Progenitors

The name Harris Rosedale spread terror among the city’s seventh-graders, especially its boys.

Harris drove from auditorium to lunch room to assembly hall, bringing a library of recorded music with him.

He offered a program of dance lessons targeted toward mothers concerned about the social graces of their children. He priced his product shrewdly — nearly every kid would be trapped. As many as a hundred left feet might walk into one of Harris’ classes.

He devised a method to match partners randomly, but the prettiest and the most athletic among them cheated and would end up together. The tallest girl invariably was paired with the shortest boy.

The first principle Harris impressed on the girls and boys is that the male needs to take charge. He taught the boys to lead by placing a hand on the small of his partner’s back. By holding a girl’s right hand he could telegraph which moves she should anticipate.

No one questioned that idea that only one partner could lead.

Neither Harris nor the children had any way of knowing that their generation would usher in profound changes on the dance floor — and in every part of the lives women and men shared together.

Soon there would be fewer hard-and-fast rules about who should lead and who should follow. Each couple would decide which moves, how much contact and what kind of coordination, were right for them.

It never occurred to the old-time, song-and-dance man that he should to spent an evening teaching his students how to dance alone. It didn’t matter. They would learn to do that on their own.

But it turned out that he was a ‘complicated’ man — at least that’s how the doctors described him.

Her brothers brought him home from the ‘glass house’* to meet their sister. That was thirty years earlier.

He was a thrifty, hard-working, unassuming, church-going man. And even though he chewed tobacco, everyone agreed he was swell.

So they married.

He was good to their boys and except for penny-ante poker, he didn’t gamble. There were no women. But it turned out that he was a ‘complicated’ man.

He had lost his mother and was raised as an only child by aunts who scorned his father and his father’s religion. He could be heard shouting back at them decades after they died. He couldn’t lay them to rest.

As newlyweds, the couple had been familiar with alcohol. The young woman’s father gave dances during Prohibition; her family bragged he could physically pick up and bounce two drunks at the same time. Her husband ran hooch out of an elevator in a downtown hotel.

By the time their second boy came, the man’s diary described how he and his crew carried hip-flasks while sorting mail on train cars. There was a photo of him bleary eyed during a labor event. He frequented distant taverns to hide his growing habit.

Alcohol and undetected diabetes tricked the chemicals in his brain. His outbreaks led doctors to prescribe electric-shock therapy and the courts signed off, twice. There was a fall from grace. Nobody knew what to say.

Don’t stop reading.

It turns out the man was as canny in choosing a spouse as his wife had been in choosing him. She refused to see her good and decent man as a damaged soul. She never wavered. She made sure her boys appreciated that their father, despite his afflictions, gave them full bragging rights. The family held.

The man outlived his wife by about a year. There was beer in the house after she was gone but now it was ice cream he turned to for comfort. He kept Eskimo Pies in the freezer.

* glass production had been a thriving industry in western Appalachia

He and his son would be together on the drive home. He had rehearsed what he was going to say.

The young man got into the car and punched his radio station as usual. Halfway home the man turned the music off to be sure he had his son’s attention.

“You’re at an age when you can get a girl pregnant. I guess you know that, right?” he began.

“They taught us that a few years ago.” His son said, looking out the window

“Questions?” The man asked.

“I’m good.” The boy said.

“Okay, then.” His father replied.

They both reached for the radio.