Howard L Robertson Sr; Mike Christine

Howard L. Robertson Sr.

          A couple of years after my father died my mother got a job with New Castle County as executive secretary for the various planning and zoning commissions and boards. Being a megalomaniac herself, she knew how to suck up to politicians.

          At the time New Castle County was being developed faster than any other county east of the Mississippi River, so she had a lot of power. Fat middle-aged guys smelling like cigars were always hanging around, inviting my mother to things. Cases of good liquor appeared on our doorstep at Xmas in 1958 and 1959. I cleaned up at my bar mitzvah, more presents than I’d ever use piling up in our living room.

          Then my mother announced that she was probably going to marry one of the fat middle-aged guys, and then he started coming around the house. Howard.

          Howard was a civil engineer. He had his own company and did most of the subdivision design work for the two biggest suburban development companies in the county. He was short and stout and had thick grey hair, a grey moustache, and a big, Jewish-looking nose, even though his ancestry was entirely Scots.

          Howard was Delaware born-and-bred, but he had a flat, almost Midwestern-sounding accent. Said ‘Missouruh’ instead of ‘Missouri’. I remember one evening early in the piece, with Howard sitting on our living-room couch, and me just standing there, getting acquainted. And he went on at some length about watching Italian terrazzo workers making artistic-looking floors, and how technically ingenious the process was, and how good it came out looking. And what struck me the most, along with bewilderment as to why he was telling me all this, was the way he pronounced terrazzo “tuh-razz-uh”, with a drawn-out flat ‘a’ as in ‘jazz’. It didn’t sound Italian to me.

          Altogether, Howard didn’t make much of an initial impression on me. I pegged him as just another grey Babbitt focused on money, having recently read Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt.

          His first marriage had just crashed on the rocks of his alcoholism and his first wife’s affair with a local bookie. He had four kids, all older than me. He also had a piece of Caribbean property on the Isla de Pinos, which belongs to Cuba. So they got married and flew to Cuba, which was still on speaking terms with the U.S., leaving my brother and me to finish off the petit-fours and what we dared of the liquor left over from the wedding. I remember that bottle of Ballantine’s scotch whisky with great fondness.

          Howard’s youngest son Kenny, who was 21, came to stay in the spare bedroom downstairs while they were gone. Kenny was shortish, dark-blond and very handsome. He was in the last year of some bachelor’s degree programme at Pennsylvania Military Institute, a private military college. He went out a lot, bought us beer, and told curious stories about breaking up with his fiancée, which clearly amused him. I found out within a year or so that he was just starting to get ready to come out of the closet.

          My mother quit her job to avoid conflict of interest too obvious to deny, and within a month or so came down with osteomyelitis in two or three of her lower vertebrae. She was out of commission for almost a year. Tough shit, Howard.

          A couple of months after the wedding, at the end of the school year, we moved across the street to an absurdly large five-level house that had been built some years before, but never lived in. Some bookie had had it built and then got himself busted. Howard had it done up to his liking. He had all the scraggly, native second-growth trees on the lot chopped down, which raised a few hackles in a neighbourhood that equated the forest-esque look with property value, but then planted a few shade and fruit trees that in a few years made the house look like the most tree-graced one on the block. He completely refinished the inside of the big two-car garage, doing all the work himself. This involved building, in addition to a complete workshop for himself, a mezzanine-like storage attic accessible by a wooden staircase that we could raise or lower using a block-and-tackle rig. From his workshop he constructed a built-in bar and sink in the TV room, and so on.

          Howard had a magnificent dog named Jake. Jake was a retriever, a cross between a Labrador and a Chesapeake Bay. He had wavy, rust-coloured hair and an astounding vocabulary of understanding and sensitivity to mood. He went to work with Howard, of course, sleeping under a drawing table in the office and galloping about when Howard went out to view jobs himself.

