Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
toms of depression, riven with terror that within a few years I was going to be drafted
and sent overseas to die in the jungle. My father found a psychiatrist specializing in
teenagers and sent me on the bus into Manhattan once a week to see him, clutching the
$25 check that was the doctor's fee. (Yep, that was a long time ago.)
This went on for a couple of years, and I don't know if the therapy did any good or if
I just grew up a little bit (though the fears were certainly rational enough). In any case,
I was a reluctant patient; my recollection is the doctor and I spent most of our sessions
playing chess. I do know I felt preoccupied with the money.
There were a few blowups—I was a teenager, this was the sixties—but we made it
through my high school graduation without too much more than the usual amount of
conflict. He hated my long hair, didn't much care for my cheerleader girlfriend, and was
suspicious of my friends, whom he was sure smoked pot. (He was right about that.) It
was in later years that a kind of chill settled over us. I wasn't home much—not enough,
according to him; I didn't call my mother enough. (Years later I learned that my mother's
nickname for me was “the Phantom” and that she and her sister, Claire, referred to me
that way routinely: “Heard from the Phantom?” Claire would ask. “Not lately,” my mom
nearly always responded.) I wasn't being enough of a family member. I wasn't, I don't
know, loyal. Dad and I weren't enemies, just a little distant.
When my mother died, they had been living in a cookie-cutter house in a subdivision
outside of Atlanta for no other reason, really, than to be close to my brother; his wife,
Lynne; and Jacob, my parents' only grandchild. After he returned there from the funeral
in New York, he was besieged by well-meaning neighbors bringing casseroles and in-
viting him to attend their Baptist churches and accept Jesus Christ as his savior. That's
when I started suggesting he might rather spend his time where he would never have
to drive; where he could go to Lincoln Center or Broadway or the Metropolitan Museum
or Madison Square Garden on a whim; where he'd find people to whom the name Ralph
Branca meant something; where he'd have access to decent pizza, corned beef, and ba-
gels and lox; and, though I didn't say so explicitly, where he and I could settle the hash
between us before it got to be too late.
My parents were married for fifty years, and my mother was very sick for forty of
them. My father cared for her. It was exalted of him, nearly saintly—I say this without
irony—because her illness ruined not just her life but his, and when I say ruined I mean
in the sense of poisoned; the burden was so profound that it infused even his moments of
pleasure with a sense of anguish and doom. When I was nineteen, my uncle Jack, Claire's
husband, made a confession to me. If I were your father, he said, I would have up and
left. That was almost thirty years before my mother died.
