David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Anyhow, this one terrible memory of looking up from the davenport and seeing myself through his eyes, and of his sad, sophisticated way of expressing how sad and disgusted he was — this kind of sums up the whole period for me now, when I think of it. I also remember both of those former friends’ names, too, from that fucked-up day, but obviously that’s not relevant.

Things began to get much more vivid, focused, and concrete in 1978, and in retrospect I suppose I agree with Mom and Joyce that this was the year I ‘found myself’ or ‘put away childish things’ and began the process of developing some initiative and direction in my life, which obviously led to my joining the Service.

Though it’s not directly connected to my choice of the IRS as a career, it’s true that my father being killed in a public-transit accident in late 1977 was a sudden, horrible, and life-changing kind of event, which I obviously hope never to have to repeat in any way again. My mother took it especially hard, and had to go on tranquilizers, and she ended up being psychologically unable to sell my father’s house, and left Joyce and the bookstore and moved back into the house in Libertyville, where she still lives today, with certain pictures of my father and of them as a young couple still in the house. It’s a sad situation, and an armchair psychologist would probably say that she blamed herself somehow for the accident, even though I, more than anyone, would be in a position to know that that wasn’t true, and that, in the final analysis, the accident was no one’s fault. I was there when it happened — the accident — and there is no denying that it was one hundred percent terrible. Even today, I can remember the whole thing in such vivid, concrete detail that it almost seems more like a recording than a memory, which I’m told is not unusual for traumatic events — and yet there was also no way to recount for my mother exactly what happened from start to finish without almost destroying her, as she was already so grief-stricken, although just about anyone could have seen that a lot of her grief was unresolved conflicts and hang-ups over their marriage and the identity crisis she’d had in 1972 at age forty or forty-one and the divorce, none of which she got to really deal with at the time because she’d thrown herself so deeply into the women’s lib movement and consciousness-raising and her new circle of strange, mostly overweight women who were all in their forties, plus her new sexual identity with Joyce almost right away, which I know must have just about killed my father, given how straitlaced and conventional he tended to be, although he and I never talked about it directly, and he and my mother somehow managed to stay reasonably good friends, and I never heard him say anything about the matter except some occasional bitching about how much of his agreed-upon support payments to her were going into the bookstore, which he sometimes referred to as ‘that financial vortex’ or just ‘the vortex’—all of which is a whole long story in itself. So we never really talked about it, which I doubt is all that unusual in these sorts of cases.

If I had to describe my father, I would first say that my mother and father’s marriage was one of the only ones I’ve seen in which the wife was noticeably taller than the man. My father was 5' 6" or 5' 6½", and not fat but stocky, the way many shorter men in their late forties are stocky. He might have weighed 170. He looked good in a suit — like so many men of his generation, his body almost seemed designed to fill out and support a suit. And he owned some good ones, most single-button and single-vent, understated and conservative, in mainly three-season worsteds and one or two seersucker for hot weather, in which he also eschewed his usual business hat. To his credit — at least in retrospect — he rejected the so-called modern style’s wide ties, brighter colors, and flared lapels, and found the phenomenon of leisure suits or corduroy sport coats nauseating. His suits were not tailored, but they were nearly all from Jack Fagman, a very old and respected men’s store in Winnetka which he had patronized ever since our family relocated to the Chicagoland area in 1964, and some of them were really nice. At home, in what he called his ‘mufti,’ he wore more casual slacks and double-knit dress shirts, sometimes under a sweater vest — his favorite of these was argyle. Sometimes he wore a cardigan, though I think that he knew that cardigans made him look a little too broad across the beam. In the summer, there was sometimes the terrible thing of the Bermuda shorts with black dress socks, which it turned out were the only kind of socks my father even owned. One sport coat, a 36R in midnight-blue slubbed silk, had dated from his youth and early courtship of my mother, she had explained — it was hard for her to even hear about this jacket after the accident, much less help tell me what to do with it. The clothes closet contained his best and third-best topcoats, also from Jack Fagman, with the empty wooden hanger still between them. He used shoe trees for his dress and office footwear; some of these were inherited from his own father. (‘These’ obviously referring to the shoe trees, not the shoes.) There was also a pair of leather sandals which he’d received as a Christmas gift, and not only had never worn but hadn’t even removed the catalogue tag from when it fell to me to go through his clothes closet and empty out the contents. The idea of lifts in his shoes would just never have occurred to my father. At that time, I had never to my knowledge seen a shoe tree, and didn’t know what they were for, since I never took care of any of my shoes, or valued them.

