Rooftop Poetry Club

Paul Cody

Bio:
Paul Cody graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, Magna Cum Laude, With Distinction in English, and Senior Honors in Creative Writing, and earned an M.F.A. from Cornell University, where he was twice co-winner of the Arthur Lynn Prize in Fiction. He as received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation, and was awarded a Stegner Fellowship by Stanford University (declined). He has worked as a housepainter, child care worker, teacher, editor and journalist, was Associate Editor and Staff Writer at Cornell Magazine where he twice won CASE awards for articles; and is an assistant professor of writing at Ithaca College. His four published novels include The Stolen Child (Baskerville, 1995), Eyes Like Mine (Baskerville, 1996), So Far Gone (Picador USA, 1998) and Shooting the Heart (Viking, 2004). His work has appeared in various periodicals, including Harper's, Epoch, The Quarterly, Story, the Boston Globe Magazine, and Cornell Magazine, and he has appeared on Voice of America as a Critic's Choice. He has volunteered, teaching in the CLEP program at the maximum-security Auburn Correctional Facility, and lives with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Holmes, and two sons, Liam and Austin, in Ithaca, New York.

Work:

Who He Was---novel excerpt-Paul Cody

1
He was a small man.

2
In his Army physical, given in Greensboro, North Carolina, in August 1942, at age twenty-one, he was listed at five foot four and a half inches tall. He weighed 127 pounds.

3
It is evening. Sunlight is beginning to slant across the lawn, and my father and I, sitting on the back porch steps, don't say anything.

4
I'm picking at the concrete steps with an old Popsicle stick, and I see specks of mica that I think are diamonds.

5
My father is wearing a white tee shirt and baggy green pants and black, scuffed shoes. He has been at work all day.

6
Shortly after the birth of my first son, when I am in my late 30's and my father dead, I begin to see a therapist with an analytic background. She asks me what my father was like, and I say, Bartleby.

7
He's a character in a story by Melville, I explain. He gets hired by a legal firm as a scrivener, or copyist, works diligently for a time, then one day, when asked to perform some routine task, says, I would prefer not to.

8
I get a copy of "Bartleby the Scrivener" for my therapist. Bartleby continues to "prefer not to" do anything. Eventually he dies of neglect, in a jail for vagrants.

9
I often don't know how to read "Bartleby." He's a Christ figure, a figure of an increasingly industrialized world, a copyist rather than someone who does authentic, original work, a rebel, a hero, weak, powerful. Weak in his power. Powerful in his weakness.

10
My father was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1920, and died in Boston, after a long, languishing pulmonary illness called central and obstructive sleep apnea, a disease where the brain does not effectively tell the body when to breathe. He was sixty-eight when he died.

11
He was a dedicated member of the Catholic Worker movement in the 1940's, 50's, and 60's. The Catholic Workers are "Fools for Christ," who believe strongly in racial, social and economic justice, and who take informal vows of poverty.

12
My mother, an orphan, spent four years as a novitiate, almost becoming a nun, then she too joined the Catholic Worker movement.

13
They met, married, and within six years, 1951-1957, have five children, whom they raise in a big two-family house in Newton. My father's father and mother live in the first-floor apartment.

14
There is very little money. My father works clerical jobs, at a trucking company during the week, and in the admitting office of a hospital on weekends.

15
We have no car, television, washing machine, no couch, one easy chair that has stuffing pouring out of it like tissues, and very few toys.

16
Picture too how happy they are that they have found each other--Mora and James. They have nothing materially, but they have everything. Children, a home, love, health, God, and a way of living that strikes deep inside them.

17
They are both exhausted almost all the time, and they are always behind on bills, but God will provide. God will provide. James finds himself standing at a back window of the house. It is fall, and trees are turning and they are the colors of fire, and this is a gift-all of it is a gift. That they are here, and that there are both great suffering and want in the world, and still these moments of small beauty.

18
The sky is a deep autumnal blue, but there is a single long cloud like a pigeon's lost feather nearly straight ahead and above in the sky. It makes him think of winter and snow and the price of heating oil. But almost as quickly he thinks of Mary and Joseph and the Christ-child in a manger, and he feels he is lucky in everything.

19
When my father is dying, we read aloud to him, though we have no idea if he can hear us. Someone somewhere has said that hearing is the last sense to go. I read from the Song of Solomon: Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot on thee.

20
So how do you do this? Remember and memorialize a man you don't much know? My mother says to me not long after his death, I feel as though I never knew him.

21
What do you do with that?

22
In my teens he and I spend an entire year not speaking, not nodding, not acknowledging the other's presence, while living in the same house.

