His Color

HIS COLOR / Sharon Sheehe Stark EVEN HIS EFFECTS were few and inconspicuous. I remember two pairs of shoes, a styptic stick, a high school medal for the low hurdles, a bottle of Serutan. We lived in a big house, but I have the impression of my father's having conserved the space he occupied, slipping in sideways like a bookmarker: the rest of us so large and unstoppable. He moved quietly through those rooms, ate little, never snored. We took his money, his closet space, his Pendleton shirt, the city chicken from his plate. He was proud of his civil service job and proud of us. He loved every car he ever owned. When he'd say, "One of these days Tm going to lower the boom," we answered him with playful cowering and hugs that threw him radically off-balance. In his first family he was seventh of fifteen. A twenties portrait shows them in Sunday best spread fan-Hke across the veranda, each body rotated slightly toward the paterfamilias; my father is between six and eight, a slender lad wedged in a biological wrinkle: only a tuft of hair shows, a round knob of shoulder and lower down you see a fist gripping the top edge of a vaguely shield-shaped thing that upon closer inspection turns out to have a cross-knotted tail. It's a kite. In so formal a grouping, a kite seems simultaneously prankish and mystical. The kite restores this family to its arguments and animations, the minutes just before, for instance, a boy called from the meadow, the primpings and pinnings and shuffling fuss, a chaos thick enough to camouflage the small trespass of a kid's kite. The kite blossoms whole welts of life and sky around the moment in which these shining Irish faces are fixed forever. There were the Blue Eyes and the Brown Eyes, so I've been told, and my father's mother, with her sharp dark gaze, loved the brown-eyed babes the best. My father's father stands with his chin tipped out, self-made and self-absorbed, handsome in a white suit, audacious, entitled eyes; he had The Gift, I remember, and when he spoke it was as if by heavenly mandate, his words as meaningless and wonderful as wind chimes. Today, a half-century later, my father's voice sings no such music through my bones. "Your brother's coming," he says flatly, over the phone. "Yep, bringing them all, Dee, the kids. . ." "Hey!" I say. "We haven't all been together—it must be nine, ten years." The silence says the rest: we might never be again. "Yeah, well," he says, uncomfortable. "The plane tickets alone. . ." His boasts are always encumbered by the accents of complaint. "Darn kid spends money like it's going out of water—out of business. I mean The Missouri Review · 99 out of. . ." "Style?" I offer. "Yep, that's what I said—style." He speaks the way he dresses. Whatever shirt is handiest. Whatever word. "Look, why doesn't everyone come down here. Bud, Patsy, everybody. I've got lots of room, the pool for the kids." "No!" "No?" Coming from him the word is almost a nonsense syllable. "I'm staying right where I am! I'm head of this family. The whatchacaUit? The patriarch. Dammit, my children are gonna come to me!" And I believe him: at last the lowering of the promised boom. On the ride back home to western Pennsylvania, Mort and I and the kids have fun with this. "A patriarch!" Mort shakes his head. "So Joe wants to be a patriarch." In a forced baritone, my son says: "Let the decree go out. AU issue must return to the ancestral castle." It's a sparkling morning in late May. That and the silliness make us feel glad and slow us down. We arrive half an hour late. Everybody is out on my parents' lawn except for my father who, we are told, is inside calling the state police and the hospitals. I bear hug my baby brother's expatriated bones. He shoves his two little girls into my embrace: Look, Shang, see...