Read Online The Story of My Father by Sue Miller - Free Book Online Page B

backwards—backed into it—so that by the time he was able to look around and understand where he was, he was already encircled by it,
held
in it.
    And I feel a doubled yawning sorrow enter my life. I’m so sure I’ll never feel this way
—encircled,
either by love or faith.
    The study was also the room where my father read to us. He was a wonderful reader, taking all the parts in whatever the story was. He loved doing a falsetto for women and girls,
being
them and mocking them at the same time, something I would remember later when he was so easily contemptuous of the chirping cheerfulness of the mostly female residents of Sutton Hill. He read whatever we picked, without judgment or censure. He read
Winnie the Pooh
and
Treasure Island
and
Swiss
Family Robinson.
He read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which I hated and my sister loved. He read
Stuart Little
and
Charlotte’s Web.
All the classics, the approved texts. But he also read
Archie
comics and
Katie Keene
and
Little Lulu.
We all loved Lulu, and we especially loved the voice my father gave her: high-pitched and ridiculous, yes, but also somehow sturdily competent.
    When my little brother was old enough for read-aloud books, he got to pick them, and we older children drifted away. We’d heard most of them several times by then anyway. But every once in a while, I’d go and sit on the daybed too, just for a few minutes, drawn by my father’s voice. And often I’d listen to the story from my bedroom with my door open while I did my homework, not quite able to hear the words, but noting the changing inflections, Pooh to Piglet, Tubby to Lulu. He once did such a convincing and self-pitying Eeyore that it brought sudden tears to my eyes.
    Where else do I see my father? Where else do I remember him clearly?
    In Maine, of course, at my grandparents’ camp—a group of small cabins scattered in a clearing in the woods by a pristine lake. We went there every long academic summer from the time I was three until I was in my teens (except for that summer my father was in Europe), and there was no part of that experience that wasn’t stamped indelibly on my mind, my heart.
    Even the long trips getting there. We would be packed in, three in the front seat, three in back, the luggage area and the top of the car overloaded with duffel bags of clothing for the whole summer, with diapers, with my father’s papers and books, with food for the trip. There was always a dog too, standing across several laps or sitting on someone, hot and sticky, perspiration spooling down lavishly from his dangling tongue. The interstate highway system was only beginning to be developed, so it usually took us four or five days of slow meandering loops on two-lane roads, through small towns across the Midwest and then in Pennsylvania and across upper New York State, to get there. Someone was always carsick; someone else had to pee
—Now!
Someone had pinched someone, encroached on someone else’s sacred sense of space, taken all the crayons, read over someone else’s shoulder,
breathed
on someone too hard. As an adolescent I once asked to change seats because the wind was blowing my hair against my carefully arranged
do.
My mother grew frantic with all of us. She reached around, slapping people randomly; it didn’t matter who, the person probably deserved it or would shortly. She smoked, she yelled, she wept.
    In my recollection, my father never lost his temper. He kept us playing games. We sang along with him the hymns we all loved, several verses through. He sang to us his repertoire of nutty, naughty songs: “Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue,” “There Were Three Jolly Fishermen,” and “The Bulldog on the Bank”—whose lyrics were:
    Oh, the bulldog on the bank
(BASSO)
And the bullfrog in the pool.
Oh, the bulldog on the bank
(BASSO PROFUNDO)
And the bullfrog in the pool.
Oh, the bulldog on the bank
And the bullfrog in the pool . . .
The bulldog called the bullfrog
A
green old water