The older I get, the more I realize what an enigma my father was and how insufficient my overtaxed memory has become at dispelling the mystery of the man. Time and again I fix his portrait within my mind's eye only to look away and find it reduced to paint chips and sparkling dust.
Now and then I can hear him before the last 30 years of silence picking out a tune on Mom's piano, fists clenched, forefingers extended and stabbing out the notes, singing: "I like coffee, I like tea; I like the girls, and the girls like me!" Sometimes he sang-along with Sinatra's "Young at Heart" on the hi-fi or, embarrassingly enough, offered up a boisterous Tony Orlando & Dawn's "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" which was always sung up-tempo with a load "Whoa!" to properly kick off each chorus.
As I grew up, he practiced routines that were utterly foreign to me, my sisters and our friends and used a language all his own. Dinner at the kitchen demanded cloth napkins, no elbows and mouths closed when chewing. Conversation there was punctuated by Dad's sparse French "Passez-moi le beurre, s'il vous plait" or simply "Ou est le beurre?" Time alone with Dad was sometimes even more incomprehensible, especially when confessing sin. The private disappointments I authored were often met with the horrified odd exhortation, "Use yer beano Murray, use yer beano!"
In winter, on the coldest of Sunday mornings, he would warm the car before driving us to Sunday School. He consigned us to the backseat where he wrapped us in car blankets knowing we could never be too warm in the brittle snap of February. Thus mobilized, we were a captive audience to his ongoing lecture series on the perils of being a child.
Dad's favorite (and oft repeated) themes included "You Think Money Grows On Trees" (Part 1) which, if he drove slowly or we left early, was followed by a brisk "You Kids Are So Ungrateful" (Part 2). Although wildly popular, "I Would Never Speak To My Mother Like That" could never hold a candle to the masterful "My Father Would Have Thrown Me Across The Room If I Ever (fill in the blank)" which, quite frankly, always brought down the house.
Ever the dutiful disciplinarian, Dad always strove to ensure that, by the time we reached church, we were indeed ready to come to Jesus. Sadly, faithful, dogmatic repetition of these time-honored themes didn't phase us. We were awful kids.
I say that in hindsight, of course. Back then, we were golden, Teflon, unimpeachable--the glowing, ripening apples of our grandmother's eye! Except perhaps for one tiny, irreducible flaw passed down to us from our mother: we were always late. No matter where we were going, no matter where we had been, somehow we were always, always late--no mean feat for children raised in a town that thrived on time. Elgin watches aside, we were a tardy people who made others tardy as well and that was unforgivable. Dad had a strange and exotic name for someone who kept him waiting: Aggie Twaddle.
"Come on Aggie Twaddle," hands fixed at 10 and 2 and thumbs thumping out the measure while he fought the urge to honk. "Let's go Aggie Twaddle," locked doorknob firmly grasped in one hand and car keys splayed in the other ready to poke the engine to life. "Are you ready Aggie Twaddle?" innocent expression fixed over Mom's left shoulder in the mirror even while the anxious eyes gave it all away.
Who, I have always wondered, is Aggie Twaddle and where in the world is she going? Is she just another fleck of fallen paint chip or does she have more to say on the subject of Arthur Macdonald Ferreira?
I doubt he realized it, but Dad's lessons might have made more of an impact at the time had he been more forthcoming about his own life. His family were strangers to us and infrequent visitors to our home. Reunions--seldom held--were private affairs looped around Dad's poker table, fortified with gin and tonic, scented with menthol cigarettes and punctuated with the foreign vowels of Boston's streets.
What they discussed over those long nights is unknown, but they had no shortage of history for review. Their father died early in life and left their mother, Jeannette, destitute with four children to raise in the growing dust of the Great Depression. Though still a child, Robert, the oldest, quickly grasped what few adults could: Jeannette was unsuited to her fate, oblivious to their peril and incapable of escaping her condition. Resolved, the children closed ranks to protect her. Robert quit school to work mean jobs and feed the family. Arthur and George scoured the nearby railyards every day, buckets in hand, searching for stray bits of coal to dull the teeth of their New England winters. Their sister "Kargy" took charge of the household as best she could.
I'd like to think that this painful, hard-won knowledge would have made Dad's lessons more meaningful to me as a child. Surely all these moments and scattered bits of information would have cracked the hard, glossy shell of cynicism my sisters and I wore so openly. And my father's witness--the mysterious Aggie Twaddle--perhaps most of all, would have spoken volumes about the hopes and dreams of a child who would later become the man. Ironically enough, she would have done so without saying a word.
Who was Aggie Twaddle? Released on Christmas Eve 1922, the silent movie "Broke and Back Home" was pure Horatio Alger with its rags-to-riches plotline. It tells the story of Tom Redding's journey back to respectability and introduces us to the people he meets along the way--including our very own Aggie Twaddle. Even though her name only appears in the cast listing and no mention of her place in the story is made, I can imagine what she might have meant to my father. He would have been 10 at the time, and the storyline would have gripped him. When his apparently wealthy father dies and leaves only debts, Tom Redding is deserted by all save Mary Austin. Desperate, he goes west and successfully develops an oil well. Later, Tom returns home in the guise of poverty, secretly buys up property and then rubs everyone's noses in his good fortune and gets the girl when he reveals that he's rich. Small wonder that, just seven years later, Dad turned his back on Boston and struck out for California in hopes of finding a little good fortune of his own.
Whatever part Aggie Twaddle may have played in Tom Redding's life, it's clear she made a lasting impression on my father and, in turn, on me. What's funny is that I didn't have far to look for her at all. I just needed to be willing to look. She was a resident in my father's every home, a passenger in every car and a sympathetic friend with whom he synchronized his watch every time I made him wait. She's present in my home and mind as well now, no longer a discarded or decaying bit of portrait paint. Instead, she's taken on some dimension and loaned a bit of it to Dad. She's given him some color and definition, filling in the background with meaning instead of shadows and adding purpose and perspective to the lines around his eyes. I'm still filling in the gaps, but his portrait is far from incomplete. I'm not worried though. After all, memory is a work in progress, too.
