Shots in the Dark

As some of you may know, I didn’t get to speak to my dad before he died. He wasn’t able to come to the phone in the days before I got to Florida, mostly because he was either asleep when I called or just wasn’t able to come to the phone. My dad never particularly liked the phone, anyway. He was old enough to remember the exorbitant cost of long-distance phone calls, and the subsequent habit of speaking concisely and with an undercurrent of financial consciousness during a phone call never really left him—and Parkinson’s and medication made the telephone even more arduous. It was hard for him to hear, probably harder for him to talk. He tried; he did. But phone calls had become hard work.

His physical descent, when it finally came, came much faster than anyone expected, including him. He did not think he was near death. Neither did those of us who knew him, till shortly before the end. My siblings and I had seen him for a week at Christmas, and though he was fragile, still, he was eating, he could walk some distance—100 yards, perhaps—and his mind was in good shape. The disease was taking its toll, clearly. But then, it had been doing that for some time.
In the weeks that followed, though, he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, which left him short of oxygen and retaining fluids. But people can live a long time with congestive heart failure, and the fluid retention was addressed by a drug called Lasix. That wasn’t great—there were side effects—but it was something.

We made plans to visit, my brother and sister and I, after the departure of two of my father’s three brothers, who were visiting from Virginia. Then we moved those plans up by a week. Then we got a phone call: Come now.

My sister got there in time. She was able to talk to my dad. My brother and I did not. That is hard. Though he was not able to speak on the day he died, I wanted to be there; I wanted to tell him things.

I did have a small consolation. My father, who was a writer and editor, was happy that I also became a writer and editor, and he always inquired about the progress of my books—how was the writing going? How were they selling?

He was particularly helpful in the writing of my first book, “American Son.” The publication of that book was a huge and silly drama, but part of it entailed me writing the book without a publisher. That was pretty scary. I was unemployed, I had very little money, my reputation had been eviscerated by people who lied. Painted as a cheat and a betrayer, I’d lost a book contract in a public and humiliating fashion. But I was stubborn—just as my father was stubborn—and determined to write the book nonetheless, in the hope that someone would buy the manuscript once they could see for themselves that the book was not what its detractors were claiming it to be. More: I knew that if I did not write the book, a part of me would be permanently defeated.

Unfortunately, over the course of the year 2000, I wasn’t doing a very good job of it, and my agent, as she read the chapters that I sent her, was growing worried. Maybe this just isn’t here, she said. Maybe it just isn’t going to work. And she was right: the stuff I was sending her was overwritten, overlong, not particularly good.

So I sent the manuscript—about four hundred pages—to my father, and asked if he would read it. He did more than that: He line-edited the entire thing, painstakingly and insightfully. When I received a package back from him in the mail, I read through the pages nervously at first. But looking at his pencilled comments and cuts, I could see the logic behind them, could see that he knew what he was doing. And I could see that, almost invariably, he was right.

I made the changes that he suggested and sent a new manuscript to my agent, and before long, she called me and said, “I’m not sure what just happened, but I think you’ve got something here.”

And the book, so tarred in the press before I’d written a word of it, went on not only to find a publisher, but to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

As I was writing my new book, I asked if he wanted to see the manuscript. I said that I could use his help.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. He couldn’t really read any more; he couldn’t really write any more.

I sent him a copy of The Greatest Game as soon as I had one from the publisher, and it reached him—by U.S. mail, because so far as I knew then, there was no need to rush—about five days before he died. I inscribed the book. “To Dad,” I wrote, “in whose footsteps I follow.”

His brothers George and Tony were on hand when he read the inscription. “Your father liked that,” my uncle George told me.

I didn’t get to speak to my father. But he had the book, and he’d heard what I wrote in it. That is something.

I’m including some more pictures of my father. The black-and-white one below is him at Yale with his friends, John and Sally Marsh. I love this photo—it’s very Joe College.

And then there are photos of him (above) with my brother in his crib; with my sister (also above) in, funnily, a little wagon, goofing around; and with me, below, on the ferry to Fishers Island, where we spent some summers and my parents built a house. Fishers was an important place to him, raw and unspoiled and beautiful. I’m not sure he was ever happier than when he was there.