Suzy McKee Charnas - My Fathers Ghost: An Authors Memoir

My Fathers Ghost

My Fathers Ghost

AN AUTHORS MEMOIR

Suzy McKee Charnas

ElectricStory.com, Inc.

Copyright 2002 by Suzy McKee Charnas. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication prohibited.

Permission to print letter to Robin McKee from Albert Einstein dated 1936 granted by The Albert Einstein Archives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

ePub edition copyright 2011 ElectricStory.com, Inc.

ePub Edition ISBN: 978-1-59729-055-5

Published by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

ElectricStory.com and the ES design are trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.

Cover design by and copyright 2011 Patrick Swenson

Frontispiece photograph by Steve Charnas

eBook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

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This account is as true as I can make it. I have, however, disguised the identities of some of the people involved to safeguard their privacy. Similarly, there are no retirement or nursing homes in Albuquerque named Vista Linda or Gracious Gardens. But you get the idea.

Thanks are due to many members of my family, to friends who have read this book for me in manuscript, and to my e-publisher, Bob Kruger, for his support and hard work. And, of course, thanks to my dad, who seems to have left me something after all.

You know?when we croak, what wed like?to be a ghost. Were mostly one now, so why not be one altogether.... A simple ambition. To be a ghost. Since a ghost, by one definition, is a human spirit that doesnt know its dead, such an extension of our life would be perfect, for we dontso farknow that we are alive.

To be a ghost. Lovely.

ROBINSON MCKEE, JOURNALS, 1969

Wine and Ashes

Death is the resumption of two dimensions,
from volume back to plane.

FROM ROBINS JOURNALS, 193345

O NE COOL AND SUNNY MARCH MORNING IN 1993, my half-brother Ian and I drove out to the old place on North Fourth Street in Albuquerque, where our father had lived, next door to me, for the first half of his twenty years in Albuquerque. The two Fourth Street housesthe square farmhouse with the peaked roof of galvanized tin and the low, flat-roofed cottage set back behind ithad both been rented out for some time now.

But that was where Pop had lived most independently during his years with my husband and me, and where I felt he might like to return for good.

Id chosen a weekday on purpose (the tenants were at work) so that Ian and I could do what we had come to do without interruptions or witnesses. Ian is my elder by six years, but because Pop had lived his last years with me, here in New Mexico, it had fallen to me to take charge of all the sad necessities connected with his death.

We parked in the yard between the two buildings, in the shade of a craggy Russian olive tree and a decrepit Chinese elm, and walked to the back of the property, the southeast corner of a scant acre of flat valley sand and clay. A sagging wire fence and more scrawny elm trees screened the big field beyond the back fence-line. That field had once grown alfalfa in summer and served as horse-pasture in winter. There had been snow back then: the view from my kitchen window of the dark horses cavorting over the white ground against the backdrop of the mountains never failed to raise my spirits. In summer the successive alfalfa crops of the long growing season had cooled the air around our place and made it an island of comfort in the furnace of Southwest heat.

But that was over twenty years ago, when we had first moved in. Now, this early spring day, the back field was rough with neglect. You could still see faint ruts marking the orderly rows of the plowing done each spring. The ground was covered with an early crop of the weeds that had eventually driven my husband and me from the Valley because of my allergies. But above the weeds, beyond the line of elms down at the end of the field, the plateau of the citys Heights still tipped upward to the crumbling knees of the Sandias, the mountains that rose raw and grainy into the clear blue eastern sky.

Well, I said, there it is, the mountain he was going to paint but never did.

He didnt even make any sketches? Ian said wistfully. A slighter version of our dad, with the same strong Scots face, my half-brother lived in Phoenix and sold computer chips. This work took him to Sandia Labs and up to Los Alamos from time to time, so he had often come to see Pop and us here in Albuquerque over the past years. I thought he was drawing, at least.

I havent found anything but some old work he brought out here with him, I said, and left it at that. I had been the one to suggest to Pop that the mountain was there for him to paint, following in the footsteps of the great French painter Paul Czanne, whom he had idolized. Now that I thought about it, Pop had never actually agreed to this program, so it was a little ridiculous for me to complain about him for not having gone along with it.

I set down the brown-paper shopping bag I had brought from the car, took out the small white cardboard box of ashes, and put it on the ground between us. Ian and I sat on the stumps of elms cut down years ago and toasted the old mans ashes, and his unpainted mountain, in good red wine.

Then I upended the box and dumped out the coarse gray grit onto the ground. Together we scooped dirt over the spot to keep everything from being messed with by stray animals or curious human visitors; though who would wander down to the end of that brushy, unused plot, or why, I cant now imagineexcept for the two of us.

I have a sister whose father was also Robin, but her life was falling apart at the time. Her disintegrating marriage and her resultant state of chronic emotional and financial meltdown, plus the exigencies of providing for various dependent animals, kept her stuck in LA. My father had so thoroughly cut his ties with everyone back east, friend, colleague, or relative, that I had no idea whom else to inform that he was dead, let alone invite to our little free-form service. The obituary notice that I had run in the New York Times (just in case) had drawn no response.

Ian and I were Robins funeral, hunched in our coats because a chilly breeze was blowing; but the sun, that southwestern light that has inspired generations of regional painters out here (but not my father), was clear and bright.

So that was that.

We poured a little wine on the ground, returned to the car (talking mildly about our memories of the old man), and drove back into the city to the house on Cedar Street, with its in-law quarters where Pop had finished out his second decade with my husband and me.

In the silent studio apartment he had occupied (where the radio used to play all day, tuned to the areas one classical music station), Ian helped me bring down some canvases and boxes of papers from the storage space high up under the skylight. He wanted a painting or two to remember the old man by; our sister had asked for some, too.

There was no clutter in the room, apart from Pops skinny, nearly toothless cat, which wound itself around and around Ians ankles, purring and meowing in manic excitement. What Pop had left behind was the detritus of failure, a poor mans meager hoard: some beat-up old books on the narrow shelves flanking the fireplace, where they had sat untouched for years gathering dust; a couple of drawers worth of jeans, long-sleeved shirts, underwear, and socks; a bright red down vest left over from days of winter cold out on Fourth Street; a blue blazer, one pair of barely worn shiny black shoes, and a huge old tweed coat that looked as if Sherlock Holmes would have been at home in it; and a painting-box full of dried up color-tubes and brushes, with a heavily encrusted palette tucked up inside the lid.