My Father's Ghost: Excerpts
Wine and Ashes
Death is the resumption of two dimensions, from volume back to plane.-- from Robin's journals, 1933-45
....It's a curious fact that whenever I complete a book, I sink into a period of some months of semi paralytic depression. I am told that this is by no means uncommon among writers, which is no help at all. Some writers work on two projects at a time, or start a new novel while completing an old one, and they seem to have less of a problem. For me, unfortunately, each work is discrete and discretely absorbing, and I'm just not free to think about other possibilities until I've finished the one in hand; and then there are bad dreams that bring me awake in a sweat of anxiety and discomfort every morning, and days of pottling about like a zombie while lists of things prepared for when I could have time to spend gathering dust on my desk. I can joke about it, but this is a very uncomfortable part of the writing process for me.
This time I was winding up not a book so much as a thirty-year fictional epic in which the characters in the story had aged just as I did, in real time. What was going to happen now? Catatonia? A wild descent into crazy ravings and bingeing on Twinkies?
I sat thinking about this in my studio one chilly autumn morning in 1998, staring gloomily at the stack of five hundred pages comprising the final draft of Book Four, The Conqueror's Child.
And when I turned about restlessly in my swivel chair, I spotted Pop's notebooks, three stacks of them on different bookshelves, with their spines out. Their years were written on them by me, during a cursory glance through them after he had died, in garish silver lettering using a fancy, blunt nosed marking pen.
Now, there was Something Completely Different: the job of transcribing Pop's journals into a readable text, or anyway part of them. That was so far from the immersion in a fictional world that I was just beginning to shake of that maybe, just maybe, it offered a hope of really effective distraction. Maybe this could be a way around the Hellish bout of discontented uselessness that I glumly foresaw for myself once the novel's manuscript went off in the mail and became the responsibility of other people.
I had no idea what I might find in Pop's notebooks, or whether it would be of any significance; but whatever it was, I wouldn't have to flog myself into inventing it, would I? Not that invention is a chore, far from it; but it has no appeal when I'm in the miserable throes of letting go of a vivid, fully realized, imaginary world that it's time for me to leave behind.
On the level of listening to my own inner promptings, well, there was something going on there too. The books had been important to Robin, or he wouldn't have lugged them out west with him when he came to live with us. By keeping them when we'd moved to our new house down the hills after his death, hadn't I in a way committed myself to at least making a stab at doing something with them? Indicated a willingness, however grudging and uninterested?
It seemed like a pleasingly perverse task, too, for nothing useful was likely to come of it. It's not as if Robin was someone famous whose journals would interest the world at large. Anticipating no particular payoff, I felt nothing enticing about the prospect of dipping into those pages, no whiff of initiatory excitement like that tingling that floats in the air at the start of a fiction writing project. In my current morose state of tapering, as it were, I would have turned away in disgust from anything as delicious as that.
In fact the morbid element in opening those books exactly suited my sense of myself as poised at what looked like a natural terminus of my writing career. I mean, what the Hell was I going to write about now? There wasn't an idea in my head, not one; I felt completely wrung out. And I was close to crossing the threshold of my own sixtieth year besides, facing in a very definite and unarguable way the downward slop we all must travel toward oblivion.
How could I decline this worthless, unrewarding, pointless task? I didn't have the energy to resist, although not quite the energy to begin right away, either.
The next day I sent off the novel. I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the floor in my studio surrounded by teetering stacks of Rob's lumpy black notebooks and sneezing mightily from the dust that drifted up from the pages as I turned them.
The earliest volume was no bigger than the old hardbacks of the Everyman classics series, which had been designed to fit into the side pocket of a man's overcoat. Some of Pop's later notebooks were in a larger format, with pages about the size of a sheet of typing paper. All the books were covered in heavy black paper treated to look like leather, with a once shiny, nubbly texture.
In the one I had picked up, some of the entries had been squeezed in at the bottoms of the pages at a later date (an economizing move, as I realized later -- why buy a new notebook, when all that marginal space sat there blank and unused?). One whole set of comments ran in the same green ink from one page to the next, one footnote style rumination after another on Cezanne's rejection of the mysticism of some of his contemporary painters.
The inscription on the fly-leaf surprised a chuckle out of me.
"Gossip Books, volume 1, 1930
"Notebooks of Robinson Mckee
"Axioms, Apothegms, Aphorisms,
"Epigrams, wisecracks, Humor,
"Philosophy, Phrases, Dialogue,
"Bilge, Baloney, Bunk, -
"Meant for the confusion of those who
"Expect an explanation for everything,
"From painting to the song of a bird;
"Meant, in a word,
"For those who want to be confused.".
1930 was nine years before I was born. I wondered how many of these volumes he thought, when he began this one, that he would eventually fill..
