In the end, the source of the smell turned up under the drafting table, pushed all the way to the walclass="underline" a china dinner plate covered with cigar ends and ash. I emptied this into a trash bag and washed the plate. Then I crawled back under to see what else was there.
To my surprise, it was this: 35-15-24, the combination to my father’s safe. I found it written on a piece of masking tape, curled upon itself in a gray snarl of dust and hair; I only noticed it because it stuck to my finger as I tried to throw it out. Maybe it had been fixed to the underside of the desk.
I tried the combination in vain several times without success. To fiddie with the dial I had to crouch, and my Achilles tendons stretched themselves out to an unnatural length, giving me the feeling that my feet might snap off at any moment. Was this an ailment common to thieves, safecracker’s ankle? Finally the tumblers clicked in an expectant way, and when I tugged at the handle the door swung silently open, as if by magic. I lowered my butt to the floor and peered inside. There wasn’t much: an old book, a manila envelope. I peeked into the envelope first and saw only cartoons. No money. I set it aside and opened the book. It had been published in 1922, by the Trenton Star Press, and its title page read:
Where Dat Kitty?
a Cartoon Treasury by Galway Mix
Galway Mix was my grandfather, whom I knew only as a wheezing old man in an armchair, a crotchety Irishman, barely comprehensible through his thick brogue, who was obsessed with inclement weather. I also knew he had drawn a cartoon for the newspaper once, but I never knew what it was about or for how long it had been published. I turned the page and saw a thin cartoon black man, dressed in frayed overalls with shafts of wheat sticking out of his pockets. The man’s lips were white and thick as croissants, puckered around a dark stupefied O, and his eyes bulged out of his head like a toad’s. His hands were snarled in his hair, and he was hovering several inches above the ground.
Of course it was the most racist cartoon I’d ever seen. Underneath it were the words “To Carl, who wants to be a Cartoonist,” and below that was my grandfather’s signature. He had drawn another, rougher picture of the black man’s face and added “Love, Pap.”
I turned to the first page. There were four three-paneled cartoons. The first one went like this: in the first panel, the black man was in a chair, rubbing his stomach. His voice bubble read, “Ooo-ee, I’m hongry for some corn pone!” A small cat was rubbing itself against his legs. In the second, he was pouring some batter into a pan, and saying, “Hmm…Where dat kitty?” In the third, the corn pone was finished, steaming in its iron skillet, and the cat’s head was sticking up out of it, charred and frazzled. The black man was doing what he had been doing on the dedication page: jumping in astonishment, gripping his head.
As it turned out, every single strip was like this. The black man chose a task, lost the cat, then found the cat somehow entangled in the task. “I loves the banjo,” the man said in one strip, as he strummed. “Where dat kitty?” he wondered in the second, and in the third, the cat’s head had punched its way through the sounding head of the banjo and wedged itself between the strings.
I read the whole thing. The cat turned up in an automobile engine, a horse’s mouth, a chicken coop, a well (“I’s thirsty!”). It was awful and great simultaneously: a formal puzzle to be “solved” over and over, a clever series of means to the same worthless end. I was reminded of Wurster’s grueling exercises, and how they were supposed to make a good cartoonist out of me. In a way, this had happened to my grandfather. The strip was, its over- and undertones aside, endlessly ingenious. It was also, much like the Family Funnies, utterly shallow.
For the first time in a solid week of actual work, I was reminded of what a pitiful contribution I was making to the world of creative enterprise. Who needed the Family Funnies? What kind of people enjoyed it, week after week? I could see them now, with their perfect teeth and golf-inspired clothes, gathered around the kitchen table, complacently tittering at the Sunday comics. If my grandfather was anywhere near as smart as my father, then he must have faced the same problem: do I make the comic strip something worth doing, or do I just do it? And it appeared they made the same decision.
I put the book down and pulled out the manila folder, then slid the drawings from it. For a second, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: my cartoon mother, standing, a look of consternation on her face, my father’s head looming goofily over her shoulder. Then I noticed they were naked. I turned the drawing on its side. Her legs were parted slightly, his hands clamped over her breasts. Visible between her legs was the base of his penis, shaded in with a couple of quick lines. Folds of boobflesh squeezed out between his fingers, and his eyes were half-closed over a look of intense and slightly sinister desire. And her face: that irritated expression barely masked something else, an intense and embarrassed pleasure.
I turned to the next page. More of the same, this time her on top of him, and then after that a rogues’ gallery of sexual poses and acts I had not ever previously imagined my parents privy to. My mother dominated each drawing, her breasts and crotch, and her pained features.
Why had he done this? Somehow his boozing and ranting and womanizing just didn’t measure up to the sheer indignity of these drawings: not only was my mother forced to act out his fantasies, she was made to dislike it, and then to enjoy disliking it. It was the secret expression of my father’s desires, and it was his apology for them, and it was his justification for doing it in spite of the apology.
But in the end it was him I felt truly sorry for. If drawing those pictures was a lonely act, keeping them in the safe was an act of profound desolation. It was as if he’d kept a chunk of the heart that would kill him suspended in a jar, so that he could moon over it whenever he wanted, up to the day he died.
I put the drawings back in the envelope. Then I stuffed it, along with the book, into the garbage bag.
* * *
Later, after my trips to the recycling center and the dump, I curled up on the couch and watched, for the first time in years, the Family Funnies television special. It was a Thanksgiving affair, washed in the appropriate earth tones and bright fall colors. The special first aired on a Thanksgiving Day sometime in the late seventies, and I remembered gathering in the living room with my family to watch it. Dad was drunk in protest. He had gotten louder and louder, and made increasingly less sense, as our meal progressed, and by the end the rest of us had stopped trying to carry on our own conversations around him and began to pack, like squirrels sensing the imminence of winter, as much food into our bellies as we could fit. During the special, I struggled with the sleep-inducing properties of turkey, knowing that if I fell unconscious my body would eject most of what I’d eaten. From the panicked expressions of nausea on my siblings’ faces, I could tell they were doing the same thing.
It was with considerable relief that we received the good news: Dad liked the special. The plot was silly, really — the Thanksgiving turkey is stolen, an angel appears to Bobby in church, our dead dog Puddles saves the day — but Dad snorted and cackled at his own jokes, repeating them at top volume in a slurred voice and spilling liquor in wide wet arcs all over the living room floor.
There could have been no clearer evidence of our real family’s divergence from the one we were watching on TV. While the FF Mom bustled about in her apron and heels, making preparations for the big feast, the actual Mom was slumped glowering in an armchair, rhythmically clenching and unclenching the fingers of one hand and rubbing her temple with the other. The more frenetic and demented things became on the screen, the gloomier they got in the living room, until my father’s laughs turned to sobs, and we were all sent to bed. I stayed awake a long time, plugging my ears with my fingers and trying to remember each and every scene of the Peanuts special, which came on next and which I was missing for the first time ever.