Ric Frede
Photo copyright Fritz Wetherbee, used with permission
Obituary
Memorial fund
Memorial service
We held the memorial service at the Peterborough Town Library on Saturday, August 14, 2004. A number of remarkable friends and family came, and we thank you for your generous presence and snacks.
For those of you who missed it, here is the speech I offered, plus memories from others. If you'd like to offer a memory yourself, please e-mail Ari at arifrede [AT] mac.com
This is my wife, Gail. One of the things that never stopped hurting was that Dad didn’t live long enough to see us marry. He did meet Gail. She even flew him to Chicago as a birthday present to me last year. He happened to be the first parent we got in touch with to tell that we got engaged. He said, “Congratulations! …And whatever you say to the lady. …’Good luck?’” Dov and I grew up with special lady friends, not girlfriends. By the time I knew him, he was sort of a southern gentleman version of James Bond, a groomed Renaissance man who once had a pilot’s license and shared the #2 table at the Pump Room in Chicago with George Plimpton and Gloria Steinem, but also listened to Morning Pro Musica and let his kids stay up late only to watch the end of The Spy Who Loved Me.
Dad’s life was exciting and he made it exciting. Dad wanted to be a writer since 2nd grade. Actually, he said he knew he was a writer since 2nd grade. Professionally, he didn’t do anything else. A lot of people know that he garnered an academic success at Yale in his senior year, becoming Scholar of the House at his college. Given extremely free rein of his education, he did what a lot of young scholars do in his position and studied life outside the book, so in the penultimate chapter he had to take the year-end test; not a big surprise considering he was in college, but he didn’t prepare well for it. If I remember rightly, he had to retake the test. He published a short story in Harper’s soon thereafter and was spotted by Random House, who quickly published his first book, Entry E. Two books later, having already spent time at the MacDowell Colony, he had his bestseller in The Interns, which helped him move up to Peterborough at 473 Old Street Road, my first address.
He designed his own house (the one which still stands there) with modern detail. It was rectangular and set partly inside a hill, but the colors and materials he chose helped it cooperate with the bucolic hills. He added a darkroom next to the garage and a studio upstairs divided for design and drawing, reading, painting, and writing. Importantly, he made space in there to share with Dov and me, and let us do our homework at his writing desk, typing our own work next to his manuscript. He stuck the living room on top of the kitchen like an open cage. Built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves supplied worthwhile material for the parties you attended, the homework I did, and the good arguments we all got into. (By arguments here I mean the question-based ones, not the disagreement-based ones, because I was always right in those.)
He wrote an autobiographical story about his move to New Hampshire when it was still recent. In it, he had to scatter the ashes of his father, Henry, and he wanted to do it in the woods behind this house. Unfamiliar with the area, he did what all of us did when we realized we lived in New Hampshire, and armed himself with a hunting knife and a pistol, and set out without much more than a jacket. It snowed and he was touched by the beauty of what he was doing and where he was as he trekked deeper into the woods. After he scattered the ashes, he kept a moment for solemn meditation, and then turned to go home. The snow had covered his tracks. The sun was almost gone. He tried to follow his path, but it was covered by more snow quickly. Eventually, in the dark, he found a road and walked at its edge, toward oncoming traffic, I’m sure, because he always insisted it was safer to walk so the drivers could see you coming at them, although in this case, he was coming at them with a hunting knife and a pistol. He was offered not a single ride in that blinding snow storm and made his way home without help.
Despite this first impression, he found a loving and very kind home in Peterborough. He was dedicated to helping the Colony, raising a family, coaching our soccer teams, writing about coaching our soccer teams, getting almost optioned for writing about coaching our soccer teams, and encouraging me to join the ludicrous ranks of those who believe in the Red Sox and the Tooth Fairy.
Did you know he wrote every single day? If he was ever so ill that he couldn’t write, he noticed it and mentioned it to me when we talked. Of course, what he’d do is add it to a list of things that he was going to talk to me about at the end of the week, lest he forget anything. Gone was the pilot and the rascal! Here was the cautious, everything-written, everything explicit father. A few years ago, I got sick of it and said I wanted to have whole conversations with organic material in it, not just the list. He sounded surprised but anxious to start. We had a good relationship after so many years of dealing with the divorce. Now, my father was not much of a practicing Jew, and I began learning late. The observance of the high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur asks us to digest the past year slowly and deliberately. Some Jews even make important apologies to people they’ve offended in order to clear the way for the next tick of the clock. I thought about this a lot, especially considering our new conversations. I called Dad and carefully worded my apology for not calling enough, for not being as close as a Chicago-based son should be. He supported my growth in Judaism, but was much less of a practicing Jew and a firm believer in a Judeo-Christian tradition (did anyone else notice the Santa hat and Christmas decorations at our house?). Instead of accepting the apology, he called me out. He said he thought I was searching for something to apologize for, and didn’t I say this same thing to him last year, anyway? Our relationship was good, he said. There was nothing to apologize for. In the same era as this call, I asked him to describe his father. “Distant,” he began. I asked what he thought of our relationship, and he said that we were closer than he had ever imagined he would be with his sons. Dov, he especially meant you.
