WHEN I WAS A KID, I used to tell my father, "I'm already there."

Say he wanted me to cut the grass, I was already there.

Or if he needed someone to find my little brother Teddy, I'd say, "Don't worry, father. I'm already there."

It was something all of us boys told him from time to time, even Teddy. To reassure him, I suppose. He needed a lot of that, especially as we got older. By the time I was in high school, father was lecturing in business management at the university and complaining that the students—who didn't know a blessed thing about the world, who didn't know where money came from, or how to balance a checkbook—were trying to take the place over. Because father was on the faculty, my older brother Dwight went there for free. Whenever father ranted about revolutionaries on campus, he felt compelled to tell Dwight not to get any bright ideas.

He didn't know it, but Dwight wasn't the one to worry about. Sure, Dwight refused to cut his hair and stop marching in peace demonstrations, but he still lived at home. Father didn't get it that Dwight wasn't doing these things to irritate him. Dwight was doing what he had to do to be his own man, and still get a free ride.

None of us could really stay in line, and in my senior year of high school, I got some news that would bend the lines all out of shape. A good thing happened, although I wasn't sure my father would see it that way. And he had a temper.

Now and then, he'd throw a book. Just heave it. I caught one off the ear once. It stung like a hard-packed snowball, and for awhile I couldn't breathe. I think he took it harder than I did. "I'm so sorry, son," he wheezed as he puffed frantically on a Camel.

Mother came running. She looked at me, and then at him. Her soft brown eyes went black and her chin quivered.

Father's cigarette hand shook. "I'm so sorry," he said to her, and then to me. "Just breathe, son." He stroked my hair while he said he'd lost his cool, and that he'd never do it again. But father had a lot of books.

After dinner, he would find his chair, loosen his belt, slip his right hand behind the buckle, and plunge into military history. Where did he go? Waterloo? Gettysburg? We wondered quietly. Eggshell time. You didn't want to step on that. Don't wheeze, belch, giggle, stomp or make any funny noises.

Once while slicing up a roast, a big butchering knife in hand, white sleeves rolled up to the elbow, tie dangling almost in the gravy, glasses askew, and grunting under the sheer futility of trying to cut meat that had warmed too long because a history book had kept everybody waiting, Teddy said to him and my mother, "M-may I be excused f-from the table?"

Father said, "For Godsake Theodore, why? You just sat down."

"B-because I g-got gas." And Teddy meant it. That's how he was. He was always talking about farting and crapping while the rest of us were trying to eat or tell a story. He took a risk in saying it every time, just as I would later in spilling the news that was burning me up.

A lot of things would happen at school, and I'd want to talk about them, tell any dumb story about my dumb day. Like when Mister Molloy, the principal, called the track team down to the gym to read a letter from some outraged lady in Cohassett who got mooned from the back window of the team bus by Johnny Quinn and maybe Louie Cedroni. Now how do you keep quiet about a thing like that? Johnny with his naked cheeks pressed against the glass. If whales had lips, they might look like that. And hairy Louie Cedroni. Dwight said Louie could grow a beard like Fidel Castro's—on his ass. Imagine. But that wasn't the thing.

When Mr. Malloy announced that the instigator was looking at a suspension, he said, "I tell you boys, if you want to dance, you have to pay the fiddler."

Johnny Quinn whispered, "Bite me."

And as much as I liked that, that wasn't the thing either.

The thing was father used that expression all the time. Not Johnny's—I mean Mister Molloy's. And I wanted to work it all into dinner. I wanted to find a way to say, You know what you always say, father, about paying the fiddler? Well, a very important man applied that same wisdom to an unfortunate incident that occurred recently between a couple of my colleagues on the track and field team and a certain innocent lady from Cohassett. But I couldn't talk like that. Even if I could think like that for the essays I had to write in school, I couldn't talk like that. I really didn't know how I would tell it. I just wanted to try. To let him know I was listening.

With father, it was hard to find an opening.

He had an agenda. Questions. When was Dwight going to find himself another job? Did I have my application in to the university yet? I planned to get back to him on that one. Although I had told mother about being accepted and taking the money to go somewhere else.

She said, "Is that what you want, honey?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then I think it's wonderful."

That was a big relief to hear, but there was still the matter of father.

"What am I going to do?" I asked her.

"You're going to tell him, Douglas."

"Can you be there?"

"Of course, honey. Some time after dinner one night, when it's just the three of us at the table, and it's quiet enough for you to talk, then you'll tell him."

For weeks, dinner conversation was about other things. One night father asked, Why was Teddy missing dinner so much lately? Was he still running around with Charlie Howard?

