Friday, August 12, 2022

The Island




Digging further into my father’s papers, I have now learned significant details about the tragic end of his wife Helen, aka Mom.

After their only son, Timmy (aka me), drowns in what Joe dismisses as a “stupid boating accident,” Helen goes into a deep depression, starts “hitting the bottle,” and finally drives her car off a cliff, killing herself.

Holy crap.

Okay, so she committed suicide. 

But I should note that my father made a side note at this point in the manuscript to remember to devote a chapter describing how hard it must have been on her being alone at home, trying to cope after Timmy’s death, with him back at work. 

Such dramatically tragic events never occurred in our real family, of course. But my mother did have an extended period of emotional distress when we relocated to another city due to my Dad’s transfer and this coincided with my boyhood illness as well.

During the worst of that stretch, I remember trying to console my mother. She cried a lot. My Dad worked a lot. 

The heart infection I experienced went undiagnosed for two years, doing its damage, after our family doctor told my Dad (with me sitting right there), “It’s just psychological — it’s all in his mind.”

My Dad believed that. I remember him telling me as we left the office that I was “weak” and “lazy” and should just stay home “with the girls.”

I didn’t blame my Dad for that assessment because I believed it too. Back in those days, the 50s and early 60s, nobody said stuff like “trust your body.” So why else did I feel no energy to chase down a fly ball (I was dismissed from the Little league team); and why did I just want to spend most of every day lying on the couch or drinking tea with my Mom and sisters?

It must have been all in my mind.

But I knew I wasn’t weak, actually. I felt that if I wanted to, I could run faster than any of the other boys. On the other hand, I did suspect I was lazy. 

Meanwhile, I really liked what seemed to be in my mind. It was on fire with ideas, fantasies and the worlds that books suggested to me. I read loads of library books, invented fantasy sports leagues, composed articles for a “newspaper,” kept elaborate statistics for the imaginary players, and generally was living a richly passive life rather than the physically active life my father wanted for me.

When it finally turned out that I had indeed been seriously physically ill the whole time, and had to be hospitalized with pneumonia in very bad condition, nearly dying, my father must have experienced an awful wave of the kind of guilt that is difficult to bear, let alone talk about.

He had been misled by an authority figure and had almost lost his son in the process. Actually, as it turned out, he did lose me, in some senses.

But in the process he probably helped to create an investigative reporter.

And although he never would have admitted it, my father was probably every bit as sensitive a man as I was. He just never had the language to express that kind of thing.

With me, he tried to hold to his idea of what a man should ideally be, based on the way it was when he grew up, albeit absent his own father, who died when he was ten.

In our most intimate moments, he confided to me how he had never imagined how disgusting and gross other men could be until he went into the military. There, he witnessed sexist and racist things that turned his stomach, according to what he told me.

But then sometimes he seemed to try to pass some of those those awful things on to me, like commenting on the way certain girls’ bodies looked when he caught me looking at them. This was thoroughly disgusting and I hated him for it, but in a way it never really felt like it was really him talking.

As the probably over-sensitive, impressionable boy I was, his many stories turned me firmly against male culture and military service long before the Vietnam War gave me the excuse I needed to burn my draft card, renounce U.S, imperialism and get arrested in demonstrations.

I just never wanted any part of that gross side of men. By then I preferred, by habit and nature, the world of women, although they too quickly proved to be way too much for me emotionally as well. 

So I guess I became a man without a comfort zone. Sort of like an island.

***

Alas, I digress. Back to my father’s story, the one he never published.

After his wife Helen’s dramatic suicide, which I imagine would have resulted in at least a small news report, Joe puts in for a leave from work, and makes an elaborate plan to travel deep into the wilderness. I’m not sure where this was, exactly, but it probably was somewhere in Canada or Alaska.

We learn that Joe makes lists of everything he will need, hires charter pilots, and hikes deep into the area until he finds an island with a narrow gorge leading to a perfect swimming hole and granite steps up to the mouth of a mysterious cave.

As near as I can tell, Joe’s goal is to prove to himself that he can survive under difficult circumstances in the wild, fending for himself, while exploring virgin lands, or conducting mysterious experiments, or seeking some sort of closure before returning to his humdrum workaday life.

He’s trying to get over some very hard stuff, but he’s excited.

Among Dad’s papers is a drawing of the area where Joe seems to have at least temporarily found what he was seeking.

And I hope that he did.

(End of story.)

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