Here was my opportunity to uphold the Howard-family tradition with integrity and dignity. With not a little smugness about how open and frank I was being with my daughter, I launched into pretty much the same speech that my father had given to me.
Disaster. Bryce burst into tears, fled the living room, and ran to my wife, Cheryl, screaming, “Mommmm! Dad told me Santa’s not real!”
Once she finished consoling Bryce, Cheryl stormed into the living room. “Why did you do that?” she asked me.
“That’s what my dad did when I was her age,” I said, raising my hands in innocence. “What was I supposed to do, lie?”
Cheryl was firm: “Yes, Ron. Lie! She wants us to keep the lie alive!” She then announced to Bryce, “Your dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There is a Santa.”
I was ordered to walk back my words. Which I did.
Bryce, who I suspect was already wise to the entire charade and was enjoying the exercise of emotionally manipulating her parents, simply looked at me and said, “Oh, good.”
ANYWAY, THE FIRST year that Clint and Dad were returning for Christmas from Florida, Mom was determined to double down on the decorations. I was conscripted to be her lieutenant. We got the tree up, put all the seasonal tchotchkes out, and hung some lights in the bushes in front of the house.
But the night that Clint and Dad were landing at the airport, Mom’s probable OCD kicked in, and she decided that we had not made a grand-enough statement. She wanted to outline our porch in string lights the way that Dad usually did. I tried to talk her out of it because this would entail getting up on a ladder to nail hooks into the house’s facade, and the weather outside was uncharacteristically rainy, chilly, and slippery.
Mom remained adamant. I grew worried. “Mom, let Dad do it when he gets here,” I pleaded as she dragged our stepladder into place and gingerly began to climb it. “Mom, I’m taller than you now, I can do it, please!”
“No!” she barked back at me. She was atop the ladder now, her flower-patterned blue muumuu whipping in the wind, a lit Kool clenched between her lips. This was no joke. She was getting emotional. “Your dad and Clint love Christmas,” she said. “Rance is going to be here any minute and the decorations are going to be finished and it’s going to be the best Christmas we’ve ever had.”
Rain was now falling heavily, streaming down her face and extinguishing the cigarette. I had no choice but to step off the porch and stand beneath her, ready to catch her if she fell. But she objected to this, too. “Stay on the porch and feed me the lights, Ronny!” she said. “I don’t want you to get sick.”
None of this made any rational sense. But I did as I was told, and, by God, Mom finished the job, stepped back, and beamed at the outcome. She then ran into the house to dry off and quickly pull herself together. When Dad and Clint arrived, she looked fantastic. She ran out and embraced her husband, and they shared a long welcome-home kiss under the twinkling lights.
12
The Injustice to Sandy Koufax
CLINT
Mom up on a stepladder. That image endures in our heads for a lot of reasons beyond the holidays. Our parents were do-it-yourself people. We never had a cleaning woman or a handyman. If something needed doing, Mom and Dad did it. Including house painting.
We always had cans of paint in the garage, ready to go should Dad feel like taking on a home-improvement project. But these served a purpose beyond sprucing up 346 Cordova Street.
See, Mom had a superstition. Sometimes, Dad struggled to get acting work. Unlike Ron and me, who were working constantly, he had cold spells where he simply couldn’t land a part. We’d hear him mouth off to Mom about “that son of a bitch” actor who beat him out for a role in The Big Valley, or that casting director who was “going on my list, Jean,” for not putting him in Mannix. If the cold spell was short, a matter of a few weeks, Dad bided his time writing scripts, and that’s when we’d see Hoke Howell come over to hang with him and bat ideas back and forth. But when things got ice cold, and Dad went months without an acting job, Mom did the most ingenious thing: she broke out the paint cans.