BIG AL

My father was a big man, filled with life, a big smile, and arms that moved swirling through space and time against the open blue sky.  He made me laugh.  And I loved him with all my heart.  So when I came home from seventh grade classes at the East Park School in Fort Lauderdale that Wednesday in September in 1954, all skirt and legs and black flat shoes with curly blond hair bouncing, and was told that Daddy had been “taken from us” I really couldn’t fathom what my mother had said. I thought he had been arrested perhaps. Perhaps taken to jail. I looked into my mother’s ashen face. And then I knew, in her bleak clenched jaw, in the way she averted her eyes, in the set of her body. Big Al was dead.
I did not think first about his touch, about how he could still pick me up and take my breath away even though I was twelve, about the way he laughed, and made me laugh, or that he loved my laugh. I just walked into the house to look for him.
Mother did not touch me. Did not hold me. Did not say, “I’m sorry child.” She talked on the phone to neighbors and relatives. She cried. She said, “Big Al is dead,” to the shocked silence and the night air.

I sat in a straight-backed upholstered chair in the foyer. The fabric was coarse and strong. I ran my fingers over it aimlessly. Mother sat by the telephone. We did not make eye contact. We did not cry. We did not touch. My brother came home. We ate dinner at the dining room table. We had slices of canned ham. Mashed white potatoes. Peas. We did not speak of my father. Without his joyful presence we did not speak at all. Mother, both strong and frail, commanded our silence without a word. We cleared the dishes. I brushed my teeth. I went into my bedroom. I did not cry.  I was empty. I found Binky my stuffed animal and took her into bed with me. I held her. I said my prayers. I prayed my father was not dead. I spoke imaginary conversations with Binky and God. I said Big Al is gone, but I did not believe it. I did not say Al was dead.

In the morning I woke up numb and cold, which was rare in Florida. I didn’t know what to do, or what was expected of me, or where my father was. I couldn’t play. I couldn’t read. I didn’t know what to wear, or if I should go to school. I couldn’t speak what was on my mind, and much was. I heard my mother on the phone talking to people and making arrangements. I learned that yesterday Al had come home for lunch, had eaten with my mother Dorothy, and then had gone into their bedroom for a nap. That when Dorothy went in to wake him he would not get up.  He was “gone.”  And I was buried deep inside the ground days before my father was.
I was not allowed to go to his memorial service at our church in Florida. I don’t know why.  Perhaps my mother thought it would be too hard for me. Perhaps she did not want me to see her as distressed as she anticipated she would be. I do not know. I wanted to go, to be with my father again, to tell Big Al I really really did not want him to be dead. But I didn’t ask to go. And I wasn’t invited.

I rode the train with my father’s body in a casket all the way to Grand Central Station in New York City with my mother, my aunt, and my brother Little Al, six feet two inches tall and fourteen years old. We sat facing each other. We talked little. We did not laugh. We did not mourn, not openly. I thought my thoughts were hurtful, shameful, irreverent. Thought I shouldn’t think. I bore my distress myself . Bore my self.  Suppressed myself. It was all my fault. Clearly. 
I was not comforted or consoled.
In Grand Central Station we stood in vast cavernous darkness while the casket with my father’s body was unloaded from the train and wheeled to a waiting hearse. I was also not allowed to go to the memorial service at our church in New York. Again, I don’t know why. Perhaps my mother was protecting me and thought it in my best interests. It took thirty more years before I was able to suitably mark that event in a psychodrama.
I was allowed to go to the cemetery, to his burial. It rained and rained. Hard rain. I remember standing there in the gray day, near the mausoleum, at the cavernous pit. And there my memory stops until I was back in Florida, back in school, withstanding the “He’s in a better place now.” Numb.