Jack was my father, and he had sterling qualities. He was a very good listener, for one thing, which may have been the result of interviewing anybody who did anything interesting in Madison Wisconsin from 1945-1974. He was a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal, which meant that he got up every morning, ate breakfast, and then retired to the green sofa that my mother hated and could not throw away.
(It wasn’t broken, to answer your question, and who could throw away a sofa?)
Jack was born in 1909 and went through the Agricultural Depression of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 30’s. The experience never left him, I used to think, and was fused with the loneliness and grimness of living on a North Dakota farm through brutal winters. Even though the family lived in Minneapolis, Jack’s father travelled frequently, since he had real estate dealing in North Dakota and Montana. Jack told me once that the sound of a train whistle even decades later stabbed him in the heart. He had stood on too many railway platforms, seeing a black train take away, once again, his father.
He was a big man who took surprising small steps and spoke in a soft voice. He invited you to spill your beans, and he was wise enough often just to listen, for the most part. But it was at breakfast, when all of us were waking up and figuring out how we were going to get through the day, that another side of Jack turned up.
He held forth. He pontificated. He was untroubled by nuance or doubt.
And he was horrified by what was happening in the country, since the 1960’s in America, which is when and where I sat with my father in those years, were definitely a time of turbulence. A staunch Republican, he believed in Richard Nixon until the end. He rejected all of the dogma of the Christian faith and the Lutheran Church, but he unflinchingly adopted its moral code and spiritual values. And he expected his sons to do so as well. Anything else would have been unthinkable.
At the breakfast table, he carried on about the liberal press, and the bias he felt they espoused. He also had strong views about the sexual revolution which was going on at the time.
From his point of view, it wasn’t.
Men were men, also known as animals, who for the most part would fuck anyone they could. He did not, and yes, I have just asked myself, quietly, “are you really sure.”
Yes, I am. He was one of the most honest men I’ve met, and he was also a man of his word. He did what he said.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t understand people who didn’t.
He knew that the average guy would screw when he could. But women, thank God, had the stronger moral code. Women were either saints or sluts, but sainthood was their preferred cloak.
There was no sexual revolution going on—it was just weak people who had been given permission to behave badly. The animals were acting up in the barnyard.
Maybe that’s what got ahold of me—but I was speechless, and if I can dredge it up, the video will show it. I stammered out that the book was appalling, and beyond that, there wasn’t much else I could say.
Or maybe it was what I did say, at the very end. Our family—or at least part of it—has been in the states since before the revolution. Some member of the family has fought in every war since (presumably) King Philip’s War. We have a stake in this game, and we don’t ask much, in this family. Nobody has to go to Harvard or cure cancer or make much more than a buck.
But we do have to be good people.
Jack would have been horrified by Jeffrey Epstein—not so for what he did, but for his openness, his reveling in it. He would have been appalled that anybody found it funny, or something to celebrate. And he would have found it incomprehensible that any woman could pose naked or near naked and be completely fine with it. Shame was an inevitable part of “illicit” sex. Silence was a necessary part of licit sex (which occurred—duh!—only between married couples).
A female reporter told my mother, once, years after my father had died, that he was the only man that every woman felt comfortable being alone with late at night in the newsroom. My mother was completely unsurprised, but also dismayed—she couldn’t believe it was that bad. Was her own husband that much of a rarity? And what kind of marriages did all her friends have?
So I sputtered and groped for words, there, on the stage of the Poet’s Passage. Thankfully, not a lot of people were there. And Lady, the muse and proprietress of the Passage, has a forgiving nature.
But it was a warning sign. I’m not in good shape. I’m fatigued and stressed and not able, somehow, to let go. To relax, and to say that the nation will be all right, that we have had crises before and survived them. That God is on our side and will not forsake us.
That may have been why, the next night, YouTube took matters into its own hands and didn’t show me Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell, or any of the purveyors of outrage that I normally see. I have no idea whose finger was on the remote, and what buttons had to be skipped, ignored and ultimately pressed. But there I was, and there Matthias Goerne, singing Schubert.
And it was odd, since I had not been listening recently to either Schubert or Goerne. In fact, I’ve been listening to Palestrina, who lived in the last three quarters of the 16th century, and Gordon Lightfoot, who died a couple of years ago (and whose mind I cannot read).
But there I was, lying on my couch, listening to Shubert, and remembering a trip I had taken to New York, a decade ago. I wanted to see my brother and sister living there, and had waited until I saw that Goerne was going to be at Carnegie Hall, singing Die Winterreise. So I bought tickets to get to New York and into Carnegie Hall, and my brother John and I went to the concert.
“Why are you going to New York,” asked Näia, Lady’s daughter.
“To hear Matthias Goerne,” I told her.
“What’s that,” she said.
“That’s a German guy,” I said, “who has the voice I want to hear, as I die.”
Once again, I didn’t know it was true until the moment I said it.
Ahh, but YouTube knew it.
No comments:
Post a Comment