Fiction is often a mixture of biography and speculation, of fantasy and fact. We sometimes take moments from our own lives and see where else they might lead. Sometimes the elements reveal the times from which the story was written. Sometimes a story written years ago as a warning to the future, from that future looking back, shows how close we came.

Just such a story is Father’s Lead Underwear, which appeared in The New Scribes, Vol. V, Nos. 1 & 2, 1980.

---

My Father was crazy. But he was right. How can you be crazy and right, both at the same time?

Easy.

Well, not so easy, but let me tell you about it.

My Father was a typical eccentric here in a country where eccentrics are not at all typical. He seemed to feel things deeply in ways very special to himself. He took the world personally, couldn’t understand how everyone else ignored his concerns.

He was always ahead of his time. Before the days of smog pollution, he worried about the cleanliness of the air. He recognized that the healthful properties of the atmosphere reached their peak during the night when a cold pure blanket of air settled with the dew, invisibly in the darkness. So he arranged a kind of tarpaulin gazebo enclosed on three sides just beneath his bedroom window. He would crawl naked over the sill and climb outside into bed. There was an adjustable canvas roof rigged to be raised or lowered and he would pull on the ropes and snuggle under waterproof drop cloths and watch the stars. My Mother, with the patience of a saint, kept the bed warm while he did his deep breathing exercises. Frequently they were awakened by pre-dawn showers.

Then there were the labor-saving devices, designed to free us from drudgery. Pots and pans are a case in point.

“Why should we fill our cupboard with so many utensils, always transferring food to pans just to heat it up, and then have to clean everything afterwards, washing all that soap down the drain?” He was also a pioneer in water quality control.

In those days, before preservatives came into their own, we ate much of our daily meals from canned goods. Now here’s where the inspiration struggles toward genius – Father took a roasting pan, covered the bottom with an inch or two of water, arranged the opened cans in rows in their hot bath, and popped on the lid. The first time was a disaster. The labels steamed off into the water and the gummy vapor saturated the food. We ate the stuff – never waste food – were promptly sick, and gave the whole process the re-evaluation we felt it deserved.

The next step corrected the minor defects. We peeled off the labels, scraped and scrubbed off the glue, then managed to heat the contents without incident, though it took longer and of course used more gas than mere cooking in a pot would have done. He cleaned up the roaster too, just to be sure, because “you never can tell….”

But that’s not the end of it. Father looked at the cans which had been so laboriously prepared in the interest of simplicity, and thought about having to do that again for the next meal.

“No,” he said. “Why should we throw away perfectly good cans when all we need to do is save these and transfer the food?”

So…to avoid the trouble of washing pans, we ended up washing cans, which were much harder to clean. And…of course you can see it coming…next meal we peeled and cleaned and scraped the new cans anyway, “to be sure we’d have enough…” In a few weeks there were cupboards full, and when they began to rust, we cleaned them. I couldn’t begin to calculate how much work we saved ourselves.

Some of his ideas were more practical. He set up a simple laboratory in the bathroom and did periodic water tests before allowing us to drink or bathe. Several times a week we would use only boiled water, with iodine added, one drop per glass, as a supplement. I never liked the taste. Iodized salt later made this seem unnecessary.

He was constantly calling the water company to alert them to some dangerous outbreak of typhoid or dysentery, graphically discussing his own internal processes and comparing his test results with theirs. If they took him at all seriously they may have tightened up their qualitative procedures and averted real disasters. He’s convinced he stopped a Salmonella epidemic, and I think so too. He could be very impressive on the phone.

Before any thoughts of bio-degradability, but while newspapers were still being collected, my Father put an embargo on our use of toilet paper. By so doing, he imagined a splendid isolation stretching across acres of virgin forest which he alone was preserving for all mankind and mankind’s children. When questioned uneasily about practical alternatives to his restriction, he snorted impatiently, “Use your hand.” The practice never gained currency among the family. A word to him about the consequent excessive flow of soap was enough to dissipate his enthusiasm – what is one to choose among so many evils? He forgot his injunction; distracted, he had already found something else. The Crusades were a thousand years behind him, but the Age of Great Causes has never come to an end.

