Much telephone talk was devoted to the menstrual cycle, pregnancies, breech positions, tubes blocked and unblocked, and change of life; to cancer of the breast, cervix, rectum, lung, and small intestine; to measles, mumps, whooping cough, and the various childhood diseases; to respiratory infections, fatty livers, goiters, and gout; to arthritis, rheumatism, and bursitis; to hardening of the arteries, diabetes, cataracts, hemorrhoids, dyspepsia, heartburn, and general orneriness; and to obesity, high and low blood pressure, strokes, heart attacks, and coronary occlusions. Following hard on this catalogue of distress came footnotes on the local medical profession. Never did I hear a doctor condemned for anything other than charging one or two dollars above the going price for house calls. By the women, the Watertown doctor was considered “brilliant,” “smart as a whip,” and, the highest accolade of all, “a nice guy.” Occasionally such encomiums were lavished on a man I had heard to be an apathetic, nurse-fondling, heavy-handed old faker; and at the women’s touching generosity to him, I smiled ruefully. A man known to the family, or to one of my mother’s confidantes, was said to be beating his wife, the result of his drinking. This was doubly dolorous and a spine-chilling indictment of alcohol as the man was said to be a “prince” when abstemious.
Often during these conversations, my mother caught me in an ironical smile, and invariably at a time deemed inappropriate. One caller had a neighbor who worked the swing shift in a factory. With his wife confined to the bughouse at Ogdensburg, his home was being kept for him by his two comely teen age daughters, aged thirteen and fourteen. Every evening at five minutes to midnight a hot rod loaded with black-jacketed, black-booted goons screeched up to the house and discharged the daughters who fled through the front door, ran up the stairs, disrobed, hopped into bed, and in a feigned sleep closed their eyes in anticipation of their father’s homecoming bed check of them at five past midnight. To my mother’s dismay, I laughed loudly at this. There was something so Rabelaisian and Elizabethan at the thought of this beleaguered, much-used, and benighted papa looking in on his “innocently sleeping” progeny, no doubt still quivering with the healthy flush of their nightly ardors, Papa dwelling in saintlike unawareness that he was viewing two Ogdensburg inmates in embryo.
It wasn’t so much that I chuckled out of perverseness as that I seemed to be listening in on comically alien tribal rites which had nothing whatever to do with me. Like John Jay Chapman, who used to lie at night wondering whatever was the matter with his native Bostonians, I lay on the davenport wondering whatever was the matter with Watertownians that they could find no more dignified way to confront the hydro gen age than fretting about Plaid Stamps or the lustful appetites of neighbors’ daughters. In those languidly optimistic days, I still owned the distasteful hauteur of one who believed the world could be shaken until the pieces fell together into the pattern of my own promised land, and had no idea what an exemplary world it would be if, like housewives, everyone sensed his inadequacy for Divine Missions and confined him
self to worrying over grocery stamps.
Because he had gone there before me, I elected to follow my father to Hobart. His career at Hobart was sweaty, contentious, controversial, and short-lived (as, in a different way, mine was too), lasting anywhere from a day or so to two weeks. By going arduously through the forlornly disordered pile of his yellowing and deteriorating scrapbooks, I could put together a facsimile of what happened from what I remember to be vaguely though indignantly worded newspaper accounts. But I shan’t. In telling the story over the years I have added such a captivating touch here, omitted such a bland one there, that the tale is now so aesthetically the way I prefer it that I’m sure the bare facts would prove inimical to my own version.
In the summer of his seventeenth year, 1924, my father was a lifeguard at the small St, Mary’s Street pool on the north, the less fashionable, side of Watertown; and one azure and balmy day he was approached there by two men who invited
him, hang the expense, to come to Geneva with them and play football for Hobart. Today, when muscular, two-hundred and-thirty-pound gladiators quake at the mere mention of Notre Dame, Texas, Alabama, and USC, such a proposition almost smacks of the insultingly laughable, but in those days football was pre-eminently an Eastern disease and Hobart played what was considered a formidable schedule. Al though my father was indeed flattered, he suffered the misgivings of being two or three credits short of his diploma and of having been named the previous spring to captain his high school team for the upcoming season, for what, in effect, was to be his senior year.
What sophistry or arm-twisting these men used on my father is not known, but apparently the recruiting of athletes in those days was not nearly so guileless as one likes to imagine. Whoever they were and whatever their connection with Hobart, they persuaded my father that a diploma was a trifling and dispensable sine qua non (and considering for what they wanted him, I expect that it was), not to be given a second thought. Thereupon they escorted him home, helped him pack his bags, stood by as he kissed his bewildered mother, and explained to her that he was off for the greater glories to be claimed on the green fields of academe; and without (one somehow imagines) as yet having let him out of their apprehensive sights, they piled him into their Model T Ford roadster, spirited him south to Geneva, put a uniform on him, and turned him loose among the Hobart mercenaries.
