Next of kin, p.3
Next of Kin, page 3
My dad, himself a lifetime member of two separate unions—stagehands and scenic artists—has his studio up front, where he designs the sets they build. He wears a charcoal-gray suit, a collared white shirt, a tie. He pulls out of the thin, piercing blue light of his drafting printer sheet after curling sheet of gray, damp paper, so wide he uses both hands, like he’s one end of a pair of washerwomen readying bed linens for the clothesline. He slides them into Plexiglas tubes reeking of ammoniated developer—so painfully pungent your eyes water even if you are wandering at the faraway end of the hallway, admiring the huge industrial paint sinks and peeking into the men’s locker room, cupping your giggles into silence at the calendar of naked women the guys have hung back there.
In the tubes the gray paper sprouts blue veins, and when he spreads the drawings out under the taut strings and the horizontal ruler of his tilted drafting table, you see he has summoned out of nothing an entire detailed world. He conjures out of the warm blue purr of his printer the scrims and prosceniums and curtains, the towers and roundabouts and panels that fly, the catwalks and grids and backdrops of what will be in Act One: The fairgrounds in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in Act Two: The ballroom of the Hotel Brevoort, New York. Even A square of wood set on a circle of wood will end up rendered in a veinous anatomic grid of lights, curtains, and flywalls on that gray paper, each mechanicals sheet individually embordered with the logo of his firm: Design Associates; the name of the project: EQUUS, written in his distinct all-caps handwriting where he refused to put the spines on his E’s or the backslashes on his M’s. He drew a shaded bar representing an inch. A circle with a plus sign for a PAR can. On that gray paper my dad can even hang moonlight.
* * *
He had wanted to be a painter—studied at Brown then transferred to RISD, then did some work toward a master’s degree he never finished at Yale—but came out discouraged and, instead, ran a scenic design-and-build shop for the next thirty years.
“The world doesn’t need another mediocre painter,” he warned us, his kids, as explanation for his decision to turn away from his dream of painting and devote himself instead to a trade.
On the rare and brief weeks he would join us on the family summer vacations—to Maine, to Corsica, to Bénodet, to the modest shingled cottage on Cape Cod where the chickadees would alight on your cupped hand if you sat statue-still and held the sunflower seeds arm’s length from your chest—he unfailingly brought a tin box of watercolors and one of those thick-leaf sketchbooks and painted rather competent dreamy scenes of the harbors and the blousy geraniums hanging in all the blue window boxes.
A private sketchbook once a year on summer vacation—barefoot, in the harmless privacy of your backyard wicker chair? Permissible. Charming even. But any overreaching ambitions ought to be scrupulously shelved so as not to burden the world with what it didn’t need. I believe we all took it very seriously, this point of view that one should muster the same self-discipline he had. That we all should refrain from littering the world with any dilettante-ish efforts or minor private achievements likely destined only for the landfill of Mediocrity.
We may have already started to win little elementary school still-life drawing prizes and little classroom poetry contests and more than our share of junior varsity athletic trophies, one of us with a remarkably high score on an IQ test discovered after a troubled meeting with the school guidance counselor regarding his disruptiveness in class, another accepted to Mensa by the time he turned sixteen, but even so, in spite of some of those early encouragements from other quarters—school prizes, teachers’ commendations, our essays, our scores, our photo in midair kicking in the winning goal in the local newspaper—giving the five of us early indications to the contrary, he reminded us always of the dullness of mediocrity, of self-indulgence, of the certain peril in imagining oneself as anything other than a Summer Vacation Watercolorist.
