Behind the Book—MLPR, "Engineer"

A WRITER'S WIT
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Thomas Paine
Born January 29, 1737

Engineering: a difficult science

Behind the Book is a weekly series in which I discuss the creative process it takes to write each of the fifteen narratives included in my latest collection, My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories. Scroll to the bottom of the post to locate links to previous Behind the Book posts.

My father lived eighty-six more-or-less healthy years, and then during the last year of his life things fell apart. He experienced congestive heart failure, and along with it, kidney disease. We were so busy concentrating on these two issues that the fact he may have been suffering from dementia of some kind never received the attention it should have. It may be only one of the many failures to serve my father that I internalized over those four years he was in my care.

“Engineer” is a story I wrote immediately after my father died. Sadly, it is a cathartic effort to distill all the events, all the characters in our real life story: an adult son who, through no choice of his own, must manage this man’s life; a younger adult son, who seems to avoid accepting any responsibility at all for his father, other than the most superficial attention he can offer; a father, who when they were children favored one son over other. And a bitter sense of irony will tell you right away which son must extend himself to care for this irascible father in his last days.

This story may have been one of the most difficult ones I ever penned: how to express the suppressed rage I felt at the time—having the very start of my retirement stunted by the intrusion of this man into my life. Again. The sessions with a shrink where I grappled, as a man in my fifties, with how I’d been treated as a child—the many ways my father ignored or rejected me. Enraged at the times a brother showed up every six weeks to balance our father’s checking accounts, and then pop back to his home, thinking he’d done quite enough to help the father who’d spent so much time with that son as a child. How did I capture the rage without offending the reader? Perhaps with a biting sarcasm, the protagonist referring to his brother as “Blessed Prince.”

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A PASSAGE FROM THE STORY:
Before the afternoon is over, I call my father and the Bellwood administrator and let them know I’m going to be gone. I reschedule his appointment. I call Uri and tell him he’ll have to cover for me if anything should happen. He grunts—as he always has if he doesn’t want to be held responsible. Blessed Prince once neglected to feed our spaniel because he was in a baseball tournament for three days. I thought it was Vinnie’s turn, he kept saying. I’m sure it was Vinnie’s turn. This is the same lad who wrote JFK in 1961 and asked for a photo. Could you also send one of Richard Nixon? Please  (218).

Harvey Dunne's "Engineer"

The title “Engineer” comes from a Harvey Dunne drawing my father used to create a wooden sculpture (Dad called them carvings) of a World War I doughboy, who’s carrying at least sixty pounds of gear. My father adored those men, who perhaps motivated him to sign up to fight in World War II, when he was in his early twenties. I applied the title with a sense of irony, that this ex-military man, who’d fought with distinction (and fear, he admitted, in his journals), ends his days as a rather weak individual, unable, finally to care for himself at all. And more telling, “Engineer” was the last sculpture of a half dozen that he created. And unlike the story, my brother and I share these treasures equally, and he actually wound up with the unfinished one based on the drawing “Engineer.” A bit of hyperbole never hurts any story, especially when trying to create a villain brother!

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Louis Jespers Carving of WWI Doughboys

I offer “Engineer” up to all adult children, who at one time or another will be forced to confront the demise of their parents, if they haven’t already been forced to do so at a younger age. It is sometimes a sad story, this larger one of letting go of our parents—or allowing them to release us—but it is like the musical form, variations on a theme: the story must be told over and over. And each narrative, no matter how repetitive, must serve to broaden the tale, to deepen it, until at last, as a human tribe we learn from it and understand.

“Engineer” won an award from a short fiction competition sponsored by The Ledge, a literary magazine out of Bellport, New York. The journal celebrated its thirtieth anniversary with the issue in which my story appeared.

Photograph of "Engineer": Karolevitz, Robert F. The Prairie is My Garden: The Story of Harvey Dunn, Artist. Aberdeen: North Plains Press, 1969.

Click here to buy a copy of My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, where it is available at Amazon.

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2015

CATCH UP WITH EARLIER POSTS OF BEHIND THE BOOK
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 -- "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"