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Authors: Nicholas DelBanco
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says, always, “Daddy, take me with you,” and if he’s returning she asks, always, “Daddy, how much did you win?”
“Enough for an ice cream, J-J,” he says. “Later.” Then he pats her on the bottom and deposits her on the floor again although she keeps her arms, or tries to, locked around his neck. On summertime Saturday mornings he takes her for an ice cream to the Dairy Queen, or the Saratoga Dairy Bar, walking down Broadway and holding her hand and, if she is very tired, hoisting her up on his shoulders and telling her hold tight now, hold tight as you can to the reins.
Then Claire was born, and David, and then the four of them would walk down Broadway, her brother riding pickaback, so she would walk in front. For all the years of her childhood and, later, growing up and growing away from her parents—their constant squabble, their drawn lines—Joanna took his side of things, adoring his swagger and laughter, his gallantry and ease. Her father was a charming man and she loved him very much and all their guests did also, but her mother was unmoved. “For better or for worse, in sickness and in health. That’s what we agreed to when we married,” said Alice, “and nowadays everything’s worse . . .”
She had tried to take her mother’s side, trying to see the car crash as the last in a series of insults, the final reproof and slap in the face—but all Joanna felt was sorrow and all she was was bereft. When she tasted her own first dry martini in a bar on East 69th Street she understood on the instant that
this
was what her father drank, and the boy who had been plying her with gin was rewarded when he took her to his room not with compliance but tearfulness, not with sex but rage. You cannot be angry at dead men, she knows, you should save anger for the living; you cannot hate a corpse. “I don’t,” her mother answered when she asked, “I don’t really hate him. It’s only there’s a kind of peace in knowing it’s all over now, and it can’t happen again.”
It could; it did; it would happen again. For years she could not enter a car without an image of her father and some stranger with her skirt hiked up, the two of them driving away from a party with a thermos of martinis and smashed into a tree. When he died she had been seventeen and old enough to know how long her parents had been angry at each other, unhappy in the life they shared yet unwilling to divorce. Theirs had been a tight-lipped silence or the noise of argument and, on her father’s part, evasion and, on her mother’s, disdain. When Joanna asked, years later, while her own first marriage was falling apart, if she herself ever thought of divorce, her mother said, “Of course not, no, there were many things I thought about but divorce wasn’t one of them. Maybe revenge. It wasn’t the way we behaved back then, or at least not the way
I
behaved. So not divorce, no, that was never in the cards.”
“Why not?” she’d persisted. “If you were—incompatible.”
“David,” Alice said.
“David?”
“You were old enough. Claire too. But David wasn’t old enough,” she said.
IV
1916
T he Vagabonds’ progress has been unimpeded: thirty-five miles since they broke camp at breakfast and nothing untoward. They have been under way, now, four days. That this region of the country should have well-paved arteries was no revelation to Edison, or less a revelation than a confirmation of his long-held faith in the all-leveling impulse toward advancement in and of the populace:
take that tree, that hillside, that mountain stream and cut and level and ford it.
He laughed. He must remember to tell Henry of the happy nature of such wordplay, the accident of nomenclature that caused them to ford the ford in a Ford, though regrettably not as yet with.
Nor would it be affordable for most. Their caravan, if neither ostentatious nor excessive, was—it must be admitted—not small. Those who journeyed to America while it was yet
“Enough for an ice cream, J-J,” he says. “Later.” Then he pats her on the bottom and deposits her on the floor again although she keeps her arms, or tries to, locked around his neck. On summertime Saturday mornings he takes her for an ice cream to the Dairy Queen, or the Saratoga Dairy Bar, walking down Broadway and holding her hand and, if she is very tired, hoisting her up on his shoulders and telling her hold tight now, hold tight as you can to the reins.
Then Claire was born, and David, and then the four of them would walk down Broadway, her brother riding pickaback, so she would walk in front. For all the years of her childhood and, later, growing up and growing away from her parents—their constant squabble, their drawn lines—Joanna took his side of things, adoring his swagger and laughter, his gallantry and ease. Her father was a charming man and she loved him very much and all their guests did also, but her mother was unmoved. “For better or for worse, in sickness and in health. That’s what we agreed to when we married,” said Alice, “and nowadays everything’s worse . . .”
She had tried to take her mother’s side, trying to see the car crash as the last in a series of insults, the final reproof and slap in the face—but all Joanna felt was sorrow and all she was was bereft. When she tasted her own first dry martini in a bar on East 69th Street she understood on the instant that
this
was what her father drank, and the boy who had been plying her with gin was rewarded when he took her to his room not with compliance but tearfulness, not with sex but rage. You cannot be angry at dead men, she knows, you should save anger for the living; you cannot hate a corpse. “I don’t,” her mother answered when she asked, “I don’t really hate him. It’s only there’s a kind of peace in knowing it’s all over now, and it can’t happen again.”
It could; it did; it would happen again. For years she could not enter a car without an image of her father and some stranger with her skirt hiked up, the two of them driving away from a party with a thermos of martinis and smashed into a tree. When he died she had been seventeen and old enough to know how long her parents had been angry at each other, unhappy in the life they shared yet unwilling to divorce. Theirs had been a tight-lipped silence or the noise of argument and, on her father’s part, evasion and, on her mother’s, disdain. When Joanna asked, years later, while her own first marriage was falling apart, if she herself ever thought of divorce, her mother said, “Of course not, no, there were many things I thought about but divorce wasn’t one of them. Maybe revenge. It wasn’t the way we behaved back then, or at least not the way
I
behaved. So not divorce, no, that was never in the cards.”
“Why not?” she’d persisted. “If you were—incompatible.”
“David,” Alice said.
“David?”
“You were old enough. Claire too. But David wasn’t old enough,” she said.
IV
1916
T he Vagabonds’ progress has been unimpeded: thirty-five miles since they broke camp at breakfast and nothing untoward. They have been under way, now, four days. That this region of the country should have well-paved arteries was no revelation to Edison, or less a revelation than a confirmation of his long-held faith in the all-leveling impulse toward advancement in and of the populace:
take that tree, that hillside, that mountain stream and cut and level and ford it.
He laughed. He must remember to tell Henry of the happy nature of such wordplay, the accident of nomenclature that caused them to ford the ford in a Ford, though regrettably not as yet with.
Nor would it be affordable for most. Their caravan, if neither ostentatious nor excessive, was—it must be admitted—not small. Those who journeyed to America while it was yet
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