Timmie tried again: “If somebody wrote your parents and said, ‘Tell us about your son, what’s he like?’ what would they have said?” He was prey to darker desires, too, but he hid those better. I like a lot of brown sugar on my cereal and a lot of white sugar in my tea and a lot of sympathy in my boyish disconsolations.” Of course, you realize, my lovely, that I am at least a little sweet. Dorie thought they were candy and ate one.” Two years later, Day wrote Mom from Amsterdam to say, “Drinking ‘young gin’ (tough) rather than lemon gin (a little sweet) because I want the waiter to realize I am tough. When we lived in Manila, in 1967, he spent two days in a hospital, as Mom noted in a doleful letter home, “under observation for-you won’t believe it-chewing up and swallowing a Christmas tree ball! We had a rather elaborate cake in the shape of a dragon and the eyes were glass balls.
In college, he got fired from a summer job for filling doughnuts with too much jelly. “You had some a short while ago,” she said. He closed his eyes and said, “I’m sort of hungry for ice cream.” But Timmie still hoped he might finally confess that he loved us more deeply than, for secret reasons, he could ever reveal. I was of like mind, a paramedic filling out the forms: Did you take every possible measure? I’d suppressed my expectations for so long it felt like a form of filial piety. He was just checking the box: I owe my children this courtesy. And then they would have described me as a boy.” Timmie glanced over: Uh-oh. Timmie asked, “How would your parents have described you?” Being raised by old-school Wasps was like being raised by a minibar. We began gently, at the beginning, which was probably a mistake, as he hated his Pittsburgh boyhood and being Theodore Wood Friend, III, known as “Dorie” to his friends (and later as “Day” to us). The way he sat in his blue armchair-chin low, lips tight, gray hair batwinging from his enormous head-called to mind a nineteenth-century caricature: Boss Tweed astride his empire the cantankerous Tories.
It felt like our last chance to understand him he was nearly eighty-six and his once-lush conversation was as clenched as winter wheat. One August afternoon in 2018, after lunch and before my father’s nap, my younger sister, Timmie, and I sat down with him in his living room to ask about his life.
0 kommentar(er)
