Why Do Stars Fall Down From The Sky?
There was a moment up there, right when the power came off, that the universe seemed to give up for a moment and time just seemed to let go of me with a sigh. Who knows, maybe the whole ball of wax relaxed, maybe everything everywhere took a deep breath before getting back down to business. Strange, because for a moment that's what I felt. The jet's engines powered back and little spoilers popped up on the top of the wing and I could feel the aircraft's nose kind of drop away a little as gravity and drag got back to work. Sitting in the first row in economy -- I think it was seat 7A -- I sighted along the wing's leading edge and could just make out the distant skyline of the city, out there inside misty gray hazes lost somewhere in the forbidden spaces between now and then.
Even from this distance, I could make out landmarks that had defined my childhood: the Southland Life Building, the pin-striped First National Bank building, and I could even see the blocky white form of Union Station, too. With that landmark in view, I knew it was only a few blocks from there to Dealey Plaza and the infamous School Book Depository. If you knew where to look -- and I most certainly did -- you could follow the motorcade's route from the Grassy Knoll along Stemmons to Parkland Memorial Hospital -- where once upon a time our little universe really did come to a stop.
That moment seemed to define my generation, especially those of us growing up in Dallas at the time. Or maybe it didn't define us so much as it haunted us. When people asked where I was from I always answered Highland Park and left it at that. It was the way people looked at you if you answered Dallas. I think it's called guilt by association, but it's not hard to see it in peoples' eyes.
I'd been in the library -- at High Park High School -- when the principal's scratchy voice came on over the intercom and announced that the president was dead, that he'd been murdered downtown and that school was done for the day. Two years later I graduated and as I flew west to San Francisco I swore I'd never return to Dallas, and I managed to hold true to that oath for almost ten years.
By that time I was wrapping up a five-year hitch in the Air Force, not fighting in Vietnam but flying KC-135 aerial refueling tankers for the Strategic Air Command out of Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. The -135 was operationally similar to the Boeing 707, and in the early 70s airlines needed pilots with such experience; I found TWA's offer irresistible and headed off to Kansas City to start training, then on to Boston -- where I soon found myself flying across the Atlantic twice a week, usually to London but occasionally to Paris or Frankfurt, in the right seat of a 707-320c. Dallas receded in my mind to a distant, unpleasant memory, and I was happy to let it stay there.
And I might have been successful if not for the determined efforts of my father.
A physician, he too had gone to Highland Park High. He'd met the woman of his dreams there, too, and in due course he married her. I was the result of that union, by the way, but my mother was an actress -- and actually a rather good one. When I was three years old she left for Hollywood and, like me, never looked back. A year later the divorce was finalized and Dad drifted for a while before meeting another former classmate at the Dallas Country Club. She played golf and tennis and poker and could put down a half bottle of Jack Daniels without batting an eye and this wild-eyed woman became the mother I was destined to remember most. She gave my father a daughter, a timid, diaphanous creature who played the piano by day and read Agatha Christie novels all through the night as she charted a jagged course through looming mental illness in a constant search for our father's love and attention.
Father was a thoracic surgeon and always busy, while Joan -- wife number two -- spent all her waking hours at the country club playing cards and drinking bourbon. Like many alcoholics, she possessed two personalities: an aloof sober variety of patrician princess and; a drunk bully. I rarely saw her when she was sober, but soon enough learned her modus operandi: When she and father made it home in the evening she launched into him until, after a few years, he found other, less stressful ways to spend his time. After she ran him out of the house she turned on me for a few years, until my voice dropped, anyway, then she turned on her daughter, my sister, Carol. Perhaps my time in that madhouse had something to do with my oath to never return, but I'll let others be the judge of that.
Not long after I settled in Boston I met a girl that seemed to punch all the right buttons and while we dated off and on for a year nothing came of it and in the aftermath I seemed to fall into a rut. I would spend the occasional layover with a stewardess but remained otherwise serially unattached -- and after a while realized that I 'almost' liked living that way. 'Almost' being the operative word to keep in mind.
I went back to Kansas City and transitioned to the L-1011 TriStar, but was soon back in Boston -- flying to Paris now all the time and growing more comfortable with the time I spent in that city but increasingly feeling at odds with my life. I was still in my thirties -- though just -- and though I spoke to my father weekly -- as in almost every Sunday -- I realized I had almost no attachments left to the people who were supposed to be my family.