The page following the fly-leaf is also inscribed:
"Malediction to be Read Aloud
"In order to testify to the truth of what I say, I lay myself open to trial by jury according to due process of law, and before all living witnesses and other accusers, before I die, or in Heaven after; and likewise, may the dentist's drill in your teeth one day slip; may your vitamin pills carcinomize your duodenum; may your stocks become worthless and your bonds taxable; may the combustion of your cigarettes, pipes, and cigars ignite your nicotinized flesh and bones by way of your breath; may your coffee keep you ulcerously awake even in hell; may your flatulence become jet propulsion and your sole means of locomotion; may your creams, ointments, astringents, soaps, salves and muds choke, clog and seal up your pores and mummify you before senility does; may your beers, wines, whiskeys, brandys, rums, cordials, cocktails and neat keep you in a perpetual pickle-rot; may your douche bones eviscerate you; may your promiscuous syszigies fuse and condemn you to the rather limited life of a sexual siamese twin; and may you be regarded as a Communist! In case you do not believe absolutely all that I shall dish out to you in this present chronicle ironical..."
What an odd, deliberately antique, spitefully humorous paragraph! And effective, too: the old man had caught my attention..
The last notebook of all was dated 1969, five years before he'd come to live with us. Disappointingly, I found no notes at all for the period of Rob's life in New Mexico. On reflection, however, I had to admit that perhaps this was a Very Good Thing.
Skimming gingerly through the pages (I mean, what if there were horrible secrets, gothic revelations, feelthy pictures, dead -- or living -- spiders?), I found this:
"I am locked in the house
"of myself. There is no
"Door, no key. I cannot
"leave the place that I inhabit
"Until I am dispossessed.
"This house can never be a home,
"for here none may enter,
"none may leave.
"I can only sit by the window
"and watch, and watch
"life that sometimes watches me,
"a peeping Tom."
I was hooked -- by the voice; an odd, secretive, thoughtful voice. He himself had never, in all the years I had known him, spoken like this -- freely, even boisterously indulging the dark, quirky, astringent mind that I had only glimpsed in him from time to time.
I'd seen the tip of the iceberg, of course, but here, in these books, I might find the whole, underwater mountain of ice, glinting with the hoarded light of his personality. The prospect was irresistible, if daunting; it was going to be a hell of a job, decoding all of this. Thank God the old man only wrote on one side of each page!
In preparation, I went through all the books and set aside the many letters he had read, refolded, returned to their slitted envelopes, and tucked away in his notebooks' pages. The vast preponderance of the letters were prosaic notes from his older brother, Irving, who had been an English professor in Sacramento.
But there was one startling find among the hundred or so of these documents. It's in faded typing on embossed stationery, and it's written in what turns out to be slightly ungrammatical German. I had it translated, and it goes like this:
"A. Einstein
112 Mercer Street
Princeton
New Jersey, USA
February 10, 1938
Mr. Robinson McKee
New Rochelle, NY
Dear Sir:
Due to being overburdened by my own productive work it is impossible for me to involve myself with matters which lie outside of my special knowledge. For that reason I am also unable to address purely philosophical questions of a nature such as they are explained in your letter. It would be more proper for you to get in touch with someone who is primarily occupied with philosophy. By the way, the imparted maxims are not understandable to me.
Very truly yours,
/s A. Einstein"
I've found no copy of Pop's letter to Einstein..
Robin was born in February of 1911. At the age of twenty-seven my dad wrote to Einstein and got an answer. I don't know about you, but I was impressed.
And my appetite was whetted: who was this man of active mind and playful language who had lived hidden inside my grouchy, lazy, cynical old dad all those years? Who had he left here in these books for me to discover after his death? I remembered him saying to me when I asked what was in the notebooks, "Ah, never mind. Read 'em after I'm dead."
So I did.
From Robin's journals, 1945:
In one's will one would like to specify that one's remains be cremated and the ashes put to work in an hourglass.
He should have told me sooner.
Going Blind
In the Autumn of 1973 my sister Liza called to tell me that she had moved to another part of L.A. and to give me her new phone number. Both of us, Manhattanites by birth and childhood, had done a lot of moving around since our mother died in 1969. I was now settled, with my husband Steve, in New Mexico, where we had moved shortly after my mother's death.
Robin still lived in New York — in Greenwich Village in fact, like any serious painter. I called him up (Liz was shy about doing that — "I never know what to say to him"), told him about Lizzie's change of address, and gave him the new phone number. "Okay, got all that? Why don't you read it back to me."
My father's rough bass voice said, "I didn't get it."
"Eight-one-eight -- "
"I can't see to write it down."
"Pop," I said, "turn on the light."
"There's light," he said. "It's still afternoon here, Suzy. But I'm having trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
"Trouble seeing things."
"Things. Like, what things?"
"Print. Writing."
I got a sinking feeling. My father was living in a loft on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. I now lived in an adobe house in Albuquerque. My husband and I were launching new careers, Steve with a local law firm, me working on a novel. Steve was paying hefty alimony and child support to his ex-wife, and a lawyer's pay in New Mexico was a lot less than back East. There was no money to spare for flying back and forth to New York.
