When my father was on the verge of death in April of 1986 I was called home from work to be with the family at his bedside.
By the time I arrived home my father, Thomas C. Nickels, an architect, had died to this world. He lay on his sickbed in the family den, a room that he had designed and built onto the house that he and my mother bought in the 1950s when they still had a young family. The den had a marvelous cathedral ceiling, bookshelves and an antique roll top desk where my mother would often type my father’s letters to his various architectural clients.
Dad had died about 30 minutes before my arrival, so the family was in the living room. Conversation was solemn and stilted. My mother embraced me, her eyes red from crying, and told me that I could go into the den to say a final good-bye.
Dad looked to be asleep. He had been very sick for a year and some months with throat cancer. I felt his forehead. It was still warm. I sat down and said a prayer even though I wasn’t much of a believer then. I stood up and studied him, felt his forehead again, and walked out.
Mom, who was upstairs with my sisters, told me that she had been with my father until the end. She told me how he had sat straight up in bed immediately before his death and looked wide eyed into space as if seeing something big.
The undertaker, I was told, would be at the house at any moment. Mom was staying upstairs because she did not want to be downstairs when they took dad to the funeral home. The last thing you want to see when you love someone is to watch as the undertaker zips them up in a body bag. I opted to watch the undertakers but the visual haunted me for years.
My father died in the split level home that he bought for his family when Frazer was an ‘in the sticks’ country town. There was a farm down the street and a cow pasture outside the kitchen window where the cows would sometimes wander up to the kitchen window as mom did the dishes. Sometimes the farmer would place horses in the pasture; other years he would plant acres of corn. As children we played in the corn and pretended that we were Scarecrows.
In many ways growing up in Frazer was like growing up inside an Andrew Wyeth painting.
Dad was the product of a strict German upbringing. He became an architect like his own father and even went to the same school, Drexel, to get his degree. He was a student architect when I was born. I recall his model houses displayed in the basement of our first row house in Drexel Hill.
He was not the kind of loving father that you often see today; loving in the sense of being openly affectionate. Fathers did not show their affection for their sons in that era. Today one sees fathers cuddling sons on trains, sometimes hugging and kissing them openly and freely, but in the 1950s that sort of behavior was reserved for mothers and their children. There was an unwritten ‘manly code’ that seemed to hold sway over fathers and sons then. One was “permitted” to kiss girls but not boys although my grandfather retained the old European habit of kissing every male and female relative on the lips.
As a small boy I had the odd habit of going through my parents’ bureau drawers when they out to see what secrets I could find. While rummaging through dad’s bureau drawers I found a stripped uniform that prisoners used to wear. Had dad been in prison? Quite often I would go back to his bureau to get another look at the uniform. Since dad had the uniform buried in the bottom drawer under a pile of sweaters it seemed as if he was hiding it.
What crime had dad committed? I assumed that mom knew what it was but she was keeping it under wraps.
Then one day during a family summer patio BBQ I saw dad wearing the uniform, which was actually a chef’s outfit with a complimentary stripped chef’s hat. He was laughing it up and flipping burgers on the grille.
I breathed a sigh of relief although it certainly didn’t put an end to my bureau drawer snooping. (Years later, I’d discover D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in my mother’s bureau drawer, hidden, appropriately enough, under a stack of silk stockings.)
Dad’s being an architect taught me to appreciate blueprints and his drawing board in his at-home office.
His being an architect meant that he had every manner of slide ruler, pen and colored pencil as well as wooden boxes filled with all manner of architectural extras.
The arts and crafts smell of his office put me in another world, and his art books (which included lots of nude Greek statues) sent bolts of electricity through my adolescent male veins.
Dad’s office was a place of reflection and study, a time out room from the world, a sort of scared space where he’d show me the design of houses or a neo colonial shopping center he was working on for a Main Line conglomerate.
We bonded when it came to architecture. He’d take me out and show me the houses that he had designed that were now in the process of being built. Sometimes we’d go to grandfather’s house and look at grandfather’s drawing board, and I’d wind up comparing their architectural offices while trying to decide which one was better. Thom Nickels
Thom Nickels
