My Fathers Four Kids

Out of my father's four kids, my half-sister Jeanne had the roughest, most conflicted relationship with him.

Jeanne was Dad's first child, born while my father was in the South Pacific, fighting the Japanese.  Dad often told the story of how he found out he was a father.  He was coming down a muddy road in the jungle, returning from a "push" (Marine-speak for a military offensive) when his unit came upon a group of Marines headed the other way, going into the fight my father was just leaving.

One of the Marines in the opposite column was a friend and he shouted to my father, "Hey, Slim Jim!  You're a father!  I just heard it over the Mosquito Network!  Your wife had a little girl!"  The Mosquito Network was set up by the armed services to give soldiers in the field a feeling of connection with America.  Big band performances were recorded, and so were personal announcements and messages to the soldiers from loved ones back home.  The LP records were shipped to the South Pacific and played over short wave radio.  That's how it came to be announced that Slim Jim now had a daughter named Jeanne.

My father returned from the war filled with the violence and aggression that the Marines and the enemy had instilled in him.  Things did not go well with his young daughter.  Now four years old, Jeanne had been raised by her mother and grandmother -- a household of women.  Her father arrived as an invading alien presence and she was not happy about it.

On the first night, Jeanne walked right into her mother's bedroom, as she often did, hoping to sleep with Mommy.  To her abject horror, this alien creature called "Dad" had taken her place.  Her eyes widened as she realized neither of them had any clothes on.   Dad yelled at her to get out. 

There was another story about those early years that Jeanne and my father liked to tell at family gatherings.  They would trade off in mid-story, each one handing portions of the narrative to the other.  And they both laughed as if it were hilarious.  

But it wasn't.  It was a horror story that we were all being encouraged to view as funny to help the two of them deny the stark underlying reality.

Here it is:

Dad was sitting in front of the radio, listening to a ball game as he spread red hot horse raddish over crackers and devoured them.  Jeanne appeared before him and said she wanted some.  Dad said she couldn't have any because the horse radish was too hot.  Jeanne insisted.  Dad denied her.  Finally, Jeanne went ballistic.  As Dad liked to tell it, Jeanne had been spoiled by living in a house full of women.  Any time she was refused something, she threw a shrill tantrum and got her way.  Dad decided it was time to teach Jeanne a lesson.

Jeanne would lean close to Dad as he told this story, her eyes shining with amusement.  Except if you looked closely it was not joyful.  It was amusement that fought desperately to hide her darker feelings.  "And you taught me, all right, didn't you Dad?"

She would bray laughter and Dad would return a knowing chuckle until someone would plead, "So tell us what happened!"  Jeanne would nudge my father and say, "Tell 'em, Dad."

And so Dad told of how he watched Jeanne pitch a fit.  "It was incredible.  She was bouncing off the walls and ceiling, screaming because that always worked before, she always got her way.  So finally I said, 'Fuck it!  You want some?  Okay, here ya go.'"  Dad shoveled a heaping pile of mouth blistering horse radish onto a cracker and shoved it into Jeanne's hollering mouth.  

Jeanne's eyes popped wide with astonishment and then she shrieked -- not a tantrum scream this time, a scream of pure agony as she rushed to the bathroom to throw up.

We did our best to laugh, and Jeanne encouraged us, leaning against my father and saying affectionately, "Oh, Dad..."

All of us kids were abused to varying degrees by our father, but Jeanne got the worst of it by far.  When we all reunited in California, my half-brother Jim was much more adept at handling Dad.  This was in part because Dad walked out of his first marriage when Jimmy was very young, so he did not have the traumatic memories that Jeanne had.

When she became an adult, Jeanne and my father had long periods of sustained closeness that would inevitably be disrupted by a fight or fit of rage from Dad.  Jeanne's method of dealing with Dad was to withdraw.  Completely.  She would not come see him or return his calls for months at a time.  Once they did not talk for more than a year.

This was a passive-aggressive move, not the best one for resolving conflicts, but it inflicted considerable anxiety on my father.  He would talk incessantly about Jeanne, wonder why she had cut him off, because in Dad's mind he was always the injured party, never the aggressor.  It was fascinating to watch Dad rewrite events as he described them -- even when I had been there to witness them.  He recast himself as an innocent, a cool-headed loving father who thirsted for tranquility.  In truth, he desperately wanted to be that kind of father, but constantly fell short, and he knew it.

