The Angel on the Roof

By Way of an Introduction

For years, my mother told me stories about her past, and I didn’t believe them, I interpreted them. She told me that in 1933 she had the female lead in the Waltham High School senior play and Sonny Tufts had the male lead. She claimed that he asked her to the cast party, but by then she was in love with my father, a stagehand for the play, so she turned down the boy who became a famous movie actor and went to the cast party instead on the arm of the boy who became a New Hampshire plumber.

She also told me that she knew the principals in Grace Metalious’s novel, Peyton Place. The same night the girl in the book murdered her father, she went afterwards to a Christmas party given by my mother and father at their house in Barnstead, New Hampshire. “The girl acted strange,” my mother said. “Kind of like she was on drugs or something, you know? And the boy she was with, one of the Goldens, he got very drunk and depressed, and they left. The next day we heard about the police finding the girl’s father in the manure pile.”

“Manure pile?”

“She buried him there. And your father told me to keep quiet, not to tell a soul they were at our party on Christmas Eve. That’s why our party isn’t in the book. Or the movie they made of it, either,” she added.

She also insists, in the face of my repeated denials, that she once saw me being interviewed on television by Dan Rather.

I remembered these three stories in a cluster one day when, pawing through a pile of old newspaper clippings, I came upon the obituary of Sonny Tufts. Since my adolescence I have read two and sometimes three newspapers a day, frequently clipping an article that for obscure and soon forgotten reasons attracts me. I usually toss the clippings into a desk drawer, and later, often years later, I’ll find myself reading through the clippings, throwing most of them out. It fills me with a strange sadness, a kind of grief for my lost self, as if I were reading and throwing out old diaries.

I’d kept the obituary because I’d liked the rough justice implied by my mother’s story of having forsaken the now largely forgotten 1940s film actor, Sonny Tufts, for my father. She grew up poor and beautiful in a New England mill town, Waltham, Massachusetts, the youngest of the five children of a clockmaker whose wife died (“choked to death on a pork chop bone”—another of her stories) when my mother was nineteen. She was invited the same year, 1933, to the Chicago World’s Fair to compete in a beauty pageant, but didn’t accept the invitation, although she claims my father went to the fair and played his clarinet in a National Guard marching band. Her father, she said, made her stay in Waltham that summer, selling dresses for Grover Cronin’s department store on Moody Street. If her mother had not died that year, she would have been able to go to the fair. “And who knows,” she joked, “you might’ve ended up the son of Miss Chicago World’s Fair of 1933.” That’s the reason I liked my mother’s stories, and why I wanted to believe them: she let me think they were about me.

The truth is, I don’t know much about her life before 1940, the year I was born and started gathering material for my own stories. Like most people, I have paid too little attention to the tales I’ve been told about the lives and events in my family that precede the remarkable event of my own birth. It’s the same with my children. I watch their eyes glaze over, their attention drift on to secret plans for the evening and weekend, as I point out the second-floor tenement on Perley Street in Concord, New Hampshire, where I spent an especially painful chunk of my childhood. Soon it will be too late, I want to say. Soon all you’ll have of me will be your diluted memories of my stories about my life before you were born.

The death of a parent is a terrible thing, but because our parents usually have not been a part of our daily lives for years, most of us do not really miss them when they die. When my father died, though I had been visiting him at his house on Sunday mornings once every six or eight weeks, I did not miss him. For a decade, he had not been a part of my day-to-day life. Yet his death, unexpectedly, was for me a terrible thing and goes on being one now, twenty years later. This is why, I think: my father, a depressed, cynical alcoholic from an early age, did not tell stories. Sadly, if he had told them — about his childhood in Nova Scotia, about stepping on Sonny Tufts in the courtship of my mother, about playing the clarinet at the Chicago World’s Fair — I would not have listened. No doubt, in his cynicism and despair of ever being loved by me or anyone else, he knew that. The only story my father told me that I listened to closely, visualized, and have remembered, he told me a few months before he died. It was the story of how he came to name me Russell. Naturally, as a child I had asked, and he had simply shrugged and said he happened to like the name. My mother corroborated the shrug. But one Sunday morning, the winter before he died, three years before he planned to retire and move to a trailer in Florida, I was sitting across from my father in his kitchen, watching him drink tumblers of Canadian Club and ginger ale, and he wagged a finger in my face and told me that I did not know who I was named after.

“I thought no one.”

