MY FATHER LIVED down the hill from Joy’s cottage in a beige stucco house identical to all the other beige stucco houses lining Foothill Boulevard, homes that sprang up quickly after the war to accommodate the returning servicemen and their families. If I close my eyes and dig down, I can conjure up his house again, can put my little-girl self in that living room and feel how still it is. My father’s house isn’t breathing, not like Joy’s. It isn’t alive. All I can hear is the muffled voice of Vin Scully saying, “Easy, to the inside. That’s strike two,” and from the mantel, above the unused fireplace, comes the crisp ticking of a travel clock, louder than you’d think possible for such a small device.
This is where I was born—well, not literally in the house. I was born at Huntington Memorial Hospital, not far away. But when my mother carried me home to meet my toddler brother, she brought me to this house, where we lived with my father until I was about three. I remember it as being sparsely furnished, with a feeling of randomness, as if it held nothing cherished, a place to stop but not to live. Maybe it wasn’t always that way, but by the time my brain could hold any images of the place, my mother had already left, taking me and Ricky and every bit of life out of it.
My father grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, with his very Catholic family and didn’t migrate to California until right before the U.S. entered World War II. He was drafted into the army in November of 1941, receiving notice to report to the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Warren at 8:30 a.m. on December 1—six days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And yet it’s recorded that he enlisted in Riverside, California, on January 16, 1942, when he was twenty-eight years old—over a month later. I’m guessing that by the time he received his draft notice, he was already living in California, where he was working as a pharmaceutical salesman. His paternal grandmother had been living in Pasadena for many years, so perhaps my father went to California to be near her, or even to live with her. None of his three older siblings had left home yet, so maybe he was a young man with a bit of adventure in him.
My mother and father met during that same year, 1942, when my grandfather invited several young men in uniform to dinner at Joy’s house, saying he knew what it was like to be away from home and preparing to go to war. Three months later, Margaret Morlan and Private Richard Field married and immediately moved to Texas, where he had been accepted into Officer Candidate School at Camp Barkeley. Upon graduating in December, he became Captain Richard Field. Exactly one year later, my father kissed his newly pregnant wife goodbye and was shipped off to Europe, serving for three years as a medical registrar for First General Hospital in London and then outside Paris.
My mother and father before I was born.
Perhaps my father changed during his time away or perhaps when he returned he was expecting things to be as they had been before he’d left. I don’t know. But when he got back, early in 1946, he found that the young housewife he’d left behind was now an independent working actress, plus the mother of a rambunctious baby boy. And, as the story goes, the army captain took one look at his new son, Richard Field Jr., and flat-out didn’t like him. Then when I was born, in November of that year, he completely adored me but still didn’t care for little Ricky. Or that’s what the women who lived in Joy’s house always told us.
I never felt any of it, how he delighted in me and rejected my brother. But it was the story that Ricky and I grew up hearing. Even after we stopped believing that we’d dry up and blow away if we didn’t eat enough, or that swallowed watermelon seeds would sprout in our stomachs, we continued to accept the tale of our father’s preferences. And the idea that I was his chosen one was like being accused of a crime I didn’t commit. I worried that I’d somehow wronged everyone, was a traitor to the female tribe up the hill. No matter if it was accurate or not, the story hurt my big brother and it was my fault.
I never knew if it was true. I never knew anything about my father, never asked him a single question about who he was, or what he was feeling, never relaxed around him long enough to be curious. Even at four, maybe before, I felt guarded, afraid to allow him into my heart for fear that his need to be comforted or to feel important or successful or even loved would suffocate me. One of my first memories—one that stays on the tip of my mind—is of my father sitting on the edge of his big bed (the bed that would never hold my mother again) with his head in his hands. My eyes can barely see over the mattress as I stand beside him, my face so close to his weeping bent body I can smell the heavy odor of his Brylcreemed hair. “Have I lost my little girl?” he sobs through his fingers. “Will I never see my little girl again?” I’m not sure if I’m the little girl he’s weeping about or if it’s my absent mother, but his anguish is terrifying. I want to run or cry myself, but instead I put my arm around his neck as best I can, and pat him the way Mimmie pats me when we’re in Joy’s chair. “It’s okay, I won’t leave, don’t worry. I’m here, Dick.”
I called my mother Baa most of my life—probably because Ricky did—always called my grandmother Joy, and my father I called Dick, short for Richard. And short he was, barely five feet seven inches, looking a bit like Alan Ladd—in a slightly less handsome way. Audie Murphy reminded me of him too, as did Donald O’Connor, except Audie seemed more menacing and Donald more adorable. Actually, Dick was all of those things: slightly handsome, somewhat menacing, and fleetingly adorable. Which happened to be his father’s name: Fleet.