chapter two - oh father, where art thou?
My father was the marrying kind. He believed in doing it early and often, as did his father, his mother, my mother, my step-mother and other assorted relatives. In the early 1950’s, shortly after his twenty-first birthday and while still in graduate school, he had a wife, a daughter and a step-son, since for his first marriage he picked an “older woman”. Of course, when you’re that age, almost all women are older.
Imagine the result. I grew up in a household that included his daughter from his first marriage, my step-mother’s daughter from her first marriage, the four children my father had with his second wife – my mother – my step-mother’s son from her second marriage squeezed in among us, and the child they had together. My step-mother was also a licensed foster parent, so we always had at least two and often a couple more foster brothers and sisters in the house. These children who lived with us the longest were what in those days we called handicapped: confined to wheelchairs with cerebral palsy, unable to communicate verbally and often dealing with cognitive disabilities as well. The others were developmentally disabled or emotionally troubled. Besides that, my step-mother provided daycare services to a few of the neighborhood working women, so there were usually two or more miscellaneous children hanging around for the large part of each weekday. And no, it was not like “The Brady Bunch”.
My father somehow managed to get custody of his entire brood. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, this was unheard of. I’m not sure how he did it, and whether or not it says more about him or more about the women he married. After his first divorce he even had custody of his first step-son for a while, a boy who happened to share his initials in reverse and whom he tried to convince was named after him, although the child’s name was in fact completely different. I read somewhere that it was once predicted that in the future, men would marry three times. The first marriage would be for lust, the second would be for breeding purposes, and the third would be for companionship. That seems to be what my father did. His first marriage was to an attractive woman who was married to her first husband when they met, and was apparently passionate and intense like a flash in the pan. Some time later he turned his affections toward my mother, who could more than hold her own with him intellectually. Based on the babies that popped out one right after the other, he clearly wanted to make babies with her. His last wife was the more dutiful, subservient woman that his fragile ego could handle, and they are still together to this day.
My father collected job titles like he collected women. He was steadily climbing the career ladder, and that resulted in his having a new job every year or two. My older brother is fifteen months older than I am, my sister is thirteen months younger, and my other brother is sixteen months younger than she is, and only my sister and I were born in the same city. It was a city that we kept coming back to, because there were more opportunities and my father kept getting recruited to come back to a better job there after taking promotions to go elsewhere. That city was also where he met my step-mother, and where we continued to live after he married her, until I was ten years old.
I have one memory of my father from when he and my mother were together. It must have been a weekend morning and both of them were still in bed, sleeping or trying to sleep, each with their back turned toward the other and facing outward, lying close to the edge of the bed. I must have been two or three years old, and I was running back and forth between them, kissing each in turn on the cheek and then running around the bed to kiss the other. I have few more memories of my father from when they were separated and divorcing.
There was the time that we suddenly found ourselves at my uncle’s house, after my father had kidnapped us and deposited us all there. I vaguely remember his being around during that trip, but I mostly remember the excitement of hanging out with my cousins since we hardly ever saw them. There was also the time when my mother got into a car accident with us in the car. I was probably four years old at the time. My father came to visit us in the hospital, and arrived right at the moment that I was lying there on my back, having developed an erection from having to urinate very, very badly (as males sometimes do) and I had, in the absence of an attendant to let me out of the bed to use the bathroom, pulled up my hospital gown and shot pee up like a fountain and out into the middle of the floor. My last clear memory is of my father arriving at our house with another man. My three siblings and I were on beds that were barely made, two bunk beds in one room, one single uncovered light bulb shining down its ugly yellow light from the center of the ceiling. I don’t remember my mother being there. It was as if my father and the other man had broken into the house and found us there, alone. Maybe they had.