          I remember once Howard and my mother were sitting in the living room (something that didn’t happen often; maybe they had company), and Howard told Jake to go and bring him his cigarettes. Jake trotted down a flight of steps and disappeared around a corner into the TV room. He emerged a moment later with a pack of cigarettes in his soft retriever mouth, came back up the stairs, and handed them to Howard. Howard looked at them, shook his head, and said, “These are Lillian’s cigarettes! I said to bring my cigarettes.” So Jake went back, returned my mother’s cigarettes to the TV room, and returned with Howard’s brand in his mouth.

          Jake had all the retriever characteristics. He was keen to plunge into any water available, especially to go fetch anything — sticks, balls, or whatever else — that would soar through the air, carry it back in his soft, non-destructive mouth, and deposit it gently on command at a person’s feet. His problem was with ducks. I never went duck-hunting myself, but the story was that he would swim out after a downed duck, but the feathers would tickle his mouth and he would spit them out before reaching land. He finally succeeded, though, and the day he came back from duck-hunting after retrieving ducks all the way back to the blind he seemed to be visibly flush with the canine equivalent of pride.

          Jake stories could go on forever. When Jake died Howard really lost it for a while.

          Although I wasn’t particularly fond of Howard, he was basically shy and we were mostly able to stay out of each other’s way. We had almost no trouble between us. When I was 15, Howard told me that he didn’t believe in giving me an allowance, but he would give me a job as a rodman on one of his survey parties at $1 an hour, which was then the minimum wage, and probably more than I was worth. On the job, as at home, we were distantly cordial — we dealt with matters of mutual concern in a direct and businesslike manner, and mostly left it at that.

          When I was a senior in high school I’d been encouraged to browse the college catalogues, but my mother and Howard decided that they would only pay for me to go to the local state university, the U of Delaware, where Howard had gone, and scholarships had become almost all based on family need. The summer after my high school graduation I worked for Howard again.

          A day or so before the Xmas break when I was at the U of D, I got a phone call from my mother. Howard was on a binge (his binges, when he had them, usually lasted three or four days), and he was drunkenly talking about sending my brother and me to the Virgin Islands for the holidays, and we should hurry up and make arrangements to go before he sobered up. We did.

          I only went to the U of D for one year before transferring to George Washington U in D.C., which my father had attended. For the summer after I went to the U of D, my mother and Howard jacked up a cushy job for me with the county as a land-use enumerator.

          In 1967 my plans to dodge the draft via grad school were endangered when the problem of money reared its ugly head, but for some reason Howard decided to finance the project if none of the schools offered me financial assistance. I got a tuition-plus-stipend fellowship, though, at a place called the Claremont Graduate School in Southern California.

          Then just being in graduate school stopped being a draft deferral and I got a suckaroot number in the draft lottery. I got called up for my draft physical at about my 22nd birthday. Howard’s reaction to this startled me. He had been an army major in the occupation forces in Europe at the end of WWII. He was a life-long Republican and, as noted earlier, a prominent engineer and businessman. He was what people called ‘rock-ribbed’.

          He phoned California to tell me that if I passed my physical he’d set me up in business in Canada. His reasoning, and this is pretty close to word-for-word, was: “Goddamn army was the worst goddamn waste of time in my goddamn life! Had to take a bunch of shit from a bunch of people who were dumber than me and I didn’t make a goddamn cent. And that Eisenhower was biggest idiot of the bunch!” He went on a bit more about Eisenhower.

          A true, rock-ribbed rugged individualist, Howard knew very well that the army was no place for individualists. Howard had once told me that one of the most important things in life for him was being able to tell anybody he felt like telling to go to hell — any time he felt like it. Can’t do that in the army.

          After I failed my draft physical  and quit graduate school I got it into my head to go into business. I wanted to run an artsy-fartsy, college-clientele cafe in Claremont, and I asked Howard if his offer to invest in a small business for me in Canada held now I was 1-Y in Claremont. I sent him a woefully inadequate business plan. He basically told me that if I wanted him to back me in business, I’d have to buy a franchise in some chain and learn from them to start with. He was right, of course. I wasn’t interested.

