreading the destination. He would not be opening the door, cigarette in hand, rumpled sportcoat, slippers on his oversized feet. I stared into the late afternoon light refusing to believe he was gone.
Perhaps I sensed I too was disappearing, so tied had I been to him, so attuned to his internal atmosphere. Once when I was fifteen after he’d been kicked out of the Bellevue church I sat up with him all night while he drank the vodka he call “potato soup.” I fixed him a hot dog at 3 AM, and he wept about being sent to Moses Brown, an all boys’ school, when he was in first grade. The next day my mother told me, “You saved your father’s life last night.”
I was committed to keeping him pumped up, season after season. It never worked or even took hold, the leaky tire that couldn’t ever hold the road for long. I may have feared the oceanic space his dying would leave
The time had come. In this moment of moving light and clouds I began to wonder if my father’s dying became my dying too. I could not cry. Not yet – only barely breathe. Hold my breath as if this would change something; pull back the second when he ceased to be. I wanted to cry out, “But I’m not ready for him to be gone.” Yet he was – gone for good; the time had come. It had passed, leaving me in a limbo unlike any hour I had ever known.
I did not see my father in death. When Wilma Sanders arrived for their usual Wednesday afternoon coffee date he didn’t answer the door. Wilma was the apartment manager and had a master key. When she discovered him she called Harry Applewhite, the minister of the church she and my father attended. Harry stood outside when we arrived and said, “Don’t go in.” By then it was dark and he stood in front of the door, the outside light shone bright behind him. An ambulance had pulled up and parked, waiting to take my father’s body away.
My sister and I cleared out his apartment. Suitcoats stacked tight in the closest. They smelled like his packed closets I remember from childhood. I reached in the pockets and took out loose change the way I used to do. Black pocket comb caked with dandruff. Bowl on the table held hundreds of coins.
I struggled with the knowledge he was here and wanted something from me. I realized how tired I was. Tired, not from his death, but from the decades of being his daughter.
I saw the green coffee mug on the table next to the door. Wanda had called me to ask if she could have it. She said, “He said, ‘ It’s your cup Wanda, and will wait here by the door for you until you come again.’” That is exactly what he’d said to me; I thought it was my cup. It was no one‘s cup. I wanted to smash it.
Clown doll: white face, red mouth, orange-red tufts of hair in a fringe around its head, baggy blue pants, big black shoes split open at the toe, red polka dotted bow-tie. His upside down smile makes him look sad.
He gave it to my sister when she was five, and it scared her. She never played with the clown. He rode for years in the back of my father’s gold Ford Mustang on the shelf next to the rear windshield. He baked in summer and froze in winter. My father’s Mustang choked. Stalled. One day it would no longer start. The clown moved to the hallway of my father’s apartment. He called it “The Roost,” after a cleaned out chicken coop, his summer sanctuary as a boy.
He kept his apartment clean. Its décor included avocado green plastic handles on the spatula, spoon, and other utensils hung from hooks on the kitchen wall, a green to match the design of leaves in his roll of paper towels. He did not drink in this apartment. He’d hit bottom as a drunk. Now he only smoked. The clown hung over an open umbrella, an upside down umbrella and the clown hung upside down over it. The blood must have rushed to his head.
I think the clown may have been my father’s alter ego, his Pal Joey who stuck with him through thick and through thin. Before he stopped drinking empty vodka bottles rolled out from underneath the driver’s seat to stay with the clown in the car.
Late afternoon. He wheeled his shopping cart over to the line. Waited to pay for his groceries. The checker may have noticed how weary he looked as he smiled and asked for two packs of “Mores,” long menthol cigarettes in a green pack. Perhaps they chatted briefly. She asked him, “How are you today?” “Fine,” he replied, clearing his throat, pulling some bills out of his wallet to hand to her. She gave him his change, dropped the receipt in the grocery sack. The last person to speak to him or to look him in the eye.
He coughed, picked up the sack of groceries, and walked slowly out to his car. The car door squeaked when he opened it. He got in, started the engine and drove the six blocks to his apartment. He unlocked the door, ducked under the umbrella and the clown. He opened the sliding glass door leading out to the patio and lifted the bird feeder off the branch of an overhanging tree. The red and gold maple leaves lay thick on the patio. He carried the birdfeeder into the house. Set it on the floor. He was tired. He wanted to lie down. He would fix dinner first. Then rest.
He set the groceries on his kitchen counter and lit a cigarette. He cooked the broccoli in the bamboo steamer he’d ordered from an ad on TV, broiled the chicken breast, tossed a small salad.
I struggle with imagining this, remembering the confusion surrounding my family’s evening meals. When he was drunk he called it “the dinner hour” in a phony British accent, yet almost always refused to sit down at the table. He would pace around the living room and dining room wearing sunglasses and a raincoat. From time to time he disappeared into the bathroom to take a swig from the vodka bottle he hid inside the toilet tank.
