New Smithville (2019)

It is the end of a long day of driving. Our kids aren’t sleeping, just staring out the side windows at guardrails and streets appearing out from underneath the highway. The turn signal starts clicking in the quiet car.

“Is this our exit?” Isabelle asks from the back. She is ten. “Finally?”

I remember feeling that same way about this same exit at exactly her age. It is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We have been driving down the eastern seaboard to visit my father’s brother Joe and his family. My mother and my sisters will arrive a few hours after us. For months I have been looking forward to this weekend, yet as I pull off the ramp, not ten miles from their house, I suddenly want to turn back on the highway and drive home.

“What’s wrong?” Suzanne asks.

“I started thinking about my father,” I say. “And I felt so angry that he wasn’t going to be there this weekend.”

Rosalind suddenly yells behind my head. She has dropped a doll and one of her colored silk scarves but can’t reach them from her car seat. Suzanne twists around and hands them to her. “We’re almost there, sweetie. Just a few more minutes.”

“I saw this really clear picture of what my life would be like if he were still alive, and then I felt this overwhelming flash of anger.” I am driving down a road I have known since childhood. “I want to spend Thanksgiving with two old men instead of one.”

“I’m sorry.” She takes my hand.

“It’s been like what—?” I count. “It’s been more than thirty years. Why would I still feel this way after more than thirty years?”

“I’m thirsty, Mom!” Caleb calls. “Mom, I’m thirsty!”

“We’ll be there in a few minutes,” Isabelle whispers over the seat behind him.

“Thirty years. Three quarters of my life. It doesn’t feel healthy. Does it seem healthy?”

“It’s not unusual. Many people have this experience.” She is a therapist after all.

“I’m tired of it. I am. It feels like madness, honestly. Like some kind of mental illness.”

“Well, it’s not,” Suzanne says.

Another visit. At a different time of year. Maybe late September or early October. I am sitting with my Uncle Joe and his sons, Mark and Joe. We are sitting on the cement floor in a two-car garage, with the overhead door open to the driveway, very late at night. We are sitting on paint cans and overturned buckets. My uncle presides on the seat of a lawnmower, holding the wheel. We are there because we are smoking cigars as well as drinking whiskey and no one will have us inside the house. My uncle keeps announcing that he is going to bed, but then the bottle clinks off the cement floor, and he holds out his glass.

“Last one, Dad?” Mark asks.

“Last one,” he says, though he has said this quite a few times already.

The four of us together, this deep and simple pleasure in each other’s company, is the closest I can come to my father. My uncle has started telling a story about their father, our grandfather. The story is about the intensely interior, personal conversations Nazarenes had with god, which often included what they called “praying through.”

Poor and hungry, our grandfather went into the woods to pray through on a particular question. He had knelt on the forest floor for hours, motionless in prayer, when he heard a rustle and opened his eyes and saw a rabbit. It sat ten feet away. Utterly unaware of him. And very plump. He started imagining different ways to cook that rabbit. But how could he kill it? He glanced around without moving his head. There to his right lay a big stick. Could he dive to the right, grab the stick, and hit the rabbit before it moved? He was judging the distance to the stick and then to the rabbit, still envisioning the meal it would make, when he decided that this was a temptation sent from the devil to distract him. He closed his eyes again and resumed his conversation with god.

“So he chose god,” my uncle concludes, “over a rabbit dinner.”

“I can imagine doing that,” I say.

“I can imagine you doing that,” both my cousins say.

“You missed your path in life, Doug,” my uncle chuckles.

Our grandfather struggled with the conflict between spiritual fulfillment and feeding his family. My uncle never understood how an educated man—and our grandfather had been an educated man—could choose to raise his children in poverty. Neither did my father. They both took pleasure in providing for their families. But to me his struggle always felt familiar. I didn’t make his choices. And it wasn’t about god. But the conflict between what was inside his head and what was outside it—this I understood. I understood being engrossed in an intricate and deeply personal internal conversation that made earning a living somehow painful.

Driving across Pennsylvania, I pulled to the side of the highway and persuaded Suzanne to pose for this picture when she was first pregnant with Caleb and no one knew but the two of us.