23
I always love him, but for a long time I also despise him, treat him with contempt, disrespect, with open derision.

24
I think of him as weak, failed, castrated, stupid. Several of my friends refer to him as Fairy James. My shrink, years later, says, You didn't defend him?

25
My mother, after his death, tells me she often came upon him in a room in the house, his head in his hands, crying. When she asked what was wrong, he always said he didn't know. She says this went on for at least five or even ten years, toward the end of his life. He always begged her not to tell anyone about the crying.

26
When my father is about sixty-two or -three, he has a routine operation, during which he stops breathing. They have to intubate him, put a breathing tube down his throat. Hours later, as he is coming out of the anesthesia, his blood gases are off and distorting his thinking; he must be in a great deal of confusion and fear and pain, so he rips the tube from his throat.

27
He severely damages his vocal cords, so for the rest of his life he hardly has a voice. What little voice he has is faint, whispery, labored, like dry leaves scraping pavement in November.

28
By the time my father dies, he has been in the hospital for well over two months and cannot weigh more than eighty pounds. Death has already taken over. He wants his body to be donated to a medical school to be used as a cadaver. We honor his wish.

29
In the late 40's, Dorothy Day suggested that my father move to the South Side of Chicago, where the movement had acquired a large house in a very poor neighborhood. The house was structurally sound, and though he knew very little about hammers and nails, his job was to help form a community to fix up the house, make it habitable, and form the Catholic Worker movement's first House of Hospitality in Chicago.

He spent more than a year in Chicago's South Side, made connections in the poor parishes of Chicago, and work on the house began. Much later, my father says to me that one of the strangest things about the whole experience was that for days and sometimes weeks, he didn't see another white person. It got to the point, my father says, where he didn't notice people's color.

30
My mother, whose name was Mora, was very small, like my father. Perhaps five feet tall. When she left the novitiate, she moved to a Catholic Worker farm in Ohio, near a town called Loveland, where she met my father in the late 1940's.

31
Their first two children, Martha and Mark, are born near Lorain, Ohio, where they move after their marriage, and my father finds work as a housepainter and general laborer. Martha is born in May 1951, and Mark in August 1952.

32
In the last ten weeks of his life, when there is little left of my father, except, perhaps, his hearing, I read to him, Oh send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me, let them bring me to thy holy hill and to thy dwelling.

33
I am his middle child, and at best, I am some odd mixture of agnostic/Buddhist/ex-Catholic. I pray by breathing and trying to meditate, which I am not good at. If I were graded in meditation, I would receive a D, and that would be generous on the part of the instructor.

People like Dorothy Day, Saints Francis, Ignatius, Benedict, and Thomas Merton interest me enormously. Also the Tao Te Ching, and dozens of Buddhist writers: Eugen Herrigal and Robert Aiken and Dainin Katagiri take me to places that feel deeply spiritual. I absolutely love the line from the Tao, in Stephen Mitchell's translation, which reads: If you want to know me, look inside your heart.

34
Sometimes a half hour of reading these people, of Katagiri, for example, puts me in this deep quiet space, where I feel in balance, centered, compassionate, unconcerned with myself, a concern, I'm ashamed to say, which takes up at least ninety percent of my thoughts most of the time.

35
Can he remember and think as he lies there these last days? Can he recall the scent of pine? A dove cooing? His own grandfather perhaps asleep in a rocking chair, unshaven, his lower face and neck stippled with white?

36
For my days pass away like smoke. My days are like an evening shadow.

37
Their third, fourth and fifth kids are born in Newton, Massachusetts, where my parents decide to move to be near his parents, and buy a house using benefits of the G.I. Bill. My father stays behind in Ohio a few months to keep working, while my mother and the two kids move in with my father's parents.

They buy a house on California Street, in the Newtonville/Nonantum sections of Newton, a big, three-story place, with a two-bedroom apartment on the first floor, and a five-bedroom apartment on the second and third floors.

38
My name is Peter, and I am born a few days before Christmas, 1953, about two weeks after my family move into the Newton house. Stephen is born April 1956, and Gwen in June 1957.

So between May 1951 and June 1957 there is Martha-Mark-Peter-Stephen-Gwen--five kids, six years and one month.

39
Catholics. The Baby Boom. Irish-Catholics.

40
You tell me.

41
What in the world were they thinking? Did they have any clue? Were they nuts?

42
On the other hand I think, God bless them. Good luck and may you have fair skies and following seas. What the hell. We make choices, and they certainly made some choices. Honestly. It's not going to be easy, but good luck. I wish I could have been there to help, but instead, I'm there and I'm one of the major problems.