“My dear Mrs. Duane,” he would say as he stepped to the counter in the bookstore, “where might I find
In Cold Blood)
Your help will serve, not only me personally, but an entire generation of impressionable students who think of Truman Capote as a guest on
The Dick Cavett Show
. And, by the by, if the jacket of that new Norman Mailer stacked in the window fades, will you consider pitching them all as a service to mankind, or, in deference to the head of women’s studies, who buys those copies of Germaine Greer you persist in ordering, a service to humankind?”
Mrs. Duane was a sophisticated woman, the widow of a former State Department official who had remarried and moved to the country from an apartment on one of the museum blocks off Fifth Avenue. But she was helpless before the stream of pleasantries that my father could pour from the pitcher of that personality. I had watched her once shift a huge stack of
The Canterbury Tales
fromone wall to another because my father had complained about finding them in the short-story section. “I would say, George, that you had the gift of blarney if only you were Irish,” she had said more than once. “I have gemütlichkeit,” said my father, “that’s what it is, whatever it is, be it some rich fruit dessert with clotted cream or a disease of the pancreas, I have it and it is yours. Have you the book?”
“I have,” Mrs. Duane said. And if she hadn’t, she would have gotten it.
He did this with me, too, when he remembered, although never once after I had come home to care for my mother. I can still remember how he taught me the ABCs in the evening before bed, when we were living in a small two-bedroom apartment on a back street far from the university in Princeton and I saw him on weekdays only when I was bathed and brushed and perfect in my long eyelet nightgowns. (My mother made those nightgowns. “I cannot for the life of me find a decent nightgown for a little girl anywhere!” she would say to her small group of faculty wives, who were perfectly satisfied to put their own children into Mickey Mouse pajamas or Doctor Dentons.)
“A
is for Aaaah-aaaah-aaaah-CHOOOOOO!” he would sneeze.
“B
is for blunderbuss.
C
is for cancan dancers kicking up their heels for Toulouse-Lautrec in the fin de siècle.” And so on until we got to
Z
, which was for Zsa Zsa Gabor. No one said Zsa Zsa like my papa.
Sometimes, particularly if one of my girlfriends was in the car, he would sing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” or recite slightly dirty limericks or compliment the girl extravagantly on an ACT LOCALLY, THINK GLOBALLY T-shirt (“Can human understanding surpass the sentiments now beating within—whoops, atop—your breast?”) Of course, they loved it all. “My father sits in the car and farts and tells me to shut up while he gets the sports scores off the radio,” said Jennifer Buckley, whose father owned a company that built supermarkets and public schools. “Your father knew one day that I was wearing Giorgio. Excuse me, but no contest.”
But a man who can identify perfume on an eleventh grader sittingin the back seat of his car may have certain shortcomings as a father. One night in December, home for Christmas my first year at Harvard, I went to his office, high in one corner of an old limestone building that houses the English department and its classrooms. Grandma Nina had called from Florida, telling my mother in Polish that Grandpa had had a stroke and that the doctors believed he was going to die. The phones at the college were out of order because of a winter ice storm, some cables down, and so I took the footbridge, holding tight to the railings as the wind made the walkway sway, trying not to look at the cold river below, the water high on its banks.
The guard waved me through, and when I got to the fourth floor the office door was closed, but I could hear sounds from within, moans, the thump of the old springs on my father’s shabby leather
In Cold Blood)
Your help will serve, not only me personally, but an entire generation of impressionable students who think of Truman Capote as a guest on
The Dick Cavett Show
. And, by the by, if the jacket of that new Norman Mailer stacked in the window fades, will you consider pitching them all as a service to mankind, or, in deference to the head of women’s studies, who buys those copies of Germaine Greer you persist in ordering, a service to humankind?”
Mrs. Duane was a sophisticated woman, the widow of a former State Department official who had remarried and moved to the country from an apartment on one of the museum blocks off Fifth Avenue. But she was helpless before the stream of pleasantries that my father could pour from the pitcher of that personality. I had watched her once shift a huge stack of
The Canterbury Tales
fromone wall to another because my father had complained about finding them in the short-story section. “I would say, George, that you had the gift of blarney if only you were Irish,” she had said more than once. “I have gemütlichkeit,” said my father, “that’s what it is, whatever it is, be it some rich fruit dessert with clotted cream or a disease of the pancreas, I have it and it is yours. Have you the book?”
“I have,” Mrs. Duane said. And if she hadn’t, she would have gotten it.
He did this with me, too, when he remembered, although never once after I had come home to care for my mother. I can still remember how he taught me the ABCs in the evening before bed, when we were living in a small two-bedroom apartment on a back street far from the university in Princeton and I saw him on weekdays only when I was bathed and brushed and perfect in my long eyelet nightgowns. (My mother made those nightgowns. “I cannot for the life of me find a decent nightgown for a little girl anywhere!” she would say to her small group of faculty wives, who were perfectly satisfied to put their own children into Mickey Mouse pajamas or Doctor Dentons.)
“A
is for Aaaah-aaaah-aaaah-CHOOOOOO!” he would sneeze.
“B
is for blunderbuss.
C
is for cancan dancers kicking up their heels for Toulouse-Lautrec in the fin de siècle.” And so on until we got to
Z
, which was for Zsa Zsa Gabor. No one said Zsa Zsa like my papa.
Sometimes, particularly if one of my girlfriends was in the car, he would sing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” or recite slightly dirty limericks or compliment the girl extravagantly on an ACT LOCALLY, THINK GLOBALLY T-shirt (“Can human understanding surpass the sentiments now beating within—whoops, atop—your breast?”) Of course, they loved it all. “My father sits in the car and farts and tells me to shut up while he gets the sports scores off the radio,” said Jennifer Buckley, whose father owned a company that built supermarkets and public schools. “Your father knew one day that I was wearing Giorgio. Excuse me, but no contest.”
But a man who can identify perfume on an eleventh grader sittingin the back seat of his car may have certain shortcomings as a father. One night in December, home for Christmas my first year at Harvard, I went to his office, high in one corner of an old limestone building that houses the English department and its classrooms. Grandma Nina had called from Florida, telling my mother in Polish that Grandpa had had a stroke and that the doctors believed he was going to die. The phones at the college were out of order because of a winter ice storm, some cables down, and so I took the footbridge, holding tight to the railings as the wind made the walkway sway, trying not to look at the cold river below, the water high on its banks.
The guard waved me through, and when I got to the fourth floor the office door was closed, but I could hear sounds from within, moans, the thump of the old springs on my father’s shabby leather
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