Can You Hear Me Now?

it’s possible no one ever asks if

you want any post-war real estate you

can, by way of a bank, call your own. i

see a high-ceilinged walk-up, friends to bring

a bottle, carapace of books, nothing

to mow, a slip under the door to summon

the super and his wrench. i could have this

all wrong, your philosophy of belong.

maybe you do love her gardens but then,

maybe you are only rooted in your

vows, her sex. what to do with a bruised carcass

but pestle it under a grinding heel,

work the crushed seed until its essence

releases from this plot of ground, this story.

* * *

Face the Music

In 1951, Fred Astaire danced solo on the ceiling of a hotel room in the film, Royal Wedding. He wore dress pants, waistcoat, and a tuxedo shirt—a state of intimate undress, somehow, without his jacket and tie. In 1961, by the time my eldest brother, Bobby, was four years old, the film sequence was an incontrovertible fact, a thing that had come to be before him and was therefore even more real than the fact of himself. My brother was under the impression that my father had a pair of shoes that enabled him, too, to dance up the walls and upside down, because my father had told him so. He never had to prove it. They'd just watch the movie when it came on TV and Dad would say, "You know, I've got a pair of shoes like that up in my closet."

Remembering the regiment of shiny wingtips, held inanimate in their cedar shoe trees, it is easy to believe my brother believed one of the pairs to be an instrument of some limitless, magical adulthood he would one day inherit.

Born in 1925, my father came of age in Brooklyn, NY, in the Great Depression, and later breached adulthood as an infantryman and medic in Africa and Europe in WWII. Growing up, movies were accessible entertainment for the kid of a beat cop in the thirties. The Astaire films—for the dance numbers, yes, but also the cuff on a pair of chinos, the silk tie or bandana standing in for a belt, the cock of a fedora, the bouncy gait on a Manhattan street—these my father studied in the dark like sacred texts. By the time he went to war in 1943, my father was a scholar of the form, and Astaire his model for manhood.

I think of my father's love affair with the silver screen as narcotic, but I believe his devotion to the dancing of Fred Astaire to be transcendental, his reach for the ineffable. He was a writer all his life; words opened worlds for him, but they couldn't defy gravity.

Dad earned a bachelor's from City College and a masters in English from NYU on the GI Bill, and considered teaching. Instead, he became one of the post-WWII Mad Men of Madison Ave, starting, as the fable must, in the mailroom and working his way to Account Executive and Vice President, one of dozens, a Polish Catholic Bellow passing for Updike. When I picture my father in this era, I imagine him buying a newspaper or window shopping watchbands alongside Frank O'Hara, unknown to each other, both humming to the vibration of the subway under their feet, whistling to the same lunchtime tune of promise and prosperity in the honking taxis and clanging steel girders. There was glamour in getting a little drunk in the afternoon, evening yet rolled up like a magic carpet.

But the ‘70s were cruel, all promises unraveled. In 1970, I, the fifth of six, was hospitalized for meningitis, an outbreak that killed seven of eight infected children. The day I came home, clutching a shiny powder blue vinyl case with a get-well Dawn doll and wardrobe, my eldest brother went back into the hospital, out of remission from bone cancer. My mother’s “mother’s helper,” Mrs. Margaret Stewart, told me later that she’d prayed for my death, a kinder end than waking up a vegetable, she explained. I was four.

At twelve, waiting in an exam room with a bout of bronchial asthma, I riffled through my medical chart to find I’d lain in a coma for 29 days as a result of the meningitis. I’d been aware of the illness, and of my sole survivor-ship. I hadn't known about the coma.

“Shut that. That’s not for you to poke through,” my mother said.

I'd survived, and that was enough. Really, I'd slept through the entire ordeal. The burden had been on my parents, on my mother, on whose behalf all the whispered prayers had worked, not to hasten my death, as it turned out, but to save the family from the burden of perpetual suffering. I'd come to, after all, bright and whole. In memory I woke up alone, but also, as I so often would, to the sound of my mother's voice mid-story.

There were the other, typical tragedies: febrile seizures in the second oldest, and then in the youngest; a broken collarbone for the middle brother; my mother's mother's death, on the heels of my brother’s; and then her father's.

How did my parents navigate such fraught territory, after so auspicious a beginning—post-war Buicks and cocktail parties and Camelot? The answer’s in the editing. What made a good story took shape on our stage, at the dinner table. The rest hit the cutting room floor, got swept to the dark.

