Figuring out my father
My father died when I was eleven and he was forty-two, so it would be a stretch to say that I got to know him in full, and vice-versa. I have memories that flit by and leave impressions of what he looked like and how he behaved, but not really who he was, and the impressions seem to be as much about me as they are about him.
His early end came when were on a two-week Caribbean cruise, the kind that hopped from island to island, dropping off passengers just long enough for them to take in some of the sights and buy souvenirs or stock up on duty-free liquor.
It was on Antigua, I think, at an intersection in the town, that he slipped on something that was lying near the curb and then he fell on his rear end. It might’ve been a banana peel. We thought nothing of it—laughed about it, in fact—but that could be what triggered the fatal rupture of the aortic aneurysm he didn’t know he had. A day later, or maybe that same evening, he felt ill and visited the ship’s doctor, who incorrectly diagnosed indigestion caused by overeating. The next day he was back in our stateroom, feeling weak as he sat on the edge of the bed. Soon he went back to the infirmary and I never saw him again, not even in a casket. The next day I was swimming in the ship’s pool and overheard two adults sharing gossip: “Did you hear? There’s been a death aboard ship; a passenger was struck by a car on Antigua”. While noting dispassionately the inaccuracy of the second-hand story, I knew it had to be him. That’s how I learned he was gone; the confirmation from my mother didn’t come until later that day. After swallowing my urge to correct their factual mistake, I let myself sink to the bottom of the pool with my eyes open and thought about staying there forever.
Everything after was a blur — the crying, the despair, and the hours I spent avoiding my fellow passengers who were splashing in the pool or staring at the horizon. Wandering around, I found one of the ship’s bands rehearsing for that evening’s performance, so I sat down in front of an unused conga drum at the edge of the dance floor and began to accompany them amateurishly without asking permission. The bass player occasionally turned to me and nodded in time to the music; I have no idea what he thought of my intrusion into his band’s business. He looked like a beatnik, with a beard and thick black-framed glasses. It was 1963. They were all Italian, so we couldn’t communicate with words. That was one way I bracketed out the incongruity of my situation.
The ship had to stick to its itinerary despite having a dead passenger aboard, so it plowed on toward Bermuda, thankfully the last stop. Our family, now consisting of three people, did something or other there, and I bought a record by a calypso-flavored string band called The Talbot Brothers; it’s filled with slightly off-color lyrics and swingy arrangements with the flavor of the 1940s.
When the ship docked in New York, a hearse was waiting, along with our family physician, who was also my godfather and a close friend of my father’s. They’d belonged to the same Italian-American men’s social club. He was given permission to look at the body for identification purposes. We weren’t. Later I overheard him tell someone the body looked terrible, its face puffed up and purple — presumably from all the blood that leaked out of his aorta. That’s why it was a closed-casket funeral. As my mind wandered all over the place, I occasionally thought about where they might have kept him: did the ship’s infirmary have a refrigerated morgue? If not, did they have to put him in the ship’s cold storage room next to boxes of frozen steaks and ice cream?
My father had smoked heavily and suffered from angina pectoris that forced him to put a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue once in a while. I recall that happening one evening during a dinner-time argument about something or other, and as his face turned red he jumped up from the table and ran to the bedroom to grab his meds, which he kept in the top drawer of his mahogany bureau, near his college ring, brass collar stays and cuff links — the little personal doodads that men keep in a particular place in their bedrooms. Both my parents smoked for their entire lives. My mother was found dead in her home at age 65 on a sofa with a burned-out cigarette in an ashtray on the floor next to her. Cigarette smoke must’ve filled our house non-stop during my childhood, but I never minded or even particularly noticed. You might be considered odd if you didn’t smoke back then. My parents had sets of matching cigarette cases, lighters and ashtrays that they put out for social occasions — treating their guests special by offering them tobacco from a ceremonial box. This was in addition to the utilitarian stackable aluminum ashtrays they used for everyday smoking outdoors or in the garage, and the small clear round glass ones that were for slightly nicer settings. I sometimes had to wash them and that’s the only time cigarette residue became unpleasant: when cold ashes mixed with water.