Teddy's friend Charlie had become a big topic at the dinner table. Dwight and I called him Charlie How-weird. Both he and my brother stammered. Sometimes their conversations sounded like radio static.

For his part, Teddy didn't have much use for either me or Dwight. He called us humpties. At other times he might look at Charlie and say, "L-let's s-split. These h-humpties are g-givin' me the fa-fa-feelin'."

I never did find out what the fa-fa-feelin' was.

Father was worse though. He spoke in a flat monotone, and as he got older, it became softer, fuzzier, like the singing in certain pop songs. You know words are coming out of the singer's mouth, but you can't help thinking, Jesus, he could be saying anything. Like that guy who sang Louie Louie.

Exasperated, I'd look at his gray, watery eyes, filling with mist as he puffed on a Camel, and I'd think, Say again, what?

After dinner, I mean immediately after he put his fork down, father would torch up a butt. So would mother. Through the smoke I watched his face grow longer as I got older. Perhaps the Republican in him made me think of Richard Nixon, or the sweat on his upper lip. Blah blah blah, and which of you boys is going to wash the car this weekend? I'm already there. And which of you boys is coming down to the boatyard with me? There's sanding to do on the railings. I'm already there. And where's Teddy, doesn't he know how much mother slaved over dinner. And for Godsake Dwight, did you paint another peace sign on the inside of the tool shed door? Now I don't like war any more than the next man, but Mister Nixon understands the communist mind, and ...

How could I really tell him what I told my mother, how could I really tell him I didn't plan to go to the local U? The free ride was his gift to us. All his years of study and dedication. All mother's years of sacrifice. The free ride was the boon that he brought back to the kingdom for us to share. But I had to get away. I am not this house any more than father was his father's house. He wanted out of grandfather's house so badly that he lied about his age to get into the Coast Guard. Now that's history.


I'M ROLLING THIS THROUGH MY MIND when Dwight excuses himself and Teddy finally shows up. He sits down, gobbles up and starts squirming in his chair. "M-may I b-be excused?" he says. "Brussels sprouts. I think I g-got the t-trots."

Neither father nor mother can smell the pot on him. I laugh a little, and father thinks I'm laughing at my brother's flare for scatology.

"One more peep out of either of you," he says to me and Teddy, "and I'll drop kick you both into the middle of next week."

And swear to God if Teddy doesn't say, "Wow! C-can you r-really d-do that, D-dad?"

If father had a book he would have heaved it, but he didn't. Instead, without skipping a beat, he says, "Theodore, I want you to run down to Florio's and pick up some coffee and hard rolls for your mother and me. Capeesh?"

Father liked to say capeesh even though we're about as WASPY as you can get.

Teddy's only hope is mother, who is on his side because it's daylight savings dark and frosty outside. Although my little brother doesn't know it, he's in good shape. Mother knows how to play the angles. "You're tired, dear," she tells my father as she strokes his hand. "Why don't you finish your dinner?"

Then she smiles at Teddy. "Theodore, you go do your business, and then, if you're feeling up to it, maybe you will join us for dessert."

Teddy's amazed. "I’m ex-excused?"

"Yes," she says, and he darts out of the room.

You're good, mother, I think, but father doesn't blink. "Fine," he says.

I linger at the table, because I'm certain now is the time mother was talking about, time for me to say what I have to say about going away to school. I figure I can't possibly make him any madder.

"Father, we have to talk."

"Good grief, what do I have to do to get a little peace and quiet?"

"It's important."

"Well. I'm listening," he says.

"Okay. You need to know something. I applied to Stilton and I got in."

"Oh dear," mother says while father's eyes bug like he's been zapped with a cattle prod. Then he shifts in his chair, turning his face away from mine and toward my mother. He's not going to discuss it.

I press on. "I made up my mind. I'm already there."

Mother stops stacking the dirty dishes and gets up from the table. Right in front of him, she says, "Go on, honey," and leaves the dining room.

Father sits like a stone statue. He lights a Camel, takes a deep drag, and says, "You think you're going. Let me ask you this, who's going to write the check?"

"I got scholarships. I can pay for it," I say.

"All by yourself you did this? The essays, the paperwork?" He finally locks his gray, watery eyes on me.

"I can't be Dwight, father."

"Dwight's a good boy," he sighs.

"That's not the thing," I persist. "I have to go my own way, just like you did when you left home to join the Coast Guard."

I know I have his ear now, and I've got to keep going but I'm stuck. Then it just comes up from deep inside me and escapes through my mouth before I can catch it—"Capeesh?"

"What?" Father says, leaning forward on his elbows and eyeing me all over again. He takes another slow drag from his Camel, and then he chuckles. Or at least after all these years, I'd like to think he did.


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