But how, actually, did they manage? My father would say, when he wanted to console my mother, he’d take her out for a steak and a drink. Nights after visiting hours at Sloan Kettering sitting at my eldest brother's bedside, they closed a lot of gin mills.

I know nothing about leaving your exhausted and emaciated eldest child in a hospital bed, sliding into a booth with a checkered tablecloth in midtown Manhattan, ordering a meal and drinks. I know nothing of the long drive home through the boroughs, bone-tired and hopeless, to a houseful of sleeping children.

I’ll never know about the absence of 29 days.

Silences, omissions. My father very rarely talked of his overseas experience of the war, his tour of duty, his absence. When he did speak, it was to entertain—an anecdote about strategic friendships with bigger, tougher GIs, or making do with Lucky Tiger aftershave in place of whisky. Nothing about the ropey four-inch scar from the shrapnel he took in the shoulder, nothing about the trench foot that made medieval weapons of his toenails, which had to be cut with an instrument like a bolt cutter for the rest of his life.

He never spoke to me of the 29 days I lay in a coma. I had gone away, and I had come back. Like him. If we didn’t talk about our absences, it was maybe because, for our own reasons, we couldn’t.

We knew things about one another, somehow: I know, though he never told me, that when he said he consoled my mother by taking her out for a steak and a cocktail, he also asked her to dance.

I know she loved to dance with him, even as she made the point that he was not a gifted dancer.

He was very romantic, your father, but truth be told…the most he could manage was the Brooklyn Shuffle.

The thing is, he’d never aspired to be a great dancer. His joy was borne of the fact of dance, as expressed in the magic of Fred Astaire: the evidence of human movement as art, the fulfilled promise of a body freed from the weight of the world, light as air, needing, wanting nothing, only air.

* * *

the movie star dances across the ceiling

and up the walls and your first born takes

it for fact, the movie being older

than he is and thereby more real. takes it

as true too that you have a pair of shoes

like fred’s in your closet, magical tokens

of the starlit adulthood he would

one day inherit, that you too watch glitter

from the moon where you hang everything.

mad man. twelve years on, grief would douse

your golden age in chaos but in nineteen sixty

the meaning of it all and all that will come

dances in a blue lens, projects upside down,

floats on a toddler’s astonished breath.

* * *

Burden

My father called me in the early evening of April 15th of 2000— something to tell me he was unable to do his taxes. His fingers were too swollen to hold the pencil.

His caginess around the filing of his taxes had become a family joke. One day the feds would be at the door, ha-ha. He laughed it off: he had a system. Indeed, beneath his orderly desk were MJB coffee cans packed tight with rolls of calculator paper, secured with rubber bands, labeled by year.

Secrets—my father was famous for them. Some were delicious to him, like the one a friend—best man at his wedding—kept for decades: two wives, two sets of children, the original ensconced in Connecticut, the bonus wife, in an apartment in the city. Most secrets, however, were strategic, or protective. The deepest dug, survivalist.

But age called him out. As for many, driving was the first skill to come into question. Very poorly sighted, legally blind in one eye since middle age, my father had never been a good driver (more dinner table humor—hilariously recountings of harrowing near-misses from the morning commute through Queens to Archbishop Molloy and St. Francis Prep, where my two brothers were each day delivered—miraculously!—unscathed before my father parked the Dodge Dart in Long Island City to catch the train into Manhattan:

…Dad took the right off Van Wyck so hard, kittens damn near rolled out the hole in the floor. Guy driving a truck gave us the finger and Dad told him he could go fuck himself, didn’t even drop his ash…

...at which point my mother, laughing, would warn the storyteller to watch his language at the table…kittens through the hole, not a metaphor—two of my father’s used blue sedans rusted out behind the passenger seat and hosted multiple litters…the half-inch ash-tipped filterless Camel as intrinsic to my father’s face as the bottom lip it was glued to.)

Mishaps escalated from fender dents to every left turn becoming a spin of the gun barrel. For the most part, however, and for a long time, my father held his secrets, as long as he held very still, something he was good at. Movement gave him away, but stillness, stillness kept his covert quarry safe. Eventually, he would deem it better to be judged deaf or senile than to reveal the true accounting of his losses.

Did he call me, or had I called him? It would make me feel so much better about making the decision to move my parents away from their Arizona home if I thought he’d been the one to call me. Because, I know, he had not wanted to move.

