An Unfinished Season (3 page)

Will you think about it? my mother asked.

Some business you lose, never comes back. And some days you just wish to hell you'd never gotten into it.

The vacation? she said.

Just give it to them on a silver platter. Here, take the damned business, you run it, you think you're so smart.

I'd like it so much—

I'm sorry, what did you say? my father said.

To go away,
just us two. You remember Havana, our honeymoon, the fun we had on the boat, we met that couple from Kansas City and played bridge in the afternoon and dined at the captain's table and then, our last day in Havana, we all went shopping together and you bought me the antique cigarette box.

It wasn't antique, my father said with a smile.

I want to go back, my mother said.

We'll see, my father replied.

I'll go
by myself
then, my mother said, but we both knew, my father and I, that she never would.

 

So much was out of sight, between the lines, a narrative vanishing like the Frenchmen on horseback where the wallpaper met the doorway. What remained was the last inch of feather on the Frenchman's hat. At nineteen you are bored witless by the family stories, the Havana honeymoon story and the others, varied according to the point being made and the response that was expected. Then suddenly, without notice, you learned how the world worked, Tom Felsen tapping telephones with the assistance of the FBI, a favor given for a favor received, Tom “rough” in his determination to keep the lid on, owing to the unsavory elements, present in Quarterday along with everywhere else; so he flew into the boards with his stick high, a good man to have on your side—and somehow all this had to do with my father's business and the strike. My father's misprision was breathtaking and he must have had some idea himself along those lines because when the specifics were announced, I had been banished to the kitchen. But I did not fail to notice my father implicitly comparing himself to Winston Churchill, heroically struggling to hold the line at Yalta while Franklin Roosevelt absent-mindedly gave away half of Europe to the tyrant Stalin, thanks to that bastard Hiss. Naturally the presumption of it was comical; even at nineteen I found it comical. I was less amused at his martyred just-give-it-to-them-on-a-silver-platter conclusion; that was unworthy of him. Yet I knew without a doubt that my father had a hard-won understanding of how the world worked—and chose to dispense this knowledge with circumspection, a worldly Croesus distributing his wealth a dime at a time.

My father was preoccupied all that winter and spring, mostly silent at the dinner table, and later alone with a book until well into the evening. I watched him worry and he seemed to age before my eyes, settling into the peevish funk of an old man. I was watching him in order to learn what it was to be a man, with a man's burdens, how to behave in adversity. I assumed this meant acting from the center of yourself, discovering your own natural motion and in this discovery learning just how far apart it was from the world's natural motion, and how estranged you were likely to be. Would you and the world be on speaking terms? I knew that as a family we were on the outside of things, separated from each other and from the wider world, so mysterious and out of reach. At nineteen you inhabit a multitude of personalities, trying them on like hats, Siegfried Sassoon and Jake Barnes and Bogart and the great tactician Odysseus and Fats Waller and the bon vivant in chemistry class, all of them observed by the nurse in the nerves ward and Lady Brett and Ingrid Bergman and Calypso and Billie Holiday and the blond girl who bounced on the trampoline in the gym after school. Your father is the shadow of these multiple personalities, physically up close, his spirit far, far away. What animated
him
at nineteen? What lurid fiction has he made of his own early memories? Surely more than icicles as thick as your arm and the wind howling like wolves. Yet when my father said, “Sometimes you wish to hell you'd never gotten into it,” he sounded as if he meant life itself.

At nineteen you dread the occasion of courage in the way the Catholic Church dreads the occasion of sin, and when the moment came it helped if you had an idea of how the world worked. What it valued and what it threw away. How much you could get away with. You knew that the gods—perverse, malignant, cunning, capricious—were perched in the trees like vultures, eager to pick apart the virtuous and the wicked alike. Even at nineteen you knew there were occasions of high complexity, come and gone in an instant; and that there was a choice to be made and you made it or didn't make it or made the wrong one, a consequence of the hat you wore that day. The films, the books, and my father hinted at the wider world, soon to be at hand, though perhaps not this year.