He was discerning. To be discerning is to be disciplined, a specialty practiced by specialists in their fields: the jeweler who can examine the diamond and detect the flaws, the art appraiser who knows it’s a lesser work of the series by that painter. To be discerning is a way of being expert, exceptional and separate, above, apart, abler, more astute than others. To be discerning is to be my special father, who can reject his own dream of becoming a painter because of his self-diagnosed mediocrity, and turn instead to a thirty-year career of plywood, staple guns, bandsaws, pipe and drape, of design-and-build, industrials and theatricals, rock shows, the rotating booth at the ’64 World’s Fair where Lee Iacocca introduced the Mustang, even the traveling sets for the Rolling Stones. To be discerning is to deny yourself becoming the painter you wished you could be.
I thought of it as an exceptional and admirable model of self-discipline and scrupulous self-inventory. I had wanted to be a writer my whole young life, but, as an adult, I mustered the same discipline and surrendered myself instead to restaurant and food service: a trade. I considered myself fortunate that I’d been made to understand the value of Standards, and of the pride and worth in meeting them. And if I felt I couldn’t meet them, I held that it made me somehow mature and precocious and flinty that I’d been shown at such a young age how to discern, how to self-select out.
“And, look, Gabs, nobody wants to be an also-ran.”
He was home on a weekend, in dusty jeans and a striped button-down, laying a corner of a masonry wall that would eventually anchor a wooden deck he was adding onto the house. I was old enough to read and went around clutching a cherished book from which I could not be separated, sleeping or waking. I carried it with me at all times, but even so, I managed to bring him each next heavy stone from the pile that he beckoned to with his trowel, as he set in place the one before it, while gripping my book with the other free hand.
I didn’t know what it was, an “also-ran.”
“The other guy on the ballot; the one who didn’t win. Who is ever going to remember Barry Goldwater?” he asked, as demonstration, and of course I couldn’t say; I was six years old.
“Exactly.”
With a protective mien, he confided his instructions.
“Don’t ever advertise it unless you’ve won it, Gabbies. Don’t ever put on your résumé that you were a runner-up. That you were short-listed. It’s like bragging that you couldn’t win.”
* * *
In his eventual career, he did not seem hindered by the possibility of his own mediocrity. And he remained candid in assessing his own talents as well as others’. He openly advocated the borrowing of good ideas as long as you knew who you were “quoting,” and he thrived, pursuing his work as an active pleasure, rather than as a tragic concession. It never held him back once he cut it loose, this sense of his own mediocrity as a painter. In design-and-build for the theater, he delighted in and seemed liberated by the recognition that having new or unique ideas was not required. I felt the same way when I gave up on the pursuit of writing and turned full-bore toward restaurant work. A kind of liberation borne of dispassion for the fallback plan. A sense of shrugging resignation, as if to say, Well, I only need to be good enough for this pursuit, and I can clear that low bar. So, let’s go! And he seemed further freed by the relatively relaxed standards that set-building called for, as I also did when I understood the minor proficiency that restaurant cheffing required: mostly just cleanliness and consistency. Henri Matisse said that the work of the artist is “illuminating the fog that surrounds us.” Which is much more daunting than roasting a nicely seasoned chicken and making sure to scrub down the pan afterward.
I suspect our father was impatient with the exactitude and the persistence required to penetrate that fog, the unrelenting dedication that is required of great art, and even of great craftsmanship; master carpentry scaled precisely to one-sixteenth of an inch, but in his looser world of “it’s good enough for theater,” where the plywood sets just had to make it to Cincinnati and then would be struck and dumpstered, you scaled to roughly the inch. Artists had to make sense of the human condition and architects had to complete rigorous math and engineering studies, but designers could set up shop without so much as a diploma and hang out their shingle and simply shove a desk in the corner for a credentialed draftsman to deal with the nuts and bolts.
“Everybody else does the bones and makes sure the thing doesn’t fall down,” he loved to say of his work. “I do the romance!”
