the potentially solid tale from the flux of history. Once I overheard my parents arguing over a thirty-year-old story’s credit line. “It was my mother who said that,” Mother said. “Yes, but”—Father was downright smug—“I was the one who noticed she said that.”
The sight gag was a noble form, and the running gag was a noble form. In combination they produced the top of the line, the running sight gag, like the sincere and deadpan Nairobi Trio interludes on Ernie Kovacs. How splendid it was when my parents could get a running sight gag going. We heard about these legendary occasions with a thrill of family pride, as other children hear about their progenitors’ war exploits.
The sight gag could blur with the practical joke—not a noble form but a friendly one, which helps the years pass. My parents favored practical jokes of the sort you set up and then retire from, much as one writes books, possibly because imagining people’s reactions beats witnessing them. They procured a living hen and “hypnotized” it by setting it on the sink before the bathroom mirror in a friend’s cottage by the New Jersey shore. They spent weeks constructing a ten-foot sea monster—from truck inner tubes, cement blocks, broomsticks, lumber, pillows—and set it afloat in a friend’s pond. On Sanibel Island, Florida, they baffled the shell collectors each Saint Patrick’s Day by boiling a bucketful of fine shells in green dye and strewing the green shells up and down the beach before dawn. I woke one Christmas morning to find in my stocking, hung from the mantel with care, a leg. Mother had charmed a department store display manager into lending her one.
When I visited my friends, I was well advised to rise when their parents entered the room. When my friends visited me, they were well advised to duck.
Central in the orders of merit, and the very bread and butter of everyday life, was the crack. Our mother excelled at the crack. We learned early to feed her lines just to watch her speed to the draw. If someone else fired a crack simultaneously, we compared their concision and pointedness and declared a winner.
Feeding our mother lines, we were training as straight men. The straight man’s was an honorable calling, a bit like that of the rodeo clown: despised by the ignorant masses, perhaps, but revered among experts who understood the skills required and the risks run. We children mastered the deliberate misunderstanding, the planted pun, the Gracie Allen know-nothing remark, which can make of any interlocutor an instant hero.
How very gracious is the straight man!—or, in this case, the straight girl. She spreads before her friend a gift-wrapped, beribboned gag line he can claim for his own, if only he will pick it up instead of pausing to contemplate what a nitwit he’s talking to.
Our father’s parents live in Pittsburgh; Amy and I dined with them, rather formally, every Friday night until dancing school swept us away. Our grandfather’s name was, like our father’s, Frank Doak. He was a banker, a potbellied, bald man with thin legs: a generous-hearted, joking, calm Pittsburgher of undistinguished Scotch-Irish descent, who held his peace. Our grandmother’s name was Meta Walten-burger Doak. We children called her Oma, accenting both syllables. She was an imperious and kindhearted grande dame of execrable taste, a tall, potbellied redhead, the proud descendant and heir of well-to-do Germans in Louisville, Kentucky, who boasted that she never worked a day in her life. Our father was their only child.
Every summer these grandparents moved to their summer house on the shore of Lake Erie, near North Madison, Ohio, and every summer Amy and I moved in with them for a month or two. With them also lived Mary Burinda, a thin woman who still carried a buzzing trace of Hungarian at the tip of her tongue, and who cooked and cleaned and warmly befriended both our grandmother and us; and Henry Watson, a Pittsburgh man who drove the car, tended the grounds, and served dinner.
Oma was odd about money. One ordinary summer afternoon at Lake Erie, I found a penny in the sand.
“Money!” Oma said. “If you’ve found money, don’t touch it with your bare hands. You don’t know who has touched it.”
My bare hands? Oma, Amy, and I had been swimming at the beach below the house when I found the penny. Now I was to bring it to Oma for safekeeping, and go wash my hands in the Lake as well as I could. This washing ought to hold calamity at bay until we could get to the bathhouse to take showers.
Oma had told me that when she was in her teens, she had sewed rows of lace on her chemises, to bring her bust forward. It was hard to believe. By the time I knew her, her bust was enormous. Walking beside Amy and me up the path to the bathhouse, she cut an imposing figure: her legs were long and fine, her hips slender, her carriage erect. She wore her red hair short, in waves. Her face was round; her head was round and slightly flattened vertically, like Raggedy Ann’s. Her blue eyes were small, stubby-lashed; her nose was short and bulbous. The expression on her thin lips was sometimes peevish, sometimes doting.
In the bathhouse Amy and I peeled down our bathing suits. Stuck to my belly skin, as if by suction, were flat bits of big Lake Erie sand—gray and smooth, like hammered dots. I pried them off with a fingernail. My buttocks were cold, my arms hot.
We all stood in the women’s shower; we stamped our sandy feet on the shower’s cedar-slat floor, and turned on the water. Oma soaped her soft arms with the red sponge. When it was my turn to use the red sponge, I got sand in it. I washed myself down with soap and sand—a delicate operation on sunburned shoulders, a pleasingly rough one on poison-ivy-covered shins.
Peering cheerfully down at me through the sharp strands of water, Oma said, “Have you washed your hands very well with soap?” She stuck her round head under the nozzle, screwed her eyes tight shut, and wagged her chin.
I mistook bodies for persons, and admired Oma above all for her freckles. Also, she could float. She could float on her back in Lake Erie, she said, and read a book. Sadly, I never saw her perform this feat, for she was not so much of a reader that she felt the need of reading while bathing, but I often saw her float for long periods. Her vast tight abdomen rose in the air; her fingers joined over it. She could easily have held a book. Her small round head in its white rubber cap lay half submerged. From the shore I could see an expression of benignity or complacency on her features, features which had been rather bunched together, centered around her nose, by the tight bathing cap and its strap. She rocked over the little waves, calm as a plank. She wore white tennis shoes into the water, for our part of Lake Erie was bumpy with glacial stones. When she floated, her tennis shoes stuck straight up.
From the bathhouse we climbed two flights of stairs to the house proper, a mid-twenties white frame house with five bedrooms and three bathrooms upstairs, and more on the third floor, where Henry Watson lived.
Now Henry was pushing a mower over the back lawn. Politely he asked us how the water was; he didn’t like the water.
Henry rarely wore his full uniform at the Lake; he wore only the heavy black pants, a white shirt, and suspenders. When he drove, he put on his cap. Famously, Henry loved summers at the Lake. He took pride in the cool lawns with their bluish, cylindrical grass. Mornings he cleared the horsetail beside the long path from the bathhouse. He washed the glass porch walls. He stood in the driveway up to his ankles in foam, a ridged black garden hose in his hand, washing the car. Vapor rose low from the hot asphalt driveway; it was warm in the nostrils, sweet, smelling of soft soap. Henry’s gold-rimmed glasses flashed.
In Pittsburgh,
