The secret of his charm (2018)

It is the end of a long day of driving, and we are finally leaving Interstate 95. Nine or ten, I am leaning over the front bench seat, between the headrests, to talk to my parents. We have been driving down the eastern seaboard from Connecticut, and my father’s southern drawl has thickened at each state line. We noticed it first at the end of the New Jersey Turnpike, crossing the bridge into Delaware. It was suddenly heavier in Maryland. Now we are in Virginia, and he sounds like he never left. We are traveling to a family gathering. Everyone has booked rooms in the same motel.

There are eight children in his family, six boys and two girls. He is the baby. His seven siblings each have a spouse. Each couple has three or four children. Some of these children are old enough to have husbands or wives and children themselves. Add some great aunts and a few of my father’s cousins, and the family could practically fill a motel.

We find the motel. It is one of those old fashioned, two-story motels with a balcony wrapped around the second floor. We can’t find the office. We are following a narrow driveway around the back of the building—I am still leaning over the front seat—when a door opens on the second floor. My father’s sister Ruth steps out of her room and onto the balcony. We all see her, from inside the station wagon. She sees my father. She waves with both hands and then covers her mouth with both hands and then uncovers it to wave again.

With a great dramatic flourish, he slams on the brakes, swipes the transmission into park, and leaps out of the car. “Ruthie!”

I flip over the front seat and sit next to my mother for a better view.

Ruth runs to lean over the railing, laughing and crying at the same time. My father shouts and gestures like Romeo to Juliet. She cries harder and stretches down her arms as her children come pouring out of the room behind her.

“Ruthie,” he asks, taking his hand from his heart, “where are the stairs?”

“Oh, Clint, I don’t know.” She is wiping her eyes with the back of her fingers. “I walked up here not ten minutes ago, but I’m so happy now I can’t remember.”

“How can I hug you if I can’t find the stairs?”

Along the balcony other doors start flying open.

“It’s Clint!”

“Clint’s here!”

He turns left and right, looking for the stairs, and then he spins all the way around and sees a painter’s ladder next to a dumpster. He grabs it, carries it across the driveway, and sets it against the balcony. More family are shouting now, from different doors, as he climbs the ladder to hug his sister over the railing. They were the youngest together in that large family, not more than two years apart. He stays there, our car still blocking the narrow driveway, to greet all the siblings and in-laws and nieces and nephews now crowding down the balcony.

What I saw—watching and listening from the front seat—was his focus on his sister. He enjoyed finding the ladder. It made him happy to entertain the rest of the family. But the gesture was entirely for Ruth. He would have done this if she were the only person in the motel. And he did it with a purpose.

Ruth had married a sweet, caring man from Kansas, and that’s where they lived, a thirty-hour drive from her family. (She met him in Virginia and saw the Great Plains for the first time after their wedding. They were somewhere in Oklahoma, turning north toward western Kansas, when Carl saw her shoulders shaking and the tears flowing down her face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, “but I don’t think even God knows where I am!”) My father understood how much she missed her sister and her brothers out there, and especially him, year after year. He also understood that driving east wasn’t the hard part. He leapt out of the car to make her feel welcome, to show her how much he missed her, and to give her a memory for the long drive back out west.

This is what I remember most about my father—how closely he followed what was happening behind your eyes and between your ears. He was always responding to you. His warm and easy understanding usually felt playful, and it was the secret of his charm.

All of this, like everything else he did, I watched closely and admired greatly. I imitated him from the earliest years of my life, to the finest level of detail.

My watching, my imitating intensified until the age of eleven—the age when children still see only the heroic best in their parents, which was when I lost him. And when you identify so closely with someone, you believe that what happens to them will happen to you. It felt a fact to me, a certain fact, that I would die at thirty-nine just as he did. And I continued to believe this until the only event that could disprove it finally occurred. I turned forty. After that, I felt confident I would make it to eighty.