          The Cuban government had long since confiscated Howard’s vacation home and local bank account in rural Isla de Pinos. He had then got into boats. Cabin cruisers. Big ones: I forget the exact sizes, but the first one was something like 53 feet (16 metres) and the one with which he replaced it was bigger still. He usually docked at a marina and yacht club on the North East River, an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay.

          In 1973 and ’74 I was married to my first wife and working for Howard again in basically the same job I’d had in 1961. Howard had sold the big house in the suburbs when I was still at university and he and my mother and Jake and another dog they named Icky had moved to his old house across the street from his office, which had been occupied in the interim as an office by a property development company with which he was cosy. Now all he had to do to get to his afternoon nap was walk across the shady street.

          My wife and I went down to Howard’s boat on Sunday a couple of times, cruised around the bay for a few hours with Howard — mostly taciturn — at the wheel, and then returned to the yacht club for dinner. The club’s speciality was Chesapeake soft-shell crabs: my favourite thing to eat in the whole world.

          The absurdity of someone in a low-level proletarian position dining on soft-shell crabs at the yacht club impressed itself upon me at the time. I didn’t enjoy the cruises out on the bay that much. I started finding excuses for not accepting invitations to go boating.

          After his Cuban property had been confiscated he’d checked out other retirement spots in the Caribbean, such as St Croix and Montserrat. I thought the Virgin Islands sounded cool. One of Howard’s drinking buddies, Charlie Goodley, a fat, middle-aged, long-retired property developer with a white flat-top, had also lost out in Cuba and had bought a place in the Keys. Howard decided to retire where he had a drinking buddy and bought a condominium in Marathon, in the middle of the Keys at the northeast end of the Seven-Mile Bridge. I didn’t go there to visit until after he died in 1979.

          Howard left me $10,000 in his will. I paid off my credit card, bought an up-market water bed that I sleep in to this day, and bought a giant unabridged dictionary, a big world atlas, and a heap of drugs. I thought Howard the shy alkie would have understood.

Mike Christine

          When Howard gave me that summer job as a rodman when I was 15, the hard-core proletarians who worked on the survey parties for a living each dealt with me being the boss’s schoolboy stepson in his own way. Some obviously resented me. Others thought I was a smartass. Others had more ambivalent attitudes. A few tried to be friends. One of these was a solid old Polish guy named Mike Christine, who was an elegant master of what we called the one-word vocabulary (“I fucken don’t fucken want no fucken supermarket fucken tomatoes!”). He’d come from the Pennsylvania coal fields, but he’d been working for Howard, I think, since the 1930s.

          Mike wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but his shoulders were much wider. He also had a wide slavic face. (“Polocks, Bohunks, Ukreenians — we’re all the fucken same; work like fucken horses all fucken week and get fucken drunk on Friday night.”)

          Mike showed me how to do the job, and didn’t set me up to fail, as some of my other co-workers did. He bought me beer for lunch. He got me into smoking cigars and buying Playboy and placing bets on the nags with him to phone in to his bookie. I remember that soon after I started working there we both lost money on a long-shot called ‘Racing Rick’ because Mike thought the name was a sign or something. He had a slow, strong, plodding way of getting through the day that I tried to copy as best I could.

          About once a month Mike and Howard would get into shouting matches out on the sidewalk in front of the office, which was a converted house. And they’d call each other every vile epithet that white people called each other in those days, and Howard would fire him. And Mike would show up for work the next morning and they’d both go on as if nothing had happened. This had been going on for years, and would continue to go on for years.

          Many years later, while chopping line for the transit operator to see along, Mike’s brush-hook went through the small tree he was clearing away and sank entirely too deeply into his lower leg. Then, as my grandfather would have done, he walked out of the woods and tried to continue work before the party chief insisted on driving him to the hospital. Howard went to visit him there every day. Once he took me. Big Mike was glad to see me.