My father worked for the Naugatuck Chemical Company in Naugatuck Connecticut, a half hour’s drive up the road from our house in New Haven. Naugatuck Chemical was a division of the US Rubber Company, later renamed Uniroyal, and the town of Naugatuck was a center for rubber and related products because it’s where Charles Goodyear perfected the vulcanizing process that made rubber industrially useful. In my father’s lifetime it was best known for two other things: being the birthplace of Naugahyde, a kind of upholstery material made from vinyl bonded to a knitted cloth backing, and for having a plant where US Rubber manufactured Keds, the original and quintessential summertime canvas and rubber leisure shoes which I still covet. Naugahyde has acquired over the years a connotation of lowbrow tackiness: it’s the stuff — often split from overuse and oddly colored — that covers the booth seats in diners everywhere. But in its heyday it was kind of a big deal because it could bring some of the advantages of leather to a mass market with the added benefit of easy clean-up. Just soap and water. Modernity at its best! A lot of car interiors owed their squishy feel to Naugahyde, and it wound up covering a lot of the seating in our house. In one of life’s odd coincidences, many years later Uniroyal sold part of its operations to Bridgestone Tire and Rubber Company, the Japanese firm where my wife’s father worked from the time he graduated high school until he retired.
With his college degree in chemistry, my dad started as a bench chemist at Naugatuck Chemical; there is one family photo of him from that period, looking at some instrumentation in a laboratory. His bosses must’ve noted his gregarious bent and he moved to technical sales, expanding the market for plastic by helping find new ways to use it. You never knew what he might pull out of the car trunk, either from his lab or from a competitor’s. Some were prototypes or proofs-of-concept, like a set of small, square, broad-lipped steel containers lined with vinyl that demonstrated the ability to permanently bond plastic to metal across complex curves. One time he brought out a pair of shoes made of Corfam, a leather substitute from Dupont. They looked pretty lame, and in fact Corfam quickly failed in the marketplace, but the fact that my father had them meant he was probably in the loop before the material was launched to the public in 1963, the year he died. Another time he lifted out an entire automobile dashboard made of tan plastic. It was the first not to be assembled from stamped metal; he noted its light weight and the fact that it was pressed from a single mold. Other times he might have promotional gadgets like miniature shovels that demonstrated the benefits of some new plastic resin, often with a catchy brand name like Marvinol or Cycolac. The endless versatility of plastics, emerging from the trunk of my father’s car.
One client was an audio engineer named Emory Cook, a pioneer in what would later be called “world music”. He roamed the globe with a Nagra tape recorder, from Bali to West Africa to the Caribbean to remote corners of Europe, and captured genres of music unknown to most Americans. A perfectionist, Cook needed a plastic formula for a high-resolution record pressing method he’d developed and dubbed “Microfusion” (the technical details are findable online and his field recordings are now housed in the Smithsonian Institution’s folklore collection). Using special raw materials my father provided, some of the 33rpm records that shipped from Cook’s plant in Stamford, Connecticut were a pale translucent blue. Along the way the two of them became friendly and items from the Cook catalogue wound up in our home collection: Trinidadian steel bands, calypso carnival competitions, early bossa nova. They were an antidote to the Broadway musical soundtracks that my mother seemed to prefer, and I played them constantly, reading and re-reading the liner notes. One I focused on almost to the point of fetishism; “O violão de Luiz Bonfa” was a tour de force of solo guitar mastery and had a cover photo, taken on Copacabana Beach, that couldn’t help but appeal to a 10 year-old boy who was taking guitar lessons.
The trajectory of a large part of my adult life can be traced in some way to that one object. After I’d mastered the Portuguese language many years later and listened to Bonfa’s songs again, it was impossible to imagine not having always been able to understand the lyrics; my earliest listenings were overwritten by new ones and combined into hybrid memories that blend the past and present.
