My Father Was a Hard Worker

My father read electrocardiograms (EKGs) at the local veterans’ hospital, where he was a poorly paid cardiologist. Due to his being a WWII veteran as well as an MD he was able to bring his family for Sunday lunch at the hospital cafeteria. As a boy I saw a row of gleaming pressure cookers squeezing the flavor out of every dish. The cooks and servers wore elaborate hairnets that reminded me of ladies’ veils in church. Lunch was like a funeral, and my father still had to pay the cashier.
At home my father was fanatical about his fruit salad. My mother had to quarter his strawberries not halve them, and the cantaloupe had to be cubes or balls, not slices. My father was incapable of eating anything liquidy without dripping it all down his front. My mother hovered over him with a wet napkin to dab him clean, even when we ate out.
My father never cursed aloud, and I doubt he ever thought in curse words. When annoyed he said “egad” or “hard cheese,” sometimes “rats” or “creepymouse.” In his youth he made a tough choice between seminary and medical school. There was a bit of the Presbyterian minister in him, and sometimes he struck acquaintances as a Southern gentleman. He was never naughty. He might have been the last Victorian. My father brought home the collection plates from church, spread the coins out on the kitchen table, and I would help him count them. My father taught me addition, and later chess.
He once took me to hear Nixon speak at the Cincinnati Gardens. We got in the crowded arena just ahead of the closing gate. My father dressed like Nixon. Like Nixon my father never wore short sleeves or short pants in public. He wore formal pajamas at bedtime. The beach and the swimming pool at the Y were the only exceptions. When he saw people in flip-flops in restaurants, he was appalled. My mother like him was of the Great Generation. The two had lived through the Depression and the War. The two of them together were like a Southern gentleman.
My father had a thing for Inger Stevens, the Swedish actress on TV. In his den he read EKGs in a recliner while he watched her golden Swedishness on The Farmer’s Daughter, her blond hair in a tight beehive. My dark-haired mother hailed from Kentucky and was petite. My mother said my father’s penis was the size of a toilet paper tube, and that she never saw his bare feet until their wedding night. He was never naughty. On their wedding night after love, my father read EKGs.
My father’s mother and sometimes his sister too would come up from Memphis on the train. The first thing the pair did at the house was take over my and my sister’s bathroom and hang their flaccid hot water bottles with long plastic tubes from hooks on the inside of the door. The bottles were ribbed red rubber and the tubes were clear plastic. I wondered if all women were cold all the time. I once fastened a combination lock on my aunt’s big toe. She said I was like a small person. Grandmother said sammich for sandwich and news-pepper for newspaper. My father said horse pistol for hospital. She had a Southern accent but he did not. How did he lose it? At the end of each day my father massaged his gums with Stim-u-Dents. He kept up his dental hygiene but had miles of bad breath, like a road of old pepper. At the end of each day he took me to hear Nixon.
My father would moo like a cow. As a boy in Mississippi he chewed sugarcane and owned a pet goat. He mooed while driving my mother and my sister and me in the Chevy. His cow was so good that I was never disappointed he didn’t do other barnyard animals. My father never once sounded like a chicken or a sheep, didn’t even try to. One time he stopped our car and carried a box turtle across the road, so no car would run it over. When he got back in the driver’s seat, he turned to my sister and me in the back, extended his hand toward us and said, “Turtle hand! Turtle hand!” My sister and I screamed in laughter or terror, I don’t remember which. I later found I had wet myself. When we went swimming, my father clenched his fist in the pool so that water shot out like a squirt gun. Imagine water shooting at you from that turtle hand!
My father took me to the Shrine Circus when I was ten and bought me a chameleon and a box of mealworms to feed it for 75 cents. The instructions said to keep the lizard under a warm light. In three days the lizard was dead with its eyes dried up. The food worms, all uneaten, were also desiccated and dead. My father said it wasn’t my fault, the chameleon was in the wrong hemisphere. I wondered if I lived in the wrong hemisphere.
I wanted to play the drums and wished my father played them. I wanted him to retire to the living room after dinner, take up his brushes, and stir a cool beat on the skins. Instead he played the piano after dinner. He played like a man with two left hands, or only a left hand, or palsy. He made Chopin sound like a jack-in-the-box. My sister and I used to deposit our breakfast bacon in the piano. We’d tell our mother we ate it, then sneak away and drop it behind the keys onto the strings. The piano tuner discovered our perfidy and asked, “Why is there bacon in the piano?” My father and mother quietly admonished us kids. My father never raised his voice. He was never naughty and he never raised his voice.
The one time my father was naughty was in New Orleans. The family strolled through the French Quarter, my father in the lead. From the sidewalk we peeked inside the burlesque houses at the lady dancers on stage until the doormen shut the doors in our faces. Then we trudged on to the next den of bawd. This was my father’s idea of tourism, that and eating haricot verts at Antoine’s.
Once when I was in high school I stayed late for a sports event and my father forgot to pick me up. I was mugged outside while I waited for him. I was okay, the mugger punched me in the stomach to assert his authority but didn’t hurt me. And I didn’t blame my father for his lateness because I knew his thoughts were of the aorta. When he finally pulled up, he found me hiding in a bush. To console me, he told me that when he enrolled in college, the dean told him no student from his rural high school had ever made it through medical school. “And now I read EKGs,” my father said.
My father had a photographic memory and late in life he took a break from EKGs to study French and Italian. I sometimes saw him in his suit, vest, and “braces” as he called his suspenders, on the campus at our local university where I too was a student. He was in his own world, muttering conjugations and declensions to himself as he strolled along. I suspected he knew the rules of the language but spoke it the same way he played the piano, haltingly and without natural cadence, like a bumpkin.
After years of reading EKGs and publishing 1,500 learned articles in medical journals, my father could afford to have a home built. He and my mother chose a lot by a public park. Their basement had a long sliding glass door open to the sunlight and trees of the park. It was here my father posed for his oil portrait. This was when he had semi-retired and spent only a few hours of his day reading EKGs. By now my mother dressed oddly, half hijab and half Victoria’s Secret. My father, dying of cancer, sat for the painter in a low chair. Years earlier his baldness had been treated with hair plugs, and he looked like the horror actor Vincent Price. He used to say a nurse at the hospital called him “Vince,” though that wasn’t his name. I still have the portrait.