My mother put up with my father's affairs for years, even offering to raise one of the children born to a mistress. But one night as I was reading, I heard her weeping as she took a phone call from a young woman's mother, who said that he had begun an affair with her daughter, who worked as a waitress in the hunting lodge where Jack was staying with his father. That was the end, she thought. And though Jack pleaded with her not to divorce him, even getting her priest to say Catholics cannot divorce, no matter how a husband may stray, she threw him out of the house. My younger sister did not realize what was happening, and resented my mother for turning him away. My mother, with saintly forbearance, did not tell her the real reason -- and when, years later, my sister found out the truth, she was so angry at Jack that I had a hard time persuading her to come to his funeral.
Jack went with the young waitress to California, where she became a television model -- they were married n the TV wedding show where she worked. In 1951, when I graduated from high school, a friend and I qualified for the national finals of an oratory contest in Los Angeles. We drove out there in the car my friend had been given as a graduation present, and we stayed with my father, his wife, and his young daughter. When my friend went back east, my father asked me to stay and work for his new business, selling ranges and refrigerators. He showed me around Los Angeles, and tried to dissuade me from going back to the Midwest, where I was scheduled to enter a Jesuit seminary.
Jack owned a vacant lot next to his appliance store. It was too overgrown and briary to be mowed, so he decided to burn the brush away -- always a dangerous thing in California. On the other side of the lot was a fancy restaurant, where patrons could catch fish in a stocked pond for their meal. The fire began to race toward the restaurant, and Jack gave me an ineffectual hose to head it off while he went to call the fire department. Luckily, the fire engines arrived just in time. Another close call for Jack.
One day, I had to deliver a refrigerator across town while he was staying for an appointment with buyers in the store. He did not yet have a delivery truck, so he hitched a trailer behind his car and sent me off to deliver the appliance. I was seventeen and had not had my driver's license for long. Jack, in his teacher mode, gave me a quick lesson on how to back up a trailer (turn one way to go the other way). How, I asked, was I to unload the refrigerator? He said, "Find someone standing by and offer him five dollars to help you." "Cannot" was a word absent from Jack's dictionary. Years later, when he had remarried my mother, he bought a lot next to their house on Lake Lansing and turned it into a remunerative garbage dump (to the disgust of lake property owners). He had an old used earthmover to bulldoze the garbage with, and he gave me a quick lesson on how to drive it. It brought back memories of my first navigation of the Los Angeles streets with his trailer.
Jack was an ingenious inventor of business schemes. Unfortunately, he was easily bored with them after they began to make money. Also, he was a heavy gambler. On the night before he went into the army, he got into a high-stakes poker game at the Elks Club, and I, as an eight-year-old, watched him lose all his ready cash. My mother had to rent out our best house and move into a rental one that we had lived in when Jack first reached Michigan. That first house was large, but he met its monthly payments by renting its upstairs floors to students from nearby Ablion College. The student boarders adopted me as a kind of mascot (I was four at the time). They rode me around on their bikes, taught me to tie my shoelaces, and made me think the life of a student the most wonderful thing imaginable.
Jack was coaching the college boxers and judging Golden Gloves matches (where he took me to ringside seats). Jack, like the rest of my family, southern on both sides, was a racist. He always bet against Joe Louis, and when I got a little older I made money from those bets. He claimed that the white men who went against Louis lost only because they tried to hit him in the head -- blacks have iron heads -- instead of hacking him down with midsection blows.
Jack was fearless -- but that was because he felt he could never die. He was superstitious about hospitals. He did not want to admit to human limits. To his credit, he went to the hospital and gave my mother a blood transfusion when she bled badly after delivering me -- she was a teenage and I had weighed almost twelve pounds. But, he could not bring himself to visit my mother after she went into a coma in her final bout with cancer. Not because he did not love her -- he just could not face the thought of losing her. My sister and I had to make the decision to remove her life support after the doctor said she could not revive.
Jack had an infectious sense of fun, and an extraordinary resilience after business setbacks. He always invented some way out of his troubles. At his funeral, the man who'd said he had to pay or kill him came up to me as the military salute was being fired, over the hill, dim in the wind, a faint pop-pop-pop. "Leave it to Jack," the man said, "to get the popcorn concession at his own funeral."
One of the reasons I am a conservative is that I do not believe that "cannot" should be removed from the dictionary. A recognition of limits is important to human life, and especially to human politics. On the other hand, a defiance of human limits is an exhilarating prospect, and it explains why Jack fascinated people. There is, I suppose, a little bit of Jack in me -- very little -- that I would not remove, even if I could.
Excerpted from Outside Looking In by Garry Wills. Copyright 2010 by Garry Wills. Excerpted by permission of Viking Adult, a division of Penguin Group.
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