Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister? Read online

  Children come to New York City and they ask about it: as adults, I guess, we just keep focused on our destinations, we rarely look up, but for a child the city is fertile ground for investigation, comparison and interrogation: Is the Empire State Building bigger than the Statue of Liberty? Was it hard to build the Brooklyn Bridge? Was it hard to build the Manhattan Bridge? What subway is fastest? What airport has the longest runway? How many lights are there in New York? Are there any dungeons in New York? And why on earth is New York called the Big Apple?

  I was a city kid, but not the type who stood on a corner smoking cigarettes. I knew every crack in the sidewalk like a kid in the country knows the best hiding places behind the biggest trees. And yet sitting atop the World Trade Center that night, I was an outsider, as amazed as someone who had traveled half the world to sit at that table in the sky.

  The events of the day were as much part of my childhood as the place where I lived. If I’d grown up in the 1940s, and not the 1970s, would I be the same person? Walter Cronkite described a strange world to a boy in footie pajamas: space shots and elections, assassinations and attempted assassinations, protests and more protests, bombings and wars, but not the kind I’d seen pictures of in books, with soldiers in blue or gray uniforms lining up in fields. These wars were in the jungles or the deserts, with helicopters, and men on stretchers.

  I was often confused, and this prompted questions.

  The Paris Peace Accords that got us out of Vietnam was signed on my father’s birthday. We sat in the living room and watched a group of gray-haired men around a big round table sign pieces of paper.

  I asked my mother what they were doing.

  She said: “They’re writing birthday cards to your father.”

  Then Watergate. Those hearings are so prevalent in my memory that I feel they must have been going on for several years. My dad and his father shared a sales office in Manhattan for their box-making company. I played with Civil War figures on the rug during the summer as my father watched the hearings on a small black-and-white television. At one point, the rebels routed, I watched along with him. I felt strangely sympathetic toward John Dean, who described the corruption within the Nixon White House, and looked very nervous and unhappy leaning into that microphone. He seemed, to me, like a kind person. Maybe he had a son and was a daddy, too.

  “Is John Dean nice?” I asked my dad.

  “Dean?” my father asked. “No, he’s awful. They’re all awful.”

  The hearings broke to a commercial. My dad explained, and not for the first time, what was going on: how a security guard had twice found tape covering a lock in this apartment building in Washington, and called the police, and how the burglars were arrested rifling through the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and planting bugs (I pictured actual little bugs with legs). Some of the president’s friends had been implicated, and surely the president would be, too, soon. My father mentioned the Plumbers, and the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). It was all crazy because Nixon had gone on to win the election easily—why on earth did they have to break into the place?

  But that was only one of many contradictions.

  “Don’t you think, Wen, if you were a burglar, and you were bugging an office, and you’d put a piece of tape over the lock so you could get back out and then it was gone, that you would have gotten out of there instead of just putting another piece of tape on it?”

  “I guess.”

  “Of course you would: you’re a bright kid.”

  I tried to picture myself, a six-year-old, my face recently scrubbed with my own saliva, bugging the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

  One weekend my dad took me to his company’s factory upstate, just the two of us. The place was filled with clattering machines cutting big sheets of cardboard into small sheets of cardboard. I sat in his office and counted the cars of a freight train that went by (the number 256 sticks in my head). We drove to Niagara Falls, where we took the Maid of the Mist right up to where the falling water hits the surface, and went deep into tunnels, boots and raincoats on, to see the waterfalls from within. We ate pizza in a little restaurant on the shore of Lake Ontario, gray and flat and impossibly big just outside the window, so amazing to me that you could not see the other side.

  Still, even with this trip I didn’t entirely understand what my dad did for a living. I knew the factory made boxes, and that those boxes held glass bottles of perfume, and that sometimes my mother wore that perfume, but it wasn’t clear what my dad, watching the awful John Dean on television, had to do with it.

  Back home, my teacher asked what my father did. I didn’t give it a second’s thought: I said he was an architect.

  I’m not sure why I said that. Was I imagining the man who designed the World Trade Center? Was I picking up a habit of making up answers to questions? My mother had. (“They’re writing birthday cards to your father.”) Maybe I just wanted to describe a job I understood, one whose mission and result were clear. The teacher was impressed; I was very pleased. But when my father dropped me off the next day and she ran up to him and said, “Wendell says you are an architect!” I felt a peculiar sort of dread.

  “Oh, no, I think he’s pulling your leg,” he said, smiling at me, and any embarrassment I’d experienced quickly faded as I tried to figure out what on earth “pulling your leg” meant.

  I like telling Dean what I do for a living because it is so simple: I work for the newspaper. There it is, every morning, right outside the front door of our apartment. I prove this to him from time to time by telling him what’s going to be in the paper the next day—“We have great pictures of a car crash: wait till you see it.”

  But sometimes he has unreasonable expectations. Maybe he thinks I have more power than I do.

  He went over to a friend’s house one afternoon for a playdate. The friend’s parents were at work, and the babysitter was a little too ambitious inviting children over: there were eight or nine boys and girls in the house by the time she was done.

