think, she realizes that he will come back. She knows but she does not know, and the uncertainty is tearing her apart. The uncertainty is tearing me apart too, and so I keep asking. I am like an awful witness to the failure of her life. After that, nothing. I don't know how the story turned out. Perhaps my father walked through the door the next moment and reassured everyone. Certainly we were able at times to maintain the fiction of being a happy family as, here, we were maintaining the fiction of being an unhappy one. Perhaps this is a screen memory, standing as an emblem for many individual events. When the pressure of circumstances became too much for him, my father would simply disappear: later I learned that he would go on binges. But he would always come back. Perhaps I was reminded of these disappearances when I heard stories of a Christian god who also disappearsdisappears for centuriesbut who also promises to come back. That god too is frequently represented as a baby, and, under certain circumstances, like the Chocolate Babies, he is eaten.*The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between Much of what Im writing here is ancient history, stories which people who know me now dont know. My pattern, in more ways than one, has been that of the shape-shifter: I am fifty-five years old; if you saw a photograph of me at eighteen you would have trouble recognizing me. My father, John Harold Aloysius (Jack) Foley: 1895-1967. Slightly taller than I, thin, jet-black hair (my hair is brown), with a touch of the dandy. People would say, He reminds me of Fred Astaire. My mother, Joanna Teriolo (later shortened to Terio): 1898-1964. She hated the name Joanna and so called herself Juana, shortened to Juan, which she pronounced Ju-an, with two syllables. Plump, dark, with intense, piercing eyes. He was Irish. She was Italian, with perhaps some Spanish blood. I was their only child: born August 9, 1940 (a Leo), Fitkin Hospital , Neptune , New Jersey , outside of Asbury Park , where my parents were living. A war baby. The Dick Tracy comic strip for that day features an attempt to arrest Yogee Yamma, an exotic-looking man wearing a turban. My father, forty-five years old, was working at Fort Monmouth as a telegrapher. I was christened John Wayne Foley. Later, the confirmation name Harold was added. (My father claimed not to be able to spell his own confirmation name, Aloysius.) The naming had nothing to do with the popular movie actor, John Wayne. My father wanted to name me after his brother, but the parish priest convinced him that Wayne was no proper saints name, so I was named John after my father with Wayne as my middle name. The name was a rare gesture on my fathers part towards his family. There were several Foley children. We were fairmersfarmersmy father told me. They were living in Elmira, NY . He was, I believe, the youngest, the baby of the family, his sister said. His brother, Wayne, somehow learned to tap dance. He taught the art to my father and helped him to enter the dazzling world of show business. My father performed in vaudeville as well as in one of the last minstrel companies, presided over by George Honeyboy Evans. My fathers sister Goldie was part of that world too. She was a Ziegfeld Follies girl, a spectacular beauty, and perhaps in some sense the love of my father's life. Wed go everywhere together, he told me, reminiscing. "Everybody thought we were sweethearts." Pause. But we weren't. He was hardly a sophisticate. He used to tell the story of being in the subway as a young man and seeing a sign saying Smoking Prohibited. He was with a friend who wanted to smoke. My father told his friend the sign meant you could go ahead and smoke. He also told me of being with the songwriter Jimmy McHugh. They were passing the poetry section of a library when McHugh turned to my father and, pointing to the section, said, Jack, it's all in there. In general my father didnt tell stories about our family. He told stories about his friends in show business. Later I realized that the friends were almost always Irish. The people he knew in show business became his real family. He married one of themLaura, one of the dancing Wood Sisters. Evidently, that marriage (about which I knew nothing as a child) was short and disastrous. The lyrics to one of the songs my father wrote go: They all love my wife They all love my wife She makes all of them fall When I go to bed she's at a dance When I wake up shes in a trance Oh, what a home sweet home Ive got it!Or, more poignantly: Passing my window faces I see Most of them smiling none smile for me None know Im lonely or that Im alone Since you have left me home isnt home Why werent you satisfied Goldie was the only one of my fathers siblings I actually met, and by the time I met her, her beauty had gone. There was another sister, May, for whom my father wrote a song, and perhaps others. I don't know what became of them. Both my father and Wayne served in World War I, but Wayne died young as a result of the mustard gas he had inhaled. He called for my father on his deathbed but my father couldn't summon the courage to go to him. Naming me after Wayne was a lateand no doubt rather guilt-riddenfraternal gesture. As my father grew older he grew bitter about women. Put a man in all that make-up, fix his hair, and hed be just as attractive as any woman. He was not advocating drag. Women baffled him and, finally, frightened him. He wished at last to keep his distance. Another lyric goes, I did all I could to make you happy, but still you chose to grow cold and forget. / My pillows wet every night, praying youll write, goodness only knows why. My father left show business when vaudeville, which was his primary bread and butter, gave way to the movies and died. In addition, his great mentor and occasional employer, George M. Cohan, lost