ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 23: My First Daddy

My father, Joseph Richard, was the youngest of four and the only son. His father died when he was two, and his mama and three sisters doted on him. He grew to be tall, slim, blond, with a big smile. He looked like a tennis player and was.

One day, Joe and his best friend, Kenny, were playing one court over from a fifteen-year-old dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty named Mary. Both Joe and Kenny fell for Mary, but Mary liked Kenny. She took both of them home to meet her parents. There, Mary introduced Joe to her shy younger sister, Bernadette, who quickly ducked out of the room.

Bernadette didn’t play tennis. She tended a flower garden and made fudge and went to the movies. “A dreamy girl,” her mother said of her years later. “She always slightly scared me. I never knew what she was thinking.”

World War II came, and Joe entered the Army even though he was the only son of a widow. He’d never held a gun before, only a slingshot as a kid, aiming at chickens. He’d never been around so many men before, exposed to their ways and perhaps doing things men did that he’d never done before. Guilt set in. He began to hear voices; he thought God was speaking to him. He was discharged to a veteran’s hospital, where he was treated with electro shocks.

“Bernadette Miller and I are engaged,” he told his mother and his favorite sister, Elenora, when they visited him in the hospital. “We’re going to be married as soon as I get home.”

This news shocked them. They’d never even met this Bernadette, and Joe had never spoken of her before. They took it upon themselves to knock on the front door of the shotgun house on Hemlock Street where Bernadette lived with her parents and younger sister. Her two brothers were in the Army, and Mary had married Kenny and already had children.

Joe’s mother and sister introduced themselves to Bernadette. “Joe tells us you and he are engaged,” Elenora said.

Bernadette backed away from them. She nearly closed the door on them. “I know of him. I met him once. My sister introduced us. But we are not engaged.”

A year or so later, Joseph and Bernadette met quite by accident outside a downtown movie theater. It was a Saturday night. Everyone went to the movies on Saturday night. He recognized her and asked her out. At first she demurred, but he pursued her. “She’s Catholic, and she’ll make a good mama,” he told his mother and sisters.

So the reclusive dreamer married the . . . I don’t even know how to describe my father. Before he married, he liked to take photographs. He documented each photo with the date and time he took the photo. Sometimes he took the same photo later the same day.

Suddenly I think: Isn’t this what I’m doing? With this writing? Re-capturing Time. Pinning down Reality.

I never saw my father play tennis. He took up golf instead. Most of the time, he played by himself unless he took one of us with him. He did take childhood photos of us, documenting us.

Thirty years rushed by. One night, in the middle of taunting my younger brother — headed out the side door — my father plummeted down the kitchen steps, dead before he landed.

This is my documentation of my father. This is about all I know of him. This, and that he was a fearful and angry man. Nothing, and no one, awakened him. And then he died.