One time when they had not talked for months, my father pulled his car next to Jeanne's at an intersection.  He frantically waved at her, rolled down the window, and called out to her, but Jeanne just stared straight ahead and drove off when the light turned green.  Dad was devastated.  Years later I asked Jeanne about the incident.  "Of course I saw him," she said.  "I ignored him because I knew it would drive him crazy."

And yet they loved each other.  In the good times, there was nobody more fun to be around than Jeanne and Dad.  

In my teenage years I collected silent movies -- by Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin.  There was no better audience than Dad and Jeanne.  They howled to the heavens with laughter.  Then I asked Jeanne to be in the Super Eight silent comedies that I was making with my Yashica Super 8 Camera.  Jeanne was hilarious!  A born actress!  Any time she came to our house I stuck her in one of my movies.  Sometimes she wasn't in the mood and I would pout, refusing to talk to her.  

The zenith of our cinematic experiments was Return of the Tramp, a silent movie starring my sister Tracey in Charlie Chaplin makeup.  Tracey was fantastic -- the spitting image of Chaplin.  My father was in it, too.  For years he had begged me to put him in a movie.  I finally granted his wish by casting him as a bartender in a scene with Jeanne, who played "Lil -- The Dance Hall Queen."  Jeanne wore an outrageous curly wig and gyrated so hilariously my father kept cracking up while the camera was rolling.  "Dad, you gotta stop laughing!" I admonished.  "I can't help it," he kept bleating.  "She's so damn funny!"

When I was 13, my father, Jeanne, Jimmy, and his best friend Gary all went on a trip to Juarez, Mexico.  They came back with an assortment of outlandish souvenirs and an even more outlandish set of stories about their experiences.  They had been drinking in a restaurant off the town square when someone started a contest about who could find the craziest souvenir.  One by one, they disappeared into the teeming stalls of vendors and came back with their trophies:  a bamboo and wire bird cage, a velvet Elvis painting, a bullfighter's cap, a gold painted plaster replica of Michelangelo's David.  Then, when properly lubricated, they all went to the cock fights.  Gary was a little too lubricated because halfway through a match he suddenly disappeared from the top row bleacher they were seated on.  "There he is!"  Jeanne cried, point to the ground some ten feet below where Gary lay flat on his back, out cold. 

As I listened to these tales at age 14 they seemed like the most exciting adventures one could possibly imagine.  So I began agitating.  "I want to go to Mexico with you guys!"  Jeanne became my ally, "We have to take David," she said with a wicked laugh.

And so, a year later we went to another Mexican border town, Nogales.  My mother did not go and neither did my sister, Tracey.  But Dad's first wife, Jean -- mother to both Jeanne and Jim -- came.  My father had not seen his first wife in more than 25 years.  At one point as we walked the streets of Nogales, Dad and Jean fell behind us and talked for a long time about their two kids and how proud they were of both of them.  Later I heard Jimmy and Jeanne whispering about how wonderful it was to see their parents reunited, if only for a weekend.  It's the irrational heartfelt dream of many kids from broken homes: to see their divorced parents reconciled.

In the early morning hours we ended up in a Mexican nightclub.  An emcee with a hideous comb-over introduced a series of singers wearing ill-fitting wigs.  Jeanne loved them all.  I can still hear her laugh, reverberating across the club, filled with her lust for the absurd.  That crazy nonsensical chaotic night was one of the greatest in my entire life. 

On our way back to the hotel in Phoenix, we stopped at a gas station.  They still had gas station attendants in those days and one came out to greet us.  He had a red baseball cap and about half his teeth tucked behind his unshaven cheeks.  As he focused his bloodshot eyes upon us, Dad called out, "Ahoy, Bucko!  We're in need of some high test!"  I remember Jeanne doubling over with laughter and saying, "He does look like a Bucko!"