He eventually designed everything with this freedom and was prolific: houses, restaurants, additions to old houses, strip malls, public parks, shopping plazas, summer stock theater. He recited poetry with the same inexactitude, sometimes paraphrasing and eliding phrases that didn’t suit him. He threw epic dinner parties using recipes torn from magazines, which he transferred in his own handwriting into his cooking notebooks, dutifully citing his sources, yet giving the impression of his having authored them. He learned to slalom race and mogul bash but pursued the more theatrical ballet skiing, with its looping helicopters and 360s, until he got good enough at it that it caught your eye if you were going up in the chair. He told long double-punch-line jokes and short zingy one-liners; picked up vivid and ribald and moving anecdotes wherever he heard them and made them his own later; he became a true raconteur even of adventures and tales and poignancies not his own, but which he could deliver to magnificent effect at all the ceremonies requiring toasts, all the last-call nightcaps, all the dinner parties, all the weddings and funerals and holiday gatherings of a man’s lifetime. He was already good at it when he told us of his harrowing night’s hell coughing up his own wet lungs and only got better at it with the years. “Nobody has any new ideas,” he’d say, again and again and again, “it’s all just in knowing who to steal from.”
* * *
So remarkable was his way of knowing who to steal from and what to do with the material he stole that, once in his possession, it would be tailored and made better by his taking it. Pablo Casals, Pablo Neruda, or Paul the Apostle—or probably none of the above—may have been the one who originally said, “She was my student until she became my master,” but when our father stands up at my sister’s wedding and tinkles his glass with the silver fork and lays that one on the room, it is only Daddy-o we have seared into our hearts, as we raise a glass of champagne and smile through wet eyes at his pure romantic heart beating in front of us. We are not thinking of proper citation, rightful ownership, or dutiful ascription.
To him, you did not need to be famous, nor a master of your craft, to be useful and borrowable. Anything tasty, wonderful, odd, scandalous, harrowing, charming, funny, dirty, or eccentric would be considered. Tragic was fine. Heroic, also good. Cantankerous, lousy, criminal, or chaste; underdog, top dog, sly fox, paper moon, cool cat, or country mouse alike, he would recognize what there was to use. And he would leave behind the dead weight of any precise factual debris, any unwieldy mitigating truths or details if they proved too cumbersome to allow liftoff.
He was quick to discern which parts of you and your experiences might likely be squandered if left in your unfit custody.
For those of us who “borrow”—I inherited a streak of this, too, in my own genetic disposition—it can be justified as an act of thrift or conservation; a genuine worried disbelief that one might waste that which we find so precious, like when a dinner companion has left half of her portion still on the plate for the waiter to clear: You’re not going to let that go to waste, are you?
Some stories can be so pitifully sad, or damning, or compromising that they are left untold, because the tellers fear they themselves will be found pitiful, and pitiable, or culpable, or vengeful and petty, grotesque and obscene, by even telling such stories.
You have to have the necessary appetite for telling them, in the first place. And be willing to gain the weight it will require to carry them.
Me, I always ask first—“Oh, man, that is a good one, can I please steal that? Do you mind if I take that?” I am too self-conscious, too concerned with others’ feelings to just freely ransack their material. But he’d reach right over and nab it with his fork, your uneaten story, even if you were still chewing. And I thrilled at his delightfully frank bravado around this propulsion to “borrow” other people’s lives. I was titillated by his utter unapologeticness about what he lifted in broad daylight with a scallywag’s wave to the security camera, as if the greatest talent of all was to know the difference and to rob the right house. As Mr. Pablo Casals actually did say, “Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.”
I was sometimes proud and flattered when he stole my experiences and made them his, even while I often blanched, stomach twitching, seated at the dinner party table, Daddy-o recounting wildly embellished and revisionist accounts to the crowded room, even when he took such egregious liberties with the “text” of my experience, even when he assigned me feelings I wasn’t feeling and intentions I didn’t intend. It can be nauseating to be publicly mischaracterized by someone and even more distressing if that someone is not especially talented. But he was mightily talented, and it was something pretty exhilarating when you were young to have ranked in your dad’s eyes as plagiarizable. It’s all in knowing who to steal from, and he was stealing from me!