We didn’t expect a third child. Our apartment had only two bedrooms. We needed to move but didn’t know where or what we could afford. When we weren’t worrying about money, we worried about balancing work and parenthood, which seemed easier to do without increasing the number of our children by fifty percent. We also worried about giving all our children the time and attention they deserved. Rosalind wasn’t yet two that summer. Isabelle was six. And having a son felt different. At least to me. I would now have the same distribution of children as my father did. Two daughters and one son. Which intensified my worry.

I have always been able to work around our children, and our children have always been good at letting me work. When Isabelle was less than a year old, she came to my office once a week. She sat on a blanket on the floor of my cubicle and turned the pages of her books, saying “bookabookabooka” while I wrote or edited. My cubicle was on a corner near a busy hallway, and at any given moment you could find at least one person leaning over the wall, watching her. I carried her to meetings where she stayed very quiet in my lap, watching all the faces around the table.

When Rosalind was four or five, she entertained herself in another conference room during another meeting. She found some markers and a giant easel pad and drew our family of five, united by the color green.

Notice how the parents are connected by black (shirt and pants) and the sisters are connected by blue (shirt and pants). Caleb is close to me. Isabelle touches Suzanne. Rosalind stands alone in the exact center of the picture, the middle child.

I worked in the School Division at Houghton Mifflin, where we developed books for elementary schools. We were teaching children to read. During those years when Isabelle kept rereading Harry Potter and editors still reviewed the pages of a book on paper printouts, she once spent a day carrying stacks of page proof back and forth from my desk. The pages were printed on large 11 x 17 inch paper, and she pretended to be Hedwig, Harry Potter’s owl. Harry tied messages to Hedwig’s leg so Isabelle took each thick stack of pages from me, sat down on the floor, and fastened them to one leg using large rubber bands. She would start walking toward where the pages needed to go, but after maybe ten or fifteen steps the papers would slide down her leg and the stack would fall apart around her ankle. The hallways were full of editors and designers and typesetters rushing to meet a printer deadline. But she sat down wherever the stack fell apart, people stepping around her, and refastened the papers to her leg before walking another ten or fifteen steps closer to the editorial assistants waiting for them.

I liked organizing people and getting projects done. My team grew larger. I spent more time talking about the work and less time doing the work myself. One year they promoted me twice, once in the spring and again in the fall. I became more involved with creating new products. We spent a year developing prototypes and then traveling to get reactions from teachers around the country. We would come back to Boston, revise the prototypes, and then take them on the road again. I began to struggle to control the time I spent working. Tasks that I couldn’t finish between Monday and Friday consumed more of my weekends.

Throughout all this, I worked at home on Wednesdays and took care of our kids. Houghton Mifflin was not used to employees working at home then, especially managers. The summer before Rosalind started kindergarten, I was invited to join a leadership meeting on Wednesday mornings, where they discussed a new project that represented a sizable investment for the company. Around the table sat my boss and others at her level, as well as executives several levels above them, including the Vice President and Publisher. The most junior person there, I was also the only one on the phone. We had no conference number. They called me at home from the speaker phone at the center of a long table.

The first day of kindergarten was also a Wednesday. Rosalind’s bus was scheduled to stop at the end of our street, four houses away from us, ten minutes after the meeting ended. I fed her and got her dressed before they called. Caleb had to come with us to the bus stop, so I dressed him as well. I joined the meeting mostly to listen, and the people around that long table almost never asked my opinion so I could spend most of the call on mute as Rosalind talked about the bus and how she wanted to ride the bus and kept running to the window to stare at the corner where it would stop.

The meeting ran long. With five minutes left before the bus came, I brought Rosalind and Caleb down the stairs from our apartment. We stood behind the front door. Then I opened the door and we stood on the porch. But people kept talking. And I was on a cordless phone which wouldn’t work if I stepped off the porch. “The bus is always late on the first day of school,” I kept telling myself. Precisely ten minutes after the hour, we heard the bus come roaring up the hill. Rosalind started jumping up and down. At exactly this moment the Vice President and Publisher asked, “Doug, what do you think?” I took the phone off mute and started to answer her just as the bus flew right past the end of our street and Rosalind let out a bloodcurdling scream of rage and frustration.