“No. When I was a kid,” he said, “my parents tried to get rid of me in the summers. They used to send me to stay with my uncle Russell up on Cape Breton. He was a bachelor and kind of a hermit, and he stayed drunk most of the time. But he played the fiddle, the violin. And he loved me, Russell. Yes, indeed, he loved me. And he was quite a character. But after I was about twelve and old enough to spend my summers working, my parents kept me down in Halifax. And I never saw Uncle Russell again.”

He paused and sipped at his drink. He was wearing his striped pajamas and maroon bathrobe and carpet slippers and was chain-smoking Parliaments. His wife (his fourth — my mother, his first, had divorced him when I was thirteen, because of his drinking and what went with it) had gone to the market as soon as I arrived, as if afraid to leave him without someone else in the house. “He died a few years later,” my father said. “Fell into a snowbank. Passed out. Sonofabitch froze to death.”

I listened to the story and have remembered it all these years after, because I thought it was about me, my name, Russell. My father told it, of course, because for a few moments that cold February morning he dared to hope that he could get his eldest son to love him for it. His story was a prayer, like all good stories, but it went unanswered. The one to whom he prayed — not me, but an angel on the roof — was not listening. At this moment, as I write this, I do love him for the story, but it’s too late for the saying to make either of us happy.

After my father died, I asked his sister Edna about poor old Uncle Russell, the fiddler hermit from Cape Breton who froze to death in a snowbank. She said she never heard of the man. The unofficial family archivist and only a few years younger than my father, Aunt Edna surely would have known of him, would have remembered how my father spent his early summers, would have heard of the man he loved enough to name his firstborn son after.

The story simply was not true. My father had made it up.

Just as my mother’s story about Sonny Tufts was not true. When I came upon the obituary for Sonny Tufts from The Boston Globe, dated June 8, 1970, and written by George Frazier, a journalist with a weakness for the lives and deaths of Social Registrants, I remembered her story freshly and knew why I’d clipped the article years earlier, read it quickly, and kept it for a later look. The title was “Death of a Bonesman,” which meant, of course, that Tufts had gone to Yale and had been tapped for Skull and Bones. Unusual, I thought, for a man in that era to have graduated from Waltham High School and gone to Yale and become a Bonesman. Rather than toss it back in the drawer for another decade or into the wastebasket, I read it through this time to the end, as if searching for a reference to my mother’s having brushed him off after the senior play. Instead, I learned that Bowen Charlton Tufts III, scion of an old Boston banking family, had prepped for Yale not at Waltham High, but at Phillips Exeter. His closest connection to the daughter of a Waltham clockmaker, and to me, was probably through his father’s bank’s ownership of the building where the clockmaker had his shop.

I had never believed the entire story anyhow, but now I had certain proof that she had made up the whole of it. Just as the fact that I have never been interviewed by Dan Rather is proof that my mother, in her apartment in San Diego, never saw me on television being interviewed by Dan Rather. As for Grace Metalious’s characters from Peyton Place showing up at a Christmas party in my parents’ house in Barnstead, I never quite believed that one, either. Peyton Place was indeed based upon a true story about a young woman’s murder of her father in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, a village some twenty-five miles from Barnstead, but in the middle 1940s people did not drive twenty-five miles over snow-covered back roads on a winter night to go to a party given by strangers.

I said that to my mother. She had just finished telling me that someday, thanks to my experiences as a child and adult living in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Florida, the Caribbean, and upstate New York, and my travels to South America, Europe, and Africa, I should be able to write another Peyton Place. This conversation took place some years ago, and I was visiting her in San Diego, an extension of a business trip to Los Angeles. I was seated rather uncomfortably in her one-room apartment. She is a tiny chickadee of a woman with few possessions, most of which seem miniaturized to fit her small body and the close confines of her lodgings, so that whenever I visit her I feel huge and oafish and lower my voice and move with great care.

She was ironing her sheets, while I sat on the unmade sofa bed, unmade because I had just turned the mattress for her, a chore she saved for when I or my younger brother, the only large-sized people in her life then, visited her from the East. “But we weren’t strangers to them,” my mother chirped. “Your father knew the Golden boy somehow. Probably one of his drinking friends,” she said. “Anyhow, that’s why, after the story came out in the newspapers about the murder and the incest and all, your father wouldn’t let me tell anyone.”

“Incest? What incest?”

“You know, the father who got killed, he got killed and buried in the manure pile by his daughter because he’d been committing incest with her. Didn’t you read the book, Russell?”

“No.”

