2007

The smell of Daddy clung to his clothes hanging in his closet as my sister and I went through them, sorting things out on this Sunday after his death.  There was really not much there.  A few shirts and three or four pairs of slacks. A couple pairs of shoes.  Underwear and socks in the drawers of a little dresser standing lonely in the corner of his closet.  Daddy's straw gardening hat was on a shelf above the clothes rack as was a heavy fur-lined hat with ear flaps that he had purchased in Germany to protect his bald head against the harsh winters there.  All but the gardening hat we bundled into bags for the Goodwill truck; my sister wanted it as a reminder of the Daddy who mowed our lawn on hot summer days.  The two of us then made a list of the things I needed to accomplish in the next few days when I would be there by myself. She had to leave that afternoon to be back for work on Monday.  As the executrix of Daddy's estate, my sister had a daunting task before her; so, I wanted to do all I could before boarding the plane back to California.

The list we compiled included getting in touch with Goodwill, returning Daddy's oxygen machine, going through his paperwork and sorting it, and gifting his motorized wheelchair to the church, which was his wish.  I added to the tasks a complete cleaning of his bedroom because I knew my sisters would be coming back and forth to Arlington, and they would need to stay there.  The mattress cover had not been changed and the sheets were soiled.  So, as soon as I kissed my sister good-bye, I set about scouring Daddy's living area.  Three men rented rooms from my father; two, John and Leon, were college students from the Ivory Coast who had lived there since May.  The other, Pete, was an older single man who had lived with Daddy for quite some time.  All of them loved my father and were heavy-hearted over his death.  Because they were home on Sunday afternoon, I elicited their help in turning the big heavy king-sized mattress and moving things around in the room to make if more livable. Then I washed everything except the drapes.  My sister and I had already replaced the handicapped toilet seat with a conventional one, so I scrubbed down the bathroom and made it sparkle. With a soft cloth from Daddy's laundry room closet, I used orange oil to polish the furniture, I vacuumed his room and the den; then, I remade the bed with fresh mattress pad and clean, warm sheets.

When I sat down on the bed that evening and looked around at the order that had been restored, I thought of the day Mother and I had first heard of Daddy's arrest.  Not knowing what to do, we had set her perfectly ordered home "in order."  I breathed deeply, inhaling the aroma of fresh linens and flower-scented disinfectant wafting in from the bathroom and realized that I had done the same thing on this day.  I needed to set straight what could be visibly ordered before I tackled the job of arranging Daddy's belongings. My understanding, from his journals, of the scope of his problems was very fresh - less than twenty-four hours old. The physicality of cleaning helped to clear my thoughts.

I did not know how exhausted I was until I became still; and, I was hungry.  John and Pete joined me for dinner at a restaurant nearby, and we had the waitress pack up a meal for Leon ,who had been studying.  They wanted to talk about my father. John, a Christian, called my father "Daddy" and loved him.  His wheelchair, said John, was always parked, with him in it, beside the front door at least thirty minutes before his ride to church came to pick him up, so eager was my father to be there.  Daddy's "ride" was his court-appointed chaperone, though my father's tenants did not know this.  Daddy loved to sing and John played the guitar, so they would sometimes have small worship services together in the evening.  It was John who had found my father short of breath and needing an ambulance before he went to the hospital for the last time.  Because my father spoke French and had been in North Africa in the war, the two young men from the Ivory Coast had a special love for their landlord, as French is their native language.  I did not tell them about Daddy then.  They saw someone engaging and godly.  Thought I was so lucky to have such a father.  I did have one, once.

Back at Daddy's, the four of us sang songs with Leon and John playing guitars, then I was regaled with stories of the Ivory Coast and shown pictures of John's home and family until late into the night.  Leon presented me with gifts - a shirt for my husband, a Cora, which is a stringed-instrument used in the Ivory Coast, and little travel bags with slippers for me and my husband.  We had become a little family that day, clinging to each other for the warmth of home that each of us, for whatever reason, was missing.

I was sitting in the middle of the den floor on Monday afternoon.  Scattered around me were photographs that I had found in a box in Daddy's bedroom.  Beside me were two or three albums of pictures from beneath the coffee table.  That morning I had gone through Daddy's desk and organized his paperwork into piles that made sense and then labeled them for my sister.  What was extraneous, I had thrown  out.  The Goodwill truck had been scheduled and the bags for them stacked on the front porch.  The church would send someone early Tuesday for the wheelchair, and a young man had already been by to collect the oxygen machine.  He was shocked that my father had died - thought Daddy was such a nice old man.

