Big Questions, Short Answers

There was a question in my mind about parents and children, and how you were different between your mother and your father.

Mothers seemed to have a lot more patience. Maybe because they had us in the first place. Maybe because they spent so much more time with us.

Our mother seemed immune to puzzlement from weird observations and misplaced notions, of which we provided plenty.

One morning, my mother was combing my hair for church. The radio was on, as it always was. WNEW, which played Frank Sinatra, and like that.

The record began to skip. It went on a bit. Finally the host broke in and apologized.

"Wow, he really gave it away now, didn't he, Mom?," I said.

"He sure did," my mother said.

I am quite sure she had no idea what I was talking about, that until that minute, I thought all music on the radio was played and sung live.

After all, the guy said, "And now, here's Frank Sinatra singing 'Here's That Rainy Day'," not "And now, here's a record of Frank Sinatra," etc.

Nor did she care.

Our father, on the other hand, seemed to fret about things we said and questions we asked that made plenty of sense to us, but swerved around his comprehension, somehow.

"Hey, Dad," I said one day in the car. I was riding in the front seat with him, just the two of us out on some weekend errand.

I was contemplating the car's hood ornament, a largish, silver airplane.

"How did you get that airplane on your car?," I asked.

"They put it there," he said.

"How did they know you work at Pan Am?"

"They didn't."

"Then why did they put it there?"

"They just did."

For some reason, apparently, he did not feel like explaining to me the process by which some people got an emblem of the place they worked put onto the hood of their car, and some didn't. My next question was going to be how come Mr. Levine, our neighbor who owned a fruit company, didn't have an apple or something up there. I let it go.

I guess the car was a dangerous place for him to be with me. There was no Mother to intercept the inevitable daffy question.

One day we were driving past Holy Cross cemetery, a large fixture in the neighborhood.

I viewed, and considered with some depth, the various markers of the graves.

Even driving by, from Brooklyn Avenue, you could see some massive statues: angels, crucifixes, in heavy gray stone.

I knew there were plenty of small markers in there, too. I asked,

"Dad, how do they decide what kind of marker you get on your grave?"

"What?," he asked.

"How do they decide whether you get a big one or a small one?"

"It depends how much money you have," he said.

I reared back my head, aghast.

Money? After all that talk in church about helping the poor, and the least of my brothers, and the last shall be first, and the rich man getting to Heaven like a camel through the eye of a needle? You get the religious honor of a big monument in death depending on how much money you made in life?

I did not realize, of course, that somewhere between my straightforward question and my father's simple answer lay a big chasm.

My supposition was that the grave marker was bestowed, as a judgment - a report - of the way you lived your life.

It did not occur to me that they were items of purchase.

My father's supposition was that I had at least that much sense.

Neither of us spoke for the rest of the ride. Me, out of shock and stupefaction, my religious beliefs riddled to the core. My father, I guess, from confusion, or relief.

The Nina, The Pinta, And The IRT

Our mother was a powerful person, controlling all facets of daily life, except whatever small aspects we could hide from her, or were naturally private. These did not amount to much.

Our father had power, too, but it derived from outside the house, where he spent most of his time.

We figured he did a lot of work out there, because when he left in the morning, he smelled fresh (shaving cream) and looked sharp. When he came home, something had obviously took the mickey out of him: wrinkled clothes, loose tie, immediate beer.

He seemed all right, though, and would stand in the kitchen with his beer talking to our mother while she finished cooking dinner.

The fact that he could even get to this job mystified me.

He took the bus on Clarkson and Utica Avenues in the opposite direction from everything I knew. I knew Clarkson Avenue, Lenox Road, Linden Boulevard, Church Avenue, Snyder Avenue, Tilden Avenue, Beverly Road. The library was on Beverly Road, a pretty far walk, and I didn't know anything beyond that.

In the other direction, I didn't know a single thing. Not even one street. He went that way because that's where the subway was.

The subway was a gigantic mystery. He tried to take me on it once. It didn't work out. I didn't like the noise or the smell or the fact that it was underground.

Underground? How do you know when to get off? I refused to get on, and that displeased him. I didn't mind the swat I got as he dragged me back upstairs. At least I was still alive and aware of my surroundings.

He also had the ability to drive a car. That was good, but I really admired his capacity in knowing where things were.

He knew how to get to Flatbush Avenue, Prospect Park, and Manhattan Beach, places we drove to regularly, but not frequently, so how did he remember? I sure didn't.

Every once in a while we would go to a different beach. Riis Park. He knew that, too. Or somewhere new. Shea Stadium. Are you kidding me? It was an hour away with a thousand turns. He never even asked for a second opinion.

Columbus was a famous guy, so I could see it was considered a valuable skill to know how to get places. Some day I would, I figured, though it might be by bus, for me.

Table Money

Clap hands, clap hands
Til Daddy comes home.
Daddy has money
And Mommy has none.

Our mother used to sing this little ditty to her babies.

It was related to the well-known couplet about fathers working, but not all day and night, like mothers.

I wasn't sure these things were strictly true, or even remotely so, but it showed you should get your message out there.

You didn't hear fathers singing or rhyming about their situations, which I could see was a blunder.

As far as I could tell, our father didn't have more money than our mother. He had less.

He had change. When he came home from work, he emptied his pockets onto his dresser. There was a torrent of change, but no bills.

He had nothing in his wallet, because he did not have a wallet.

On the other hand, "Go get my purse," our mother would say when the beer man delivered, or the milkman collected, and it was filled with large coarse notes.

On weekends, going shopping to King Kullen or Sears, my mother had the money. If our father was going out alone, to the auto supply or hardware store, our mother gave him money.

Where would he get any money? Our mother went to the bank. It was closed at nights and weekends, when he was home.

He had a piece of paper called a paycheck. On Friday nights he handed it to our mother.

Our mother turned that into a lot of papers. She had a big, brown accordion file filled with envelopes, and typewritten letters, and sheets of papers filled with numbers.

Our father never touched this file. Every once in a while, when our mother was working with these papers on the table, she would call, "Eddie, come in here," and he would get up, sit with her, and talk.

He got out of a lot of work at that table, no doubt, so I'm sure he would not have beefed about the judgment about who works more hours, mother or father.

He might have felt differently about who had more money, if asked. But really, what would he care? His answer probably would have been, "We have our money."