I made space in my writing room for Dad’s executive desk, opposite my own desk, made of plywood over sawhorses. Mine contrasted starkly with his. A set of deep drawers flanked the knee hole, and a wide pencil drawer spanned the top. I oiled the metal slides, waxed the wooden runners, and polished the surface to a shiny gleam. I tucked John Cleve’s chair into the knee hole. The front legs were scraped and dented, but the chair was intact, the nails firm, the glue tight. His desk became a catch-all for papers, slowly collecting dust as if unable to get free of old behavior. I never sat in the chair. No one had but Dad until he hung it on the wall.
When it came time to organize a file of Dad’s earliest artwork, I was reluctant to again take over the dining room table. The light was poor, and working there disrupted meals. My own desk was small, with notes and paper cluttering the surface. The best option was my father’s desk. I stared at Ol’ John’s chair for a long time, imagining my father hunched over the surface of the desk, working furiously.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I emptied the trash. I washed my face and combed my hair. I picked up my father’s chair and readjusted it. I walked back and forth behind it like a dog. I ate a piece of chocolate. I considered another cigarette. Then I smoked one. I thought of all the things I’d done that were supposedly brave:
Faced a man with a loaded gun.
Entered numerous cars with strangers while hitchhiking.
Camped alone in the woods.
Killed a poisonous snake with a stick.
Moved to cities where I didn’t know anyone.
Slept in a cemetery at night.
Hopped a train.
Defended myself with my fists.
Explored a house supposedly haunted.
Talked my way out of being mugged.
Ran a chainsaw.
Lived in a foreign country.
Crawled out of waist-deep quicksand.
Rappelled headfirst down a cliff.
I finished the cigarette, came inside, and wrote the preceding list. These were not acts of genuine courage, but were born of foolishness and despair. I was lucky to escape being maimed or killed. Nothing in my life came close to the courage my father displayed at the age of thirty-six when he quit a successful business career to write books. I was a grown man afraid of furniture. The shame of cowardice compelled me to approach the desk. I withdrew the chair, and I sat. Nothing untoward happened. It was just an old chair, not real comfortable.
I began reading Marcus Severus in Ancient Rome, a black-and-white comic book Dad made at age seventeen. To avoid capture, Marcus becomes the first man to swim the English Channel. He evades opposing forces and heads for Rome, accompanied by an “amorous concubine” disguised as a man. The book stops, incomplete, corresponding with his second year of college. That same year his father died of a stroke.
In 1949 Dad began another comic, Cade of the Galactic Patrol, and worked on it for nine years. The narrative is swiftly engaging. Richard Louis Cade, an officer in the Grand Army of the Galactic Republic, goes on a mission to rescue the president’s daughter. In a portent of contemporary times, people talk on “vizi-phones” and transmit instant “galactic telegrams” via desktop computers.
A strange dreamlike quality pervades the crude art. Perspective and scale are off-kilter. Figures exist independently of the space they inhabit. Backgrounds are vaguely rendered in repeating patterns of crosshatching and tightly compressed vertical lines. Characters change clothes often. A fierce warrior woman goes about dressed as a boy, while Cade wears loose blouses and midthigh skirts because his “clothes are at the cleaners.”
Dad finished the final installment of Cade a few months after I was born. On the last page, Cade looks in a mirror, experiencing his only self-reflective moment in 230 pages.
He sees himself ten years ago entering the Space Academy and beginning his career, expecting to be either dead or married and settled . . . and where am I? Neither dead or settled. Or maybe I am dead—
It is tempting to freight these words with retrospective meaning—is my father suggesting that marriage or paternity made him feel dead? The word “cade” means an animal abandoned by its mother and raised by humans, a kind of feral foundling. Perhaps Cade’s literal comment “maybe I am dead” is how Dad always felt. Then again, maybe it’s just a comic book made by a twenty-four-year-old late at night after a long day’s work, drinking Schlitz and smoking cigarettes while his new wife soothes his infant son. Regardless of interpretation, Dad never returned to Cade. In his notes, he wrote that he quit because it was veering toward the shameful.