My mother still worked part-time as a nurse in an obstetrics clinic, counseling pregnant women, a job she didn’t need but enjoyed; once each month, she flew to Oklahoma City to help her family with inventories and other Duffy’s matters.
Besides playing golf, my father spent his free time painting. After finding the old sketchpad in his father’s basement, he’d come home and converted the guest bedroom into a studio. He built his own easel, arrayed tubes of Winsor & Newton oils on a ratty old card table. On the walls he hung photos torn from Life and Look and The Saturday Evening Post, interiors he might want to paint someday. Books on graphic design, theater set painting, and most interesting to me, because they were big and glossy and full of pretty girls, art design for the motion-picture industry cluttered his desk, along with rocks of every “accidental” shape, which he used as paperweights.
That room, I see now, was his sacred space, his escape from the chancy, combustible world. He’d stay in it for hours, in full control of his materials, and he wouldn’t say a word. This drove my mother batty. She was an active woman, from a family of movers and shakers. Even as a girl, she’d attended balls, political rallies. I used to hear her stories about them. Now, she zipped around Dallas in a sporty little Mustang, from the League of Women Voters to the Old Homes Preservation Society to various garden clubs and high-profile charity meetings.
She complained, often and loudly, that Dad never accompanied her anywhere, never took an interest in her civic concerns. When her appeals to his conscience didn’t work, she railed against his art. “Every damn weekend, Ray, it’s this cluttery old room — ”
“Honey, I don’t know what to say to your hoity-toity friends.”
“For God’s sake, you’re a grown man. It’s time you lost a little of that diffidence, don’t you think?”
“It’s easy for you. You grew up with rich folks.” He’d make a pun on a senator’s name — “Gridlock” for Griffin, something like that, hoping to laugh off her anger.
After the worst of these fights — and they deepened, decayed in tone and effect, over time — I’d sit in my room down the hall, listening to my mother dress while my father adjusted his easel. Sometimes his “curse of an arm,” as he called it, stiffened up on him or cramped, as it did on the golf course, but the moments always passed and didn’t affect his work.
I think he had genuine talent, but he never composed his own images; he copied pictures from the magazines onto his canvases, apparently lacking confidence to shape his own world.
“I know what this is about,” my mother told him one night after a particularly nasty quarrel between them. “Drawing and painting again. Don’t think I don’t know.”
My father tried to make a joke, some kind of wordplay — I don’t remember. My mother stood in the hallway in her slip. “If you want to stir up your old misery, that’s your business, Ray, but don’t expect any sympathy from me, you hear?”
He tried to hug her. I was watching from the doorway of my room. Brightred paint like crackling flames smudged his fingers. They slid around her hips. “Don’t touch me!” she yelled, pulling at her straps. “You’ll ruin it, Ray!”
“Of course, your mother’s right,” he confided to me one day in that little back room. I was fourteen or fifteen. Mom had left for Oklahoma City. It was a hot, early fall afternoon, flies batting the screen of the room’s open window, a sprinkler sighing in the still-springy yard. Dad’s silver Cutlass gleamed in the drive.
On a shelf behind his easel a transistor radio screamed, “Ten, five — touchdown! Touchdown! The Fighting Irish have taken the lead!” He always listened to football or baseball while he worked. He knew batting averages, pitchers’ ERAs; concentrating on cold, hard facts, he told me, freed the rest of his mind to wander with the paint.
That day, his shirt, pale red, smelled of turpentine. He lit a cigarette.
“Right about what?” I said.
“Hm?” Inspecting his canvas again, he’d forgotten I was even in the room.
“You said Mom was — ”
“Oh. Right about me.”
“How?”
“I am jealous of their assets. Her family, I mean.”
With a palette knife, I picked at a dried medallion of ocher on one of his tabletops. “We’ve got money,” I said. “Don’t we?”
He laughed. “Oh, we’re getting by. We’re getting by just fine. It’s not that.” He plopped a wet brush into a little jar of Liquin. “It’s … their behavior, I guess, their attitude, a way of approaching life. I don’t know. A kind of arrogance. I don’t like it — especially when they turn it on me — but you have to admire it. They know how to get what they want.”
His paintings darkened in spinning shadows from the front-yard trees, rigid in their strict geometry. “Confidence, you mean? Ease? What Mom’s always saying?”
“Yes, I guess that’s it. Whatever it is, I don’t have it, and she’s not going to — ” He shrugged. “Ah, hell. I think I was exotic, something different for her at first. A charity case, maybe. Lord knows she loves her charities.” He wiped his hands on a rag. “Till she gets bored with them.”
His face seemed to vanish. He turned from me, back to his work. Afterwards, I was aware of the Kellys’ contempt for him in ways I hadn’t noticed before.
That year my mother’s father bought a summer cabin for us on the Illinois River in northeast Oklahoma. We went there on fishing trips, sometimes with Mom’s folks and her sisters. They never spoke directly to my dad. Her father bragged about his annual profits, his parties and social affairs, his “friends in high places” (he joked that he “owned” Oklahoma’s governor, that he’d bought every cleric in the state — “Get ’em where their faith lies, that’s the bottom line”).
Whenever my father tried to say something, the Kellys looked away from him, as though they couldn’t bear to watch this commoner with his dingy old arm. A gaggle, Mom’s sisters. Noisy, indistinguishable to me, even now.
In the city, on those rare occasions when he’d visit a Duffy’s store — when nothing else was open, say — Dad paid cash. I remember Grandfather Darnell ordering the kindly clerks to “charge it,” but Dad didn’t seem to have an account with the chain. Once, he didn’t have enough money in his pocket to purchase the oil paints he was after. I asked him why he didn’t just write them a check, but he shook his head, certain they’d refuse to accept it.
“But this is Mom’s store!” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Mom’s. Not mine.”
One afternoon, I ran into Cassie and Sharon in a Safeway. They were shopping for candy. Sharon and I talked for a long time until Cassie became exasperated, wanting her gumdrops. “You two act like you’re married whenever you’re together,” she told us, rolling her eyes.
Tonight, as the fireworks unravel just beneath the clouds, Cassie, delighted, wriggles in her daddy’s lap, then Sharon’s, then mine. She closes her eyes and pretends to be a blind girl, feeling the features of each of our faces, misidentifying us on purpose, and laughing. Her fingers brush Sharon’s mouth, then reach up to tap my lips. “This is Mommy and Daddy,” she says, then she finds our hands and brings them together.
Clay smiles, awkwardly. “Watch the fireworks, baby,” he says. “Ooh, there’s a pretty one!”
“I’m bored.” Eyes wide open now, she stands and grabs my hand. “Let’s play ‘Mercy.’”
“How do you play?” I ask.
“I hold your hand and twist your arm until it hurts too much and you say, ‘Mercy.’ Then you do it to me. Whoever goes the longest, wins.”