Father was still technically married to Joan, my mother-in-law, but now, twenty years after I'd left she was by all accounts beyond redemption. My sister, Carol, had developed an apparent affinity for razor blades and overdoses and had been in and out of Timberlawn -- the gentile psychiatric hospital east of downtown -- so many times she had her own room there. Father still lived in the same house at the end of Willow Wood Circle he always had, a low pink brick thing that looked vaguely French, but every time I talked with him he sounded more miserable than the last time we spoke; by this point I was starting to worry about him.
I suppose I shouldn't have. He'd been seeing someone, of course. For years, as it happened.
And oddly enough, neither my father nor Deborah Baker felt the least bit ashamed of the arrangement.
They played golf together. They spent Sundays fishing at Koon Kreek together. And then they decided to go to Paris together, but first they stopped off in Boston.
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I knew her, of course. Genie and I, Deborah's daughter, had known each other since grade school and we had been a 'thing' during our senior year at Highland Park. We'd gone our separate ways after graduation, me to Berkeley and she to Tulane, but I'd neither seen nor heard from her since -- and had no idea what she'd been up to. Seeing my father and -- ahem, Mrs. Baker -- walking up the Jetway at Logan left me feeling at little disoriented because, let's face it, they were both married -- just not to each other, and I had known Deborah most of my life -- just in a very different context. And I guess I was supposed to either go along with this charade or be gracious and not say anything untoward about their new relationship.
To put this whole mess in sharper relief, I really didn't know my biological mother -- beyond what I'd seen of her in movies and on television -- and I think is by now apparent that I really disliked Joan, my mother-in-law. I'd always appreciated the sense of family Deborah Baker created in her home, and under the circumstances perhaps that was inevitable -- because I felt safe there. Holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas felt stilted and coldly contrived under my mother-in-law's stewardship, yet the same holidays had felt warm and cozy when I dropped by the Baker house, and yet it was those few instances that rattled me most. I'd simply never known what the fuss about Christmas was all about, as Joan was always too drunk to give a damn and Dad was usually in surgery taking care of another broken heart. By the time I was ten, and Carol was, I think, around seven years old, Christmas had become something all of us dreaded -- and after seeing Christmas in the Baker's home I knew that was all wrong.
So as I watched Dad and Mrs. Baker walk up the Jetway I felt that lingering dichotomy; Dad with his faint grimace of a smile and Deborah Baker with the same welcoming eyes I remembered from my teens. It was, after all, just a few days before Christmas.
With their luggage checked through to Paris/Charles de Gaulle all that was left to do was shake my father's hand and hug Deborah Baker, then we walked along inside uncomfortable cocoons of silence over to the international terminal for our flight -- and with the two of them in first and me up front in the right seat, it promised to be an interesting flight. After we made our way onboard I clued in the head stewardess and asked her to take care of my old man, and after we arrived early the next morning I helped get them into the city and to the Crillon, their hotel. We enjoyed an early dinner after long naps then I left them to enjoy the first week of their vacation, though they had convinced me to take a week off for Christmas and to stay with them in the city when I returned later that week. I dared not ask what their other halves were doing for Christmas, and from what little I could see my poor father seemed really not to care. I think taking care of Joan had simply worn him down, like stones under a pounding surf.
When I returned to Boston the next day I found a letter from my mother, not my mother-in-law, in my mailbox. She was, it seemed, now between husbands and with the holiday fast approaching it appeared she was feeling abnormally blue. She wondered, or so she wrote, if I had plans for the holidays -- and if not she wanted to spend some time together. The tone of this missive was more plea than request, and this was a first in my experience.
And this was notable to me, as this outpouring of loneliness represented a vulnerability I'd never suspected in her. She'd done well in Hollywood, really very well, and was now a regular on a popular television series and still making movies; fans adored her and reporters followed her everywhere. We'd spent a little time together when I was at Berkeley, and I found the life she'd created for herself to be an intoxicating brew of glamour and ego; it was hard to imagine a life more comfortable than what she had in Beverly Hills.
Yet within her words, I felt something uncomfortably dangerous. Loneliness was not something a vulnerable soul like her's tolerated well, and her reaching out to me was a first in my experience. Thinking about her out there suddenly by herself at this time of year felt wrong, so not knowing what else to do I called Dad. I explained my concerns and as he always did he listened attentively, and carefully, then he agreed with my assessment. Go out to LA, he said, and help her get through the holidays. We could do Paris again next year.
That was, of course, the last time I ever heard his voice.
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It was a few weeks after that. I had just walked into the flight dispatch office inside the TWA annex at de Gaulle when one of the dispatchers handed me a note, and I could tell by the look in the man's eyes that bad news had come calling.
