Portrait of My Father as a Young Man

I remembered my father only in fragments. My mother re-created him for me.

His Mother Remembers

I had never dated, in my disreputable life, a woman with a child, and I dreaded women who seemed determined to have one. I did not want a child, the way I did not want fuzzy pajamas, dishwashers, neckties, sensible cars, department store credit cards, multivitamins, running shorts, umbrellas, goldfish, grown-up shoes, snow skis, and most cats.

I saw her, and I forgot.


I love women, but I had seldom been plagued by the debilitating kind of love other men went on about till it was just nauseating. My attention span, in romance, was that of a tick on a hot rock. Then I met her, and landed with a thud on the altar at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. "I have children," she told me, and I am sure I heard that, must have heard it. But by the time I regained what sense I had, I was driving carpool next to a ten-year-old boy who, for reasons I may never truly understand, believes I hung the moon.

I guess it is natural that, in the company of the boy, I almost always think of my father. I didn't know him well. If you add up all the time I spent with Charles Bragg in my life, as he tore in and out of it, it comes to only a few months, not even one whole year. I remember him in fragments, because we left him too soon, my mother and I and my two brothers, and still not soon enough. In the last year of his life, alcohol was the only sustenance he ever cared to receive. As the TB squeezed his lungs and the cirrhosis ate his liver, he followed his family from afar, from twice and three times removed, asking friends of friends and kin of kin about us. He missed my mother badly, but by then too much damage had been done.

He died in 1975, when I was 16.

There was no more time left.

But with the weight of a new boy tugging on me, I went to find my father. I did not believe in ghosts, though others did. The writer Willie Morris once told me, as elegantly as anyone ever did, "There is no place you can go he will not be." I didn't want to rewrite my father, or whitewash him. But the man I knew was not all that he was.

I wanted to know the other man, the young man, the young husband, the young father-to-be before I came around, the man who would one day have a son who needed him. It might open my eyes a bit, help me improve my view. Help me understand why everything I did was so rich in consequence. And my mother, Margaret, now in her 70s and with a past that was hard to relive, helped me find my father by remembering.

Man, I wish I could have seen him. They say he was slick and pretty in '55, and when he leaned against his black-and-pearl '49 Mercury in his white Palm Beach suit and cherry-red necktie, he looked like he got lost on his way to someplace special and pulled off to ask the way.

He always stole a red flower for his lapel—what magic, to always steal a red one—and cinched up his pants with a genuine leatherette imitation alligator belt. His teeth were too good to be true, long and wicked-white, and he wore his wavy, reddish-brown hair swooped up high like the Killer, Jerry Lee. It turned black when he combed it back with Rose hair oil, and when he fought on the streets, leading with his right, punishing with his left, all that hair flopped into those blue-flame eyes. My father only finished sixth grade, but he was drawing good government money then, as a Marine, and drove home every weekend from the base in Macon, Georgia, with one thing on his mind.

He liked to pose on the square and see the girls sway by, but he wouldn't whistle, because he'd already found the one. "He smiled mischievous," my mother remembered, like he was picking life's pocket, like he was getting away with something just by breathing air. He was just another lint-head kid, but different from the other men she knew. When it was time to leave the square, he slid behind the wheel and turned the key, and he looked like an angel, one of the fallen kind, as the big engine caught fire and he vanished in a blue-black, oily, noxious cloud.

"His car burnt a lot of oil," she told me. "It burnt so much oil that a cloud followed him around town. People used to laugh at him. They'd say, 'Here comes that Bragg boy, in a cloud of smoke.' They ought not to have laughed, though. People are mean."

All these years later, my mother remembered for me and defended him. She had not defended him in 40 years. She also remembered him, sometimes, on his knees.

"It was about four months after we started seeing each other," she said. "We were at Germania Springs, and he was getting a drink of water, laying on his belly on the creek bank. You could drink it right out of the creek back then, and it was good and cold. Well, he got a drink, and he turned and looked at me. 'Will you marry me?' he said. And I laughed at him and he got mad. I think he cussed a little too. But I mean, who asks somebody to get married while they're on their belly getting a drink of water? 'You're kidding, ain't you?' I told him. He cussed again. He said, 'Hell, I was serious. Will you marry me?' But I giggled again. I couldn't quit."

She has tried to forget so much, it seems odd to try to remember. But she can still see him pushing himself up to his knees for a little dignity. For a second, just a second, he faced her on one knee, like in a storybook.

"I mean it," he said to her.

His face was bright, burning red.

"Will you, or not?"

He was not a marrying man.

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