My father, apparently a simple cheery soul, seemed impossible to know. His smiles made him impenetrable. In his lifetime I found it hard to see through his niceness, and even now, ten years after his death, he seems more enigmatic than ever. There he stands, at a little distance, jingling coins in his pocket, waiting for someone to need him, a satisfied man with the sort of good humor and obliging manner I associate with an old-fashioned servant. “Glad to oblige!”
A smile is the hardest expression to fathom — you don’t inquire, you don’t even wonder. He must have known that. I never thought: Who is he? What does he want? He said he was happy. He would not have said otherwise, but though I believed him, there were things I didn’t know. At the period I am thinking of, he had just lost his job. Never mind, he found another one. Did he like it? “I’m tickled to death!”
He was so thoroughly nice it did not occur to us that we did not know him. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke. He never went out at night except to church. Bowling and the movies he abandoned after first becoming a father. He had few friends, no close ones, no confidants — he wasn’t the confiding type. He wasn’t a joiner.
I was eleven. With two older brothers and a younger sister — there would be three more children eventually — I was invisible, in the lower middle of the pack, always a few steps behind, beneath notice. And my father was the insubstantial presence he wished to be, merely a voice, a man who lived in the house. Dramatic entrance, and then silence. A hush. Dramatic departure, and then silence again.
This all sounds harmonious, yet there was disorder and tension and conflict in our household. It was crooked in the angular splinters in the woodwork, pulsing in the air, a disturbance that was deep, subtle, and without any voice, a noiseless bewilderment and uncertainty, the vibrant presence of low-pitched rivalries, and it was all masked by politeness, or sometimes hostile displays of affection. The quiet-seeming household is often more turbulent or intimidating than the household of the tyrant or the drunkard.
One of the unspoken conflicts in the house was the house itself, a constant reproach in the cabinets that failed to catch, in every creak of the floorboards, the peeling wallpaper, the stains on the ceiling like mocking faces, every draft that scuttled under the doors. All these awkward reminders. My mother’s version of the story, which was the blaming version — the one that my mother wouldn’t let him live down — was that having decided that we had to move (four kids in a tiny house and a fifth on the way), my father would be the house hunter. My mother was pregnant and busy, but she was also the sort of person who provoked us to make a decision, so that if we failed she could say, “Whose fault is that?” Deniability was a defense she mastered long before such a word was coined.
By directing my father to look for a new house, she became the one to be propitiated: a scolding silence if it was a good choice, loud blame if it was a bad one. Dad was like hired help, the house hunter. “And it better be a good one.”
Unused to the trick of spending a large amount of money, risking this big decision, Dad became more affable, more genial than I’d ever seen him. It was sheer nervousness, a kind of helpless hilarity, like that of an almost ruined gambler at the blackjack table risking everything on the turn of a card.
He saw three or four houses. They were unsuitable. He liked all of them. My mother was vexed. This was dinner table talk: we were discouraged from speaking during mealtime, so we listened. Buying anything involved endless deliberation. “What’s good about it?” my mother would say. “It’ll be hard to heat,” or “It’s not on a bus line,” or “That’s a bad neighborhood.”
One winter night Mother was in tears. Dad had seen another house he liked. He was told the price. He was in the nervous affable mood, his gambler’s anxiety. He did not bargain, or say “My wife will have to see it,” or “We’ll think it over.”
He said, “We’ll take it!” with a sudden flourish of money that startled even the seller of the house, who was a cranky old woman in a soiled apron.
That was my mother’s version, in the oral tradition of the family history, the only version that was ever allowed, all the blame on Dad. In a matter of an hour or so my father had seen the house and agreed to buy it. Another detail to his discredit was that he had seen it in the dark. Because it was January and he worked until five-thirty, he would have driven there after work, tramped through the snow, looked it over, and by seven or so it was a deal.
The reason for my mother’s tears was that, anticipating his finding the right house, Dad had been carrying five hundred dollars in small bills around with him, and the papers he signed that very night (the old woman had them handy in the pocket of her apron) specified a deposit of that amount, nonreturnable.
“Our whole life’s savings!” my mother cried, thumping the table. “How could you?”
Obviously he’d liked the house, he didn’t want to risk losing it, he wasn’t a bargainer, and he was pressed for time, house hunting after work. It was: buy the house, pay the rest of the money with a mortgage, or lose the deposit. “Our life’s savings — wasted!”
My father suffered, smiling sheepishly through a number of scenes at the dinner table — and other times too. I heard bedroom recriminations, rare in our household. But in a short time the mortgage was granted, the house was bought, and we moved — a huge disruptive event in a family with few, almost no, events that involved a substantial outlay of money. It was the only time we moved house, and what made it memorable were my mother’s tears. After it was done, her father and mother paid a visit. Her father — sententious, pinched and pious, a self-proclaimed orphan — looked at the house, surveyed the street, pronounced it a disaster, and said, “Poor Anna.”
The house was large but odd-shaped, bony and tall and narrow, like a cereal box, the narrow side to the street, the wide side a wall of windows, and somehow unfinished — the kitchen not quite right, the doors either sagging or poorly fitting or missing, varnished cabinets of thin wood, the floors creaky and uneven. But it had four bedrooms. Fred and Floyd shared a room with bunk beds. “There’s room for the piano,” my father said in a voice of hollow enthusiasm.
“Life’s savings” was probably an exaggeration, but not much: my father’s new job was menial, a shoe clerk. He was grateful for the job, but a man selling shoes spends a great deal of time on his knees.
He never stopped smiling that winter. His smile said, All’s well. Mother banged the kitchen cabinets to demonstrate the loose hinges, the broken latches. She tugged at the front door, exaggerating the effort, saying she was coming down with a cold because of the drafts, sighing loudly, all the sounds and gestures in the theater of discontent.
Dad said, “Say, I’ll see to that.”
He was imperturbable, not so chummy as to cause offense, but deferentially amiable. “How can I help?” A kind of submissiveness you’d see in the native of a remote colony, with the wan demeanor of a field hand or an old retainer.
Spring came. The roof began to leak, the gutters were rotted, the nailed-on storm windows proved hard to take down. Now that we were less confined by winter, we could see that the house was big and plain and needed paint.
Dad began to paint it, with a borrowed ladder and a gallon of yellow paint. A neighbor saw him and said in a shocked voice, “You’re not going to paint that house yellow!”