My father-in-law’s five children

FATHER’S DAY brings to mind a father whom I never knew but who nevertheless had a major influence on my life. My father-in-law, Frank Wood, was dead — and had been dead for ten years — by the time I married my husband 27 years ago.

Though I never met my father-in-law, it’s not as if I don’t know him. I think I know him pretty well and if he walked in the front door today, I would probably recognize him and know exactly what to offer him to eat and drink. However, I don’t think he would walk in the door if he were alive. He was a man bound to his home and his neighborhood for all but two weeks of the year.

I have a vivid image of him, sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening, having spent a weekend of leisure both at home and at the Eagle Club nearby, and announcing to the assembled at dinner, “Well, the ball game’s over now.” He has told his last story and retold his last joke. He has read his last detective story and flipped the pages of his last adventure magazine. He is approaching his final bites of “rope beef.” Those words on Sunday night signaled that his extended time at home was over and the new week, when he would return to the shipyard where he worked as a machinist, had begun.

The ball game was over, but it would start again in five days. On Friday nights, he had another famous line. When he was sitting late at the dining room table and the assembled started to walk away because they had heard him tearfully recite Babe Ruth’s farewell speech one too many times and were tired of hearing the jokes he had also told many times before, he would say, in a moment of maudlin seriousness, after noticing the slipping away, “All I really want in life is a little love and affection.” To which everyone would roll their eyes as if to say, “Oh, shut up, Pop!” His gentle rule was not without its insurrections.

My father-in-law was not a wealthy man. His mother died when he was 13 and his overwhelmed father left his three children permanently with relatives. In other words, they were abandoned, a development toward which my father-in-law never expressed the slightest resentment. And so he was accustomed to having little, and much he never had. By society’s lights, he was not a person of remarkable talents or impressive ambition. He was not a great athlete, had no truly productive hobbies and was not a civic leader of any kind. But he took pride in his trade, which had required a four-year apprenticeship, and he performed it well, never once being late for work in 43 years. He did not view his job simply as a job. Being a machinist was a skill he had mastered and he loved his work, though he loved his days off even more.

Despite the lack of great distinction and affluence, Frank Wood, who walked to the shipyard every day and whose favorite book was Pudd’nhead Wilson, had things that a working man today cannot dream of possessing. He was the benevolent, sometimes irritating and never autocratic monarch of a tiny, urban kingdom, a roomy and flagrantly shabby Victorian twin house in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania that was inhabited by a wife who went to Mass every morning and made dinner every night; five imperfect children who walked home from St. Michael’s school in a line of pupils in suits and ties or dresses; a varying number of boarders who shared the mashed potatoes and helped keep the household afloat but not so well that the family was not forced to go without heat for a few days now and then in the winter; and a mongrel dog named “Buttons” (aka Butsy-Wutsy) who had more lovers than Don Juan, walked to the butcher shop himself to pick up a bone, killed cats without remorse and always looked both ways before crossing a city street. The household also encompassed an ever-flowing stream of humanity that came and went through the front door, which was never locked. The visitors included an uncle who was a school janitor. He arrived without fail every Christmas Eve with the school’s leftover Christmas tree which was promptly set up in the shabby living room and surrounded by laughter, conversation, gift-giving, eating, drinking, and various forms of human irritation. My father-in-law once referred to the bond he had with his wife, formerly Kate Kerrigan, who was about five feet tall in heels and also was orphaned as a child, as “35 years of savage amusement.”

All this, Frank Wood supported with his skilled labor as a working man. And he supported it not with relentless, unforgiving labor. In fact, on his weekends and in the evenings, he was a man of leisure. He had no lawn to mow or hedges to clip. He didn’t have to drive his children to Little League games or soccer matches; they had plenty of opportunities to play ball right on the street outside their door. He didn’t have to do many domestic chores because his wife took care of most of those during the week. He was free to dream, to sketch, to tell stories, to drink beer, to read and to laugh, which was a common pastime in the dingy house.

Every year, the whole entourage packed into two cars and drove to Wildwood, New Jersey for two weeks of complete leisure, during which Frank Wood would implacably sit on the salt water as if he was on a chaise lounge and float for hours on end. It was an idyllic two weeks in a town of working class bungalows by the sea. Nothing much ever went wrong, excepting the time when the police showed up at the front door of the two-bedroom cottage where 15 or so people stayed and insisted that Buttons, who was part dachshund, had killed a neighbor’s Persian cat. It was the one and only time that Buttons showed fear. He began to tremble uncontrollably, a sure sign of a guilty conscience. The whole family rallied around Buttons and insisted he would never do such a thing, even though he had decimated the cat population back home in Chester. Given the lack of evidence, the police officer told the cat’s owner that the only way guilt could possibly be established was if the cat was dug up from its fresh grave in the backyard and an autopsy was conducted. Fortunately, the owner, who was very upset by the loss of his pet, did not want to desecrate the grave in this way, and Buttons went on to hunt and romance for many more years until he died of a heart attack immediately after killing his last cat. He had a wonderful career.

Like Buttons, Frank Wood was part of a cohesive community of those who tolerated his excesses; he was not an atom in a dizzyingly impersonal world. He belonged to a place that as his children entered adolescence distressingly unraveled, a place that became part of the archipelago of urban devastation that has existed in America ever since. By the time Joe Hoffman, a father of ten, was shot to death while walking the few steps from the parish hall to the rectory with the bingo proceeds in his hands and Libby Greenleaf, the crossing guard who never missed a day of work, had been beaten with a claw hammer to within an inch of her life during a burglary in her tiny row house, everything was pretty much undone. Frank and Kate remained in the shabby Victorian when almost everyone around them had left for the suburbs. My husband was the first of the family to go to college. He often recalls the time when he visited his parents while he was living in Philadelphia. He was heading out the door to go back to school a little sooner than they had expected. His father wondered that he was leaving. “There’s nothing for him here, Pop,” Kate said, words which still cause a pang of filial guilt.

It was almost true. There was nothing much left for him or for anyone. No more children walked in lines to school in suits and ties. St. Michael’s, once the most glorious edifice in their enclave — the industrial counterpart of a cathedral in the center of a medieval village — would soon close and the parish would sell its magnificent stained glass windows. The altar before which Buttons had once scandalously fought with the priest’s dog, Playboy, (who started it) would no longer see the daily consecrations  that had been the heart of their world. There was nothing left of extended family in the neighborhood except those two elderly people and many indelible memories of savage amusement. Today the social institutions that once made it possible for a working man to be that kind of urban patriarch, a man who floated blissfully in the lap of the ocean every August, surrounded by a large family that was sustained by ancient traditions and his manual labor, are all but gone as well.

Happy Father’s Day, Frank. I never knew you. But I will remember you always.

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