She and her friend Lauren make a small envelope out of wrapping paper and in it place two notes. Kathryn’s reads: “Dear Daddy, get well soon.” The other reads, “Get well from Lauren.” Both are written in pink and red, and both have stars and circles on them. They have thoughtfully but oddly included string inside the envelope.
On August 12, 1984, she has written an anniversary card to Sue and me, this time with blue clouds and a rainbow and a pair of lips with a tongue coming out and flowers near the bottom. The sun has a smiley face on it.
For Father’s Day she attaches a piece of red paper, folded in half, to a theater program from her class at Sidwell Friends School. The play is called The Amazing Voyage of the New Orleans. Kathryn is playing Townsperson One, Mr. Wilson (silent). She begins to include stickers—flashy red hearts—on her letters to me. She begins to sign her name KLG.
For Father’s Day she reminds me that I am a great father, even if she gets mad at me. “Your Loving Daughter, Kathryn (Curly Pie).”
A sentimental father? A pushover? Not me! Except I use her fingers to trace her name on my fingers and on my hands and the back of my hands. On my arm with various colored magic markers, she designs flowers and bumblebees and cherry trees and smiling suns. She makes little circles on my elbows. She makes triangles on the insteps of my feet, in the sand. On my face, she writes “I love you Daddy.” I wash my face, shave, and it comes off; I have her write it again.
When Kathryn goes off to camp in the summer, I send her long letters that detail our life without her, and then when she comes home, I ask that she write on my chest everything that she has done, and on my shoulders I ask that she spell out that she received my letters. I ask that she chronicle, in case I forget, which I will not—but just in case—all the trips we make, the plays she has been in, the iterations of the images she has of herself: little girl in the clouds, little girl in winter, little girl on the beach, little girl in a helicopter. Write it here and here and here.
“Why?” she wants to know. Answer: “So that I will remember, as I have on every night.”
And then the poems, so many of them, so knowing. The one, for example, written in the shadow of Father’s Day 1987 when she was only ten:
He is a palm tree, shading people from the sun.
He is a pillow all nice and soft.
He is a racing car, sometimes moving very fast.
He is a turtle, moving very slowly, taking a walk, enjoying every
second of life.
He is a tree, tall and strong.
He is a summer breeze, so kind and gentle.
He is very generous.
He is my dad and I love him to bits.
And the one from a decade later, mailed to me on Father’s Day, not handed over in a homemade rococo envelope:
Grow
as a speck of dust would grow.
Let me begin by being a better daughter
Let me begin by understanding
the silence of your life;
by showing you the sounds of sight:
How a peach (your favorite, I know, especially in France)
full in the sun might be the sun,
how a flock of starlings fanning the sky
is like one large wing,
by knowing your gentleness your quiet but deliberate way
of speaking, so easily read by you. Let me begin with patience—
that I need not shout, simply face you when I speak.
There are also the moments she remembers that I would have liked to have protected her from. The big family trip to Florence, say—the one she took with her uncle and his son, and her two grandmothers, and all the rest of us. We all ate together in Sue’s and my room—a wonderful time! Afterward, Kathryn went off to sleep in a room with her two grandmothers. There is little else that a child could want in life than to be with her two grandmothers. Combined, they would have known everything about being a woman that she would ever need to know, and they would always be there for her to ask. All the questions about boys, if that came to pass, and questions about how to be a bride, a young lady, and manners, most important. Later there would be questions about her parents when they were young people—what they were like. That might happen when she was a teenager, but at the time I’m remembering, she was too young to know, to even ask.
Except that’s not the way this memory turns out. Kathryn thinks she remembers her father’s mother talking to her mother’s mother in their bedroom but getting no response. She vaguely recalls her father’s mother racing out of the room but having to stay put herself. She supposes that she must have known by then that her mother’s mother was dead, but what she really remembers, she says, are the bricks under the Ponte Vecchio—it was as if the entire bridge might collapse. And her mother going to pieces. And how her brothers tried to help her even though they, too, were too young for this.
And now Kathryn, like her brothers, is grown: lovely, charming, smart, competent beyond measure. But still the memories go on.
16
Road Tripping
We decide to do a road trip—not Kak, she’s still too young for this, just the guys: Paul, Jimmy, me, and Artie, of course.
In Los Angeles, we take the boys on a tour of Universal Studios. We walk on the back lot. The hills are green with round shrubbery and the land is brown. Paul has sprouted up. He