"What can you read?" I said. "Newspapers?"
"Nah, that print is so small - "
"Book print?"
"If I hold it close. But it's hard."
"Street signs?"
"Yeah. I can read street signs, if I'm not too far away."
Jangle of serious interior alarm bells: New York City street signs were big and clear (mental image of black background, white edging and white letters reading, "42nd Street", outside the New York Public Library where I used to hang out to escape from my mom bugging me at home). "What does your doctor say?"
A pause. I knew what it meant before he answered, "I haven't seen a
doctor."
"Good!" I cried with ferocious enthusiasm. "You're an
artist. You're going blind. And you haven't seen a doctor."
I was scared, so I waxed sarcastic. As an adult, and a distant adult at that, I had with him at that time what in anthropology textbooks is sometimes called a "joking relationship", as between young spouse and mother-in-law, maybe. Ours was not your garden-variety father-daughter bond.
At least I didn't think it was. I had no other father-daughter bond to measure it against, except in fiction; and it wasn't like any of those I had ever come across.
He said angrily, "Doctors cost money.;
All right, Pop was a Scot by background, or anyway Scots-English, but this wasn't about Scottish frugality. It was about reality, and we both knew it. After all these years Pop was still an unknown painter. For eating money he had worked for many years in the kitchen of a West Village pub called the Lion's Head, under the longtime owner he had liked, Leon, and now under Leon's heirs, whom he didn't.
The Lion's Head was a basement joint when I saw it, very English in a wood paneled sort of way, on the north side of Sheridan Square. Pop lived a few blocks from "the Head" (as he liked to put it, having a lifelong love of gross jokes, locutions, and puns) in a huge, cold loft into which black New York grit ceaselessly sifted through the grimy, tar spattered panes of a rectangular skylight.
This was at the top of a venerable industrial building with neither elevator nor hot water. The pay for being the "salad man", dishwasher, and garbage hauler at the Head was enough to buy him that one vast room, with a deep porcelain work sink fixed to the wall in one corner next to an unspeakably grimy and questionably functional toilet, behind a screen. He slept on an old army cot pushed against the wall.
But first you had to climb those stairs. He said they kept him in good condition, and certainly he had always been a lean man.
"You must have seen a doctor that time you fell down the stairs," I said into the phone; I knew about this because I had visited him shortly afterward and had asked about the bruises on his face. He had admitted that he'd been drunk, but added that being drunk was, for him, a rare occurrence (which, so far as I had ever observed, was true).
But that was years ago. Now, on the phone with me, he said that he no
longer had any contact with the doctor he had seen then. Several minutes
of exasperated haranguing later, he reluctantly volunteered the information
that there was a clinic nearby that he sometimes went to. I more or less
commanded him to go there next day and have his eyes examined. He said he
would
There was a small silence while I considered the idea of my father the
painter going blind, and he thought Robin thoughts, whatever they were.
"So how's everything?" he said.
This meant, How's your cat? Pop did not have, or at least did not customarily express, any great interest in the people in my life -- husband, stepchildren, editors, colleagues -- although when he said, "What's new with the mob?" he was asking for some word about my sister Liza. A brief bulletin always seemed to suffice.
The cat was different. When he asked about the cat, he really wanted to know.
He had, unofficially, a cat of his own. This was the cat at the Head's kitchen, Ketzela (so named by my Wasp, presumably Presbyterian raised father). According to the health code no cat should have lived in the restaurant kitchen. I pointed out the illegality once, being something of a goody-goody and inclined to follow rules because then people left me in peace to read books, which I did instead of almost everything else. In this -- the reading, not the rule following -- I was my father's daughter, as my mother had always (rather bitterly) remarked when she found me sprawled on my bed with a book. Also, like any intelligent child, I picked and chose the rules I obeyed, if you see what I mean.
It was okay, Pop said, about Ketzela; they had mice at the Head, and so the cat was a working cat, which made the code inapplicable. (Having cats myself, I was skeptical of the concept "working cat", but let it ride.)
Now, asked for cat news from New Mexico, I told Robin that Flakey, an apartment raised cat who had come West with us, was slowly getting used to the terrifying unfamiliarity of actual earth underfoot and no longer went about lifting his feet up almost to shoulder level in a vain effort not to step on the grass. Robin approved, and we parted on amicable terms.
He called me back a few days later to report the results of his visit to the clinic. "The doctor says it's ocular degeneration."
Great; I could have come up with that myself. "From what, though? What's causing it?"
A pause. Then he said, "He thinks it might be alcohol poisoning."
I hugged the phone closer, astonished. "Alcohol poisoning?
In your eyes?"
| Pictures From an Imaginary Exhibition | | Where Do You Shelve a Ghost? | | ToC | | Excerpts | | Journals | | Newsgroup |
 |
||
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||