Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father's Wars (21st Century Essays) - Softcover

Passanante, Joy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814254241 ISBN 13: 9780814254240

Publisher: Mad Creek Books, 2017

Synopsis

A 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver Winner for Biography

Against the backdrop of World War II, Joy Passanante’s touching new book, Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father’s Wars, is the saga of a wartime medical unit, a passionate long-distance love, the making of a surgeon, and two first-generation American families. Told through her father’s eyes—drawing on hundreds of his letters to his beloved wife, his four-volume wartime diary, and his paintings—Passanante masterfully recreates his wartime journey and physically retraces his steps more than sixty years later in an attempt to understand a time in her parents’ lives that they’d spoken about very little.

More than just a World War II story, Through a Long Absence delves into one man’s past to explore his personal wars: a stint as a child bootlegger, a marriage between newlyweds separated by continents and strained by years apart, and his struggle late in life with his own mind. The narrative propels readers to surprising places—from a freight train through North Africa to an underground St. Louis distillery during Prohibition, from a young couple’s forbidden courtship to the chaos of surgical tents under fire in Normandy, from an underground trove of priceless artwork hidden by the Nazis to Jewish New Year services in Paris a week after its liberation. Through a Long Absence is a love story, an honest look into one man’s life, and a daughter’s moving quest to rediscover her father years later through his own words.

About this title

About the Author

Joy Passanante has been publishing in three genres for five decades. She is the author of The Art of Absence, My Mother's Lovers, and Sinning in Italy.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chevy Chase, St. Louis, Missouri, the 1990s

Every morning of my yearly summer visit, before the sun could warm the water, I’d wake up in the room of my youth in the bed with the blue ball-fringed canopy and dust ruffle and immediately don my bathing suit. I’d sail downstairs, out the recreation room door, toward the pool. By then, my father, Bart Passanante, had already hosed down the patio and tile that rimmed the water and moved the redwood lounge I’d been occupying for a score or so of summer visits. He’d place the lounge close to but not under the shade of the Japanese maple in the pool garden. That way, he could maximize my sunlight before the heat and humidity could sink their teeth into my skin, scorch and drain me in turns. As the heat deepened, he’d pull my perch into the shade so that my view would be the daylilies that trumpeted out every day with the precision of a metronome.

Whenever he entered the pool garden on his rounds with his bucket and hose and rubber fishing boots and hoes and weeders, I stared at him, relishing his idiosyncrasies. He poked his grass here and there with what looked like a pronged stick. When he glanced up from his work and saw me looking at him, he dimpled up. He paused from time to time to straighten his back and admire his zinnias and cacti garden, and, if I was there in June, the daisies, which were my wedding flower and which he always timed to bloom when I was back in St. Louis. Occasionally he gestured to show me a plump worm of the sort he used to dig up when he took me fishing, or a sprig of poison ivy. We smiled at each other, and I was happy to be in his presence.

From this seamless-seeming bank of pleasure-days, my memory proffers me two hours in particular, both scenes tinted with the preternatural brilliance of Technicolor. Scene 1: I am perched on the lounge next to a small redwood table, a splintered leg of which my father has bound up with a generous hunk of the adhesive tape he once used in dressing the wounds of his patients. He is nearly deaf by then, and I usually need a pad and pencil to communicate clearly. Though I always keep these supplies at hand when I know I will be with him, and they are now on the table, I seldom use them. We never seemed to need to say much to each other.

Writing away on an idea for a novel, I’m only vaguely aware that he has ducked into the house. When he returns to the patio, he’s toting a stack of worn-looking books. He sets aside my notepad and pencil and lays down the books. At first I don’t recognize them.

“Did I ever show you my war diaries?” he asks, his voice a little uncertain since he can’t hear how loud he’s talking. I shake my head, feeling the sting of shame at remembering a Christmas night when our annual holiday party was waning, when he wanted my sisters and me and all our friends to listen to him read from his diaries, and we, deafened by our youthful narcissism, chose not to. Shame, too, at the fact that I am relieved that he doesn’t seem to remember. Knowing what I know now, I can hardly believe that I felt relief at the desertion of his memory.

“Would you like to see these?” he asks sheepishly.

“I’d love to,” I say, raising my volume. I pluck a book from the pile. It’s not a diary but a photo album with black-and-whites meticulously organized and labeled, stuck with black photo corners. As I begin to thumb through it, he beams, then resumes his tour of duty around his lawn.

I spend the better part of the month immersed in these books, and, sometimes when I glance at him puttering in his garden, rubbing the moisture from my eyes.

Scene 2: On the last day of that summer’s visit, Diary Volume 4 propped up on my knees, he comes up behind me, startling me.

“I don’t suppose you would want to have these someday, would you?” he asks, pointing to the pile on the table. I look askance. How could he even think I wouldn’t want them?

“Of course,” I shout so he can hear. “We all would. Anyone would.”

He nods, though I’m not sure he has understood my exact words. But he has certainly read my expression.

“Well, if you want them, I’d like you to have them,” he says. Since he can no longer hear his own voice clearly, his words emerge a little unsteady, and some of the syllables crack and lilt up a timbre. Before I can rise from the lounge to throw my arms around his neck and yell directly into his ear, he disappears around the fence.

He still had his memory then, and I like to think he remembered giving me that gift of gifts that afternoon under the Japanese maple even after he could no longer remember my name.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mad Creek Books
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814254241
• ISBN 13: 9780814254240
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 314