A Captive Audience - Memoir (and)

This morning I walked up the road to the Methodist church where farmers paid their respects to God when I was a boy. I thought I’d find my father’s grave without any trouble, but it took an hour of searching through generations of Dempseys, Whitemans, Littles and Nelsons, distracted as I was by the platitudes etched in stone.

His gray stone is still glossy enough to reflect my face in the steamy Delaware sun. It’s as humid as the day of his funeral, thirty years ago. I haven’t been here since then.

My mother wore a navy blue suit and didn’t cry until he was laid to rest. I can see the limp roses around the brassy coffin, the minister spieling at the sky.

Then there was that doctor who never told us my father was dying, but said we should hospitalize him for the best care. During his last week, an ambulance came and took him to Wilmington General, where he babbled and wailed in the bed of a tenth-floor bile-green room and no longer recognized us. Seeing him like that was a relief after months of morbid silence. I tried to console myself with this thought as he rolled his eyes and head, a quivering stick of the man who’d sparred in gyms in South Philly and played semi-pro football when runners used the stiff-arm.

His right thumb, broken in a brick fight when he was twelve, cocked acutely when I was a boy and we played marbles. The deformity only seemed to sharpen his aim and the force of his shooter as it sprang into my pack of cat’s eyes, knocking out two at a time, and when he knocked out three he threw back his head and yelled, “Move over, Oppenheimer!”

His thumb made the same angle when he wrote with his gold Parker pen. His signature, “Thomas Harley Davis,” with its rolling serifs and elliptic grace, was his Declaration of Independence from the City of Brotherly Love, where his thumb had mended without a cast.

Nights after dinner when he was home, we lay on the davenport and I begged him to draw me a train. He propped his graph pad on his thigh, took out his mechanical pencil, and drew the profile of a locomotive and long train of cars. He drafted an aerial view, showing the coal and timber and cattle in their cars, and shaded them with smoke from the smokestack. Beside these two versions he drew a foreshortened third.

I told him to put cowpunchers on the engines, and he did. I told him to make the engines black, and he did. “Blacker,” I said. He laughed as he blotted out the inner contours with the beveled point of his pencil. When I told him to make the smoke blacker, he said, “You’re never satisfied, are you, bub?” and hid the fine detail of his aerial version. I didn’t care. I just wanted to watch that cockeyed thumb in motion and tingle with goose bumps beside him.

He’d seen the Dempsey-Tunney fight and found pride, precision and humor in his left hook. He loved to show it to my big brother Tom and me, barely raking our chins with his nicotine-yellow nails, which he wouldn’t cut until my mother set the clippers on his desk chair. He worked for Du Pont as a troubleshooting engineer who fixed critical equipment in chemical plants around the country. He hated communism and loved America. The summer he died he watched the Watergate hearings, claimed Nixon was framed, and told me to get a real job and a haircut and shave off my beard, even though I hadn’t lived with him for ten years.

He spent his last year at home in my boyhood bed, where his body shrank to his bones and his feet swelled twice as big as he watched reruns of Ozzie & Harriet, Lassie, and Father Knows Best on the rabbit-eared Sylvania my mother set on my old desk. (My parents had long since acquired the habit of falling asleep with the TV on, and when they’d slept together, I believe she turned up the volume to mute my father’s snoring.) Books lay untouched on the nightstand. We no longer played chess. Life had betrayed him five years after his retirement. He didn’t want to talk, and I couldn’t sit there and simply be with him for long. I went out and ran through the fields of our farm, breaking a sweat that killed the chill inside me.

Once I massaged his feet that felt like waxy balloons filled with cold water. We hadn’t really touched since I was a boozing teenage bum, when he’d bailed me out of jams and told me stories behind the closed door of my second-floor room, where I lay on my bed and dreamed of diving through the window, somersaulting on the ground, and running across the hills, away from the farm, forever. But there was no escaping him.

He held his wrist at the small of his back and paced by my bed, looking down, talking to himself, until he pounced on his memory bone. Then his hands flew about as he told me one of his stories.

His mother died giving birth to him. Six years later his father, a train engineer, went insane after running over a hobo on the tracks. My father was kicked around, uncle to aunt, and went to Girard College for orphans. His first day there, he found a place in the middle of a crowded cafeteria table, and went to get a glass of milk. When he returned, his lunch was gone.

“I looked at those bulgy-cheeked bastards, their eyes on their plates, and asked who took it. They said nothing. It took all I had to sit down and have milk for lunch. I knew if I pushed it, they’d beat me up. I’d learned the ropes, and tomorrow I’d be sure to eat my lunch.

“Next day, hell with the milk. I start eating and don’t stop. I knew they couldn’t steal it from my belly. Then I see something funny. Each guy that comes to the table spits on his food. Yeah, spits on his meat loaf, potatoes, and string beans. Then he goes and gets his milk.

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