Dad, famous for toying with Salespersons Desperate to Close like grassland cats with a limping wildebeest, deferred making a final decision on a house and responded to Dianne’s evening phone calls (“Just wanted to know how ya’ll liked 52 Primrose!”) with melancholic indecision and plenty of sighing and thus, Dianne’s handwritten memos became increasingly frenzied (“Won’t last the summer!!” “Will go like a hot cake!!!”).
Finally, Dad put Dianne out of her misery when he chose one of the most exclusive of all Featured Sherwig Properties, the fully furnished 24 Armor Street, #1 on the Hot List.
I was shocked. Dad, hailing from his visiting professorship at Hicksburg State College or the University of Kansas at Petal, certainly had not been amassing great reserves of wealth (Federal Forum paid a derisory $150 per essay) and almost every other address at which we’d lived, the 19 Wilson Streets, the 4 Clover Circles, had been tiny, forgettable houses. And yet Dad had selected the SPRAWLING 5BR TUDOR FURNISHED IN KINGLY LUXURY, which looked, at least in Dianne’s glossy photo, like an enormous two-humped Bactrian Camel at rest. (Dad and I would discover that the Sherwig photographer had taken particular care to conceal the fact that it was a molting Bactrian Camel at rest. Almost all of the gutters were detaching and many of the wooden beams decorating the exterior fell down during Fall Term.)
Within minutes of our arrival at 24 Armor Street, Dad began his customary effort to transform himself into Leonard Bernstein, orchestrating the men of Feathery Touch Moving Co. as if they weren’t simply Larry, Roge, Stu and Greg hoping to get off early and go for a beer, but sections of Brass, Woodwinds, Strings and Percussion.
I snuck away and did my own tour of the house and grounds. Not only did the mansion come with 5BR, a COOK’S HEAVEN ON EARTH W/GRANITE, HARDWOODS, IN-DRAWER FRIDGE and CUSTOM HEART PINE CABINETS, but also a MASTER SUITE W/ MARBLE BATH, an ENCHANTING FISH POND and a BOOKWORM’S FANTASY LIBRARY.
“Dad, how are we paying for this place?”
“Hmm, oh, don’t worry about that — excuse me, must you carry that box on its side? See the arrow there and those words that read, ‘This End Up’? Yes. That means, this end up.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“Of course we — I ask you once and I will ask you again, that goes in the living room, not here, please don’t drop — there are valuables — I’ve saved a little in the last year, sweet. Not there! You see, my daughter and I employ a system. Yes, if you read the boxes you will discover that there are words written there in permanent marker and those words correspond to a particular room in this house. That’s right! You get a gold star!”
Carrying a gigantic box, Strings lumbered past us into COOK’S HEAVEN ON EARTH.
“We should leave, Dad. We should go to 52 Primrose.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I worked out a fine price with Miss Seasons Greetings — yes, now that goes downstairs into my study, and please, there are actual butterflies in that box, do not drag — don’t you read? Yes, lighten your grip.”
Brass clumsily made his way down the stairs with the giant box marked BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE.
“Hmm? Now, yes, simply relax and enjoy—”
“Dad, this is too much money.”
“I’m, well, yes, I understand your point, sweet, and certainly, this is…” Dad’s eyes drifted up to the giant, brass light hanging from the ten-foot plaster ceiling, an upside-down representation of the 1815 Mt. Tambora eruption (see Indonesia and the Ring of Fire, Priest, 1978). “It’s somewhat more ornate than we’re used to, but why not? We’re going to be here the entire year, aren’t we? It’s the last chapter, so to speak, before you go off, conquer the world. I want to make it memorable.”
He adjusted his glasses and looked back down into the opened box labeled LINENS like Jean Peters gazing into the Trevi Fountain, about to throw in a coin and make a wish.
I sighed. It was evident, and had been for some time, that Dad was determined to make une grande affaire out of this year, my senior year (hence, the Bactrian Camel and other perplexing Auntie Mame — like lavishes I shall soon detail). Yet he was dreading it too (hence, the gloomy gaze into LINENS). Part of it was that he didn’t want to think about me leaving him at the end of the year. I didn’t particularly want to think about leaving him either. The thought was difficult to fathom. Abandoning Dad felt like de-boning all the old American musicals, separating Rodgers from Hammerstein, Lerner from Loewe, Comden from Green.
The other reason why I thought Dad was feeling a little blue, and perhaps the more significant one, was that our scheduled year-long stay in a single location would mark an undeniably monotonous passage within chapter 12, “American Teachings and Travel,” of Dad’s otherwise thrilling mental biography.
“Always live your life with your biography in mind,” Dad was fond of saying. “Naturally, it won’t be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.” It was painfully obvious Dad was hoping his posthumous biography would be reminiscent not of Kissinger: The Man (Jones, 1982) or even Dr. Rhythm: Living with Bing (Grant, 1981) but something along the lines of the New Testament or the Qur’an.
Though he certainly never said so, it was evident Dad adored being in motion, in transit, in the midst. He found standstills, halts, finishing points, termini, to be unappetizing, dull. Dad wasn’t concerned with the fact that he was seldom at a university long enough to learn his students’ names and was forced, for the sake of assigning their grades correctly at the end of term, to give them certain pertinent monikers, such as Too Many Questions, Tadpole Glasses, Smile Is All Gums and Sits on My Left.
Sometimes I was afraid Dad felt having a daughter was a last stop, a finishing point. Sometimes when he was in a Bourbon Mood, I worried he wanted to ditch me and America and return to former Zaire, presently the Democratic Republic of the Congo (democratic in Africa, a word like the slang usage of totally and bobbing for fries, used purely for cool effect) in order to play a Che-cum-Trotsky-cum-Spartacus to the native people’s fight for freedom. Whenever Dad spoke of the four treasured months spent in the Congo River Basin in 1985, hobnobbing with the “kindest, hardest-working, most genuine” people he’d ever met, he adopted an unusually flimsy appearance. He resembled an aged silent movie star photographed with buttery lights and lens.
I’d accuse him of secretly wanting to return to Africa in order to spearhead a well-organized revolution, single-handedly stabilizing the DRC (expunging Hutu-aligned forces), then moving on to other countries waiting to be freed like exotic maidens tied to railroad tracks (Angola, Cameroon, Chad). When I voiced these suspicions, he’d laugh of course, but I always felt the laugh wasn’t quite hard enough; it was conspicuously hollow, which made me wonder if I’d haphazardly thrown in my line and caught the biggest, most unlikely of fishes. This was Dad’s deep-sea secret, never before photographed or scientifically classified: he wished to be a hero, a poster boy for freedom, silk-screened, reduced to bright colors and printed on a hundred thousand T-shirts, Dad with Marxist beret, martyr-ready eyes, and a threadbare mustache (see The Iconography of Heroes, Gorky, 1978).
There was too a certain uncharacteristic, boyish gusto he reserved solely for sticking another pushpin through the Rand-McNally map and briefing me on our next location in a show-offy factoid riff, his version of Gangsta Rap: “Next stop Speers, South Dakota, homeland of the Ring-necked Pheasant, the Black-footed Ferret, the Badlands, Black Hills Forest, Crazy Horse Memorial, capital, Pierre, largest city, Sioux Falls, rivers, Moreau, Cheyenne, White, James…”