  All was well and good, everyone running up and down the stairs and screaming, until three girls decided to break away from the maelstrom and have their own mini playdate within a playdate. They went into the parents’ bedroom on the third floor, and locked the door.

  The doorknobs in this house were very elegantly designed, the kind you’d see in a decorating magazine, with a tiny hidden latch above the knob to unlock it. But they are not designed to be handled by small children. So when the babysitter called them down to dinner, the little girls couldn’t get out.

  Shouting, the babysitter tried to explain through the door how to flick the latch. Dean and his chums ran around some more, screaming and yelling, stopping from time to time to offer advice. Finally, the babysitter called the fire department.

  Now this was exciting. Sirens wailed in the distance, then closer. A pumper truck pulled up outside, lights flashing. A team of firemen came tramping up to the third floor weighted down by gear. They tried the lock. No luck. So one climbed into a harness. He went out through the window in the hallway and crab-walked on the ledge outside the house to the room where the girls had trapped themselves. He let himself in through the window and unlocked the door.

  When I got home Dean wasn’t as excited by this as one might think. He was very nonchalant. But he figured I knew all about it already.

  “Is it going to be on the front page?” he asked.

  I have a photographic road map to my own childhood: three albums of black-and-white photographs that my dad put together, and to which he obviously devoted a great deal of care, from the time he and my mother got married until I was ten, when they split.

  At first, my parents are younger than I am now, my father in suits and ever-widening ties, his hair initially crisply cut and combed, and eventually with a stubbly beard in a jean jacket; my mother—many pictures of my mother—in miniskirts, boots, in big sunglasses like a model in Vogue. I’m playing with a dump truck in
the sand, or wearing a blazer the day we went to see my great-aunt sail on the Cristoforo Colombo. My sister, head in her hands, smiles over her birthday cake candles.

  But for every picture of our family is one shot somewhere in the city that had nothing to do with us: a rail-thin model on a runway in a short white dress; a horse-drawn carriage, flecked with snow, in Central Park; a woman in a raincoat and miniskirt in the Museum of Modern Art, an abstract painting in the background; a black kid looking out a bus window above a campaign poster reading “Our Judges Mustn’t Be Picked in a Back Room,” or the Beatles leaning on a podium and giving a press conference.

  I’ve always liked the story of how my dad got those photographs of the Beatles.

  This was 1966, the band’s fourth time in America. Revolver had just come out. Since my dad worked with his father, he could more or less do as he pleased. So after reading that they would be giving a press conference, he put his camera in his pocket and walked to the Warwick Hotel, where thousands of teenage girls in short skirts, screaming and giggling and crying, crowded the sidewalks behind police sawhorses.

  My dad saw some men carrying benches. He helped pick one up and he and one of the workmen carried it into the hotel, through the lobby into a large room with a lectern, where they put the bench down at the very front and my dad sat on it. A little time went by. The place filled up with reporters and photographers. And then the Beatles came out and took questions. My father didn’t ask any, but he shot away, and now there they are, John, Paul, George and Ringo, smiling and leaning forward on the lectern to answer questions, John in a blazer with giant stripes, Paul in a paisley shirt, all of them with haircuts like mine at the time, ensconced forever in our family photo album.

  I wanted to create a record like this for Dean, a portrait of a family and its city and its times—and those things that would be gone by the time he was my age. I started filling up albums with black-and-white photographs: Dean and Helene by the Hudson River; me in the newsroom of my paper, drinking coffee; the three of us and several of our friends, one wife pregnant, posing outside the little cottage near the tidal estuary on Long Island.

  Photo courtesy Walter Jamieson, Jr.

  Like the Upper East Side in the late 1960s, our neighborhood along the waterfront in Brooklyn was changing. The working port that attracted those green-hulled container ships from Saudi Arabia was being phased out, and new buildings were going up, blotting out our view piece by piece. I wanted to record this evolving place.

  I was copying my father, deliberately.

  But I was starting to copy him in other ways, too.

  One Indian summer day a rusty but evocative-looking freighter came in. I got my camera, and Dean and I headed down to the pier. It was hot and he wanted ice cream so we stopped at a little grocery store. As usual he eschewed the classics, like an ice cream sandwich or a Fudgsicle, and instead chose the most disgusting selection available, in this case a bright yellow SpongeBob SquarePants bar with frozen globes of black bubble gum for eyeballs. By the time we got to the ship, which I shot through the chain-link fence, its crane swinging pallets of burlap sacks filled with cocoa beans, Dean’s face was a glistening, slimy, lemony mess. But I was prepared: I’d grabbed about thirty napkins in anticipation. I leaned down to talk to him.

  Here is what I said:

  “Dean, stick your tongue out.”

  “Why?”

  “Just stick your tongue out.”

  “Is John Dean nice?”