I cannot talk about life or death for very long without referring to Our Town. Dad believed that after death there was simply nothing, almost like the third act. (Actually, Thornton Wilder was generous with his version of afterlife, giving a folding chair in the middle of a yard to think about tiny, tiny us.) I do remember talking about death with him many times, including in 1985 when he went in for open heart surgery, and again as recently as last summer, when he warned me he was starting an important medical treatment for his heart, which unfortunately didn’t work out the way we had hoped. We scattered his ashes at MacDowell Colony, and we’re saving part of him for a clandestine trip to Yale and the original Entry E at Timothy Dwight College. Please don’t tell. Although it will be unlike him, he will not be asking permission before this mission.
Perhaps the worst thing about this memorial service is that Dad didn’t RSVP. He was always so careful that I took it to mean he had other plans. Here we are, throwing this big surprise party for him, and he can’t come. Since he’s not here, I’ll tell you what he’d be doing today. First, Dad would have wanted Edwards as the candidate. Today he’d be calling people back at a women’s prison where he was in the research stage of his newest novel. I discovered pages of vocabulary he was copying down carefully from his subjects, and I’m certain that he would have used those terms in some phone call to me, just so he could add that he learned that in prison. When he sat down to do this work, Karen, he would have had pictures of you, Bob, Fred, and Jocie all right over his writing. He kept us close. I probably would have called him today, and Mom, he didn’t ask about you because he respected a rule I made long ago about that, but I know that he cared to know what was going on with you. Bob, he had a folder of your correspondence and articles that he had printed and kept at his desk. Hank, you would have stopped in to visit, and he would have been overjoyed. He would have filled the special wine glass you liked, and I’m sure he would have given you the glass himself if he’d had the chance. Now, the Sox don’t have a game until tomorrow, but Byron & Cynthia and he would have discussed whether the game was important enough to risk watching. Dad always told me that the only reason they ever lost was when he actually watched the game, so there’s one reason for optimism this season. And another thing: Dad lived to see the greatest World Series that never was, the Boston Red Sox vs. the Chicago Cubs, and since that’s the closest God will ever get to seeing that race, too, I know he would have done what all of us would do this year: Fill ourselves with denial and ask for another punishing season.
So that brings him to tonight. I can guess that his dinner, as good as it would have been, would have born the Frede family trademark of too many spices and too much of each one. Perhaps with this cold spell he would have made sausage chowder, depending as always on Roy’s homemade sausage. Or minestrone. Or garlic-stuffed baked tomatoes over rice. If you ate with him, you probably asked for a recipe sooner or later. And speaking of his kitchen, Dorothy and Walter, he loved his relationship with you, and he loved the apartment. I understood a lot more about his warmth for that place once I cleaned it out. It is really upsetting to walk in on a man who has died, as we all do, in the middle of everything. Annagreta, he had to return another damned spy novel and would have asked about Glen when he saw you. Edith and Peter, there were pictures of you he had not yet developed on his dresser. I want to tell all of you that he kept you near. His was a populated memory.
I will have a lot to think about when I start unpacking these boxes of incredible photographs, manuscripts, artwork, literature, poetry, slides, sculpture, letters, and stories. I will see all of you in them, and myself, and Dov, and Mom, and Aunt Karen, and I will see how he pictured us. One of the earliest lessons I learned about art from him was that these are never just stories about someone, these are stories by someone. When he named a character after you, or put your own words in his book, he was embracing this whole adventurous life he created, and quite aside from the house or plane or music, it was a life you were part of. If he took your picture, know that if you had not been there, he might not have picked up the camera in the first place.
Let me tell you about the undeveloped rolls of film I found on his dresser. Of course I was excited to take it in. This was archaeology and psychology and art all wrapped into one! I found a number of things. Photos of the Colony, snapshots of friends and one of the local springtime festivals (since when did Francestown start bringing in alpacas to celebrate township?), and then a couple of rolls of him photographing at his best. I found a series that began indoors. He aimed the camera out the old warped glass toward the back yard next to the Contoocook River. Then he started chasing the image. It was a bland, trite picture of winter. I could tell that he saw something, but had not yet gotten it inside the camera. He took the camera outside and recomposed the shot. He reframed it again and again, then changed the exposure. There it was, finally. My dead father led me again to show me art, one hand on my shoulder, one pointing straight ahead at what he saw. Along the bottom was a sprawling, monolithic floor of snow that extended, uninterrupted, off the sides and bottom of the picture. The top half was equally sprawling, a snow-frosted thicket of brush and tree, tangled, bony, unwelcoming branches running this way and that all the way off the print. But nestled in the center, he had made appear a bowl-like alcove. There sat a summer table. The wind had blown a couple inches of snow on one side of it. Three chairs were tipped against it, reserved, covered on one side by the wind’s snow, and a blue umbrella posted in the center, still folded, waited for your visit in springtime.
Click here to see these photos. Big file, not recommended for slow connections.
Greg Prestopino's memory
Marcia King's memory
Recipes of Ric's
Creme Brulée
Korean Fish
Putanesca sauce
Sausage Chowder