My father’s hair, which had evidently been almost light brown or blond when he was younger, had first darkened and then become suffused with gray, its texture stiffer than my own and tending to curl in the back during humid weather. The back of his neck was always red; his overall complexion was florid in the way that certain stocky older men’s faces are florid or ruddy. Some of the redness was congenital, probably, and some psychological — like most men of his generation, he was both high-strung and tightly controlled, a type A personality but with a dominant superego, his inhibitions so extreme that it came out mainly as exaggerated dignity and precision in his movements. He almost never permitted himself any kind of open or prominent facial expression. But he was not a calm person. He did not speak or act in a nervous way, but there was a vibe of intense tension about him — I can remember him seeming to give off a slight hum when at rest. In hindsight, I suspect he was probably only a year or two from needing blood pressure medication when the accident occurred.

I remember being aware that my father’s overall posture or bearing seemed unusual for a shorter man — many short men tend to stand ramrod straight, for understandable reasons — in terms of his seeming not slumped but more like slightly bent forward at the waist, at a slight angle, which added to the sense of tension or always walking into some kind of wind. I know that I wouldn’t understand this prior to entering the Service and seeing the bearing of some of the older examiners who spend all day for years at a desk or Tingle table, leaning forward to examine tax returns, primarily to identify those that should be audited. In other words, it’s the posture of someone whose daily work means sitting very still at a desk and working on something in a concentrated way for years on end.

I really know very little about the reality of my father’s job and what-all it entailed, though I certainly now know what cost systems are.

On the face of it, my entering a career in the IRS might appear connected to my father’s accident — in more humanistic terms, connected to my ‘loss’ of a father who was himself an accountant. My father’s technical area was accounting systems and processes, which is actually closer to data processing than real accountancy, as I would later understand. For myself, however, I am convinced that I would now be in the Service regardless, given the dramatic event that I remember totally changing my focus and attitude which occurred the following fall, during the third semester of my returning to DePaul and when I was retaking Intro Accounting, along with American Political Theory, which was another class I’d gotten an incomplete in at Lindenhurst through basically not knuckling down and putting in the work. It’s true, though, that I may have done this — retaking Intro Accounting — at least partly to please or try to pay back my father, or to at least lessen the self-disgust I had felt after his walking into the nihilistic scene in the living room which I just mentioned. It was probably only a couple days after that scene and my father’s reaction that I took the CTA commuter line down to Lincoln Park and started trying to reenroll for my last two years — in terms of credits, four terms — at DePaul, although due to certain technicalities I couldn’t officially reenter until the fall of ’77—another long story — and, thanks to knuckling down and also swallowing my pride and getting some extra help to deal with depreciation and amortization schedules, finally did pass, along with DePaul’s version of American Political Theory — which they called American Political Thought, although it and the Lindenhurst version of the course were nearly identical — in the Fall 1978 semester, though not exactly with final grades to write home about, because I largely neglected serious studying for these two classes’ final exams due to (somewhat ironically) the dramatic event, which occurred accidentally during an entirely different DePaul class, one I was not even really taking but sort of bumbled into through an inattentive screw-up during the final review period just before Christmas break, and was so dramatically moved and affected by that I barely even studied for my regular courses’ final exams, though this time not out of carelessness or sloth but because I decided I had some very important, sustained, concentrated thinking to do after the dramatic encounter with the substitute Jesuit in Advanced Tax, which was the class I’ve mentioned sitting in on by mistake.