I had moved the sorting process from the bedroom to the den and looking through the pictures was my next endeavor.  Not really knowing where to begin, I picked up an unfamiliar album from the stack beside me.  Here was a little boy, chubby, wearing a yellow shirt and a big smile. Sitting atop Daddy's lap. Cozy. Safe. Next was a child, dark hair curling angelic around his face. Maybe he was eight or nine. Then a boy dressed in a Superman t-shirt and shorts, sitting snuggled into the pit of my father's arm. No treachery.  Who were these children? Of course, I knew none of them. The pictures were not sexual in nature, but appeared to display the love and warmth of this older man for children. Probably taken by a mother or father who had no idea who this grandfatherly gentleman was.  It seemed strange to me that his probation officer had never seen these pictures.  The freshness of my father's words describing his deepest secrets compounded with the images before me made my stomach churn with that all too familiar queasiness before I had time to leaf through the many pages of the album.  I got up and went to the kitchen where I found a large black trash bag. Into it I poured the children and the old man, treachery emblazoned with a smile, to burn in a cremation of fire or to rot with the other garbage outside the city in some dump. No more photographs added to the album of this secret life. That, at least, was now over.

Reticently, I began to lift picture after picture from the stacks around me on the cool linoleum of the den floor. Family.  My family chronicled for years in photos. I was struck by the memories of a safer father. I held in my hands for a few minutes an eight-by-ten of my father reading to my daughters.  Two little blond-haired girls, ages three and five, were listening as their grandfather read them yet another story book. Vanessa, the younger, leaned over the edge of the big green velvet recliner in which her granddaddy sat and laid her head almost against his chest in order to see the illustrations in the book more clearly.  Heather, the older, sat, comfortable, upon her grandfather's knee, her index finger to her rosy mouth and her body lying against his as she lost herself in the story of the little white rabbit.  An ache in me for the loss of that father.

There were pictures of Christmases and baby dedications; grandchildren playing in the back yard and relatives now dead; wedding photos mixed in with picnics, trips to Europe, and birthday parties.  It was a thoroughly eclectic journey through the past, and it made me yearn in a way that by then seemed intrinsic.  Into this array of photographs walked John, just home from class.  Fascinated by the faces there on the floor smiling up at him, John asked if he could sit and help me sort them out. I welcomed the company, knowing that the task could become maudlin in a moment's time.  I had learned John's family the night before - met them vicariously through the many images and stories he had told.  It was time for John to meet our family in the same way.  Because of the several visits my sisters had made during the summer to see Daddy, John knew them.  He had fun guessing which childhood photo was which of us daughters. He and I made a stack of pictures for each sister and one for me, and I entertained him with stories of our lives as we put the snapshots, one by one, on the appropriate piles.  Much of life recorded by the camera was really sweet, untainted in the moment by the darker knowledge of what was.  Life, as captured in these memories, is not a straight line.  It has many twists and turns, surprises and griefs, joys and setbacks.  The photographs so loosely strewn across the den floor revealed, as we picked them up randomly to enjoy them, even in the most conflicted life there are times of purest experience.  My father was a homosexual pedophile, but that was not all he was.  Other better times defined another better man.

Later that afternoon I went through the glassware in the big hutch with its stained glass doors that Daddy and Mother had brought back from Germany.  I packed up the set of blue dishes that Daddy had saved for me - the ones we had eaten from on my birthday in 1985 when Mother announced her impending death.  They had arrayed the dining table on many different special occasions, and the dishes were the only thing from the house I really wanted.  Handling so much history was emotionally challenging that day.  I felt caught in a confusing time warp and did not know what to do with the heaviness of heart that had settled on me by dinnertime.  No one was in the house with me, so I picked up my purse and got into my rental car without specific destination - just needed a breather.

I made my way toward the freeway near my father's house and discovered a seafood restaurant near a movie theater complex.  Since fried oysters and beer can almost always cheer me up, I pulled into the shopping center and parked the car, mouth already watering.  There is no comfort food like that which is fried in lard!  While waiting for the fried oysters, I munched on raw ones and drank my cold Coors Light as if it were some sweet nectar from the gods.  Lots of deep breaths.  A few tears escaping curiously.  My body relaxing from the day.  I was not quite ready to go back to the house when I finished eating, so I walked to the theater and bought a ticket for  3:10 to Yuma.  Transported into the old west with a highly defined story of good and evil, I forgot, for a couple of hours, my own life and how smeared the lines of righteousness and sinfulness can become.

I awoke early the next morning, Tuesday, to the aromas of chicken and tomato sauce wafting in from the kitchen where John was preparing one of his native dishes for me to try before I left for the airport and my return to California.  He had told me the night before that he would do this, but he is young and it was early; so, I thought he might sleep through.  I got up, took a shower, dressed and followed my nose to the kitchen.  Proudly, John showed me how to eat his favorite meal; I did as he did and picked up some chicken and the rice paste with my fingers and popped the tasty concoction into my mouth.  It was delicious, tomato-y, greasy fun!  The chicken burst with flavor and the experience was laden with love. My little Christian brother from North Africa had blessed me, and I thanked the Lord that He had provided this friendship at such an unsettling time.

Somewhere thousands of feet in the air between Dallas, Texas, and Santa Ana, California, as I flew home that day, I thought to be thankful that my father had always embraced other cultures and our lives had often been enriched by that.  He had loved travel, unique foods, learning languages and harboring foreign missionaries in our homes.  I had him to thank that I had eaten chocolate-covered ants and tasted brains and eggs and calf's tongue; that I had traveled Europe and taken road trips to Paris and Vienna with him and Mother; that I have a heart for the orphans of Cambodia even now; that the world does not seem too big a place.