Post 33: A Marriage

Day 53: Drew, The Dream: A marriage. A family. Then, a man on a plane.

God, that was such an important time for me. I was so good. I really was. Walking away from the piano was hard, John. I’d spent so much time trying to make the music perfect. I took years before I played again. Now you know why I have to drag my piano with us every time we move.

John, I have to tell you something. Of course I can’t tell anyone anything right now. And that’s part of the problem  This all taking a long time. Longer than it should. It’s not exactly unpleasant here. Nor is it pleasant, exactly. I’m just here. And, to be honest, John, I’m ready to for something to happen.

I actually enjoy my dreams. But each one, they just take me backwards, John, careening back into the past. I want to move forward.

 I miss you. But it’s so lonely here. So uncertain. I miss you and Phyllis and our walks and your cooking. Here? I don’t know what cooking is. Or food or Phyllis or friends. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but so far it’s a disappointment here. And speaking of “here,” where’s the welcoming committee? Where’s Aunt Cam? And Mama? And Daddy?

Can you get any of this? Why haven’t you done it? Why haven’t you pulled the plug?

It appears that I don’t get a vote here. All I end up doing is dreaming. Which is happening now and, which I have no control over. I’m just along for the ride.

                                            *

The Dream: After a brief, false start in banking, I spent the first twenty-three years of my working life in advertising. I was drawn to the clever use of words and visuals that were used to persuade people. However, when I graduated from the University of Virginia in the late ’70s, I walked off the grounds with a double major in English and economics and absolutely no idea how to get a job with an ad agency.

I majored in English for myself and in economics to get a job.

I was fortunate, from a survival standpoint, to land a job with a large regional Southern bank as a credit analyst, on a promotional track to commercial lender. I’ve always maintained that I received an invaluable education in business during those two years holed up in the corporate tower in sleepy downtown Atlanta. The actual work, however, was soul-crushing.

In my second spring as a naïve but rising analyst, it was politely suggested and later ordered that I “adjust” loan compliance documents for one of the bank’s high-profile corporate customers. The account was serviced by one of the bank’s EVP golden boys who made sure his customers’ financials also looked golden, even when they weren’t.

He made it clear to me that I was disposable. He could make me go away and, in the process, take the blame for his sloppy account management with me. It was my first brush with forgery, threats, and fraud. I was twenty-three. So, I turned to the only person in business that I could trust—my father.

I called the house after ten that night, knowing I would not sleep without finding some way out of this legal and ethical dilemma. And, in a thirty-minute phone call that would change my life, my father told me, quite simply, to get out. Specifically, he advised returning to the office that night and typing out a short but professional letter of resignation. I made a copy for each of the vice presidents I served, along with my director and supervisor, placed copies on each of their desks, and came home for a decent night’s sleep.

I also went back to the credit file in question and left what was called a “tickler” to call the credit’s irregularities to the attention of the next analyst or auditor. I left the bank the next day, as they had hastily waived my two weeks’ notice.

I felt like I had been freed, and made a career pivot into advertising.

Several years later, from my copywriter’s desk at Young & Rubicam, Houston, I read in the Wall Street Journal that the golden boy’s client had filed for bankruptcy. And, back in the day when a million was a lot of money even in banking circles, according to the front-page sidebar, the bank was left holding a four-million-dollar loan that was never repaid. A friend from the bank later called to tell me that the EVP who had threatened me and who was responsible for this debacle was being investigated. In a defensive move, the bank had transferred him to the London office, otherwise known as “Siberia.”

                                            *         

The dream/movie stops.

Something feels terribly wrong. I am looking down at a flailing body that’s jerking and rolling and trying to scream. Women in nurses’ uniforms rush John out of the room. The body stops all movement, and bells go off as the machinery in the room goes wild with warnings. A group of people huddle around the body, pulling back bed linens and the gown that provides no modesty.  They scramble. “Clear.” Nothing. Machines whir. “Clear.” The body bucks under the current. Once more. “Clear.” I am back. And, as abruptly as they stopped, the images in my head resume. I am thirsty and can tell no one.

                                            *

Daddy married Mama in the middle of the Great Depression. Years prior to their marriage, his mother summoned him home, to Virginia, in November of 1929 during his first semester at the University of Louisville. It seems that not only had my father’s father suddenly left town with the heiress to a cotton empire, but my grandfather’s personal fortunes had been completely reversed in the stock market crash a week earlier. With no husband, no money, no job skills, and three teenagers at home, my grandmother had nowhere to turn but to her eldest son.

Daddy spent the next six years providing for his mother, and eventually subsidizing the college educations of his three younger siblings. With his youngest sister, Marilyn, finally graduated from Tulane and his mother retrained as a nurse’s aide, Daddy was finally financially free, in a fashion, to marry my mother.

When he asked her, she turned him down. She explained she wanted them to have a proper honeymoon, and told him to ask again when he had saved a hundred dollars. She might as well have asked him to save a hundred thousanddollars. It was fall of 1935, and jobs and money were scarce. Saving was almost unheard of.

According to Aunt Camille, my mother’s younger sister and maid of honor, my father took on any paying work he could find to supplement his meager pay at the People’s Drug on Jefferson Street, at one point working three additional part-time jobs that took him away from the family on both Thanksgiving and Christmas days. It would take Daddy seven months to save the requisite sum, and he repeated his proposal to Mama in May of 1936. (When telling the story, this is the part where Aunt Cam would choke up and tears would come.) My mother happily said yes and handed my father an envelope with a hundred dollars of her own savings, to match his. Mama later explained she had been sure Daddy would save the money, but she would never ask him to do anything that she wasn’t willing to do herself.

As summer waned, they married, borrowed a friend’s Ford Model A and motored south to a proper honeymoon in Chimney Rock and Asheville, North Carolina.           

This was one of the many stories told and retold at family gatherings over the following fifty years. It was dusted off for presentation at a larger and more public celebration of my parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, after cake and champagne. The story, as could have been predicted, brought the gathering to their feet and tears to their eyes.