“Well, your father, he was afraid we’d get involved somehow, so I couldn’t tell anyone about it, not until after the book got famous as a novel. You know, whenever I tell people here in California that back in New Hampshire in the nineteen-forties I knew the girl who killed her father in Peyton Place, they’re amazed! Well, not exactly knew her, but you know…”

There’s always someone famous in her stories, said I to myself — Dan Rather, Sonny Tufts, Grace Metalious. She wants her stories, although false and about her, to seem true and about her listeners, and she’s figured out that having characters who are famous helps. When people think a story isn’t true, when they believe it’s only a fiction and not about them, they don’t listen to it, they interpret it — as I was doing that morning in my mother’s room, treating her story as a clue to her psychology, which would let me compare my own psychology and, noting the differences, sigh with relief. (My stories don’t have famous people in them.) I had done the same thing with my father’s drunken fiddler, Uncle Russell. Once I learned that he didn’t exist and the story, therefore, was about my father and not me and, worse, was made up, I rejected it by using it as a clue to help me unravel the puzzle of my father’s dreadful psychology, hoping, no doubt, to unravel the puzzle of my own and safely distance it from his.

One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another — to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us. And it’s why we tell each other stories that we pray will be transformed in the telling by that angel on the roof, made believable and about us all, no matter who we are to one another and who we are not. It’s certainly why my mother tells her stories to anyone who’ll listen, and why my father told me how I got my name. And though it’s too late for me now to give him what, one snowy Sunday morning long ago, he risked asking me for, by remembering his story and recounting it here, I have understood a little more usefully the telling of my own stories. And by remembering, as if writing my memoirs, what the stories of others have reminded me of, what they have literally brought to mind, I have learned how my own function in the world — regardless of whether I’m telling them to my mother, my wife, my children, my friends, or, especially, to strangers. And, to complete the circle, I have learned a little more usefully how to read and listen to the stories of others.

As I was leaving my mother that morning to drive back to Los Angeles and then fly home to New Hampshire, where my brother and sister and all my mother’s grandchildren were then living and where all but the last few years of my mother’s past had been lived, she told me a new story. We stood in the shade of clicking palm trees in the parking lot outside her glass-and-metal building for a few minutes, and she said to me in a concerned way, “You know that restaurant, the Pancake House, where you took me for breakfast this morning?”

I said yes and checked the time and flipped my suitcase into the backseat of the rented car.

“Well, I always eat breakfast there on Wednesdays, it’s on the way to where I baby-sit on Wednesdays, and this week something funny happened there. I sat alone way in the back, where they have that long, curving booth, and I didn’t notice until I was halfway through my breakfast that, at the far end of the booth, a man was sitting there. He was maybe your age, a youngish man, but dirty and shabby. Especially dirty, and so I just looked away and went on eating my eggs and toast.

“But then I noticed that he was looking at me, as if he knew me and didn’t quite dare talk to me. I smiled, because maybe I did know him, I know just about everybody in the neighborhood now. But he was a stranger. And dirty. And I could see that he had been drinking for days.

“So I smiled and said to him, ‘You want help, mister, don’t you?’ He needed a shave, and his clothes were filthy and all ripped, and his hair was a mess. His eyes, though, something pathetic about his eyes made me want to talk to him. But honestly, Russell, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. He was so… I guess dirty and all.

“Anyhow, when I spoke to him, just that little bit, he sort of came out of his daze and sat up straight for a second, like he was afraid I was going to complain to the manager and have him thrown out of the restaurant. ‘What? What did you say to me?’ he asked. His voice was weak, but he was trying to make it sound strong, so it came out kind of loud and broken. ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘nothing.’ And I turned away from him and quickly finished my breakfast and left the restaurant.

“That same afternoon, when I was walking home from my baby-sitting job, I went to the restaurant to see if he was there. But he wasn’t there. And the next morning, Thursday, I walked all the way over there to check again, even though I never eat breakfast at the Pancake House on Thursdays. But he was gone then, too. And yesterday, Friday, I went back a third time. But he was gone.” She lapsed into a thoughtful silence and looked at her hands.

“Was he there this morning?” I asked, thinking that a mild coincidence was perhaps the point of her story.

“No,” she said. “But I didn’t expect him to be there this morning. I’d stopped looking for him by yesterday.”

“Oh. Why did you tell me the story, then? What’s it about?”

“About? I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. I just felt sorry for the man. And because I was afraid, I shut up and left him alone. And then he was gone.” She was still studying her tiny hands.

“What were you afraid of?”

“You know, sounding dumb and naive. And making him mad at me.”

“That’s only natural,” I said and put my arms around her. “Everyone’s afraid that way.”

She turned her face into my shoulder. “I know, Russell, I know. But still…”