Except for special occasions and holidays with guests, we ate our meals at a round formica-covered kitchen table that was white with a 50s-modernist pattern of random criss-crossed short black lines; that left the fancier dining room table free for my father to do paperwork, often after supper. He kept his work in a tan leather briefcase, old-fashioned style with double handgrips and no shoulder strap, and with the initials “AJL” discretely stamped in gold leaf near the brass closure. He’d disgorge a wad of papers from it along with a slim record-keeping booklet that documented his travel expenses. It was all done by hand, of course, sometimes in duplicate using carbon paper. When he needed to calculate he’d use a slide rule. His main one was lightweight, non-warping bamboo, judging from the cellular structure visible along its edges, with working surfaces of creamy greenish-white celluloid engraved with black lines and numbers. I was always pleased by the way the inner slide moved so smoothly within its groove. Genius bit of mechanism, talisman of the science and engineering fraternity.
The whole scene is a set-piece of my childhood: him working silently at the dining table, smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes, still in his white button-down from work but maybe with the sleeves rolled up and necktie off or loosened, bearing down firmly with a ballpoint so the carbon copy would be clear, illuminated by the gentle parabolic curve of a big lamp that hung overhead and could be raised and lowered on a black rubber cord by a clever self-ratcheting mechanism hidden in a polished brass enclosure attached to the ceiling. (Decades later when I was furnishing my own place, the Louis Poulson PH 4/3 pendant lamp I hung over the dining table was a direct reference to that one in my childhood dining room.)
In the adjoining living room I might be watching TV while lying on one of our très moderne armless slab sofas which had had their original white bouclé fabric (definitely my mother’s idea, but what was she thinking??) overlaid with more child-resistant Naugahyde. I’d catch a glimpse of him whenever I got up to go to the kitchen or lavatory. He’s the breadwinner of a quintessential postwar suburban American family, playing his part — plastics… technical sales… business trips… expense reports…— in an economy that felt unproblematically stable, firm, consistent, open-ended. When it was time for bed, we almost always exchanged goodnight kisses. His cheek was slablike and cool. And even though he was not a large man, for as long as he lived he was always bigger than me.
With a couple of partners, he started a side venture while still working at Naugatuck Chemical. He spoke little about it to me; I know nothing of the financial arrangements, or if our family lost money after it failed. But one Saturday morning he took me to where he and his partners had installed a prototype manufacturing line. It was a modestly sized space in a cinder block structure about halfway between our house and his office in Naugatuck. There was a vacuum molding machine that spat out their first product: a multicolored plastic child’s ball a bit smaller than a basketball. He explained that the technology was innovative because the ball came out ready to use, not requiring inflation. It had no visible seams and no inflation hole. His mentions of this side business were infrequent enough that it stayed a minor theme in my understanding of him, though it may have occupied a great deal of his energy before he died, and I wonder if his death dealt a blow to whatever prospects the company had.
On Friday evenings we’d sometimes shop at a specialty grocery store near the church we attended. The place had some of the Italian products he liked and — extroverted as always — he became friendly with the owners. I looked forward to these end-of-week expeditions, sitting next to him in the front seat of the car, usually an Oldsmobile, roaming the aisles together, watching him chat with people, bringing home our haul in brown paper bags, when as often as not he’d then make meatballs or cook a bunch of sausages and we’d have a vague simulation of the Italian dinners he might’ve enjoyed as a child, but with pre-made sauce from a jar and the pre-grated parmesan cheese in a green container that no modern home could be without. Since those dinners were made by Dad instead of Mom, they were objects of special praise for their maker and he’d be relieved of his usual dishwashing duty that night. I wonder now if he missed the home-made foods from his parents’ day, the cheese you had to effortfully grate yourself, the sauce you had to tend for hours, or if that was just more stuff from “the old country” that everyone was trying to forget as we jet-propelled ourselves into the future. He never talked about it.
Saturday mornings for the two of us would sometimes be haircut time at Tony’s Barber Shop in the tiny commercial center of Westville, our neighborhood. Tony was old, with a salt and pepper mustache and a severe expression; His employee Mel was younger, with thin reddish hair and a round face. They both wore light blue barber coats and kibbitzed with the grown-ups while they applied the electric trimmers to my head and dusted my neck with talcum powder. On one of those days, we also watched Senator John F. Kennedy ride past, smiling and waving from the back seat of a convertible car during the 1960 presidential campaign. My faint memory of the broad smiling face and upraised waving hand is almost indistinguishable from similar images of him just before he was assassinated.
