Visions of My Father (July/August 1991 | Volume: 42, Issue: 4)

Visions of My Father

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

July/August 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 4

For a long time, I have wanted to write about a vision of my father I experienced on a New York City subway train while riding downtown to a literary meeting. As a historian, I am skeptical of visions. I pride myself on my rationality, I rely on facts. But, as a novelist, I believe in visions. Now, I see a way to tell the story in the context of other visions of my father that have pursued me lifelong.

 

Ever since I came to New York, I saw him whenever I drove down West Street, the wide cobblestone road along the Hudson. Every morning at 6:00 in the year 1898, my father got off a ferry from Jersey City and sold copies of the New York World there.

By 7:00 A.M., West Street would be jammed with horse-drawn cabs and wagons and scurrying commuters off the ferries. In the winter, the temperature would frequently hover around zero. To set a good corner and hang on to it, a newsboy had to fight. That was where my father learned to use his fists.

He was ten years old in 1898. I always see him as a skinny kid with a cap over his reddish blond hair, wearing a ragged jacket or a sweater or both plus an old scarf around his throat. Blowing snow whips across West Street. “Hey, getcha Woild!” he yells.

On a good day, he would make 25 cents. That was a lot of money for someone whose father made 50 cents a day rolling barrels around the Standard Oil refinery in Bayonne. At eight o’clock, the commuters would dwindle. My father would spend a cent for a cup of coffee and head back to All Saints School in Jersey City. He had to be there by nine.

I always saw him in gray dawnlight on West Street, small, fists clenched, fiercely determined. It is always cold and snowy. His teeth are crooked and protruding. He is an ugly little kid. His eyes glare at me. Could you do this? he seems to ask. He whirls and punches a newsboy who is trying to take his corner. “Getcha Woild!” he shouts at me.

Snow and cold are also part of a less painful vision of my father that stirs when I stroll along Sixty-ninth Street between Third Avenue and Lexington Avenue. On the left side of the street is a huge modern apartment house. On the right is a row of turn-ofthe-century carriage houses—now garages with apartments above. One night in 1920, my parents were visiting friends who lived in one of these houses.

The man, Eddie Shanaphy, was my mother’s first cousin. He was a chauffeur for the millionaire James Brady. The gray Rolls-Royce Eddie drove was in a garage below them. His wife, Mae, enjoyed living in the aura of the very rich. She was