Mr.Pete

I remember taking walks with my father when I was a kid. I remember sometimes when it was me and my brother, but mostly I remember the times when it was just me and daddy and how my little hand fit tightly in his. He would hold my hand the whole time, as if he were afraid to let go of me for even a moment. While this might have irritated a more fidgety variety of child, I never struggled to get away. I liked the way my hand felt in his.

Sometimes we went to the movies or got on the train and went into the city, but more often we walked the same route through the neighborhood. We would make our way down the long street we lived on past the houses of friends I wouldn't know until I started school. Sometimes, we would stop at the library where my dad would return the pile of books he had gotten the week before. While he selected new material and flirted with the crusty old librarian,whose smiles seemed to be reserved for my dad alone, I was allowed to leave his side momentarily and go downstairs to the children's section. Here I would happily leaf through books, some that looked familiar, some I had never seen before, until he came downstairs to get me. I remember one time when the librarian commented to him on my apparent fascination with the books and how she hoped that it would endure when I learned to read. I never said anything to my dad, but I guess when my eyes filled up, he understood how foolish the woman had made me feel, albeit unintentionally. On our very next trip to the library, he got me my own library card, which I carried proudly in my red plastic Dale Evans wallet, and that summer, the summer of my fifth birthday, I learned to read.

After we had finished our visit to the library, we would walk down past the train station and head for the Bronx River. Occasionally, we would sit and eat lunch or a snack that my mom had packed for us, but mostly we just walked. The Bronx River in that part of Westchester was little more than an expansive median, spotted with trees, that separated the North and South sides of the parkway, but when I was walking among those trees with my dad, I was "in the woods." My brother and I still refer to this small suburban oasis as "the woods" even though we now know this to be a blatant misnomer. In those "woods" was a large, charred rock. This was evidence of nothing more than a teenage bonfire, but to me it was "Indian Rock," a sacred place where the ancient residents of these New York suburbs had held strange and mystic rituals. Whatever imagination it took for my father to come up with this story was totally spent on its genesis, as the version never varied once in the scores of times he told it. The curious part of this is that, while I remember its unvarying familiarity, I cannot remember one single detail of the story. I believe this is because the words drifted by me somewhere while I was concentrating on the religious expression on my father's face and the exaggerated deep boom of his voice as he related the tale. These details I can see and hear in my mind at will with total and complete recall.

We would continue walking for what seemed like miles to my child's sense of distance, until I would cry fatigue and my dad would hoist me up onto his shoulders. From my lofty perch, I would hungrily take in all my eyes could survey, elated to find familiar things looking so wonderfully different from this "grown-up" point of view. In adulthood, I have often longed for this simple solution to making things seem fresh and new. I have never achieved any great success in duplicating that perspective, but I still feel graced that I can remember it.

Before we started on the walk home, we would stop at the Plaza Lounge where my dad would drink a couple of Rheingold's and I would sit quietly at a table with a bowl of peanuts, a Shirley Temple, and a pen and paper. I quickly discovered that drawing a picture of the bartender (a middle-aged balding man) with lots of hair would warrant me a handful of dimes. These portraits soon became the first exercise in the artistic endeavors of any given visit. Any hastily drawn likeness of "Mr.Pete" was enough to insure my indulgence in the wonders of the juke box. Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday lit a fire in my heart that has never dimmed. This is my "comfort music." The magic in the singing of it to this day is the memory of the wild applause bestowed on me after each performance by my dad and Mr.Pete (and any other lounge denizens who were lucky enough to catch my act).

I don't know how I knew, but I knew to omit this particular leg of the journey when relating the day's events to my mother at home. It was an unspoken secret between my dad and me for a long time. One night my parents stopped at the tavern with some friends. Hanging there behind the cash register (where he had proudly displayed them in all their hirsute splendor) were the many studies I had done of Mr.Pete. I suppose that, even at a tender age, the artist has some individual characteristics exclusive to his work, because my mom managed to pin-point the source of the drawings immediately. I remember this being an issue at home for a short time, but the visits continued and eventually the quarrels died an appropriate death from repitition. Years later, I thought about this and wondered what had taken my mom so long to catch on to our secret. Where did she think I learned to strut around the kitchen crooning a vampish rendition of "Fever," a la Miss Peggy Lee?

Once I started school and made friends in the neighborhood, my walks with my dad dwindled until they finally ceased altogether. From then on, any days I spent with my father were usually at the pool, where he would sit in a lounge chair and read, and I would perform magnificent feats of aquatic grace, first for him, and later for my friends with hardly a glance in his direction. Eventually, he stopped coming to the pool except to watch me in a particularly important race or diving event. When I met my first boyfriend, I would emerge from the water in victory, instantly seeking out his face, instead of my father's. It was probably right around this time that my dad stopped coming to all my swimming events.

I never really thought about my changing relationship with my father. I got along pretty well with my parents, but my teen years brought secrets into my life that I could not dream of sharing with them. Sure, we would get in heated political discussion about the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam and George McGovern, but I never dared tell them that I smoked pot or snuck off into Manhattan to sit in Thompkin's Square Park to drop acid and listen to David Peel with college students and runaways when they thought I was safely within school walls attending a CYO dance. These were private parts of my life that I chose not to share with him until years later. This seemed to be normal teenage behavior (at least, most of my friends were doing the same thing), but the chasm that had developed between us became apparent to me on a visit home during my freshman year of college.

Two months prior to my return home, I had telephoned an older friend, begging funds for a girl in my dorm, who had gotten pregnant and had decided to have an abortion. Somehow, this had gotten back to my father, who decided that we needed to have a serious talk when I got home. I was expecting a fatherly lecture on peer pressure and not letting a boy convince me to do anything I wasn't ready for. What he actually said to me was, "Was it you that had the abortion, gaily?" At that moment, the comfort I had always felt in my dad's presence floated out of me up to the ceiling and through the skylight, and I didn't even have the strength in me to reach up and grab it before it got away. In one heart-stopping moment, I realized that my father didn't know anything about my life or who I was. I think I answered his question and walked out of the room, but this is still unclear to me. What I do remember is an overwhelming sense of regret in having allowed this distance to grow between us.We were still friends and, to this day, there is no one who can make me laugh the way he did, but I never felt like his little girl again until years later.

My family had moved to the Jersey shore and after a brief and unsuccessful stint as a counselor in Boston, I had followed them to Atlantic City. I was driving a cab at the time, nurturing dreams of becoming a great writer, and had stopped at a neighborhood bar to pick up a fare. Having some time before his train, my dad had ducked in for a beer. I called another cab for my fare and sat down with my dad. I had finished a story that morning that I wanted him to read and we spent the rest of the afternoon arguing over my prolific use of commas and parenthetical commentary. While discussing my latest literary masterpeice, I absently doodled on the back of one of the pages, a habit I still have, the origins of which are no mystery. At one point, I got up to play the jukebox. When I got back to my stool, there was a Shirley Temple sitting in front of me and, over a bad caricature I had drawn of the bartender, my dad had written in his barely legible, left-handed scrawl, "Mr.Pete."


©1997 Gail Von Schlichting


Back to Dad's Page

This page hosted by Geocities