Tribes

39 CHARLES HAVERTY TRIBES M y father was between jobs. He was often between jobs, this being both his nature and the nature of his trade, but it had been months since he last worked and he was never happy to be home. For as long as I could remember, he would leave our house on Long Island early every morning and return from the city late at night, sometimes not until the following night. It was on one of those evenings, a couple years before, when I laughed at something on television and without a trace of pride or pleasure my mother said, “Your father wrote that.” She was born and raised in Germany and had what my father called a German sense of humor, by which I think he meant that she considered laughter on a par with other bodily functions , or at least equally distasteful. Even so, her words struck me with the force of revelation. Until then I hadn’t grasped that an actual person had written the funny things these performers said and did; somehow I assumed they simply said and did them. That my own father was one of these persons seemed a miracle to me. Yet when I asked him about it later, it was as though I’d caught him in some shameful act. He said that when he was discharged from the army after World War ii, he’d tried and spectacularly failed to be a stand-up comic, whereupon he was reduced to writing for “the box,” to making other people make other people laugh. He called it ventriloquism, Cyrano de Bergerac bullshit, sitting at the children’s table, and I never asked him about it again. In November my father bet ten thousand dollars on the reelection of Jimmy Carter at odds of five to two. I knew he’d lost money before, on horses and cards, but I was astonished to learn that one could gamble on something as momentous as who would be president of the United States. He took the loss very personally, as did my mother, who went to live with her mother in Laguna Beach, California, a week later. As my mother disapproved of laughter, my father disapproved of Cali- colorado review 40 fornia. Ronald Reagan was from California. So was Richard Nixon. Bobby Kennedy was killed there. My father had only been there once, for Ernie Kovacs’s funeral in 1962, but by 1980 most of the work was there, and my mother blamed the failure of both his career and hers (she’d been a sort of model when they met and married) on his refusal to switch coasts. While this wasn’t the first time she’d left, it was the longest, and on those other occasions she’d never gone farther than her brother Victor’s home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her timing was especially unfortunate as her sister’s son Otto had traveled all the way from Wiesbaden to spend the school year with us. Ostensibly, he’d come to learn English, but he was a quiet kid and when he did speak, it was almost always with my mother and almost always in German. He rarely left the house and wouldn’t even watch television as it made him nervous , so at best his English stayed broken. He spent most of his time building model cars or else staring out the kitchen window at my mother’s birdfeeder. My father hardly spoke to me, much less to Otto. Between his air of Teutonic superiority and being three years older (I had just turned thirteen), Otto and I didn’t talk much either. Left to our own devices, the three of us shared long, mostly silent dinners made longer by Otto’s habit of meticulously tackling one food group at a time, and after three weeks of this, my father broke down and phoned Otto’s parents in Germany. He told them that things weren’t working out, that without the necessary feminine element the house was off-kilter and no place for a sixteen-year-old boy. Otto would have to go. And so it was arranged that...