The Gob by Liz Dolan

Description:

There is no doubt in Liz Dolan’s mind where her urge to write came from. Her old man never shut up. He had the Irish gift of the gab which often drove her nuts. Sometimes he was hysterically funny, sometimes deliberately cruel. In hindsight, Liz believes all of the bluster was a cover up for loss, especially that of three infant girls and a son at five years old. Still, her father’s voice haunts her reverie; still she laughs and cries. Collected here are the anecdotes that not only bring either laughter or a tear to the eye, but also help to paint a portrait of perhaps one of the most important and influential people in a young woman's life: her father.

This is the first in the new Untreed Reads Essay Series, giving a voice to authors for short commentaries on all categories of nonfiction.

Excerpt:

There was never a dull moment when my father was around; he couldn’t even die quietly. His body turned up in the Lincoln Hospital morgue three days after he closed the garden gate behind him yelling to my mom, “I’m taking a ride down to the old neighborhood, to St. Luke’s.”

He must have boarded the Lexington Avenue local at Westchester Square and exited at Cypress Avenue and 138th Street. Sensing a tightness in his chest perhaps, he headed towards the 40th precinct, a hike of about five blocks, where he died on the steps. Because he had no identification on him, he was sent to the morgue, an ignominious end for a man who knew every cop in the neighborhood in the 1950s and raised five children there. The date was May 16th, 1969. He was sixty-six.

“I knew he was dead when he didn’t come home, Mom,” sobbed my younger, twenty-five year old sister, Mary, after she hung up the phone on the call that told us my father’s body had been found. “He’d never miss the opportunity to come home and torture us.”

Pop was known as “Fisty” by those who knew him when he was young. Whenever I asked the origin of the name, my uncles laughed and told me nothing. By his coworkers on the New York-New Haven and Hartford Railroad he was known as “the Gob,” a moniker I completely understood, for it aptly described the torture to which my sister referred—he talked us to death.

Pop would lounge in the overstuffed tan damask armchair in the living room and we would wait. When will he start? What will set him off today—a phone call from his sister or brother, a letter from Castlewellan, dirty dishes in the sink, my older sister Ann weaving pincurls into her long blonde hair, so exactly that each curl marked a perfect “X” on her scalp.

Pop used to massage his scalp because it encouraged the growth of his silver locks. Sometimes, he would pose in front of the oak mirror in the foyer in his longjohns and Henley shirt, admiring his gray pompadour. “Wouldya look at that mane of hair?” he’d say. Then he would glance sideways at his profile with his protruding belly. “What a man, what a fine figure of a man.”

“Yeah, Dad, Cary Grant himself,” I’d say.

“And would you look at these elegant feet, no bigger than a size eight all me life.”

“Fred Astaire has nothing on you, Pop.”

It wasn’t until I read Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth that I began to appreciate Pop’s cultural love of small feet.