Big George looked woebegone when he arrived home with a pole and more nasty worms in a small box. Work, hard work; this was the Baker family religion, but my father was the good-time sinner man who never quite got the faith. My uncle Harry, who supervised the running of all four of the family’s lumberyards, had a way of suggesting, as he peered over his accountant’s half-glasses, that no one else could ever do quite right. My father tended to ignore him when it was possible; he was as easygoing and personable as Harry was shrewd and financially adept.
We headed to Moberly, to Rothwell Park where there was a pond or lake or something. Daddy took along a six-pack of Budweiser. I was determined that whatever happened, I would not touch a fish. I left the jar with the worms I had found, dead by this point, on the kitchen table for my mother to find with a sign that said, ENJOY YOUR LUNCH!
My father did what he always did when we traveled together alone. “I want you to have a happy childhood,” he told me before asking about school, my life, my friends. Sliding as far as possible toward the car door, I never knew quite what to say to please him. I wanted him to believe that all was well, but could not really make the case.
“I’m not right,” I blurted out to him once.
“No one is,” he answered. “They just think they are. Too many people think they’ve got it all figured out. But they don’t.”
This idea was going to come as quite a shock to many people I knew.
“No one?”
“Look inside a person and everyone has problems. I work in a damn lumberyard. My father was a lawyer. He was number one in his class.”
All the way to Moberly, my father sang, as he always did in the car. From his old single man’s life as a salesman, he kept, in a rarely opened cabinet in the family room, the records of Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, Lionel Hampton, the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole.
“Mona Lisa, men have named you,” he sang as he dried off after a shower, always folding his towel carefully and hitting every inch of flesh. I thought the method was something he had picked up in the army.
At Rothwell Park, after my father finally succeeded in assembling the pole and baiting it, he retired to the grassy bank to drink beer. There I stood for fifteen minutes or so, holding the pole, hoping that the fish were elsewhere, preferably in some far-off bay. My father checked the sky for rain with some frequency and chugged on a Bud.
About every five minutes, I shot him a look that said, “Isn’t this enough?”
“Fish, dammit,” he said. “Fish.” In return, I made a face, turned back around, and threw the fishing pole into the lake. Already I was a believer in the power of the grand gesture.
“Damn, George,” my father yelled as I plopped down beside him.
“Daddy,” I said, “you know and I know that this is just a shit waste of time.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said. “Your mother is going to blame me for this. I am never going to hear the end of it. Some boys would be damn grateful for a fishing pole like that.”
Then he gave me a sip of beer.
. . .
After the fishing ordeal, my father and I wound up eating hamburgers at the country club bar where my father’s cronies wandered through the bar in their golf shoes. “I guess you wouldn’t want to learn golf,” my father began. But I was reluctant. I did not care for the shoes.
“Am I a brat?” I asked.
“Borderline,” he responded.
Soon, another thought occurred. Funny Girl was playing in Columbia. I did not know Barbra Streisand, but anyone who tripped on her pants leg at the Oscars was my kind of woman. I had read the reviews of the movie, knew the songs from the record, and had memorized the number to call for showtimes. My father shrugged, threw down the last of his drink, gave in. We saw the movie. When Barbra declared, “I’m a bagel on a plateful of onion rolls,” I wanted to cheer.
When it was over, my father remarked, “That Jewish girl can sing.” Afterward, we dined at Rice Bowl Shan-grila restaurant, which I considered the height of sophistication. All the way home, I talked about Barbra until my father turned from the wheel and said, “Please, George, hush. You’ve got to straighten out and fly right.”
For days, I spoke in Brooklynese 24/7. I narrowly escaped injury when, standing on a bar stool in my bathrobe, lip-synching to “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” I fell to the floor after what I considered a particularly devastating climax. Betty came rushing, kneeling down to check for fractures as I rubbed my head, thinking, “Oy!”
. . .
A city kid who grew up in St. Louis as the son of a successful attorney, my father—who snoozed over the stacks of sale tickets he brought home nights—was from a family of huggers, eaters, drinkers, people who dragged us, way past my bedtime, to suppers at fancy restaurants with waiters in tuxes, appetizers, tanks of lobsters with snapping claws.