My father’s favorite song was Smile, lyrics and music by Charlie Chaplain. The clown’s smile was upside down. In his autobiography Chaplain wrote his Little Tramp was inspired by a lost lamb he saw in childhood escaping from the slaughterhouse. The lamb ran away, was chased. He saw humor in the running, the chasing, and seeing the lamb be caught. The humor in the chase was informed by the fact the rescued lamb would be returned to the slaughterhouse. All of this went into the spirit defining the Little Tramp.
Susie feared the clown’s teary glassy eyes.
Smile though your heart is breaking,
Smile even though it’s aching,
Although a tear may be ever so near. . . .
My father’s bathos and indulgence in sentimentality were part of the dead weight I carried. He called sentimentality “unearned emotion,” and yet he bathed in it, indulging himself in feelings others believed were true. One year for Christmas he gave me a novel titled Love, Dad written in bold red letters on the book cover. My sister and I were his “two Cordelias.” He had played King Lear his freshman year at Brown, and when drunk often delivered Lear’s heath scene in the middle of the night. His voice booming :
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the
cocks. . .
interlaced with lines from Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The clown was an emblem of sweet melancholy sadness, a drunk’s pathetic projection of his own blind fumblings onto the replica of a circus performer he hung from the ceiling upside down. I do not know how that day in November might have been different had my father not loomed so large and taken me along from the very beginning to both witness and march in the circus of his parade.
I first remember clowns when he took me to the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan. I was three and rode on his shoulders where I could see above the crowd. The clowns did flips and juggled bright bowling pins, red and blue and yellow. Their shaggy orange wigs and painted mouths made me feel uneasy. Clowns on stilts underneath their trousers walked past in halting steps, waving down from high above us. I heard the beating of the big bass drum.
As a child TV was my refuge. Every day at 5:30 PM I watched The Howdy Doody Show with Buffalo Bob and Clarabelle the Clown. Clarabelle never spoke, only squeezed the rubber ball at the end of his horn as he padded around the stage set. His lumbering goofy goodwill appealed to me in the room at the end of the hallway inside our house on Woodland Avenue in Gardner, Massachusetts. It had an overstuffed chair and piano. There I watched I Remember Mama, The Milton Berle Show, Sid Caesar ‘s Show of Shows, Gabby Hayes, and Howdy Doody. Clarabelle was not the same as my father’s clown.
Sad, glassy eyes. Susie, and I could always tell when our father had had even a sip of vodka because his eyes turned glassy and his face began to shine. In the last seven years of his life they were no longer glassy. He only drank coffee, but the eyes of the clown were the same.
If his eyes had been clear and not this way where would the clown have resided? He might have only been a toy for my sister to play with and later grow beyond. But since he became a steady sidekick like Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza, the clown evolved into a presence whose sadness would be ours as well.
It is dusk again, hard to see and in the field an egg begins to fracture. A pecking can be heard, tap-taping against the inside of the shell. Hold out your hand. In your palm the egg is warm and moving. You can feel it. The chick inside, how hard he works. He will keep it up all night until he’s made his exit – into what he has no idea.
My father’s legs are stiff and he limps, shuffles down the hallway, cannot, will not, ever run. No spring in his step, only the scar of original fire.
He plays Indians. Hops up and down. A war dance in dead wood of a campfire his older brother, Amory, had burned there the night before. The embers ignite and catch on his pants. His leg is burning, the cloth on fire. He rolls on the ground to put it out. The doctor is summoned at once. He lies on his back. The doctor rubs through his flesh with a towel. Sweat beads on the doctor’s brow. Teeth clenched tight he takes the towel straight down to the bone.
It is a hazy day. Summer; the brothers and sister play in the field not far from the Jaffrey farmhouse. Amory is six, Jean is four. My father, Ben, is two. Amory and Jean pretend to be a pair of nesting birds incubating an egg. Ben is the egg. They sit on him until he hatches. He is unable to breathe. The light is blue above them. They grow thirsty and walk to the house for lemonade, leaving him behind. A few years later they play trench warfare in a swamp. Suddenly wasps fill the air. The shovel has disturbed a hornets’ nest. Amory and Jean run away. My father, Ben, is there. Wasps sting him and sting him. Wasps move toward him in a cloud. He screams. He cannot breathe.
In the family photograph my father is fourteen. He sits in the living room of the parsonage at 20 Diman Place in Providence, Rhode Island, dead center in the midst of his parents and five siblings. His penetrating eyes look directly into the camera. He wears a starched white shirt and striped suit, tie tucked into his suit’s matching vest. He has his mother’s mouth. Neither of them smiles. Handsome and seductive as though doing the Devil’s bidding. Above his right eye a scar, the “dent” from when he ran into the path of a car at the age of two. Disobedient and independent, he broke away from his mother and started to run across the street. The driver slammed on his brakes, went into a skid. The car’s rear passed its front in a full circle ramming into the curb across the street. A mudguard curving out at the bottom hit him on the forehead, flattening him as it went by. He lay in the street, a small limp body streaming blood from the cut on his head. Parted on the left, his hair is perfectly combed. Ankles crossed, his black shoes shine.
