Chapters (14)
Now I had my own disaster. It let me know how little my own dad could’ve managed in shaping his. I, assigned a sewer, perfected water acrobatics on its unlovely surface. But like him, you sacrifice form. But you get ashore alive.
And, later, after the next to last of my friends died, after I escaped New York, didn’t I, moping around the hardware store of my new village, show both his affable surface and his overpressurized triggerpoint? People acted kind to me but I saw they felt they couldn’t really count on me, not yet. They whispered around me.
In a shed behind my North Carolina house, I bent over some old windows. Each pane reflected the silhouette, stern, bowed, manly yet thickened toward the tanklike—and it was so much him, I had to rush indoors and sit somewhere and miss him.
Did I earlier say I didn’t, that I only missed missing my father? What a flippant, queenly, overelegant and quite inaccurate revenge on half my being. I recall his three-pointed handkerchief as he headed to the Rainbow Room: “Watch out, New York!” I remember his saying, “Provide, provide, they told us.” I recollect the sight of him, having dragged my mother’s vacuum cleaner out into the garage, him down on all fours purging sand from the Buick’s backseat carpet, and looking so intense and playful squatting there, using the screeching as something to hide in, his face grown childlike, rapt. Doing good, doing good well.
Oh, Dad. I never even “interviewed” you.
Would you, asked, have answered me?
I will go on record. I still don’t exactly know why you were so strict with your young son. Did you fear that my emotions, my drama, would cut me off from seeming serious enough to be, say, anybody’s dad? That’s not true, Pop. I’ve several friends and children.
I sometimes miss you, Sir.
* See Appendix.
* The New York Times, March 18, 1986.
AFTER AFTER
The Company of Spirits
I can never write any sort of story unless it contains one character for whom I feel physical desire.
—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Introduction to Collected Stories