I was utterly taken with his remarkable showmanship. His knack for placing the poignant detail, allowing silent beats, burying the lede, using what he would call a “by the way”: “Oh, and by the way…she’d been picked up by the cops that afternoon!”
You squirmed in your seat at his dinner parties, twelve years old, sixteen years old, nineteen years old, twenty-four years old, thirty-one years old, forty-two years old, outwardly giggling at the Total Rewrite, receiving their winks and side glances at what a sassy monkey you are—What a handful!—while his dinner table or barstool audiences looked back at him, eyes glittery. “Good night, Jim. Good to see you! Take care!” And they shake his hand and head out into the night. You’re so proud to be his punch line that you collect all the crumpled napkins, empty the ashtrays, giving yourself a moment to walk off the sting of having been so egregiously mischaracterized, like a midfielder shaking off a ground ball to the shin, and then, you get right back into the game. Without even realizing it you start to go out of your way to drum up a life of new sassy episodes that will feed him a supply of fresh raw material. And you begin to see yourself through his eyes, as a plywood panel of the scenery in his story, a stage prop, a character. And this becomes a lifetime’s lifestyle.
Whenever I find myself in a story I can’t bear, I become a second-person remote you, a body’s length removed from an I, observing. No longer the me, here, my actual self, I, standing right in the very room, going to fucking pieces.
* * *
But still, even with all of that DNA coursing through my veins, and all of the uncanny ways he is me and I am him, I grow up to be not nearly as brazen as my own father. I am obsessive about verifying and annotating and footnoting. Citing the sources. Announcing whose byline of what article whose exquisite phrases I may retell at dinner parties of my own. Which poet and which poem, declared. Wincing if I spell a name wrong; shame if I mispronounce it. For him, of no concern at all.
In his mind, you and your slavish fidelity to truth and citation: actually a mark of your own smallness, your own pettiness and inability to think big or to see broadly. “But wait, Dad, that’s not at all how it really happened,” you have sometimes protested, after everyone has left. “That’s not the truth.”
“Oh, that’s for the bean counters!” he dismissed, making a pantomime of a squinting company accountant, mock-pushing up his pince-nez and dutifully penciling in an exact amount on the ledger of his open palm.
That kind of earnest accounting, to be so conscientious in detailing how it really happened or didn’t really happen, was it a Tuesday or a Friday, an inch and three-eighths or one and five-eighths, that ledger so fastidiously and meticulously kept of the Truth in one column and the Fibs in the other, he derided and dismissed as the petty concern of the dull.
“Accuracy is for clerks!” he delighted in repeating.
Though he himself never wrote more than personal correspondence, black ink, felt-penned letters and notes, quite possibly he was the greatest writing teacher I have ever had.
Freeze Tag
When I was little I felt the same gushing admiration for Jeffrey as I did for our father, and for a week or two I had a crush on him and planned to marry him. This was before I knew that you couldn’t marry your family, when you are so young that all that you know is that you heart heart heart that perfect boy so much much much. I discussed it with my best friend, Renee, who lived just up the road, and she said she had the same feelings about a long-haired older cousin of hers. We hunted for woolly bear caterpillars, braided and chewed on onion grass, choreographed gymnastics routines on the lawn, practiced the delicate art of making saliva bubbles. Are you allowed to marry your own cousin? Your own brother? we wondered.
Her property had portions of meadow and steep hill banks that lined the stream, and our property had portions of meadow and steep hill banks that lined the stream, equally. But at her house, there were crumbling walled gardens with stone paths, a long keyhole driveway missing most of its white gravel, and a proper name on an iron sign at the entrance—Springdale. Jeffrey had been allowed to commandeer an outbuilding on the property—a tilting, lopsided potting shed—and he repurposed it into a little fort, which we wandered around outside of, trying to spy into it without getting caught.
