Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Dad's Story III

(This is the third of four parts.)

This business of piecing together my father’s unpublished writings is getting complicated.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.

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

The man’s only son, Timmy, dies in the story, but so does Joe’s wife, Helen. This was another shocker for me.

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 just learn she too is 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 at several different times. Perhaps he wanted the project to be kept a secret, but the end result is confusion on my part.

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

We also learn that Joe’s son Timmy was 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 been in the fatal boating accident, which irritates Joseph T. Gallagher.

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

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 detailed round of golf.

There’s some guy named Mort, another one called Bill, and so on. Joe’s wife 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.

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

Anyway, it is after Timmy and Helen have died that the narrative picks up again. 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.

What I don’t understand is why this all has to be a secret.

TO BE CONTINUED

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