I had no idea what was in store—what goods were on the shelves and what birds were crowding the trees. Surely they would differ from my father's. Meanwhile, I tried to coax life itself in the way that Fats Waller coaxed a blue note from his piano never looking at his hands.

M
Y FATHER
was five feet ten inches tall and wide at the chest, built like a stevedore with the unhurried stride of a farmer. He never looked entirely comfortable in city clothes. He never wore a hat. His heavy Goya face looked as if it belonged on an alcalde or other unsympathetic municipal official. My mother was quite beautiful, tall and slender as a fashion model. They made a striking couple, her eyes green against a luminous complexion, his two points of the blackest ink, wide-set in a weatherbeaten face. My father's bearing—you could almost say his “standing”—reinforced his ominous physical appearance. He was attractive to women because it looked as if he could handle himself and anyone else, and because he seemed to withhold so much. Women suspected, correctly, that he had a sentimental streak, something my mother had discovered years before on their honeymoon trip to Havana.

He had bought her a close-fitting ebony cigarette box decorated with a seventeenth-century Italian street scene etched in silver, Giacomo della Porta's palazzo for Prince Chigi in Piazza Colonna, Rome. The loving way he handled it made her think that he had actually bought it for himself, though, truth to tell, seventeenth-century Italian street scenes were not in his repertoire of interests, so far as she knew them. When she asked him about it, my father smiled and said he loved the tiny figures, the cavaliers in their flared jackets, the fountain, and the formality of the palazzo itself, five stories of princely living, each horizontal row of windows of a different size and shape so that it seemed to him that five separate floors had been laid one on top of the other like a stack of books on a bedside table. He thought it represented a world unto itself, all other worlds out of sight and out of mind, and so much to imagine of the interior of the princely stories, the bedrooms and the reception rooms, the dining rooms with their glittering chandeliers, the chandeliers no doubt as brittle as the conversations that went on beneath them.

And also, the box was beautifully constructed, airtight it seemed.

It feels good in your hand, he said, and went on to speculate what such a valuable object was doing in a nondescript shop on the Calle Obispo in Havana. He imagined it the last heirloom in the estate of an impoverished aristocrat, perhaps a descendant of Prince Chigi himself, exiled by a vengeful pope to the humid and undisciplined Caribbean, sea of hated English pirates. My mother listened to this aria with mounting exasperation and said at last, But you must have it for your desk at the office—and realized at once that she had offended him.

It's for you, he replied stiffly and then amended—a tactful amendment, for he had noticed her dismay—for
us,
for our bedroom or the cocktail table in the den, somewhere we can see it every day and remember Havana, our honeymoon. She was grateful for his diplomacy and said, Of course, what a good idea. With women generally, my father was courtly and always managed to ask questions that intrigued them. Do you ever wish you had been born in a different century, in a country different from our own? Could you ever have married an Italian from Italy and gone there to live, changing your citizenship, speaking Italian? My mother would watch his performance and roll her eyes, but she liked it exceedingly when she overheard a friend say, Doesn't Teddy Ravan have the most wonderful smile? Yes, my mother thought, and the more effective because he used it so seldom.