  —WENDELL JAMIESON, age six, during the

  Watergate hearings

  James F. Neal, attorney, Nashville, Tennessee, former chief trial counsel of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force:

  “John Dean was my main witness. I spent a great deal of time with him. Of course, I put him in prison first; that was part of a plea bargain. I thought he was a very nice guy. He had a Saul-to-Paul conversion—you’re not from the south, I can tell, but that’s an expression: Saul was on the road to Damascus to persecute the early Christians, and then Jesus spoke to him, and he realized what he’d been doing was wrong, and he took up the name Paul and started making up for the things he’d done. So that’s what Dean did: he said there is a cancer growing on the presidency. He tried to straighten things out. He tried to warn Nixon. Until we heard the tapes, I was a little skeptical of how bad things were, but when we heard them, it turned out everything that John Dean was telling us was absolutely true. He was a fantastic witness, he’s very bright, great memory.”

  ME: “Did he have a sense of humor? Did he like practical jokes? Was he nice to his son and his wife?”

  “It wasn’t a situation for much humor. Before he went to prison, he would come down to Nashville and meet with me. He was always very solicitous of his wife, Maureen. It was really hard work getting him prepared, and I didn’t really have a chance to test his sense of humor.”

  “Why are there sidewalks on both sides of the street?”

  —DEAN, on the way to school

  Iris Weinshall, Commissioner, New York City Department of Transportation:

  “It goes back to the late 1800s. The city started to grow, we didn’t have a subway system, we didn’t have an extensive mass-transportation system. How did people get around? If you didn’t have a horse and buggy—which was very expensive—you walked everywhere. We started to think how to keep people safe. There were something like nine hundred pedestrian deaths at the turn of the century. Basically, what the government was saying was we have to recognize there are multiple uses for the streets, and we have to tell the property owners how to create this safe environment for people.”

  “If Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocked over a lantern in our neighborhood, would all the buildings go on fire?”

  —DEAN, after learning a song at school about the Chicago fire

  Salvatore J. Cassano, chief of operations, New York City Fire Department:

  “No, they wouldn’t. In the time of the Chicago fire, they had wood-shingle buildings and wood-frame buildings. In Brooklyn, if you take a look at the beautiful buildings, the brownstones, they are very well made, they have brick nogging between the buildings—spaces. We call them ‘fire stops.’ Very rarely, unless some work had been done, would a fire in a brownstone spread to the next building. They will spread vertically but not horizontally. Normally we call a brownstone fire a ‘one-building fire,’ as opposed to a fire in a wood-frame row house where we are playing catch-up, trying to confine that fire to the one building that it’s in.”

  “How many lights are there in New York?”

  —RONAN GALLAGHER, age five, Los Angeles, California

  Peter Jacobson, lighting specialist for Consolidated Edison, New York City:

  “There are many types of light bulbs used, including the incandescent light invented by Thomas Edison, the fluorescent lights used in schools and stores and new-light emitting diodes, or LEDs, that are very efficient and are in many of the traffic lights and Walk and Don’t Walk signs in New York City. Lighting in general uses about twenty-five percent of the power Con Edison distributes. Electric power usage is measured in kilowatt hours, and a kilowatt hour of electricity would be enough power to light a 100-watt incandescent light bulb, the type found in your home, for ten hours. In 2005 Con Edison distributed 40,629,913,573 kilowatt hours of electricity to New York City, and assuming that a light bulb is on for twenty-five percent of the time and that on average the light bulb consumes 100 watts, then that amount of electricity would light 25,393,690 light bulbs.”

  “Are there any dungeons in New York City?”

  —NICK MANSKE, age seven, Brooklyn, New York

  Martin F. Horn, Commissioner, New York City Department of Corrections:

  “There are people who commit crimes and we lock them up, but we don’t use dungeons. If you were in one of our jails, your day would be pretty routine, but it wouldn’t be like being in a dungeon. You would get three meals a day and a chance to work. You would probably be living in a dormitory with abo
ut forty other young men. About half of our inmates live in dormitories and only those that need to be apart are kept in cells. Your family could come and visit you several times a week, and you would be allowed to watch television sometimes. But you wouldn’t get to decide whom you live near and with, and you wouldn’t get to decide when you go to sleep and you wouldn’t get to decide what you eat. We make all of those decisions for you. It is kind of boring, and it is not fun.

  “If you went back to the 1800s, the common practice was to lock individuals in cells. Contact with other inmates was thought to be corrupting. They ate their meals themselves, they went outdoors by themselves. The experience was so isolating that many of them went crazy. The modern penal system really began at Auburn prison in upstate New York where the notion of solitary imprisonment was rejected in place of what we now call congregate care.”

  ME: “How about ‘The Tombs,’ the jail in downtown Manhattan? I had a friend who had to spend the night there once; something to do with breaking into a car. Is that like a dungeon?”

  “No, no. That name has to do with the architectural design of the exterior of the original building, which was believed to be reminiscent of some Egyptian tomb. That building no longer exists. Now we call it the Manhattan Detention Complex. The newest tower of the center is a modern air-conditioned building that was built in the 1980s, and is probably one of the most humane jail facilities in the country.”

  “Why is New York called the Big Apple?”

  —DECLAN KRISKA GUNN, age three, Brooklyn, New York

  Edward I. Koch, mayor of New York City, 1978 to 1989: