Prison Baby: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

alarm me.
    “Good right!” my father shouts and pitches forward, his elbow propped on his knees.
    “Keep ’em up!” he coaches a weary boxer to raise his gloves and protect his face. “That’s it! Wear him out. Just keep ’em up!”
    As a young man, my father boxed in amateur bouts, his lanky and lean less-than-two-hundred-pound body perfect for the sport. He believed in the balance of exercise to complement the hours he spent in mental discipline. He taught me the old adage: all work and no play and exercise make us dull. Even though my father devoted hours to the study of seventeenth-century literature and was a dedicated professor to his graduate students, whom he entertained in our home with cocktail parties and poetry readings, at the same time he was an avid hiker and swimmer.
    FROM AS FAR BACK as I can remember, my father scared me. Not just his backhand swats. Not just his six-foot-four-inch stature. His melancholy frightened me, his dark thoughtful pauses between words and his high expectations for our articulate brilliance. Children of academics often grow up isolated inside a bubble of expected intelligence.
    I can still hear my dad telling me, “Don’t act so silly.” Well, it worked. I turned tough and shut down.
    SILENCE DOMINATES MOST memories of my father, though. I’d stand at the door of his study and Mother would say, “Let him finish his train of thought.” I couldn’t figure out why he sat at his desk all day or what he was writing, and what exactly is a train of thought?
    Each dusk I fetch him from his study, a converted log cabin by the apple and cherry orchard and chicken coops on the property of our first house. Wood piles lean against the back of his study. I enter his world—“Time for dinner” I announce with caution, and wait, timid in his silence. The quiet swallows me while he scribbles away with a mechanical pencil.
    A silence so intimate I’m embarrassed. For something to do and to ease my discomfort, I memorize the room. Old issues of
National Geographic
and the
New Yorker
pile in front of the iron fireplace grate and fill the wide hearth, the stone fireplace always cold. His desk swims with imbalanced stacks of scattered papers and open books, pipe cleaners stained tan with tobacco oil, rancid ashtrays, and a typewriter. None of it makes sense to me. He gazes at me through air thickened from blue-gray tobacco smoke, clears his throat, and, in a voice raspy from not talking all day, says, “Just a sec, Mouse.”
    He rises from his desk and we head across the backyard into the house for dinner. He never says what he’s writing, and I never ask. We talk of other things.
    MY FATHER FANCIED himself self-sufficient, almost like a farmer, a contrast to his New England background and his life as a scholar. My father was an East Coast cultural Jew and borderline socialist. His mind disciplined with military-like focus, he rose out of a blue-collar family. He savored aged cheeses and built a cellar for his fine wine collection. He shunned his working-class background in Brockton, shunned his father who worked in a flower shop and played pool in bars. My father felt shame about his roots, but he never lost his Boston accent. In fact he accentuated it the more years he spent away from New England.
    He was first in his family to attend college and graduated from Harvard and later Yale for his graduate work. He financed himself through his first years of college by gambling at late-night poker games and with a series of jobs, including weekends as a guard, and he helped put his younger sister through college because he believed women deserved education as much as men.
    In back of our first house my father cultivated a small orchard. He’d wander it in season and pick berries, prune trees, and pluck apples. Maybe he wanted to support his family by “living off the grid.” My brother reminded me how once our father also grew a short row of corn, one plum tree, and a pear tree. Right