In a room full of people, your eyes went to him at once because of his actorly quality of stillness, his face immobile as iron. Of course people knew that our house had been his family's homestead and that his father had been a farmer but beyond that his early life was a mystery; not interesting, he said on the rare occasions he was asked, rising with the roosters and retiring with the hens. He seldom spoke of his childhood except for the unspecified adventures with Tom Felsen and the endless winters, the wind, and the wolves—fictitious wolves, I later discovered, wolves having disappeared from the northern Illinois prairie before he was born. However, the west wind was constant. I had the feeling that he and his father were at odds and I was not surprised, unable to imagine my father submitting to any authority except, conceivably, his mother's authority. Then, many years later, I discovered a book in his library, a birthday present many years before, my father to his father: “To the best dad a guy ever had.” This was not his voice at all, and I imagined him hesitating over the inscription, finally writing swiftly in what I am certain was a flood of emotion. But what do I know of this? The childhood of our parents is forever inscrutable, the cave within the cave of our own. The light's too dim, the dancing shadows unreliable, fundamentally unstable, even the impromptu photographs and private letters somehow contrived. These years might as well have occurred in the sixteenth century, the salient facts etched on a cigarette box and sold at auction, the box moving from hand to hand, continent to continent, like Hammett's Maltese falcon. I was very young when my grandfather died, though I remember the flowers, the crowded church, the closed casket, and my father entirely composed and reading the eulogy in a gruff voice, his body rigid, a slight flutter of his hands the only show of emotion.

 

My father was trained as a lawyer. He got to Dartmouth on a scholarship endowed by an industrialist from Lake Forest. He got to law school the same way, and returned naturally to Illinois to practice. His father-in-law was eager for him to join a New York firm and offered to open the usual doors but my father turned him down without a thought; yet whenever he was irritated by some aspect of his business life he always said, I should have gone the hell to New York when I had the chance. “New York” in our family was code for the greener grass, the pot at the end of the rainbow, or the successful inside straight, though as a concept it brought only sarcasm from my disappointed mother. There was
no chance in this world
that your father would have gone to live in New York or any other foreign city; he's Illinois bred, and born, and does not feel safe anywhere elsess. Illinois is his native soil, the prairie and the cornfields and the waving fields of grain and the wolves and so forth and so on, and Chicago. So it was inevitable, my mother said, that he would join a small Chicago firm, not one of the established La Salle Street concerns, but a grittier firm on the Far North Side whose founding partners were a retired circuit-court judge and his nephew, a former assistant state's attorney. Uncle and nephew practiced political law and hired my father to do other work, outside work that did not involve representations to City Hall, the City Council, the county Board of Supervisors, and the tax assessor's office. My father claimed that the Hollywood Avenue offices of Greenslat & Greenslat were a microclimate of Chicago justice, and in them he learned how the weather worked, how the rain was made, and how the rain was paid for, and which crops flourished and which didn't and why. Chicago was a lawyer's paradise.

Not a wife's paradise, my mother said.

The city was dirty. Not a tree. We lived a mile from the lake. I had time on my hands. God, I was lonely. Your father told me to be patient, that when we had a stake we would move to Quarterday, renovate his family's house, begin a family of our own. My father offered to help but Teddy didn't want his help. So we remained in Chicago for five years, saving what we could, your father dreaming of Quarterday. And then Andy came riding to our rescue.

Early in his practice, my father was retained by the owner of a suburban printing business, routine corporate work that included union negotiations. Andres Carillo had a knack for infuriating labor unions, and there were three of them at his plant in the western lakes region. My father excelled at labor law and eventually Andy Carillo asked him to join his board of directors, and then to give up private practice altogether and work full-time as general manager and counsel to the corporation. These discussions took place on Friday afternoons at the Arlington Park racetrack, where Andy had a box. My father was also a dedicated horseplayer, so he was happy to meet his client each Friday at noon, a fine lunch at the Post and Paddock and then the races, all the while talking business and horses. He always had a tip on a horse from Judge Greenslat; and later in his life my father loved to reminisce about his afternoons at the track, the smell of the turf, the excitement when the horses broke from the gate, everyone rising, fists in the air, an animal roar from the grandstand. Andy Carillo was a widower and childless and gave my father to understand that he would inherit the business “in due course,” meaning upon Andy's death or retirement.

You're like a son to me, Andy told my father.

You're the reason this business is as successful as it is. You've kept the taxes low and the unions down.

And I like the way you bet, Andy went on. Study the field, study the odds, study the track, and go with your findings. Screw the hunches.