Here for Us

By Cecil Zakariás

We both started running as the October rain began to fall. I was trying not to get my white socks too dirty while skipping over puddles. We were out of breath but managed to catch the bus home. Maria looked at me frowning so I knew I didn’t look neat. I started to set my blouse and the dark skirt right, which we had to wear to school on national holidays.

Today we were remembering the victims of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. At fourteen we didn’t understand all that much of it, but on such occasions I always felt uncomfortable about wearing an elegant skirt and patent shoes which were clopping in the corridor during recess.

Maria said I should tidy up my hair before I go to my grandparents for lunch. I tried to make my hair look neat while simultaneously balancing on the bus. I hoped the rain would stop by the time I had to get off.

When I arrived, my grandfather was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for his favourite radio programme. My grandmother was warming the potato stew on the stove for me. The cutlery and my favourite plate were laid there in front of me with great care. I was staring at my reflection in the spoon and after a bit of hesitation I asked, “Grandpa, where were you when the Revolution happened?”

For a second it seemed as if everything had gone silent, I only heard the sputtering from the gas stove.

He looked at me surprised and turned the radio down.

“Well, as soon as I heard the news, I decided immediately to travel home to my parents…” 

Whenever we hear stories about wars and revolutions, we want to hear stories about heroes who died for us. Luckily, reality is usually more complex than that. What about family birthdays, cheerful laughs, or napping under your favourite tree on a lazy summer afternoon and all the experiences you would miss out on? What about peaceful lives, being surrounded by loved ones? What about having a small garden you can care for, just enough to grow the fruits and vegetables you have always wanted, no matter what they call the land that nurtures your flowers?

He told me when he saw the devastation in his village after the Second World War as a child, he never believed that he would still have the possibility to enjoy happy and rich lunches, especially with his own grandchildren later on. He told me that he considered his life would end again when he was taken into prison for a false accusation after the Revolution.

I had never known about this prior to that afternoon when I was there eating my grandmother’s potato stew in my uncomfortable school uniform. But despite the stories from the past, this was never how I remembered him.

For me—for us—he had always been the one with white hair trying to teach me how to ride the bicycle, running after me when I was going too fast and almost fell, who was sitting for hours at his typewriter working as a translator during retirement, who knew everything about classical music, or the one who was walking around in his well-tended garden and smiled whenever we entered.

Because there are some who stayed here for us.

DISCOVERING A FATHER'S QUIET LOVE

Army Private First Class Lawrence J. Curtin 

at Fort Eustis, 

Va., in October 1941.

 By Beverly Beckham

“You’re making a big mistake,” my father said 20 years ago when I told him I was not going to renew my teaching certificate. He was angry, and he let me know it. We argued for days about my not wanting something I would never use. I was in my 40s and a long time out of college. And yet he was furious that I would toss away something he had paid for and in which he took great pride.

I was his daughter, “the teacher,” you see, never mind that I had taught school, fourth grade, for only one year way back in 1968, and never mind that I had been writing for two decades. In my father’s eyes I was and always would be a teacher, first. The way I was and always would be his daughter first, not my husband’s wife, not my children’s mother.

After my father died, his wife gave me two binders she found tucked away in his desk drawer. One is red and labeled: “World War, 1942/1945, European Campaign, General Eisenhower,” and is full of pictures of people and places he never talked about. “French girl, Jeannie.” “Dog named Lucky.” “Phil Hamp, GI.” “North Africa.” “Algeria.” “Sardinia.” “Tunisia.” Black-and-white photos dated and pasted on thick white paper.

 I’ve looked at this binder so many times that it’s dog-eared. I’ve tried to picture my father, 18, 19, 20, 21, an infantryman, marching from Africa to Europe, ducking bullets, fighting a war, stopping to pose with pretty girls. I try to imagine all the things he never told me. But I can’t.

The second binder is thicker and must have surprised me when I first saw it. But it mustn’t have touched me, the way it does now, because if it had, it would be dog-eared, too. It’s black and is labeled (because my father labeled everything) “BEVERLY BECKHAM” in all caps. And inside are dozens of columns I wrote, columns my father printed and saved.

Last week, at the library, I picked up “Every Father’s Daughter,” a collection of essays by 24 women writers about their fathers. In the foreword, which broke my heart a little, the author writes that books were a language she and her father spoke, that they learned everything they knew about each other because of the books they read, that it was because of her father’s admiration for writers that the author became a serious writer, and that even as her father lay dying, she read to him and books continued to connect them.

And I thought, my father and I never had that. I never read to him. We never talked about books. We never had deep conversations based on theory.

And then I remembered.

I gave him “DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF ... and it’s all small stuff,” a book by Richard Carlson, right around the time we were arguing about the teaching certificate. And he read it. Then he read it again. He read it so many times, over the years, that it fell apart.

He quoted from it for the rest of his life. “One hundred years from now, all new people.” “Don’t interrupt others or finish their sentences.” “Let others be right most of the time.”

Maybe he was letting me be right when he stopped talking about the teaching certificate. Maybe that book was our special language.

I continue to try to piece together my father’s life. He took me to the movies, to Paragon Park, to the doctor for my polio shots, because he never cared that I cried. He taught me how to ride a bike, drive a car, change a tire.

He gave me gift certificates to Barnes & Noble every year on my birthday because he knew I loved books. He did this even though he didn’t like gift certificates. They reminded him of his childhood, he said. They reminded him of waiting in line for food.

He was on leave for seven days in Mannheim, Germany, in 1944. He was 21. I never knew. He never told me. But he showed me in the pictures he left behind.

And in the big black binder that bears my name, he shows me what I see so clearly now: not my father and me arguing, but his quiet, constant love.

Army Private First Class Lawrence J. Curtin (bottom row, last on right) at Fort Eustis, Va., in October 1941.

  

Piece originally published in The Boston Globe on June 17, 2016. 

Beverly Beckham’s column appears every two weeks. She can be reached at bevbeckham@gmail.com.