How long my father worked out with “The Statesmen”— the decorous patronymic hung on Hobart athletic teams, and one that by the time of my arrival there had become devilishly apt—I do not know, though I have always told the story in such a way as to indicate it was long enough to have the college’s president, the dean of men, the Episcopal chaplain, and the entire coaching staff smacking their lips in anticipation of the imminent autumn. “Yeah,” I always (and certainly apocryphally) told my version, “when the roof fell in, Hobart had their whole fucking team built around the old man!”
The “roof which fell and aborted my father’s candidacy for All-America honors was Gary M. Jones, principal of the high school. I never knew Jones. At my unremarked (for me no coaches waited breathlessly) arrival at the school, he was long since retired or dead, but summoning him back produces in me a certain stiff-backed reticence. From what I remember of his photos this rigid deference to his ghost seems exorbitant, for in appearance Jones was a luminous-domed, roly-poly, jovial-looking soul. As a child, though, I remember grownups speaking of him in the respectful tones of men who in wayward youth had experienced the awfulness of his justice, awful, I gathered, because it was always so uncannily appropriate to the offense committed. Jones was tough and fair and approached as a principal should be approached but almost never is today: with respect, with trepidation, and with guarded affection. Precisely what he said on learning my father was at Hobart—and whether he was more concerned with my father’s not having graduated or his being lost to the high school’s football team—is also conjecture; but he said it with such stinging animus that the Hobart authorities had little choice but to repack my father’s bags, tell him they’d expect him back the following autumn, and send him home where he captained his team to an undefeated sea son (along the way defeating one opponent 119-0), and where he so added to his growing mystique that, alas, Hobart’s bid was no longer tempting enough.
Somewhere among his now-tattered papers are many offers, including two or three telegrams from Lou Little solicitously inquiring after my father’s whereabouts. Little was then near the beginning of his career at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the wires are dated in the early days of September, 1925, and the controlled indignation of their tone indicates my father had made Little a promise he hadn’t kept. Little wanted to know not only why my father hadn’t shown up on the Georgetown campus but what the problem was. Was it finances? Was it illness? When I was a boy and on rainy days used to drag my friends up to the attic to spend the long afternoons leafing through the scrapbooks, it was these telegrams that impressed them above anything else, even a
bove the ardent-treacle prose style with which the newsmen of his day had described my father’s exploits.
By the time my boyhood friends and I were in our teens, Little had gone on to Columbia, achieved a national eminence, and become to athletically minded boys the symbol of a man who breathed the very fire of immortality into one, a man who, as though with putty, molded All-Americas with little more than his sinuous and invigorating fingers. Hence, although my friends and I were able to laugh skeptically, even jeeringly, at the photos of my father and his teammates in their patchwork-quilted football breeches and spartanly black wool jerseys beneath which it was impossible to detect pads; although we were able to giggle disparagingly at their greasily slapped-down hair parted sinisterly—in the style of the cinema gangsters of the twenties—down the middle of the scalp; although we were joyously and swaggeringly able to “make book” that the teams of our own epoch could have beaten those spindly-looking men by untold touchdowns—”Ten at least!” someone always shouted—still, these telegrams never permitted us to dismiss my father out of hand, and there inevitably came a moment when, unable to sustain such jeering, one of the boys, reverently lowering his voice, would ask the obvious: “How come your old man didn’t take the scholar ship?” Though the answer was simple, it was not one easily understood by boys, and I always evaded replying or lied by saying that my father had been sick or that he had incurred an injury which prevented his accepting. During his senior year my father had fallen in love with my mother and had determined to marry her at the expense of either education or fame.
Thus it was that the days of my youth flew by like violently clashing confetti, the pale scraps of my life as I imagined I was living it opposed to the vividly multicolored hues of what-might-have-been. My father became an unhappy line man—he loathed that job to desperation!—for the Niagara Mohawk, struggled to eke out a subsistence for his wife and children, and took his pleasure in the grim Sunday afternoon world of semiprofessional athletes seeking violently to recapture a sense of a talent that may never have existed. Still, I always imagined a world infinitely more glittering, one in which my father had indeed become an All-America and had afterward, partly on the strength of it, risen to the top of some huge industrial complex. In adolescence, in a euphoria of possibilities, I had no difficulty believing that I summered at Cape Cod with splendid, golden maidens; roomed at Exeter with Ronald Farquarson III; or that I would one day go all tan-faced, broad-shouldered, and gleaming-toothed to Yale where I would be hushingly pointed out as “the son of Earl Exley.” Thus it was, too, that for many years I imagined my childhood infinitely more execrable than it was. Macaroni and cheese was more common to our table than lobster, and clothes were (if possible) handed down from sister to sister, brother to brother (it was, Dr. Freud, those inherited run-over shoes that drove me mad!); but I doubt we were any less well off than most of the populace in an economically depressed America. Now I can also understand that my father, for all his melancholy aspect, was as happy as any man can be who has performed his most poetic feats before twenty. But I am perhaps being unkind and unfair. There is a possibility that in the end he performed the most poetic feat of all. Though I have elsewhere remarked that the pain became such that he begged for morphine, there is a possibility that he knew for a long time he was about to die—and that he did so well.