In the summer, dad would take us to a beach in Bridgeport called Seaside Park. We used his old olive-green woolen Army blanket as our home base in the sand, burying the corners to keep it from blowing away. There was a lunch stand across the street and we would hop across the burning-hot asphalt in bare feet to reach it. The grilled hot dogs always seemed to smell a bit like melted tar, and it somehow made them taste more delicious. The smell of melting tar is still pleasant to me because of its association with this memory.
In winter he took us ice skating. First, on the small weed-clogged pond that was behind our house for a few years until it was drained and filled in to make room for more houses. Ours had been the first house on a newish street in a newish subdivision, with a remnant of wilderness behind it that stretched into the distance.
After the backyard pond was gone, we skated on a larger one, Bishop’s Pond, up the hill in the town of Woodbridge. There was a rude structure by the pond’s edge — a roof and a couple of stone walls — where we could drink hot chocolate from thermos bottles and seek shelter from the wind. It was surrounded by trees and felt deliciously isolated from the world. Winters were always cold enough then to guarantee that ponds would freeze thick and be good for skating. Later, we skated on an oval rink the city of New Haven built in Edgewood Park, with a two-storey A-frame warm-up house that had a luncheonette and picnic benches. It was technically better than the pond, but didn’t give the same feeling of being embraced by wilderness.
The Edgewood Park rink was one of the places where I first flirted with girls. By the time I was eleven or twelve they were starting to look interesting. At the rink, their cheeks would be red from the cold, their knees sometimes flecked with ice crystals from falling down in their woolen skirts. The wind drew us toward each other instinctively for warmth and the canned ice-rink music would fade to an indistinct hum as I carefully absorbed their gossip about who liked whom. My father was already gone, so whatever he might’ve been intending to impart to me about girls, sex, manhood and all that will stay a mystery. He never got his chance, and that part of a father-son relationship is a blank space in my psyche. At the time, though, I was already getting over his absence, it was just becoming the way things were and I didn’t pine for his advice.
For a family where both parents were heavy smokers, one of the only times my father punished me physically was when he discovered me and a few friends smoking a cigarette (stolen from him) in the basement of a house under construction in my neighborhood. The house sat on the spot where the tiny pond had been. I never understood how he figured out what we were doing and where we were, but he came roaring toward us with a head of steam that we knew was going to result in something unpleasant. He yelled and whacked me painfully in the rear end. I never had any curiosity about tobacco after that. At the same time, though, my parents regularly gave me candy cigarettes to eat; chocolate ones that were wrapped in genuine cigarette paper, and crunchy white sugary ones with a pinkish-orange end that was supposed to resemble the glow of a burning tip. Both kinds were sold in little boxes that resembled real cigarette packs, with fake logos and everything.
In addition to the Italian-American men’s social club meetings he attended faithfully, my father also belonged to a duckpin bowling league. About once a week he and my mother would pack their bowling shoes into special bowling-shoe carriers and spend a few hours being hypnotized by the sound of wooden pins struck by hard synthetic rubber balls. Duckpins were an East Coast thing which may have gotten their start in Baltimore, my parents’ home town. Dad was an extrovert, made friends easily and kept a busy social schedule, but always seemed to have time for me, for example on Cub Scout outings. One in particular has become the proxy for them all. We hiked to a spot atop a cliff-like outcropping called West Rock, one of the region’s prominent geological features carved out by a receding glacier. My mother had packed hamburgers for us to eat, and by the time I unwrapped mine from its tinfoil, the bun had become pinkish and soggy from the leaking burger juice. That little detail engraved a permanent spot in my memory for some reason, but I didn’t care enough to be bothered by it. I was with my father, with other boys and their fathers, in a woodsy spot somewhere in the chill of autumn in our woolen jackets eating lunches our moms had packed for us. How could it be anything but perfect?