Elaine sang the melody. Mary Ann added an alto harmony. Next came Peg, who was the middle child but a natural soprano who’d eventually end up an octave above everyone else. Gerard usually did an Al Jolson imitation. Joe and I were expected to be able to stay on tune, which was impossible since all the on-tune parts were taken. Marie stood up on her chair. She didn’t need the extra height to blow out her candles, but she was wearing a new dress and showing it off for Father F. This was the sort of behavior that would win Joe and me a trip to the laundry room to examine our consciences. Everybody tolerated it from Marie because she’d lost her father. Joe was considered too young to have really lost much of a father. I was even younger, and when I’d had my chance to start a relationship with him, I’d made it pretty clear that my father’s legendary charisma was lost on me.
This was proven by one of the few stories from my father’s life in which I figured. He comes home from work, is mobbed by eight kids, and finally notices that I am playing on the floor near the stove. He’s amused and confounded by my lack of interest in him. I think you brainwash him when I am at work, he says to my mother in his good-natured way, but everybody knows he really doesn’t mind losing one out of nine times.
This story was a source of great pride to me. It allied me singularly with my mother. It also implied I had miraculously foreseen the tragic future and saved myself a terrible loss. And it tallied perfectly with my one visual memory of my father.
My father was available to me in a fifteen-second sequence I had committed to memory. It is morning in our big, square kitchen. The windows are silvered with the sun, and the fake-brick linoleum floor is warm, as if I am walking on the real-brick hearth in the living room while a fire is crackling. I am two feet tall, and I walk into the kitchen wearing footed pajamas with rubber soles. My parents are seated at either end of the oval maple table. My mother is drinking orange juice. It must be a Sunday: There are place mats beneath the eleven breakfast settings. I walk straight to my father, who balances his no-filter Camel in a clear glass ashtray, picks me up, turns my face to his, kisses me on the lips, and settles me down on his lap. His torso is broad and soft. Beneath the pleasing scent of the toasty cigarette smoke, I smell coffee. I put both of my hands on the edge of the table. Everything that is happening is deeply familiar to the three of us. We’ve been through this routine many times. We are all still waking up, but we’re happy. My father helpfully shoves his chair back a few inches from the table. He doesn’t say anything. I hop down, walk around the table, past the warm radiator covered with pairs of mittens smelling like winter, and climb into my mother’s lap, where I intend to spend some time with her, watching my big, dark-haired father enjoy a few minutes without the other kids.
It’s all I ever had of him, priceless footage, the only original, singular claim I ever had to knowing him, feeling him, smelling him, measuring and negotiating the distance between him and me. Without it, I was not a real Downing but a spectator, a witness to what happened to a family.
Father F. caught Marie’s attention just before she blew out her birthday candles. He said her name, and he smiled, and then he told her she’d forgotten how to blow out the candles. She nodded. Somebody turned on the pendant light, and Marie tried mightily to blow it out. It was hilarious and scary.
Father F. said, That isn’t a candle, Marie, and Marie nodded again and started trying to blow out her fingers. Then she stared at the candles for a while. She looked delighted and confused.
I sat up, trying to divert Father F.’s attention to me, but my sister Peg was laughing the loudest. Father F. smiled and said, Peg? You know what else is funny, Peggo? You forgot how to cut the cake, so cut the cake. Peg banged the silver cake server on the table a couple of times, and then she picked up her empty dessert plate to examine the bottom of it, as if her slice of cake should be there. He told somebody else to serve the cake, and then told the older kids it was too bad they’d forgotten how to eat it. A couple of them tried to push it through their cheeks and necks. This went on for about an hour. He sent some people to the hall closet to forget how to put on their coats, and he made a couple of my sisters believe their feet were so heavy that they couldn’t move. He could make them cry and laugh and wander around and bump into each other like blind people just by paying close attention to them for a couple of seconds and saying their names.
I’ll never forget how he said their names. He spoke them as soft and confident questions, as if he knew they believed they were lost but he knew they were not. Gerard? Marie? Peg? I’d never heard a man speak so tenderly to children. It was definitely a good weapon to use against the witch doctors.
Out of respect, Father F. did not mesmerize my mother. He did not mesmerize Joe out of respect for the miracle cure my mother arranged after he was born with an incurable disease. He wouldn’t mesmerize me, he said, because he didn’t know me well enough, which I took as an insult. I really didn’t mind not being forced to smash cake into my own face, but I desperately wanted him to speak my name as a question only he could answer. He never did.
Like so many memories made in that stucco house on Howard Street, Father F.’s last visit ended with Joe and me in our bedroom above the kitchen, listening for a while as the party continued beneath us. We didn’t try to hear what tricks were being performed in the kitchen without us. We drowned out the laughter by regaling each other with accounts of what we had been allowed to see, convincing each other that we were lucky just to have witnessed such amazing goings-on.
Joe and I taunted each other constantly and cruelly about being born sick and being born too late to remember our own father. But we didn’t use it against each other that night. We didn’t even make each other admit we hadn’t been worth mesmerizing.
Years later, in that same bedroom, I will confess to Joe that I have only one real memory of our father. Joe will ask me to tell it to him. I will. But even before I get to the coffee and cigarettes—my favorite details, as they supplied me with the material for conjuring my father later in life—Joe will ask me to stop the story and start again, “from the top.” As I rewind the well-worn tape, Joe will say it seems suspicious that the floor was warm enough for me to feel it through my footed pajamas. He will remind me that they probably had slip-proof rubber safety soles. I will stop the tape and examine one frame—my feet, the fake-brick pattern, sunlight, a table leg, one of my father’s feet in a black sock. Joe will say Daddy usually wore shoes in the house. I will worry over that sock. Maybe his foot was slippered? Did he own black loafers? Joe will tell me not to worry about the shoe. That shoe is the least of your worries, he will say. Michael?
At that point, I will pretend to be asleep, but Joe will say my name forty or fifty times—his version of Chinese water torture—until I say, What?
For your information, he will say—Joe-code for it pleases me to inform you—that brick linoleum was installed about five years after Daddy died.
In May 1966, exactly one day before my eighth birthday, Jack’s wife suddenly had a baby, the first Downing grandchild. She wiped out my party, and my First Communion was now competing with a baptism. I was eight and Joe was ten, and we’d heard a rumor that Jack and Jerry and the baby were moving back to Pittsfield so Jack could look for a job. While everybody was trying to embarrass Joe and me by telling us we had to start acting like uncles, all we could think about was our erratic oldest brother being back in town. We couldn’t discuss it in public, but we stayed up late in private, planning our defenses. We certainly weren’t going to sleep well anymore. I compared the situation to a flood in a Fizzy factory. Joe said Nagasaki, which sounded worse.