I still remember standing on the platform at the train depot and watching my dad wave to us when he came home from World War Ii. I was shocked. My parents are small people. My mom is five-two and has never cleared ninety pounds. But I’d grown up with my mom and was used to her size. My dad was a different matter.
I’d seen a lot of John Wayne and
Ronald Reagan-two of the many brave movie stars who hadn’t actually gone to war-war movies, and so I just figured my dad would be this big heroic kind of guy, too. He’d been gone a long time. Well, he wasn’t big and heroic-looking. In fact, he looked like a kid. He was five-six and weighed maybe 130 and had dishwater blond hair. His khaki uniform looked too big for him, gave him a vulnerability that made him seem even less soldierly. He was an utter stranger to me. The last time I’d seen him I’d been seven years old. I felt sort of ashamed of him, actually, how young and vulnerable he looked in the midst of all these other towering Gi’s. Why couldn’t I have a dad who looked like Robert Mitchum? And I’ve always been ashamed of myself for feeling that. I know that when I see him in his coffin over at the Fitzpatrick Funeral Home, that’s what I’ll think of, how I betrayed him in my heart that first day he came back from the war.
The other thing I always remember about him was how he used to jitterbug with my mother on the linoleum in the kitchen in those good giddy days right after the fighting stopped. They’d play the Andrews Sisters and Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and they’d dance for hours. But he managed. They stayed home a lot, as if they didn’t want to share each other with anybody else. They’d have a quart of Hamms beer on the oilcloth-covered table (i’ve always loved the smell of oilcloth) and the amber eye of the radio would burn far into the night as music poured from its speakers.
That wasn’t too long ago but it was hard to believe it was the same guy. Bald, stooped, nearsighted. The war hadn’t taken nearly as much out of him as his various jobs did afterward. Just as I’d barely recognized him that day on the train platform, I had a hard time recognizing him these days. Small to begin with, now he seemed to shrink even smaller in his gray Penney’s overcoat and blue Irish wool walking cap.
I got in the car. The heater was on. So was Bill Haley. Somehow my dad had picked up a fondness for rock and roll, one not shared by my mom. He was watching Darin slip and slide up to his trailer.
“I wonder what the hell went wrong with him,” my dad said. “I always thought he’d have a nice future. And he’s got such a nice wife and all.” He shook his head. “I s’pose it’s growin’ up out here. How colored people get treated, I mean.” Dad had all the insecurities that go along with being a small and somewhat delicate man. But instead of using them to hate or bully, he’d turned them into empathy and wisdom. He always watched the Cbs Evening News with Douglas Edwards and watched what the white cops were doing to black people trying to ride whites-only city buses. Stuff like that got to him as much as it did me. Even my mom, who didn’t vote because she hated all politicians equally, had tears in her eyes when she saw little Negro kids blasted off the streets with fire hoses and their parents clubbed to their knees.
“I found him over at Paddy’s.”
Dad made a face. “I wonder why he does that. He knows they’ll just throw him out.
Poor bastard.”
He put the coupe in reverse, we whipped backward into a small drive, and then turned back toward town. The coupe was warm and snug.
“Sykes is lookin’ for you.”
“Sykes?” I said.
“Yeah. He called the warehouse and asked if I knew where you were. And then he called your mom out to the house.”
“He say what he wanted?”
“Said you shouldn’t have left Kenny Whitney’s house before he told you to. He said he could arrest you for leaving. What a dipshit that guy is.
I had a captain like him in the army. Always struttin’ around and actin’ like he was on top of things. Drove a truck straight off a mountainside when were in Italy. Luckily, he was the only one who died.”
“Well, I’m going to see Judge Whitney first. That’s been my plan all day but I can’t get in, she’s so damned busy.”
He looked at me, this old man who had yet to see his fiftieth birthday. “She been any nicer to you lately?”
I smiled. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
“Well, I don’t have to tell you how the Whitneys are.”
“Eastern money,” I said. “Big Eastern money. The only thing I could never figure out is why her branch moved clear the hell out here to Iowa.”
We were passing a supermarket on the edge of town. Dad read some of the prices in the windows out loud. “Gosh, look. Pork steak is thirty-three cents a pound. And bacon is three for a buck. Guy’d have to be a millionaire if he wanted to eat a good steak these days.” As a child of the Depression, Dad watched food prices the way other men watched stock prices. Overseas and dreaming of home, the men of his generation had imagined heaven on earth when they returned home. They hadn’t known that heaven had inflation and bad spells of recession, too.
“You know Ross, the guy I work with? You know what he paid for his new Mercury? Three thousand dollars. Hell, we paid that for the house when we bought it.”
“You were going to tell me why the Whitneys came out here.”
“Oh. I forgot. The Whitneys. Well, the judge’s grandfather got caught in a land swindle, one of those deals that’s so complicated it gives you a headache to think about. Anyway, what it came down to was that her grandfather cheated the government and they were going to bring him to trial and everything, but the family chipped in and gave the cash back and got the government to drop the charges. And then they gave him a lot of money and told him to get lost somewhere on the frontier. Iowa was as far as he got.”
I laughed. “So that story she hands out about her grandfather coming out here because he wanted to be a gentleman farmer-”
“A total crock.”
We were in town and headed toward the one-story corner brick building where I have my office around back. Dad pulled into the parking lot and said, “Mom wants to know when you’re coming over for dinner.”
“How about next Tuesday?”
“Spaghetti night. She makes the best.”
Mom did housework with military-style orderliness. For years, Tuesday night had been spaghetti night just as Tuesday day had been housecleaning day, just as Wednesday was Swiss steak night and grocery shopping day. She did all these things on a budget so minuscule I felt like a spendthrift every time I bought a candy bar.
Dad said, “You didn’t mention Kenny.”
I looked over at him. “I don’t think he killed her.”
“That isn’t what I was thinkin’ of.”
“Oh?”
“I was thinkin’ of how he was always beating you up.
Ever since you were in kindergarten together. And I could never protect you and I felt like hell about it.
I remember the time he broke your glasses and I drove out to their mansion and I was ready to be all pissed and everything but when I got inside there I was really intimidated. The way they looked at me and talked to me. It should’ve made me even madder. But it just kind of beat me down. I shoulda stuck up for you a lot better, but I didn’t. All he did, Kenny’s old man, was scratch out this check and hand it to me and tell me to never come out there again. I felt ashamed of myself, I really did, kiddo. I really did.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “You did the best you could, Dad. I wouldn’t have done any better.”
Then he circled back. “So how come you don’t think he killed her?”
“I’m not sure. Just a feeling, I guess.”
He thought a moment and said, “You know what I shoulda done the day I was out at their mansion?”
“What?”
“I had real muddy shoes on. I took them off at the door. I shoulda tracked mud all the way into his den.”
I laughed at the picture of my small father leaving big mud prints on the mansion floor.
It was like watching a really funny Daffy Duck cartoon.
“Well, kiddo,” he said, glancing at his Timex. “I better head back.”
I watched him pull away, and then I walked over to the imperious Judge Whitney’s chambers, the same Judge Whitney whose grandfather had been a federal land swindler.