The three of us moved into the dining room where Ben had set an old cardboard box on the large ornate oak table, richly polished to a high sheen. In the box was the clock for my father, or rather the pieces of a clock. To me, all the little gears and wheels and springs looked like someone had disassembled a set of automobile brakes and thrown the parts into a container. I could almost sense my father’s back stiffen. He looked at Ben.
“Is everything in there?” Dad asked, with only slight sarcasm edging his voice.
“Yes, sir,” Ben replied. “But before you restore it, you’ll need some lessons in clock repair.”
“Uh huh,” said Dad. My father worked on newspaper presses and was quite mechanically inclined. What he didn’t know about clocks he could certainly figure out.
“Sort of like an apprenticeship, Ed,” said Ben.
“All in one afternoon?” said Dad. I could hear the anger building in his voice. I don’t know how Ben used the word “apprentice” in his line of work, but in my father’s it meant the lowest of low, a real dummy. If the light had been better in the dining room, Ben might have noticed my father’s neck turning red.
“Oh, more than an afternoon!” said Ben. “You can come here Sunday afternoons and work with me in the basement for a couple of months. I’ll start you off cleaning a lot of old pieces I’ve been meaning to get to.” Ben chuckled to dull the barb of the arrow as he shot it.
“Even an Irishman,” he said, “should be able to handle that, Ed.”
I remember looking over to my father for his reaction and I saw him flinch. Years later he would tell me the relatively mild insult had struck him hard, reminding him of taunts of a different nature he’d suffered from his father. I’ve always thought his soul brought him to a place that afternoon he had been avoiding. There in the box lay a clock in pieces, appropriately enough, ready to be put back together. Even the dark oak table in front of us may have been reminiscent of the rich and beautiful desks Dad stood before when he swore his allegiances to the powerful, those to whom he would nod his head and curry favor in order to have the kind of life he wanted. His bargain with them … for that’s how he viewed it, made so long ago when he was young and poor … no longer stroked his pride.
My father would eventually adjust his bargains to match his values, and he learned to grant more authority to himself than he accepted from others. But on that afternoon in Herkimer, he was just beginning that leg of the journey. As he tried to make sense of his emotions, the awful gnawing in his gut was literally making him sick. For the first time in years he would not be agreeable. He would not submit. Not to this little Protestant prick across the table from him who wouldn’t know decent manners from a stick up his ass.
Out in the kitchen, the women busied themselves with lunch, their laughing voices carrying through the door to the three of us as we stood around the table. I watched Dad raise his eyes from the box of parts and let his gaze wander over to the window and then through the glass into the distance, as if he was looking somewhere for strength. Or counting to ten. Quickly, he brought his eyes back and looked down again at the box. His mouth twisted into a hard line and he looked like he was about to explode. I began to fear he would pick up the little man and throw him through the window.
Not even a tone-deaf blowhard like Ben could miss the minor chord now vibrating throughout the dining room. The chatter of the women dribbled to a stop as our silence blared out into the kitchen, and in a moment the entire house was as quiet as a tomb, except for the grandfather clock ticking in the hall.
“Ed …?” I heard my mother call. She did not get an answer.
“Well, Ed,” Ben finally began. “Perhaps we ….
“I thank you for the clock, Ben.” said my father. “But I’m afraid we have
to get back home sooner than we planned.”
“Oh, now” said Ben, “there’s no need to ….”
“I’m not feeling well,” said Dad. “We’re leaving.”
We were in the driveway and loading ourselves into the car less than a minute later. I said nothing at first. I was surprised my mother or grandmother offered no comments. Women often try to fix what is not ready to be fixed.
Dad carried the box of parts to the car. He got in the passenger side, a signal for me to drive, and sat staring straight ahead, the box planted on his lap.
Ben fluttered around outside the car like a small bird, offering one comment or another to each of us as I started the engine. Dad avoided eye contact with him, but nodded his head when Ben said he hoped my father would feel better soon. Dad appeared as agreeable as a muzzled bull. Anger welled up inside me and I wanted to tell Ben off.
When the little man danced around to my side of the car, I looked up at him and spoke with contempt written across my face.
“You know what, Ben?” I snarled.
An iron clamp seized my right elbow and squeezed so hard I almost fainted.
“Uh,” I said through clenched teeth, “thank you and good bye.” My father let go and I slumped back in my seat. Under his breath Dad said with a fury, “Don’t ever speak for me!”
I put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway a bit too fast, scraping the bumper on the pavement when we hit the street.
No one uttered a word as we drove up Route 5 toward home. Near Ilion, my father asked me to pull over near a railroad siding.
I expected him to heave the box of parts out the window and tell me to drive on. But instead, he got out, placed the box on the seat and walked 30 feet or so into the grass. He knelt down and threw up.
Small womanly nurturing sounds came from the back seat, but neither my mother nor grandmother got out to attend my father. That told me they understood what was going on. I can’t say I did, not then, not fully. I turned to the back seat and said, “Gee, he really was sick!” No one answered.
In a few moments Dad returned and told me to drive on. Two or three miles went by without a word being said by anyone. Finally, I could take it no longer.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked.
“Yes,” was all he said.
“Maybe I can help you with the clock,” I said. “I mean clean the parts or something while you figure out how they go together.”
“Don’t worry about it, “ he said curtly. The brusque manner hurt. While I thought nothing of dismissing him when I wanted to, I didn’t like his dismissal of me.
The more I thought about Ben, the angrier I got. Why couldn’t we just put Grandma on the bus once in a while and ship her off to Herkimer? Why did I have to watch my father demean himself when we went to visit Ben?
“You should have told him off,” I said.
My father’s hand shot out sideways and almost ripped the shirt off my chest. I slammed on the brakes and pulled the car to the side of the road, cries from my mother and grandmother coming from the back seat.
Dad threw open his door and pulled me by the front of my shirt right across the seat and out on to the side of the road. Hot tears came to my eyes as I prepared to lose our first real fist fight. He spun me around and threw me up against the side of the car. His face was a mask of anger. I shouted into it, “You should have told him off, goddamn it.!”
“Who are you to tell me what to do?” he shouted back, his spit spraying into my face.
I took a breath, choked and took another. “I don’t know,” I said. I looked down at the ground. “I don’t know who I am.”
His face relaxed and he straightened up. Then he grabbed me and hugged me, for the first time since I had been a little boy. A bear hug.
“I don’t know, either,” he said.
That night my father telephoned Ben and apologized, something I thought was totally unnecessary. But at sixteen I knew nothing about apologies.
Over the next week, Dad worked on the clock at his tiny workbench in the cellar after supper each night, while the rest of us sat in the living room and watched television. He had the mechanism together and working in no time. He sanded the wooden case and gave it three coats of varnish. When the last coat was absolutely dry, he brought the clock upstairs and placed it on the mantel in the living room. He wound the clock, set the hands to the correct time and gave the pendulum a tiny shove. The clock went tick, tock. It seemed rather loud.
When Micky and I settled in our beds for the night, the ticking noise drifted down the hall to our bedroom. Micky wondered if Dad should have put more oil in the clock.
“It’s not a Chevy,” I told him.
“I can’t sleep,” Micky moaned from across the room. “Go tell Dad to stop the clock.”
“You go tell him,” I said. “And mention that a telescope would have been a lot quieter.”
But after a few minutes I got up and headed down the hall.
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