In the summer of 1969, I do not remember precisely when, I returned to the resort by the sea with my father. I was then in high school but no less an outlier than I had been in the times of Major Hyde. In my first year I wore sunglasses to class until teachers complained to their superiors and I was asked to remove them. Just why I wore them wasn’t clear, since I’d taken to speaking little, above all to myself.
My mother was by then permanently entrenched in Rome, the husband-wife divide permanent and accepted. My father had been diagnosed with cancer, treatable but ominous. He had lost weight and it seemed he had lost interest in life.
These moody times provoked our little jaunt, as always aboard the Trailways bus headed across the Bay Bridge, all the while trying to play word games as we once had in years gone by.
The Wilmington Avenue cottage was gone, now a parking lot (in line with the lyrics of a Joni Mitchell song) and Mrs. Simpler had not only retired but died, leaving her restaurant to a new group of owners who managed it more like a waystation for takeout meals. The waitresses from the university were gone, disappointing my father, and the mood of the place was different enough that we went there just once.
This is how time works, by subtraction, at least among those in their twilight. The young observe the new and the vibrant while the old regret the old and the good old, at least in their eyes. I found myself in the middle.
The pizza place had also changed hands, the second-generation Italians gone. This also disappointed my father, who took no solace in my suggestion that the pizza might actually be tastier than it was.
We walked the packed boardwalk but, yet again, something rang false to my father, as if a duplicate but inferior resort much like the one we once went to had been erected to fool him. Now, loudspeakers boomed Top-40 radio that promenade-oriented folk had no choice but to absorb. The songs came from Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Youngbloods, and the music itself was strong, even abrasive. I loved it. My father’s remark was one only he could make. How was it, he asked me, that a people so reserved and repressed and fond of restraint, at least in certain classes, could produce something like rock ‘n’ roll, which in spirit was inimical to the England he knew. To which I replied that his England, and the London we had known in 1960, was now something entirely different.
He ignored the remark and told me a story about wartime in which, upon arriving in London, he was taken on a drive by a low-ranking diplomat to bide time ahead of an appointment he had in London. The war was on and my father had been named chief of European operations for American military intelligence, in essence a job that demanded selecting men and women who might effectively pass as natives and drop them into Nazi-occupied countries. My father wished to speak of this but the driver was mum, doing little more than pointing out bits of the pretty countryside and diverting all talk away from the war. Soon, my father grew exasperated by what he considered small-talk.
It was at this point that the kindly diplomat, who was, in fact, a key figure in the British intelligence service, turned to my father and asked a simple if seemingly absurd question, “How many telephone posts have we passed in the last few miles?”
My father had no idea.
That my father would even tell this story, in which he emerged chastened, humbled, but also wiser, proved to me he was dying.
“This, you see, dear Mr. Winner, is at the core of intelligence. Paying attention. Ignoring the small-talk and looking around you, taking in what you see. Growing annoyed at me defeats the purpose of the work.”
That my father would even tell this story, in which he emerged chastened, humbled, but also wiser, proved to me he was dying. His was an unselfish confession, a broadcast from father to son in the late stages of life’s game. Many times he had let the newspaper drop and said, “All my friends are dying,” but that rhetoric seemed now to have acquired a tangible dimension, one he could share with me, his half-century-younger son.
We stayed at a motel by the sea made from cinder blocks. The view overlooked the ever-unsettled Atlantic and in the morning we ate at a coffee shop that served toast and waffles. I’d wake hours after him, which as always meant he’d read the papers, and he spoke aloud of his worries about the politics of the Middle East. The United Arab Republic (a name he mocked as an oxymoron) had already, with Egypt and Syria in the forefront, tried to obliterate Israel, and failed in the most abject way. But Soviet Russia continued arming these two nations, America backing Israel, France playing both sides, and my father foresaw a third world war which was already being watered along the Jordan River. He disliked, if not loathed, the American president of the time, Richard Nixon, and these waffle speeches were his way of telling me to count the telephone poles. Entranced by Jimi Hendrix (I had bought a tiny record player) I found these injunctions difficult, and yet, as always, I listened.
I challenged him to a game of miniature golf, trying to insert a joke into my repertoire. The joke backfired, as he won easily.
I fell into crushes with two girls my age, Cindy and Darla, and our walking “dates” amounted to cotton candy strolls. Not a kiss dared introduced itself, though we did exchange addresses. These little encounters, flavored sweetly like my Spanish batidos of old, did nothing to prepare me for Carol, who by then was only a year away.
My father paid no attention to these flirtations as he’d to some extent phased out of female partnership (as my mother, in Rome, though not yet fifty, had set aside men in a similar way: though my parents were estranged, they never divorced).
In all, we spent four days at the motel, often by the swimming pool, he the only man around putting thin newspapers against the Atlantic wind, and winning at that game also because of the art of turning pages he’d mastered perhaps before the seas were even made.
We paused one evening outside the still-operating auction house, bidding in progress, and my father seemed to marvel at how life took its small and modest course notwithstanding the potential calamities in the wind.
All that time, in particular those final years, I was the most miserable of students, and after his death all changed.
On the night of the last day we walked to my spot, from which I’d once made my foray toward submarine turrets. This time we sat together, alone on the white bleached bench and said nothing as the sea thumped at us. A few people passed us, then reached the end and turned back. I wonder still, what they saw: no doubt a boy and his grandfather. How quaint! How nice! Boy and grandfather sharing a moment Norman Rockwell might have transformed into one of his magazine covers (if only they knew how much the chafed white bench we sat on resembled the one I had languished on proudly in the Major Hyde years).
But those around us could not possibly hear what followed, not with the pummel of the surf, and my father’s brief speech seemed itself to arise from that pummel, all the more so because the voice he chose for important occasions adopted the graven tones of 1930s radio, a long-lost intonation intended above all to convey inarguable authority. My father, after all, had covered national political conventions for CBS Radio, but spoke of this rarely.
“You know of course how things are,” he began, his gaunt face trained toward the Atlantic, “I will die soon, maybe not this year or next, but soon, and that of itself does not bother me in the least. To be most blunt, I think it is a good thing in its way.”
I tried and failed to intercede, my vocabulary stilled.
“By a good thing I mean that when that time comes, after I am gone, you will in a way feel a weight lifted. You will come into your own. You will excel. You’re a bright young man. You need life to start, and it will really start when I am no longer here for these walks and chats and all the rest. You will understand this only later on.”
He rose, preventing a reply, and quickly changed the subject to the after-effects of the 1969 turmoil in France. I tuned this out and in the distance heard notes from the song “All Along the Watchtower,” and Jimi Hendrix singing the Bob Dylan lines, “There must be some way out of here…”
My father died a few years later, his final days brutal but with no mention of his decay, let alone his pain.
All that time, in particular those final years, I was the most miserable of students. After his death all changed, as if the time had come to apply what he had taught me to my own world, my own age-mates, my own future. And as he had predicted, in my own small way I excelled.
I would now, as I begin my own fading, much enjoy a morning by the sea and a newspaper chat, until, that is, I realize I have it any time I wish to have it, in memory.
