Thursday, August 11, 2022

The Escape

This business of piecing together my father’s unpublished writings is getting complicated. As I figure out how to put the pages in order, and discover more side notes, outlines, and hand-written parts, I realize the whole thing ties together into a draft of what he envisioned would eventually be a book.

And that book was to be a semi-self-biographical novel about a man dreaming of escaping from his conventional life after a series of overwhelming personal tragedies. 

Since I am sorting through this material daily, in between other responsibilities, I’m bound to make errors — some of them big ones — along the way.

Then I’ll correct them and keep going.

Yesterday I made a big error when I said that my author-father had named his son in the story Tommy. Actually, I now have discovered that the name he chose was Timmy. What threw me off is in the typed version it’s Tommy with the “o” hand-corrected to a “i” lightly with a pencil.

When I first saw it, I read straight through that pencil mark in two places and fell for the typo.

Freudian slip? Maybe, but if so by both me and him, assuming he was the typist.

Anyway, Timmy still dies in the story, but so does another major character.

Joe’s wife, Helen. This was another shocker for me.

(Dad, you’ve got to be kidding! Mom gets killed off too?)

What kind of novel is this?

I haven’t located the explanation for Helen’s demise yet, but there’s a long section where she is utterly inconsolable over Timmy’s death. Soon after that we learn she’s gone.

Part of the issue here is Dad’s papers when I found them were badly out of order, some numbered, some not, as if they had been stuffed away in the middle of a move. So I got easily confused.

Near the bottom of the pile of pages, Helen and Timmy are suddenly alive again. Joe is 45, Helen 39, and their beloved daughter (maybe named Julie?) lives out in L.A. and had a daughter of her own, who sounds quite delightful.

I also learned that Timmy was quite a delightful child as well. He was full of energy, walking, running and talking at exceptionally early ages, always falling down and getting up again, keeping going, though his head was usually “black and blue.”

Sounds like he was mistake-prone.

There is a parallel story developing at Joe’s office, where an important guy named John T. Lewis — later corrected by pencil as Joseph T. Gallagher — shows up and is making a serious presentation when an interruption comes in the form of a phone call. 

Gallagher can barely control his anger at this disruption.

This turns out to be the frantic phone call that Timmy has died ( once again), which apparently irritates Joseph T. to no end.

(This whole saga is starting to remind me of a Bob Dylan song where the only order is disorder. I like Bob Dylan songs.)

The business section of the novel is pretty boring, to be frank, and has to do mainly with failed attempts to acquire various other companies. 

But I might understand more about the overall arc of the narrative if I could force myself to read a long, long, long section where a whole bunch of the main characters engage in an incredibly well-documented round of golf.

There’s some guy named Mort, another one called Bill, and so on. Helen is there as well with her beautiful golf swing. The score is tied at some point, and there’s all this detail about tees, playing through, putting and the mechanics of the game of golf, which I confess never has been able to stir the depths of passion in my soul like it clearly did for my Dad.

It’s charming if it’s your thing, I assume.

Maybe some answers as to what this is all about are buried in the rough in there, such as Helen getting a big hole in one, or getting hit in the head and killed by an errant shot from Joseph T. Gallagher. 

(Maybe I’ll get around to reading it soonish.)

Anyway, after Timmy and Helen died, Joe starts plotting his secret escape into the wilderness. Using a false name, so he couldn’t be tracked, he charters a flight somewhere deep into the mountains, where he is going to conduct a mysterious scientific experiment…

But I don’t understand why it has to be a secret.

(To be continued, probably.)

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