Picture a gray Mercedes. No. Erase it. Because what you’re imagining is, maybe, a new model, big and expensive, a sedan cruiser, a power car. But what I’m remembering is a 1953 model, 1954, built before I was born at any rate, and floated across the Atlantic to New York, my father’s toy. Nobody we knew had a Mercedes then, and in a way it didn’t mean much, at least to me; I thought it was just another car, like a Chevrolet.
But it wasn’t: it was my father’s car. In a way, it was my father. Even the license plate, which he kept for years and years, until they began calling them vanity plates and started charging for them, and he refused to pay, and then, a year later, regretted, carried his initials, AA 121.
I would sit in the car in the narrow driveway beside the house, in the driver’s seat. I was very little, but I was learning what things were and how they worked. The car was made so long ago that there was a starter, a little black button in a chrome circle, and a choke lever that you pulled out and eased back in as the engine began to breathe. The steering wheel and the handle of the steering column gear shift were of ivory. Well, ivory-colored plastic, but I didn’t know the difference then. The steering wheel was hard and ridged, with teeth like those on a starfish’s arms.
The seats were upholstered in channels of red leather. And because we were little, the Mercedes-Benz people had made rear windows that went only halfway down. And because we were little, there was clear plastic over the rear seat, and sometimes I picked at it where there was a hole. And I sat behind Dad, because I was Daddy’s boy, and Robert, after Robert was, sat behind Mommy, because he was hers. He looked more like her, dark hair, brown eyes, round. Dad was round too—fat, even—but we never counted that—only sandy hair and lighter eyes.
And we drove. To Howard Johnson’s for dinner. To Carvel for ice cream cones. To the Chinese laundry, where they gave us lychee nuts at Christmas. To the supermarkets, Waldbaum’s, Bohack’s, and to Aunt Pauline’s.
And, for a while, life was simple, with a simplicity that has so unimaginably, so unforeseeably disappeared from every place but my memory. Still, for a while, it was simple and easy, and there were four of us, and we all knew our places.
But places change. Was it in that car that Mom drove us away when she decided to leave? It was certainly that car that Dad drove into the city to see us. Twice a week, at first, Wednesday nights, for dinner at cheap diners or Tavern on the Green, and then the endless, rolling ritual of alternate weekends, Friday nights giving way to Saturday mornings, and then the trips into the city to Sunday school and back out again.
A car of tension, a car of barter, a car of negotiation. A car of carefully timed streams of one-way conversation, of revelations, gossip, and dropped hints. A car of predictable headaches and unpredictable delays, of the 59th Street Bridge and the commercial, yeasty aroma of Silvercup Bread as we wound down the spiral ramp and into the lost borough of Queens, with its blacktop and roads and the grungy, seedy air of the early ’60s that never left that entryway, and the Long Island Expressway, and Chinese restaurants and deli and bagels and Nova, of cream cheese and tomato juice and trips to the nursery, with vague memories of Mom hanging in the humid air. A car of anxiety, of unshed tears, of noses blowing. Not a car of love, in any sense but the lawyers’, but a car of “If he doesn’t bring you home by six p.m. on Sunday, I’m calling the police.”
And, too, the car in which I got older, in which the questions changed from “How is your mother doing?” to “How’s your social life?”, each with threats, and fears, and semigloss of mutual deception and revelation, and my despair, for none of it ever really came right. Even the games, the vacations, the road trips and the maps: everything had a glaze of family pretense, an eye on the clock, a foot on the brake, a worry about the spare. And things did go wrong in that car—a flat, or a jam, or a loss of way, a signpost missed, a deadline broken, a motel that didn’t turn up, or one that charged too much and went down, like a warning, in the little travel planner.
The car itself changed over time, became another Mercedes, became Uncle Henry’s ill-fated white Peugeot, became the silver Toyota Celica which, like Catherine Parr, survived its master, the Celica that suffered the indignities and embarrassment of diabetes and its onset of blindness, the car that held a line of others captive behind it as my father, in the arrogance of his fear, drove with reckless, painful hesitation even when he had no right to, even when he should have admitted that it was no longer his time to drive, the car I drove him in to his girlfriend’s funeral, when I got lost and he got angry.
Gray or white or silver, though, it was always the same car, its oil changed and tires replaced, the car I was never meant to be a man in—never the man my father was, nor the man he wanted to be, a man always in motion, a man on wheels. A gray Mercedes, no, not a new one—but a little, rounded, quiet thing that ran and ran and ran, a car that ran, finally, not on fuel but on memory, and devotion, and duty, and need, a car of quiet and broken dreams, the car that was my father’s—his car.
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Peter Lewis Allen has published on a wide variety of topics, from sex and disease in the Middle Ages to his unlikely experience as a chauffeur for Donald Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Chaucer Review, LIT Magazine, and elsewhere; his scholarly books were published by the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago Presses. Allen has studied creative writing with Lew Hunter, Robert Towne, Luis Alfaro, and Wendy Wimmer. He holds degrees from Haverford College, the Université de Poitiers, the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), and Wharton (M.B.A.). He’s taught at many colleges and universities, including Princeton, Pomona College, USC, Yale-National University of Singapore College, and Hult International Business School. He lives in New York with his Singaporean husband, Ching Jet Heng.
Story © 2025, Peter Lewis Allen
Photo © Alvin Allen
Halfway Down the Stairs 