While I scrambled to balance being a manager and being a parent, my primary care physician kept reminding me to get my skin checked by a dermatologist. So did my wife. So did my cousin Joe and my Uncle Joe, both doctors. And so did any friend who read the medical articles in The Boston Globe or The New York Times. Because my father died of melanoma, I had a fifty percent greater chance of developing the disease. He had moles all over his body. I had moles all over my body, another risk factor for the disease. But I couldn’t make myself go to a dermatologist. My primary care physician kept making referrals. Suzanne kept reminding me. I kept promising, until she finally started making the appointments herself. Then I would cancel them because of some conflict at work. Once I canceled them, I had to wait three to six months for the next one.

Suzanne found a dermatologist whose office was right on Copley Square, which meant I could fit the appointment into my lunch hour. For whatever reason I didn’t cancel it. I walked past Trinity Church in the whipping winter wind, stepping over melted and refrozen banks of snow. Then I sat fully clothed at the end of an examination table, waiting near a window that looked back out over the square.

The dermatologist was a small, serious man. He carried a large magnifying glass. He apologized for this. His eye sight was poor, and he would need it to examine my skin.

I told him my family history and how I had never had my skin checked.

“Never?” he asked.

“Never,” I said.

“Why not?” He blinked at me through his thick spectacles. “You must have some explanation,” he said finally.

“I am afraid of dying like my father did.”

“That’s not a very good reason.” He didn’t sound unkind.

“I realize that.”

“In fact, the reason you cite is exactly the reason why you should get your skin checked regularly. Right? So you don’t die like he did.”

But that was not how it felt to me. Just being there sealed our sameness.

The dermatologist repeated the statistics about family history and the risks of having moles all over my body. Never get a sun tan again, he told me. He made me promise that I would have my skin checked every six to twelve months. But treatment for melanoma was so much more effective than when my father died. Back then, if you had malignant moles anywhere on your body, you didn’t survive. Now many people survive—with one exception. “If you have a malignant mole on your hands or your feet,” he said, “you die. We don’t entirely understand why, but for moles on hands and feet the fatality rate is still extremely high.”

He wagged the magnifying glass at me. “I’m going to examine you now.” He took my glasses and set them on a counter. Then he asked me to undress down to my underwear, and because it had been so cold walking over there my shirt and my sweater were the last pieces of clothing I dropped on the chair beside me. My bare feet felt cold on the foot rest. He pushed his spectacles on top of his head and was raising his magnifying glass when we both saw it at the same time. A large black mass on the top of my right foot.

“Now I will die.” That was my thought. I didn’t feel any rush of adrenalin, no panic or anxiety, just a kind of curiosity, like someone falling who couldn’t quite predict how it would feel to hit the ground.

The doctor was just dumbstruck. The magnifying glass fell to his side and dangled there as he tried to decide what to say.

I bent down to look at the mass, raising my foot at the same time. My foot tipped, and the large black mass rolled off. It was a ball of dark wool from my sweater.

“Oh, my god!” he cried, taking a deep breath. “Oh, my god! You can’t scare your doctor like that!”

I was my father’s good man now. If he could see the life I had chosen to live, he would have approved. But I felt so vulnerable. In the midst of all this effort to pursue a career and provide for a family and make my contribution to who our children would become—in the midst of all this, I could still raise my eyes to a doctor’s face and hear the same kind of news he had.

When we moved into a larger apartment, we stood in the kitchen and decided that this is a drawer for cooking utensils, this is a shelf for pots and pans, and that this large drawer can be for all our phone books. And there the phone books remained as life changed around us. For months and maybe even years, I wouldn’t look inside that drawer because it didn’t have anything I needed. And then one day, frantic to find something, I would yank open the drawer without thinking and suffer a moment of vertigo. Why do I live with a drawer full of phone books? It was the same floating, falling feeling I felt looking at what I thought was a tumor on top of my foot.