But I’d urged—after my father’s bypass surgery, after the removal of a kidney, after countless falls in the backyard—each one a story, a Shakespearean comedy ending in a little dance, wherein my mother, grateful as a spider with a fat housefly in her web, was quick with a beer or a gin and tonic for the neighbor who hoisted my father up after he hit his head or abraded a shin on a loose patio tile. The party continued, through my father’s physical demise, with nightly happy hours wherein the topic of conversation was where they might go when the time came—as if they were planning a second honeymoon, or discussing the making of a movie about themselves.

The move, when it happened, was grotesque. I snow-shoveled family snapshots, melted and fused, from steamer trunks into Hefty bags in my parents' Tempe garage in 110 degree heat. My mother wept inside, in the air conditioning, as my father, grey as an old tube sock, slept slumped in a chair in what had been the den, loose cables snaking the room. A macabre estate sale had left the previously meticulous carpet filthy and dotted with dead tree roaches, émigrés of the grapefruit and tangelo canopies. Their cats, neighborhood orphans adopted over the years, batted at the corpses, anticipating flutter.

Before dawn of the day of departure, on what would be one of the last direct flights from Phoenix to Redmond for several years to come, my mother woke me from a fitful sleep on the couch to drug and kennel the three cats. My parent’s electrician had agreed, a little bizarrely, to drive their Mercury Marquis to Oregon, but first he would drive us all to the airport. He kindly stayed to walk us through the ticket line, after which our two-wheelchair, three cat-kennel caravan was on its own.

At security, a TSA worker instructed me to remove each sedated cat so he could search the kennels. We held eye contact for a long moment. In my peripheral, my father sat in his chair, pale and unfocused, on the other side of the scanner, clutching his belt in his lap. I could hear my mother’s voice telling the story of their adventure even as it was unfolding, even as the edges of the story caught flame, probably to another TSA worker as the wand moved over her. I told my TSA worker he was welcomed to reach into the kennels himself and feel around. He peered into the mesh, reconsidered, and allowed me to wheel my mother, then return, dripping with sweat, to wheel my father and a yowling cat to the gate, our names ringing through the terminal over the loudspeaker:

Would passengers Robert Povey, Irene Povey and ***** ****** please come to Gate 26, your flight is boarded and ready for departure…

We pulled the elephant through the keyhole and transported ourselves and three decreasingly sedated cats from the Valley of the Sun to sunny Central Oregon, to a motel beloved to them from years of happy visits. They settled into their room with a balcony and a river view and a rosy plan to find a cozy new home. The next day, I got a call from my sister-in-law in New Jersey. My brother Bill had collapsed, liver failure.

He's on a waitlist for a transplant. Could you tell them?

I drove to their little dollhouse of a motel room and sat at the chrome-legged table, on which my mother had laid out a breakfast of grapefruit juice and bacon. Along with the aroma of coffee, the air was suffused with a whiff of the optimism I’d hoped for, but never expected—a sense of willingness, a resilience that somehow survived—no, generated—after the ordeal of the move. The heaviness that had been squeezing my mother into mania, that had been sitting on my father like a yoke, had lifted. Through the sliding glass doors, I saw two resident swans and their cygnets skimming the sun-glittered river.

Then I told them that their golden boy, their jewel, their smart, their funny son, the triumphant understudy to their beloved deceased eldest, was sick and dying at age 49. In that instant, with the speed of a camera shutter, I witnessed my father retreat. He didn't move from his chair—he didn’t move at all—but he vanished, utterly, from the room and its terrible moment. He blinked quickly several times, placed both his hands palms down on the cool, smooth table and spoke of my living brother in the past tense. Not a proclamation, just an ordinary phrase, conversational, unreflective of the devastating news I'd just delivered, wherein the verb tense he used for his son was was, not is.

I saw the fissure open, then, between absence and loss, saw my father run out of story, find himself at the unbreachable edge of what can, and can no longer, be borne. I watched from the other side as he slid out from under the weight, let himself go.

* * *

a man comes to your apartment to buy

your lionel trains. i’ve never seen them.

now i know there are two camps—lionel cars

and american flyers, opposing teams:

yankees or dodgers, blackjack or beemans

pick a side and go down bloody, that’s what

love looks like in the black and white movie

of your lonesome boyhood. i often wonder

how you come by those trains, if your atheist

old man set them running on the cold parlor

floor christmas morn, choo! choo! or maybe