Free Only in Naples by Katherine Wilson Page A

pool. He swam with no bathing suit. “It slows me down,” he would tell us.
    Ed Wilson didn’t like to be slowed down by anybody or anything.
    My father grew up rich in Chicago. His grandfather, Thomas Wilson, was a captain of industry who had immigrated to the United States from London, Ontario, at the turn of the century. He worked his way up from cleaning manure in the Chicago stockyards to becoming president of the third largest meatpacking company in America. As president, he changed its name to Wilson and Co.
    A lot of the canned meat that was unloaded by American GIs in the Bay of Naples and given to starving Neapolitans during World War II was Wilson. The hams baked by my maternal grandmother in a small West Virginia town in the fifties were Wilson.
    My great-grandfather, instead of throwing away the cowhides and intestines of the animals, started producing footballs, baseballs, and tennis rackets:
We use every part of the pig but the squeal!
was the slogan. Wilson Sporting Goods was born. Thomas Wilson made the footballs that American kids played with and the hot dogs their parents grilled.
    Little Ed was the first grandson, and he had everything he could ever want: his own horse, a chauffeur, tickets on luxury liners to Europe at the age of nine. After Princeton and Oxford, he got his PhD at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, where he met my mother, at a reception for new students in 1967.
    “He looked like a Kennedy, but fat,” she told my sister and me.
    When she became Mrs. Wilson, Bonnie Salango gave up her job at a Washington think tank to become a full-time wife and mother. My father was at the Department of Commerce, where he worked with the Bureau of East-West Trade to investigate market opportunities in Eastern Europe. My mother accompanied him to places like Bucharest and Sofia, and at home cooked Italian American meals for pudgy communists.
    A
think tank
? I now wonder. A
government job
? The two of them could have taken their Bonnie and Ed show on the road; they could have fought it out in an Edward Albee play, or started a puppet theater for underprivileged toddlers. We would have been better off. But they both had advanced degrees, and they both shouldered lots of parental expectations. It was 1970, and they made “respectable” life choices.
    I was embarrassed by my father, always. He couldn’t get in a taxi without speaking some exotic foreign language with the driver; he couldn’t be served at a restaurant without making sure the Czech waiter saw his imitation of Václav Havel. While the dads of our friends at the country club wore bermudas with little frogs or ducks on them, my father wore a tie that Romanian dictator Ceau s¸ escu gave him (“I’m telling you, Bonnie, the guy likes me,” he told my mom, who ignored him) with sheer white bell-bottoms. Ed Wilson needed to be at center stage—he had to be
noticed.
With his clothes and accessories (an obscure Central Asian medal of honor from the last century, an antique walking cane that he didn’t need), my father begged to be asked, Where did that come from, Ed? Tell us the story.
    My mother hated the way he dressed. She called his see-through pantwear
diaphanous.
    That particular evening, she had told my father that there was no time for him to swim, much less to swim bare-assed. My father paid her little mind, shouting as he dove in, “There is absolutely time, and I can’t hear your screaming underwater! Ha!”
    Splash.
    Despite her anger and embarrassment, I think my mother felt some genuine, if vindictive, joy when the Polish ambassador rang the doorbell and she escorted him outside to see my father freestyling in his altogether. I remember her crouching down with a grin at the end of the pool to catch her husband when he came up for a breath. “Your ambassador’s here. Aren’t ya gonna come say hi?”
    Who knows, maybe this kind of vaudeville-meets-
Deliverance
was just what