Later my mother will call him evil, a cruel and evil man. He shrugs his shoulders in response, almost innocent – as if caught stealing a child’s toy. He is harmless, unloved. Wind rises then blows through the junkyard. Rusty fenders, broken chairs, tattered fragments of vacant rooms.
The Latin teacher asks him to recite. He is not prepared. He stumbles. Light across the floor of the classroom, sun shaft in his eyes. The teacher says, “You flunk,” then sticks a thumbtack into his wooden leg. “Pull it out,” he orders. “Come pull it out or you’ll pay for this, pay for not being prepared.” He stares at the tack in the man’s leg, notices the sock and shoe. He walks to the door of the classroom. Opens it. Walks outside into the snow.
He hurls a magazine with photographs of nude women out of the window of his dormitory into the room where it hits the wife of the headmaster at Andover. Bulls-eye. He doesn’t fit in. This very morning he walked through the bird sanctuary counting the days until Christmas. Too many to bear. He packs his bags, gathers up his books and papers. It has begun to snow. A few flakes fall past the window of his room.
His father, the Reverend Arthur Howe Bradford, is a good man. Minister of the First Congregational Church in Providence, Rhode, Island, he is beloved by his parishioners, as is his wife, Eugenia Price Bradford. They are good people and have six children; Amory, Jean, Ben, Stella, Arty, and Jimmy. Ben is the black sheep. He first tastes alcohol like a bright morning at debutante parties when he is fifteen. He hides his bottles in the grandfather clock in the living room of the parsonage. He is kicked out of three New England prep schools; Andover, Exeter, and Philips Academy.
He marries Joan Stone five weeks before he goes to war.
The troop train pulls out from Grand Central Station. He sees her through the window. He has an infection in his hand; a red streak begins to shoot up his arm. It burns and he lies in the baggage car slumped against a heap of duffel bags. He is off to war. His wife of five weeks waves when the train pulls out until it disappears.
Dark and rain turning to sleet against the window. Inside the train the air is musty from cigarette smoke. The coal of his cigarette burns bright red.
He will be a Captain in the Army, join the 559th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion serving with the Third, First and Seventh Armies, join the Ninth at the Roer river, meet the Russians at the Elbe. En route they will chalk up 59 enemy planes as “positive” kills.
Years later a rash will come and go on his left hand where he strangled a German soldier. Silver blade of the bayonet. Shoot them then stab them to make sure they are dead.
After the war he attends Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. His teachers are Paul Tillich and Reinhold Neibuhr. He becomes a minister. From the pulpit he will say, “The cross is the ‘I’ crossed out.” Eventually he is kicked out of the First Congregational Church of Gardner, Massachusetts, the Bellevue Congregational Church, and Columbia Congregational Church because he is a drunk. His wife leaves him when he is fifty-seven.
He sits in the dark. Empty vodka bottles cover the dark brown wall-to-wall carpet. Empty half gallons of Thunderbird wine filled with cigarette butts. There is an eviction notice on the door of his house. He goes to the garage and shuts the door. He gets into the car, puts the key into the ignition. He starts the engine of his gold Mustang. Lets it run. A passerby discovers him before it’s too late. He goes through alcohol treatment at the Seattle VA Hospital. Afterwards he moves into his new apartment.
We enter the hallway of time. Hornets have waited for this moment and fly above the eggshells scattered everywhere on the floor. They have waited years for this. He enters with a pitchfork, diabolic and on fire. He has spun an irresistible web, sticky and all but invisible. The hornets seem to be humming a love song, wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Won’t the story stop here, make its bed and call it a day?
Jean is eight and Ben is six. Jean wears a cotton dress, faded blue with small green bows . She has petit mal seizures. She faints a dozen times a day. Ben, who follows her everywhere, catches her to keep her from falling. She never acknowledges her black outs. They continue walking as if it never happened. Maybe it didn’t happen. Perhaps he and his sister are only heading toward town along the dusty road eventually leading back to the farmhouse. This is Jaffrey. Arthur, Eugenia, and their six children spend each summer here.
Sting. Slap. Cut. Oh, the red is what we hoped for. His teeth are loose, the sky overcast. Even more he is shuffling now, slowly back to the summer field. He carries a bag of groceries; chicken breast, broccoli, two packs of cigarettes. The receipt and bag will still be on the drainboard when they find it days from now. Leftover chicken and broccoli stored in plastic containers inside the fridge. He paid for them at 5:15 PM, came home and fixed dinner. Then he sat down on the couch, turned on the TV and began to read his mail.
He collapsed like a felled tree, wearing his glasses, but not before he brought the birdfeeder indoors. “Rats,” he said to me on the phone.
Published in Under the Sun
Volume VII, No. I
Summer 2002