I Barely Knew the Man

Eve Marx

Word Count 1219

I was eight when my father left the planet. For years, I was under the impression I was younger when he died; when an old friend with an interest in ancestry offered to dig into my heritage, the first thing I had to reckon with was the actual year of his death. How is it possible I don’t recall our final two years together?

I do remember how I learned he was dead. It was Easter vacation, I’d spent the night with a friend. She lived close by and I was accustomed to traveling independently between her home and mine so I was cranky the morning her mom insisted on walking me home. Inside the apartment, there were people I didn’t recognize milling around.

“Your father’s dead, “ my mother dramatically announced from the couch. Instead of responding, I walked straight past her to the third bedroom my dad called his office where I dialed the number of my best friend. When she picked up, I told her my father was dead.

You always talk about your mother, a therapist remarked when I was in my 20’s. He urged me to discuss my father but I had so little to say. Before I was born, he and my mother were married for ten years. This therapist opined I had daddy issues having lost my own at such a young age. He repeated the old chestnut that the death of a parent in childhood is trauma, but I couldn’t grasp what he was talking about as there were so many other things going on in my life that were traumatizing me, starting with my mother.

“Your father died because you had to have all this shit, ”she told me the day after his funeral. The most frightening part of him dying was leaving me alone with her. She informed me that my father — her husband! — suffered a heart attack working so hard to buy me things. This made perfect sense. In addition to my bedroom, an entire room in our sprawling four bedroom, floor through apartment was filled with my things. It was a proper playroom with a chalkboard covering one wall, an artist’s easel, a worktable and floor to ceiling shelving filled with books and stuffed animals. I was an only child and spent a lot of time by myself; the room was meant to keep me busy and out of my parents’ hair. It was also a sanctuary from shouting and other audible signs of domestic dysfunction coming from other rooms. My mother was a screamer who threw things when she was upset. My father, who didn’t yell, was skilled at ducking and dodging to avoid getting hit.

My father was eighteen years older than my mother which influenced their dynamic. She had a career before they married but he held the purse strings. His day job was legal counsel for a handful of nightclub owners in our touristy shore town. His real passion was music and playing the piano. When he was in his thirties, he enjoyed some success as a lyricist and composer. It seemed to me he was rarely home; he was a partner in a small record label and was often on the road. When he wasn’t hitting up radio stations, promoting his talent, he and my mother dressed up at night to go to nightclubs. While she sat at her dressing table, finishing her makeup, he would escort me to my room and tuck me into bed, telling me not to get out of it, no matter what, and he’d see me in the morning. When I woke up I would find a pile of tiny paper parasols and orange and pink plastic monkeys on my night table, collected by my mother from the rims of their cocktail glasses.

I have a handful of Polaroid pictures of my dad. It’s through these old photos I’ve tried to get to know him. He was good looking, tall and slim. Well into his 50’s, he still had all his hair. What he loved were muscle cars and jazz. He played the piano. He was patient with my mother, less so with me. I remember his frustration attempting to teach me to ride a two-wheeler.

After his unexpected death, we were suddenly poor. A man from one of the nightclubs he represented came to our apartment a week after his death and handed my mother a small briefcase filled with cash. Good luck, he said. Soon after, she sold his car and her mink stole and moved us out of the luxurious apartment into a dark, tiny studio just up the block where she slept on a pull-out sofa.

My whole life I’ve struggled with missing a father I barely knew. I feel guilty about not feeling more. My memories are a collage of disconnected scraps; accompanying him to Dairy Queen to get hot fudge sundaes; dining at Chinese restaurants and opening fortune cookies. He loved dogs although my mother said we couldn’t have one. One night, he brought home a miniature poodle with the unlikely name, “Wyatt Erff.” He'd bought it off a showgirl. The dog was part of her act and the first and only night we had it, the dog kept us up until after midnight bouncing balls off its nose and dancing on its hind legs. For decades I’ve held on to a handful of postcards my father sent me on his frequent road trips. They’re handwritten with a blue fountain pen, addressed to a girl he called “Pussycat.”

In the thirty-something years of my marriage, we’ve had nine dogs. Sometimes we’ve had three dogs at a time. When my son left home to start college on the opposite coast, I took on a dog being sold out of a local groomer/pet shop. The dog was a four month old Lhasa Apso, purebred, the shop owner said, who had grown too big for the window. The store owner practically gave him to me, the price was so reduced.

It turned out the dog had issues, specifically, he was born crippled, although I didn’t realize that at the time. On impulse, I named him Basil, my father’s name. I told people I liked it because it sounded dignified and British and also because it gave me a reason to say my father’s name multiple times every day. Basil’s personality blossomed when my husband revived his own old interest in music by picking up the saxophone. It turned out Basil, the dog, was extremely musical. You might say he was a prodigy. He began singing (some people might call it howling) in perfect time to John Coltrane. He especially responded to a tune called “Sugar.” He really knows this song, my husband said, admiringly. He’s a scat singer. They performed this song together onstage at a local talent show and the audience went crazy.

From time to time , my husband mentions my father. “Basil would have appreciated this,” he says, referring to the man, not the dog, sharing some detail about a gig or a new song he’s learned or when he’s in his studio (a shed behind our house) practicing. You should write about your father, he says. I always shake my head.

I have nothing to say. I barely knew the man.

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.