She doubled over again the night my father died.  Not with laughter, but with grief.  Dad was already in a coma when she came through the door and the sight of him in the living room in a hospital bed caused her to break into violent sobs.  "Oh, Dad..." she said with such stricken sadness.  She remained at his side all night, until he drew his last breath at 3:30 in the morning.  Even after he died, she stayed with him, gently stroking the curly black hair on Dad's icy forearm and talking to him in gentle tones about all of their unfinished business.  

Jeanne taught me that relationships are complicated.  People are not made up of one emotional color, but many colors.  Their worst behavior is not the sum of who they are.  Neither is their best behavior.  All of her life, Jeanne yearned for the father who had at times been so cruel to her.  Yearned to be with him, to be close, until she could not stand it anymore and had to go away for a time.  But she always came back.

Just as she always come back to me in the night as I lie in my bed, unstuck in time, traveling through all of the moments of my life.  So often Jeanne is there, with her grand laugh, her love of the absurd, and her love of me and her brother and my sister, Tracey. 

My Mother

I first began writing it as a story about my mother being struck by a brain tumor and the how she dealt with the impact of this tragedy.  But as I was writing the first episode I began to realize the memoir could be much more than that.  I could use the last year of my mother's life as a narrative spine from which a series of flashbacks would sprout to tell a more expansive story of my family.  

The climax of the saga would be the last week of my mother's life, which she spent in my bedroom before dying with my sister and me at her side. 

I hit upon this approach four years ago, while visiting my mother's home town in Ireland.  It was Easter in Blessington, a small farming community just south of Dublin.  On Sunday I climbed the bell tower of our family church, pulled the rope, and rang the bell for my Mom.  It was a profoundly moving experience.

My mother is the hero of The Birds That Fly Backwards.  She was the one who held the family together.  She endured my father's emotional abuse and shielded her children from the many nasty ways in which he betrayed her.  My mother forced my father to strike a bargain to save their marriage.  For the sake of the children.  That phrase has become a cliche.  But reducing it to a cliche denies the painful emotions associated with such a pact.  

My sister and I benefited enormously from this arrangement.  My father also benefited.  He had a domineering personality.  If you walked into our home in the 1960s you would think my father ran the entire show and needed nothing from anybody.  But in fact he desperately needed the emotional equilibrium my mother provided.  If they had divorced, Dad would have fallen apart.  He knew that, which is one reason why he kept rebelling and trying to prove he did not need Mom.

When my father turned 65, my mother revealed she had saved a bunch of money while working as a secretary in an architect's office.  She offered to take Dad on a trip anywhere in the world.  My father said he wanted to go to Guadalcanal, where he had fought as a Marine during World War Two.  And so they went, in 1986.  Once there, Dad broke down and confessed he had lost his identity and emotional equilibrium in the war.  Mom held him and promised to help him regain his stability.  No other woman would have had the tenacity and empathy to do that for someone who had often been so cruel to her.

That was my mother's most important gift to me.  Empathy.  She always tried to see the good in other people.  She never judged them.  She approached everyone with an open heart.  As a writer that has been one of my fundamental principals: to approach every character I write about with empathy, an open heart, and to try to understand them rather than pass judgment on them.  My mother taught me that.

She took me by the hand when I was two and led me along the beach so I could set foot in the ocean for the first time.  She loved the ocean.  In family photos and home movies if a body of water appears in the frame, you will find my mother turned toward it.  "It brings me such peace," she used to say.  She would inhale the sea breeze and you could feel the visceral effect as it filled her with quiet ecstasy.

Every morning and night I walk along the cliff in Malibu and pass the bench she used to sit on during her last year on this planet.  I look out at the ocean where her ashes now swirl and I think of her.  Sometimes I talk to her, expressing gratitude for all she did for me and my sister.  

Her family came from Ireland to start a new life in America.  She couldn't afford to go to college, so she became an American Airline stewardess instead because it was one of the few jobs in the 1950s that gave women a measure of independence and financial freedom.  My father had not even graduated from high school.  But together Gloria and James Weddle grabbed hold of the opportunities of the post World War Two boom and managed to put both of their children through college to provide them with opportunities Gloria and Jim never had.

Whatever their shortcomings, that remains a stunning achievement.