"So tell me, son, I got your letter you sent. Can I ask, what made you want to contact me?"
"I don't know, really. I guess I feel I missed you in our life. And I have been wondering what became of you - and why you left."
What followed was a long, rambling account of his early days with my mother (bliss), how they met (he was a rodeo clown), and where things went sour (my juvenile delinquent uncles moved in with us and turned our country life into a holocaust). I should have been intrigued by my father's time with my mother, should have asked for more details about my trouble-making uncles and their role in the dissolution of that bliss and my family, but I was piqued instead by how they met.
"Wow," I said, after he'd come to a stall in his narrative, "were you really a rodeo clown?"
He seemed taken aback, even a little irritated. "Yes," he said. "I used to ride in the rodeo, but I fell off once and broke my hip in a coupla places and it never healed properly. Couldn't ride any more. But I always loved the rodeo. And clowning can be a lot of fun."
"But how did you meet my mother from that?"
"Well," he paused, "they used to hold the rodeos in the Boston Garden. There was a bar there - Rafters, I think - where the rodeo people would go after the show. Your mother was with a friend and her pretty laugh caught my ear, and I introduced myself. She had been at the rodeo with her friend (Eileen, I think her name was) checking out the fellas, and when I explained my role she said she remembered my routine and antics. And we pretty much hit it off after that. After we ditched Eileen with a clown friend of mine."
My father was in the Navy at the time and had just come back from the Korean War; he was stationed at the nearby Charlestown Naval Yard. He said that because he came from Missouri, and grew up around horses, including riding wild ones, he signed on to the rodeo, which was always looking for riders when it was in town.
Without being rude or confrontational, for that was not my intent, I wanted to ask him the key and obvious question: How could he have deserted a young wife and four little boys - even with all the aggravation of dealing with two delinquents?
There was a long pause, during which I thought I could hear my father sobbing. I heard Linda say to him, "Do you want me to have him call back some other time?" Then he came back on.
"The thing you need to know, son," he began, and I bristled a bit by his insistence on calling me 'son', "I really loved your mother. We had a good thing."
He continued with what may very well have been the most important information of my life. I tried to be attentive to my lost-now-found father's words, the plaintive tone, the agony of self-discovery, words I had longed to hear from him for 25 years. However, I was befogged and hopelessly distracted by Laura's waltzing, but more, by subtleties of her general presentation - her dishevelment (stretched nylons, hair askew), her scent (Claire de Lune ?), her choice of dress (flowing and flowery, accessible), and just her unexpected joyfulness. Or maybe it was kust the contrast to the Dylan tunes I'd been listening to before I conked out. I was prepared to accept a reasonable explanation for all of this (out drinking with colleagues after work), except I knew that she had been assigned to cover the school board meeting that evening (it was usually my beat, but I'd had to interview the mayor about the budget crisis at the last minute), and a more sober affair than that could not be had. She'd been out drinking - clearly - but with whom?
My father was sobbing again. "We had a good thing," he repeated. "We had a nice home. I had plenty of work as a carpenter. But it all began to fall apart after your grandmother sent out those two hoodlums to keep them out of juvenile detention back in Boston. Those two got into mischief almost immediately, and then, on top of four toddlers to feed - well, I...."
I held the receiver to my ear, but I had stopped concentrating. Laura was no longer dancing, but she was still beaming. She stood in front of me and frantically gestured for me to continue conversing with my father. I had never seen her lit up so brightly. And it occurred to me, all at once, that she had found it - what we had talked about for several months - her freedom. She was 25 years old and not even born the last time I had spoken with my father. And she had been raised conflicted. Her traditional Cape Verdean background meant that her role as a woman was to be limited to raising children and cooking three meals a day (her mother was a marvelous cook; I'll bet fish vied to be on her plate), But Laura was, in fact, the daughter to a woman who had herself defied convention in the end, striking out on her own, and telling her unfaithful husband to take a hike, in their delightfully musical creole Laura had two brothers who had received solid educations and had become successful engineers, and her mother pushed her to achieve as well, which led to her becoming the first woman in her extended family to go to university. She had studied journalism and, after graduation, wound up with a job as a reporter at The Daily Standard of New Bedford, once the home of whaling, though now a fishing hub.
"I drink too much now," my father was saying, and in the background I could hear Johnny Cash strumming, which reminded me of all the times I had listened to country-western music, while sitting around with my mother and stepfather, drinking for hours, and talking politics and popular sociology. Then I heard my father repeating a question and I knew he had caught me not listening.
"I'm sorry, what was that?" I asked. Laura waved and slid off to the bedroom with a slight stagger. I almost shouted after her to tell me who she'd been out with, but I knew it wouldn't make a difference any more.
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