91 REVERE STREET
451
The radio's specialty was getting programs from Australia and New
Zealand in the early hours of the morning.
My father's favorite piece of den furniture was his oak and
"rhinoceros hide" armchair. It was ostentatiously a masculine, or
rather a bachelor's, chair. It had a notched, adjustable back; it was
black, cracked, hacked, scratched, splintered, gouged, initialed, gun–
powder-charred and tumbler-ringed. It looked like pale tobacco
leaves laid on dark tobacco leaves. I doubt if Father, a considerate
man, was responsible for any of the marring. The chair dated from
his plebe days at the Naval Academy, and had been bought from
a shady, shadowy, roaring character, midshipman "Beauty" Burford.
Father loved each disfigured inch.
My father had been born two months after his own father's
death. At each stage of his life, he was to be forlornly fatherless. He
was a deep boy brought up entirely by a mild widowed mother and
an intense widowed grandmother. When he was fourteen and a
half, he became a deep young midshipman. By the time he graduated
from Annapolis, he had a high sense of abstract form, which he
beclouded with his humor. He had reached, perhaps, his final mental
possibilities. He was deep-not with profundity, but with the dumb
depth of one who trusted in statistics and was dubious of personal
experience. In his forties, Father's soul went underground: as a
civilian he kept his high sense of form, his humor, his accuracy, but
this accuracy was henceforth unimportant, recreational,
hOTS
de
combat.
His debunking grew myopic; his shyness grew evasive; he
argued with a fumbling languor. In the twenty-two years Father
lived after he resigned from the Navy, he never again deserted Boston
and never became Bostonian. He survived to drift from job to job,
to be displaced, to be grimly and literally that old cliche, a fish out
of water. He gasped and wheezed with impotent optimism, took on
new ideals with each new job, never ingeniously enjoyed his leisure,
never even hid his head in the sand.
Mother hated the Navy, hated naval society, naval pay, and
the trip-hammer rote of settling and unsettling a house every other
year when Father was transferred to a new station or ship. She had
been married nine or ten years and still suspected that her husband
wa~
savorless? unmasterful
l
merely considerate.
UIlma,sterfuJ-Fath<;r'~