My father wrote a letter of appreciation to the people of Watertown from Ray Brook Sanatorium, dated January 6, 1945, and addressed to the editors of the Watertown Daily Times. On New Year’s Day six nights before, attended by much hoopla, there had been an Earl Exley Night basketball game, the proceeds of which had gone to my mother to help defray medical and other expenses. On the day he wrote the letter my father had seven months to live. Held in sway by worlds that never were, I had not gone to the game, having apprehensively hidden in a movie theater while it was being played. I hadn’t gone because rooming at Exeter with Farquarson III on the one hand and accepting charity on the other were too vexatiously incompatible. There was a moment when I might have gone, but on coming home from school one night I found my mother distraught at the news that the fund-raising committee was contemplating giving her the money as she needed it—twenty dollars here for groceries, thirty there for the doctors—that they were going to make of it something it didn’t have to be—charity with strings, generosity be grudged, kindness disfigured; and though some cooler, more sophisticated head eventually prevailed and persuaded the committee simply to turn the money over to my mother, that they were considering doing otherwise brought home to me the humiliation of charity, and I, who after all summered in quite other, more golden worlds, refused utterly to sit red-facedly in that packed gymnasium and allow people to beam their beneficence down upon me.
Syntactically, the letter is painful. Composed for The Public, the sentence structure is strained to ungrammaticalness, the language is pretentious (he uses “mentor” for “coach,” phrases like “For me or any of mine to forget this noble gesture would be a sacrilege in its basest form”), and in no way does it reflect my father’s intelligence, humor, or style. He thanks his friends for their generosity, he unconsciously, immodestly, and amusingly accepts their verdict on his athletic greatness, and with that damnable sentimentality peculiar to celebrities, in three paragraphs he says that he was no greater than his teammates, his coaches, the sportswriters, and the fans made him (though we are left with the feeling that he rather doubts they made any significant contributions). The letter would, in fact, be too painful to keep were it not for one unnerving line. With so much going for him, the love of his family, the prayers and kindness of his friends, the best the medical profession can offer, he says not that he will not die but that it seems “next to impossible to die.” There is a dreadfulness about that “next to impossible.” How my mind reels and shudders at the qualification of that “next to.” This man who in his bouncy, pigeon-toed way did not even walk like other men; this man who joyously and for nothing other than the love of contact knocked down men twice his size; this man who in rage could leave a man a mouthful of bloodied teeth; this man who had an affecting need of intimacy with broken humanity, my father at forty has been touched by the inexplicable and horrendous specter of death and knows that life is over.
Though I know very little of him during this time, over the years I have come across two people, a nurse and an X-ray technician, who did. I didn’t, as I yearned to do, earnestly implore, “Did he die well?” There was no need to do so. On learning who I was, both of them voluntarily remarked their proximity to my father at the end, both smiled warmly, both had a bright ness come into their eyes, and both wagged their heads in fond reminiscence. That fond head-wagging endures in a way no game by which a community buries a favorite son can ever endure.
Though the television droned all day, and though by day’s end, to save my head from decapitation, I could not have related to my tormentors a smidgen of anything I had seen, now I remember the shows clearly. I saw the quiz shows in which contestants stood as tremulous as condemned men in outhouse-like glass prisons, the flanks of their skulls encased in great Buck Rogers-like earphones. Watching them strain, look abstracted, purse, wet their lips, and roll their eyes while searching so zealously for an answer, I laughed heartily and knew that the show was either rigged—the contestants were such abominable actors—or—watching them, all phony sighs of relief, give their farcically esoteric answers—that the contestants were mental freaks unworthy of the homage a boy-minded country was paying them. I watched the jolly come dies that induced no laughter save on that Orwellian laugh track. Implying, as in its sinister intimidation it did imply, that there was a green and salutary land just off the wings where pink-cheeked, wittily precious people were grasping things be yond my brutal sense of humor, that laughter soured me utterly. The louder the belly laughs grew, the more puritanically severe became my distaste until I began to feel like an obtuse Presbyterian perusing Rabelais.
I watched—but there is no need to
enumerate. Not once during those months did there emanate from the screen a genuine idea or emotion, and I came to understand the medium as subversive. In its deceit, its outright lies, its spinelessness, its weak-mindedness, its pointless violence, in the disgusting personalities it holds up to our youth to emulate, in its endless and groveling deference to our fantasies, television under mines strength of character, saps vigor, and irreparably perverts notions of reality. But it is a tender, loving medium; and when it has done its savage job completely and reduced one to a prattling, salivating infant, like a buxom mother it stands always poised to take one back to the shelter of its brown-nippled bosom. Save for football I no longer watch the tube, and yet my set is always on. In the way one puts a ticking clock in a six-week-old puppy’s pillowed box to assure him that Mom is always there, I come in from having one too many beers, flick on the switch, and settle comfortably on the daven port. The drone reassures me that life is there, life is simple, life is unending. Starting up abruptly at 3 a.m., I am at first chagrined and terrified by the darkness; then suddenly I am conscious of the hot hum of the voiceless tube and turn to receive the benediction from the square of brilliant light shining directly upon me from out of the darkness. How I envy those people who live in areas where all-night movies are shown.