interest in musicals and made an ill-fated attempt to establish himself as a straight playwright. My father opened a dance studio. He received a telegram from Cohan wishing him luck and tendering kindest personal regards. The venture failed. He turned to Postal Unionwhere he had worked as a telegrapher during the summersand then to Western Union, which eventually made him manager of the Port Chester branch. He claimed that the sound of the telegraph key reminded him of tap dancing. Recently I came upon a clipping, a review of one of his performances. It refers to him as a great dancer. Since childhood I have collected recordings of vaudevillians: Cohan, Harry Lauder, Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth, Gallagher and Shean, many others. All these recordings bring me closer to my father, whose performing days were long past when I knew him. To Americans, writes John E. Dimeglio in Vaudeville USA,the vaudevillian...typified the spirit of liberty. Was he not utterly free? He travelled across the expanses of the great land, and did as he wished on the stage. In the most mobile of all nations, that nations most mobile citizen, the vaudevillian, represented something special. Vaudeville entertained the family, the sacred core of America s strength. Yet the nation had been founded by daring adventurers who challenged the unknown. The average American had to remain close to home, but not the vaudevillian. He was heroic in this sense, meeting the challenges of one town after another, one audience after another, his very career at stake each time he mounted the stage. The theatergoer could share in all this. The destiny of the lone figure on stage was in his hands. I think of my father in his suit, with his black hair slicked back, or in his underwear playing his nightly game of solitaire. Your father, one of his drinking companions told me after his death, was a goodtimer. The story of my mothers life seems to have been the story of the longing to go home. Her home town was Perth Amboy, New Jersey , where she met my father. He must have seemed like an embodiment of all the lights of Broadway. She maintained the hope that I would enter show business, and my father did indeed teach me to tap dance. Like my father, my mother came from a large family. When we visited Perth Amboy on Memorial Day there seemed to be relatives everywhere. Her brother Panny (strong as a bull) was once a wrestler and now called himself an automobile beautician. I remember her sister Maggie as immensely fat (its her glands) and barely able to walk. I was expected to hug Maggie and kiss her, which I did with little enthusiasm. I dont think the people there liked me very much. I was too bookish, I had little interest inor capacity forsports. When I learned to play the guitar my mother would force me to bring it to Perth Amboy . Everyone would ask me to play. At first I would refuse. Finally, I would comply. Everyone was sitting around me in utter silence. You could hear a pin drop. The moment I began to play, everyone started to talk. My maternal grandparents, whom I never knew, operated a store which featured delicious Italian cooking, my favorite kind of food. My relatives maintained the tradition of good cooking, but I disliked these trips to see people whom I scarcely knew and who scarcely knewor wanted to knowme. Yet this was the place for which my mother yearned. Port Chester was quite similar to Perth Amboy . It too boasted a large Italian population. Yet my mother was never really able to make friends there. She would make a friend, there would be an intensity of communication, then there would be a fierce argument and that would be the end of that. There were fierce arguments at home, too, but that relationship went on. My parents made an attempt to make me happy, and at times I was. But I was also lonely, on my own a lot, given to imaginative play. There was a great mirror on my mothers dresser. I would play in front of it, watching myself. We listened to the radio (this was the golden age) and we went to the movies. If I saw a movie in which I identified with the hero, I became the hero the next day. The movie became my image in the mirror. Thirty years later I raised the question, Is the movie screen a window or a mirror? It appears to be a window, but it turns into a mirror. I'm sure my childhood experience had something to do with that question, though I believe there is also something in the nature of movies which encourages one to think of mirrors. Criticism as secretor, as Oscar Wilde said, the only civilized form ofautobiography. I suspect that my mother would have preferred for me to have been a girl. There are stories of her dressing me in girls clothingmy girl ego was named Geraldinebut I remember little of this, and I have no temptation to cross dress at this point. When I was in my twenties, my father remarked, in as manly a voice as he could muster, Well, I thought you were a little, you know, but I guess you're all right. Theres a story here too. When I was in high school a male teacher took an interest in me. Like Deborah Kerr in the popular movie, he was planning to offer me a little more than tea and sympathy. He taught gym and English literature and was responsible for school plays. He knew of my interest in musicals and once hinted that he was planning to cast me in the lead in Carousel, but the production never materialized. I must have led him on unmercifully. He was very popular with the guys, and as far as I know no one ever suspected him. My mother in fact decided she wouldnt believe me when I told her the truth. Oh, you're lyin. He was Italian and rather handsome, so she must have fantasized about him. The teacher invited me to accompany him to an excellent Broadway musical, The Music Man. He was very careful to ask my parents. He explained that he could take