by Tod Davies.
My first word was dog.
So I’m told. I don’t remember. I don’t remember calling my first born cousin ‘dog’, or patting the first of my four brothers, born a year after me, on the head whenever we met. My paternal grandmother left word of that in a family scrapbook, over a picture of the two of us, my brother and me, mentioning in passing that I was ‘a wonder child’.
Doubtful that. No doubt, though, that I loved dogs.
Why was this? My family had a cat, which familial lore tells me lay beside me in the playpen. A ginger tom named Oliver. I don’t remember Oliver, though maybe it’s a sign of something or other that I always thought if I ever had a son, Oliver was what I’d like to name him. I never did have that son.
I did have many dogs. But that began by Accident, which is another name for Fate. Much later.
My paternal grandparents had dogs. First a border collie named Sooner, a creature I remember through a kind of legendary mist. What I remember about Sooner was his honest doggie smell. I think that must have been comforting to an anxious child, left in the dark house of her grandparents while her mismatched parents set off on plans of their own. We were what I now think of as a typical west coast post World War II family. My mother was Macanese, which is culturally pure colonial Portuguese, and genetically a sly mix of that with Chinese—some from the baby girls left to die in the Chinese countryside, but retrieved by surreptitious Jesuit priests going over the border and bringing them back to Catholic Macao. “Our family was pure Portuguese,” my mother would say often enough, even though logic, which came to me early as it does to most children, told me that if our family had been in Macao since the 16th century, it wasn’t very likely that it had included Portuguese wives in the mix.
In this my mother was, again, a typical American of her time. Rewriting family history was practically a national sport after the war—probably before it, too.
Probably still is.
My father had his own version of rewritten history. His father was more than a quarter century older than his mother. The former was first generation Irish, the latter second generation German. As I grew older, I wondered why no one seemed at all curious about what my grandfather’s life had been before he married, in his forties, a girl of seventeen. My brother investigated long after grandfather and grandmother were gone, when my own parents had long been grandparents themselves. He discovered grandfather had a first wife. My brother could not find a divorce, or a death, in the records, and since family lore said that my grandparents had run off together, madly in love, from Chicago to Washington state, only returning, married, for the birth of their first child, my father, that seemed to answer that question. I mean the question of why the elopement, and why they hadn’t stayed put. They wouldn’t be the first couple to reinvent themselves in the west.
My brother started to tell my father what he’d found, in a sushi restaurant in the California suburb of Sunnyvale, where we’d gathered to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday. She’d always liked sushi, since growing up in Japan, probably because she didn’t get much of it when trapped there during the war. Now, safe as an American, she felt it was an elegant taste. We indulged in it as a family on special occasions.
I remember I was eating a bit of seaweed salad when my brother started to speak. I remember kicking him hard under the table, and I remember his startled look. He didn’t go on and, after, asking me why, I said, “If someone has gotten to more than eighty years old without ever wondering about his father’s early life, I don’t think he wants to hear about it now.”
Very American. Very post war American, too.
So it was that couple, those grandparents, him wizened, given to sitting alone in the living room smoking a pipe. Also to going on unexpected benders to the bars below Market Street, in San Francisco, where my father and his brother would be sent by my grandmother to find him one more time and bring him home.
“I don’t want to, Ottilie,” my father complained.
He always called her by her first, odd, German name, which is also my own middle name. When I asked why he called her that, he would say, “Because I’ve known her long enough.”
“I don’t want to, Ottilie,” he said. I think they didn’t realize, absorbed in their argument as they were, that I was under the big mahogany table in the overstuffed dining room, sitting quietly and taking things in, the way children do. “Send one of the girls.” By which he meant one of his three younger sisters.
“I don’t want to send the girls,” my grandmother said. “I don’t trust him with the girls.”
“Bullshit, Ottilie,” my father said, but that is all I remember. He must have gone to find grandfather, in spite of his protests.
Many, many years later, after my father had been dead some months, the possible significance of this conversation dawned on me. I recounted the memory to my mother and asked if it could have happened. “Oh,” she said, laughing in that high pitched way she did whenever she wanted to sidestep some thorny issue, “that sounds like something your father would have said. He did always call your grandmother Ottilie.”
I let it rest there. Why cause more pain?
Very American, as I say. Very post World War II American, that form of family. That form of denial, too.
The smell of dog comes with that memory. I wonder if Sooner was with me, under that table. I don’t know what I would have done without Sooner. Though I only have a few memories of him, the memory of that smell is enough to make me grateful to him for the rest of my life.