Winds. We weren’t his first owners. Someone had taken the puppy home, had him around for a year or so, then thought better of it. Who were these people? What name did they give him?
Whoever they were, they hadn’t succeeded with the house-training. Playboy wasn’t above squatting down in the living room and leaving—as the Irish song might have it—a token he’d been there-o. My father thought this was kind of funny, but then he was never the person who had to clean it up.
That task fell to my mother, a woman who never quite felt that this was her natural calling. She’d arrived in the country in 1923 via Ellis Island, and she and her six siblings settled along with their mother in what she later referred to as a “dirt farm” in Williamstown, New Jersey. One day, she came back from church and asked her mother why the pastor, in reading the Twenty-third Psalm, said his head was running over. The German word for head being Kopf. My grandfather appeared and disappeared. The youngest boy, Wilhelm, died in infancy. The oldest daughter, Gertrude, became a seamstress, and the older of the two sons, Roland, dropped out after seventh grade and became a milkman. My mother read books and played the banjo and worked at a soda fountain. One day, when she was in high school, a wild-eyed hobo came into the store, looked at her, and announced, “Ich bin dein Vater.”
The next morning, she found him drunk in the pigpen. She had to get Roland to help her haul their father out of the sty. He took off after he woke up, and they didn’t see the man again for a couple of decades, when he turned up at the New York City morgue. The only way they’d recognized him was that he was missing the end of the third finger on one hand. He’d lost this back in the 1930s, when he worked in an auto-body plant.
Hildegarde and Gertrude told New York they didn’t want him. So he was buried on Hart Island, the potter’s field of the city. I did a story on Hart Island when I was in my twenties, working for a magazine, not knowing at the time that my grandfather’s bones were right there at my feet. In graduate school I wrote a short story about Hart Island, something about a boy who loses his father and a chimpanzee that rides a unicycle.
My mother eventually got away from the dirt farm and started working for book publishers in New York and Philadelphia. She swore that she’d never get married, having seen the ruin that her own mother’s love for her feckless husband had brought about, and she kept that pledge until just shy of her fortieth birthday, when she was taking an accounting course being taught by a droll young Irishman, my father, who was twelve years her junior. She’d been a successful career woman for almost twenty years, having left the world of pigs and men behind. But then she fell.
Everyone was happy about the marriage, except my father’s mother, Gammie, who had hoped for something more along the lines of Audrey Hepburn. Toward the end of her life, begrudgingly accepting the fact of my mother’s goodness, Gammie told her, “Well, I guess it could have been worse. You could have been some hussy.”
And so my mother had given it all up—her lunches with Bennett Cerf, the autograph parties for celebrity authors, her train trips to publishing conventions in Chicago. All of this she left behind and became the mother of two—Cyndy when she was forty, me when she was forty-one. She liked being a mother. After all those years of being part of a family that was defined by poverty and absence, it was as if she got a chance to get things right.
And then came Playboy. She’d turned fifty years old right around the time he first burst through our doors, and there he was, a resentful, dangerous creature who gave nary a fuck about her earlier success in the publishing industry. Was she reminded, as she bent down to clean the rug with a roll of paper towels and a bucket of Mr. Clean, of her days as a child yanking her drunken father out of the pigpen?
“This creature has to go,” she said to my father after Playboy had left another steaming pyramid beneath the baby grand piano. “I’m not here to clean up dog dirt!”
My father loved