History Lesson 
My Heart Belonged to Daddy
He died two years ago this month after a long career as a newspaper editor. Although he could handle a hard-news story with the best of them, he had a sentimental streak that kept the father-daughter dance going his whole life.
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By marrying a fellow reporter at the Gazette and by keeping her on the staff sporadically even after I was born, he saw to it that I grew up amid the heat, the grime, the smoke, and the excitement of a fifties newspaper office. Almost everyone and everything of interest in town came through the doors of the newsroom. I met every president from Truman through Nixon. I also saw club women, civic leaders, preachers, circus folks, and regular townspeople, proud or grieving, all in search of some notice for themselves or their children. Old Associated Press and United Press International wire-service machines rang bells to announce incoming stories. The whole place fairly vibrated with a sense of urgency. Typewriters clacked, ashtrays overflowed, coffee grew cold and rancid, and telephones never quit ringing. The aging society editor, Annie Mae Turner, frequently became so engrossed while gathering the latest social gossip that she set her frizzy hair on fire with a cigarette in the hand holding the telephone receiver to her ear. “Somebody put Annie Mae out!” a reporter would yell and another would beat the burning locks with a telephone directory. More heat from hot lead poured into the windowless, unair-conditioned newsroom each time a proofreader handed copy through the sliding glass window to the typesetters in the clattering composing room.
Overseen by a penurious, eccentric publisher, the Gazette office was rife with absurdities. Dank toilets in a dark hallway were supplied with a roll of newsprint in lieu of real toilet tissue. Memos from the publisher about wastefulness were often followed up by his ferreting out discarded pencil stubs in trash baskets, sharpening them with a pocketknife, and returning them to the offender’s desk. My father maintained that his requests for small raises were always met with, “Why, John Quincy, if I hadn’t hired you, do you know what you’d be doing now? You’d be a ribbon clerk at Ben F. Smith’s.” Years later, when I lauded my father’s hiring of women to cover police beats and city council meetings at a time when they were usually relegated to reporting teas and fashion shows, he burst my feminist bubble by explaining, “Oh, honey, I had to hire them. They’d work for less.”
My father loved the news business, and as a family, we always felt sorry for the “outsiders” who would never know the funny, cynical, irreverent camaraderie of newsrooms or the triumph of getting the story and being on the inside of almost everything that happened in our town. No pretentiousness was attached to writing in my family. It was a taken-for-granted motor skill that my brother and I improved by writing letters home, which were sometimes returned to us proofread and corrected. In lieu of gifts, my father wrote a love letter to my mother each Christmas, an especially touching one the year he gambled away Santa Claus. My father could write and edit a hard-news story, but he remained an old softy with a sentimental streak that touched his readers and kept the father-daughter dance going his whole life. When I was ten, he wrote a column that began, “If a man has ambition to grow in character as the years rush by, I can’t think of anything he needs more than a daughter.” And when he was 89, we sat in the kitchen of my parents’ house, both exhausted by the frustrations and sadness of my mother’s final illness. He looked up from our cold supper and said, “You know why I’d like to live forever?”
“Sure, Daddy, so you could wear out that Brooks Brothers sport coat I gave you for Christmas and watch the Masters golf tournament every spring.”
“No, so I could keep on loving you.”
Small wonder that my father was never without some romance in his life. He liked women, and right to the very end he expected them to like him. Secure in a marriage that lasted until she died at 86, my mother tolerated, even encouraged, his flirting as he tolerated hers. He was always falling in love with a choir member at the church, absolutely certain that the soprano soloist sang just for him.
In his nineties, without my mother to deflate his ego, he worried that his friendship with a bright young Gazette reporter who occasionally took him to lunch or a movie might be mistaken for something more. “You kids don’t need to worry,” he said. “Your inheritance is secure. I’m not going to get married again, even if she is pretty sweet on me.”
When his poor old bent back and breathing problems made it difficult for him to shuffle outside his apartment, romance came by mail. It started with a condolence note from Cousin Kay, known to me only as his uncle Presley’s daughter.
Several weeks later, as I sorted through Daddy’s accumulated mail—cards from his Sunday school class; long, hilarious letters from his old newspaper buddy George; and AARP magazines—he reached for a stack. “Don’t read these. They’re sort of mushy,” he said, stashing several envelopes with decidedly feminine handwriting in his desk drawer.
He had not seen Kay Corley since 1922, when he was fifteen and she a year older. Her letters brought back one of his sweetest memories, a dreamy Christmas afternoon in Clarksville at Aunt Mattie Marable’s. He remembered Kay’s beautiful strawberry-blond curls, and she remembered how handsome he was in his military school uniform. They danced all afternoon to the Victrola in the parlor, and at the end of the day, noting his moony expression, his mother jerked him up and said, “You do not fall in love with your first cousin!”
With no one left to object, the “dance” resumed 74 years later. Her husband, Bill, had been gone for many years. My mother’s death had sent my father into a deep depression. I give Kay’s lively letters as well as the prayers of Baptists and Carmelite nuns as much credit for his recovery as I do the miracles of pharmacology that his young psychiatrist prescribed.
Kay’s correspondence from Cuero, where she had moved to be with her daughter, invariably began with the salutation “Dearest sweet man” or “Honey.” They were full of picturesque recollections of relatives they shared and picnics in the Piney Woods and sometimes ended with resolve: “Let’s kick and wiggle as long as we can even if our derrieres aren’t quite what they used to be.”
I knew from another cousin that Kay’s health was at least as bad as my dad’s, but reading her sweet and funny letters (he eventually had me read them aloud to him) buoyed us both. During the four years of their “romance,” my father’s physical health steadily declined. At one point, I asked him if he’d like to see Kay. I thought some time away from his retirement apartment might do him good. I was prepared to make the trip from Texarkana to Cuero leisurely, with plenty of bathroom stops and lots of picnics along the way. His answer surprised me. “Oh, no, honey, I don’t want to see her. She probably looks just like these old women who live here. I like the way I see her right now. She’s sixteen, so lovely and graceful, a wonderful dancer.”
As he grew weaker, her letters piled up on his desk. He reproached himself for not answering them, an unthinkable breach of etiquette to a South Carolina-educated gentleman. He apparently wrote her one last letter the week before he died. When I cleaned off his desk after his death, on June 29, 2000, I found her reply.
My dearest, sweet J.Q.,
I have just received your letter marked finis, final, exit, deadend, point of no return. Of course, I understand it, honey. You closed the door, never to be opened again, my love. That is all right with me, but you forget that I’m a very diminutive person and I can easily crawl in a key hole and there I am—aha!
Do you think for one minute that I can’t realize the discomfort you have, the efforts to breathe that you are making? Oh, but I do and it breaks my heart. Certainly I’ll not intrude on the private battle you are having just to say I love you, sweetheart. If I have one outstanding trait, it is compassion. Thank God for that, but it means also that I hurt for you.
So now I’ll go quietly and tiptoe out of your life all the while thinking beautiful thoughts of the boy I loved once long, long ago.
Your devoted,
Kay
You’ll understand why I sometimes have to pull off the road when I flip through the stations on my car radio and hear:
Heaven, I’m in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can
hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.
"Cheek to Cheek" by Irving Berlin. © Copyright 1935 by Irving Berlin. © Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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