Evenings during the last springtime of the last great war, after what seemed to me our happy suppers–gravy, fresh vegetables, plate clatter, talk–my father doffed the jacket to his tailor- made suit and read the paper while Black Mary and my mother cleared dishes. My mother plucked up the white tablecloth by its four corners and carried it out the back door. The sun by then was down, the grass spinach green and shadows purple. She stood on the stoop (where my father had scratched, when the concrete was wet, a lopsided heart, and then inside the heart, “1939: B + C”). She shook the cloth. Up, down. Flapped it, scattering crumbs.
His chair ruled the room. It was upholstered in nubby rose wool, and next to one of its wide arms stood a table with a Chinese lamp that had been his mother’s. He was mad for flowers, and breathing noisily through his mouth, he would arrange in a white vase drooping peonies or lilies of the valley.
A lazy bounce or two later he spoke–“Giddyup’s over!”–and let fall half the newspaper, showing his face: round, lightly freckled, blue-eyed, grinning. He was 30. His loose red curls had begun to recede.
From the navy blue Dr. Johnson’s can he sprinkled tooth powder on my toothbrush. “Let’s polish those chompers whiter than snow!” His own teeth clenched, face wrinkled in a hideous grimace, he brushed.
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Mary clinked one china plate onto another. Pots clanked. “Blessed assurance,” she sang, “Jesus is mine.” (“We have ourselves another Marian Anderson,” my father would say.)
Off the cover of Poky Little Puppy the milk-white mongrel of the title streams light.