But you want to know about the lead underwear. When the world goes mad, you find what personal protection you can. Woven lead strands of aluminum-coated filament, zipped into a cloth cover and worn testiculously. The cloth and aluminum were to prevent lead poisoning and overheating. Apparently he had been reading again. Or a thoughtful friend had suggested possible dangers. Or he remembered some of his high school chemistry and physics. All designed to insure healthy children. Four of us. Counter eugenics balanced by population pressure. Springing godlike as if full grown from the head of Zeus, we were shepherded into the world by those plumbic loins.

He turned his attention to milk, investigating every local dairy. He was attracted by the sound of Whittier Sanitary Dairy, visited their facilities to evaluate the truth of their claims, and came home pronouncing them the most scrupulous of all milk purveyors. He even took a job driving a milk truck so he could be near his heart’s delight, the bastion of sanity and cleanliness.

Periodically he tested samples from every company of all the raw and pasteurized commercial milk products. When Strontium 90 reached his awareness, he bought a Geiger counter and considered giving up milk entirely, but finally allowed himself to restrict our family consumption to the productions from carefully selected pasturage.

Insecticides terrified him. Torn by the obstinacy of non-viable alternatives – we must have freshness from our food or die, but we must not die from the nature of its preservation – he attacked bananas with a passion. “Look! After two days, brown spots appear, evenly spaced over the peel. You just know evil things are working their way into the fruit.” Oranges were dyed, cucumbers were waxed, apples were sprayed. The selected alternative was to scrub everything with detergent. The flavors persisted on the complaining tongue. Lysol became a staple part of our diet.

It was not enough to guard all bodily intake against unwanted foreign substances. The very environment became an enemy. Fluxes were in the air, cosmic exhalations permeated day and night. My Father finally found his métier and let his neuroses feed and cluster around it.

The panic and paranoia of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, when we color coded our national dangers, the red menace, the yellow peril, produced a construction boom among the subsidiary concerns of swimming pool manufacturers to meet the demands for individualized fallout shelters. At last! Here was everything his dreams could have fashioned, a microcosm, self-contained, aware of and defensive against the dangers that beset us on all sides, no matter our vigilance, waking and sleeping, against the invisible rays, death that comes to us all equally in perfect universal democracy.

Not for him were the weekend shelter sitters, partial practitioneers, loading and unloading their rifles in readiness for that terrible and thrilling moment when they would shoot down their neighbors to preserve their own claim. Not for him the simple paranoia of nuclear destruction, the hasty investment in concrete and yards of earth, the family savings lost in the jeopardy of economic existence. No! On such neighbors he looked with disdain. His own obsessions had come to full flower, rooted in the Heart of the Matter. The danger was now, not at hand, already the vanguards were sweeping the earth, radiation was altering our processes of living, mutation was before our very eyes, out of control. Birth defects, cancer, leukemia, these were outriders of the host, the shadow staining duration with a dark annihilating storm. We must fight for our lives.

We had a basement. A concrete pit, stairs through the kitchen. Ready-made. This became our home. Modifications. Layers of aluminum and lead foil under the roof, lining the attic, the ceilings and floors. Cellar vents were fitted with a sophisticated system of baffles, surprising the air to enter unscathed. The most carefully selected items of food and water were stockpiled under the steps. Beds were moved in. We were moved in, and there we stayed. Crouching in the dark, the lights turned off, that artificial band of the spectrum of radiation which only wanted intensity to join the x-rays and cosmic rays lurking in wait among the shorter frequencies. Even daylight, even the sun was not quite to be trusted.

My Father is dead now, buried beneath our feet. He will dissolve himself into our lives and this small created world as long as eternity lasts.

We seldom come out anymore. There seems so little reason to. I have been encouraged to marry and have children of my own. But I am afraid; as I look about me I see how far it has progressed. It seems as if I alone remain in health. But even so, perhaps not enough. Not enough.

My Father was crazy. He wore lead underwear. But he was right.