The Name's the Thing
The characters from the Ghost and Mrs. Muir belong to 20th Century Fox and David Gerber Productions. I make no money off them and write for my enjoyment and hopefully others.
This story was written for Mary Casey's very important birthday of 2007, as I know this subject is very near and dear to her heart. Some references are from her lovely story The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship.
Thanks to Amanda for looking this story over before hand.
What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet
I have very few memories of my father. And some of those I am sure are actually other people's that I have heard so often I have made them my own.
I do remember that he was tall, had dark blond hair that never stayed in place and bright blue eyes. I know that he was tall and from years of biking, riding and rowing he was strong and well muscled. I know that he loved the outdoors--fishing, hiking, camping and he loved to travel. He was a whiz with a camera and played around with poetry from time to time. He always wanted to live by the sea and have horses.
I do remember him telling me a story about a prince who rescued a beautiful princess from a cave and together on top of his black stallion they rode to freedom along the water's edge. He would always tell how the horse ran and he would make the clump, clump noise, moving his hands up and down on my stomach, making me squeal with laughter.
He loved chocolate ice cream and pizza and hot dogs. He would rather have one more than a steak and I do remember how much he loved to barbecue. He and Mom would have their friends over all the time and the smells from the pit of roasting chicken, ribs and corn are some of my favorite memories.
I know that when my father died at the age of 33, no one was expecting him to. I'm sure it was the furthest thing on his mind as well. He was there one day and gone the next, a shock that took my mother far longer to get over then most people suspected. She sat dried eyed at his funeral and for many days thereafter, but I remember the nights she bawled, her face red and eyes puffy, always looking at the phone, waiting for it to ring. I remember clearly the day she put all of my father's things in several boxes and took them to her parent's attic.
She then took all pictures that he was in, and put them in a Whitman's Sampler box hiding it in the \back of the closet. When we moved to Gull Cottage a year later, the box came with us, but still lived in the back of the closet. It was five more years before she was able to look at them again.
I know from hearing others talk-grandparents, honorary aunts and uncles, friends, that my mother and father were very close and loved one another deeply. I found out later that neither one of them had ever expected to marry for love so when it had happened they had both thought it extraordinary. Aunt Janie told me that they had been engaged to others and thought of one another as a gift. I remember my mother and father walking hand in hand, touching with greatest affection, kissing whenever they could.
I remember when my mother was angry with him she would call him Robert and he would get what she called the bad boy face, but anger wasn't usually part of their world. I remember my father telling me that he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth and that he hoped that God would be as good to Jonathan and me.
I loved him and love him still and as a teenager I would often wonder what it would have been like if he had lived. Sometimes, I wouldn't like the answers I found for myself, knowing that we more than likely would not have moved to Maine, or lived in Gull Cottage. And that brings me to someone else I can't imagine my life without--Captain Daniel Gregg.
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My mother moved to Maine for two reasons she told me once. The first one being to get away from all the memories of my father and the second one to show her in-laws (and her parents) that she could take care of herself and raise her children the way she and Bobby had planned.
A journalism major, she had worked for the Kensington Star in college, a nice neighborhood newspaper which only served about 1,000 people, but helped her get an internship with the Philadelphia Inquirer after graduation. She married my father that same year and they lived in a small apartment close to the parkway, to happy to realize they really didn't have any money.
My father worked for his father's company and was constantly going to meetings in Chicago, Boston, and whatever major city my grandfather hoped to do business with. Keystone Manufacturing did and still does produce light fixtures. I came along a year and half later, and my mother's three months of maternity leave, turned into 12.
Jonathan showed up a year after that, just as she was considering going back to work and she just never did. She loved being a full time Mom and Daddy was doing quite well, so they decided she would do just that. (My mother's generation was one of the first to really have that option. My grandmother for instance would have never considered returning to work; I on the other hand, didn't have that choice. I still remember the guilt and frustration I felt living my three month old in the hands of strangers. Just shows how times change)
After my father's death, she decided to dust off her writing skills and see if it would actually be enough to support two children and one dog. She had had some short stories published during her marriage--Harper's, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, nothing earth shattering but she had enjoyed them and they had paid a substantial amount.
She enrolled in college classes to finish her master's degree and moved us to a small apartment, not unlike the one she had started her married life in. David King, the editor she had worked under at the Inquirer, gave her a start by letting her contribute to the social page and Harper's picked up a political piece she did on the upcoming elections and one thing led to another and she was convinced she could make a go of it. So, a year almost to the day of my father's death, we arrived in Schooner Bay, Maine and most importantly at Gull Cottage.
The landlord, Claymore Gregg was a funny looking man, or at least I thought so, and trembled whenever he got near the house. He insisted to my mother that it was haunted; something she laughed off and told him basically there was no way he was getting rid of her.
My brother kept saying the ghost of the original owner Captain Daniel Gregg was in the house and for the first couple of weeks, I will admit, I was scared.
My fright soon turned into more of confusion. Why if this great ghost as Jonathan called him was so great and wonderful and told the best stories and watched over all of us--why was he too afraid of me to let me see him. I still remember clearly the dark and stormy day he revealed himself to me, a day I will treasure always. It was the day; I became a very lucky girl. A girl with two fathers.
And yes I know what you are thinking. Two fathers? It sounds to me as though you don't have any fathers. One is dead and well the other one is dead as well. That kind of leaves you in the lurch. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
I will admit to having had a bit of a crush on the Captain after I first met him, but I think most little girls do develop them on their fathers. I know my oldest daughter was crushed to learn that her father was already married--to Mommy. Captain Gregg was everything I had read about in books and seen on late night television with Martha our housekeeper. He was Errol Flynn, Cary Grant and Rex Harrison all rolled into one. He made me feel special, and as a matter of fact he still does.
I remember he was always reminding my mother that certain things were not lady like. He didn't like it when she wore slacks into town or if her dresses were too short. But he seemed to encourage my tomboy ways, cheering me on when I broke the barrier and joined the boy's baseball team and then the boy's rowing team in high school. And he took my side on the jeans issue. I was 14 and it was 1974 and everyone wore jeans to school. Ever y one except for that old Penelope Smellyhammer and I certainly didn't want to be like her. But my mother for being quite the liberated woman thought that after a certain age, young ladies shouldn't wear jeans in public. It was a small battle and perhaps looking back now, unimportant, but He fought for my right to do so and I loved him for it.
Sometimes it was hard to remember all the good things he did when he would do something embarrassing--just like a father is want to do. At 16, I had my first serious boyfriend and I dreaded have him come into the house; knowing the Captain might be watching us. I still remember with horror the night that he came over to work on a history project and as teenagers with short attention spans and seething hormones, we started kissing and then making out. I know that Brian never did quite figure out what happened or how he got pulled back at least twenty feet from me. Or what happened to his glasses as they went flying through the air.
I didn't talk to the Captain for a week after that, and did a lot of general pouting. Mom tried to play mediator between the two of us but ended up being something closer to an umpire.
He came to talk to me at the end of seven miserable days and for some reason I listened. I'm not sure if it was the look in his eyes or the fact that not being on the right side of Captain Gregg was killing me, but as best as he could, he explained why he did what he did and then he said something I would never forget. "I'm sorry for embarrassing you and scaring your young man," he said, his left hand pulling on his ear, a sure sign of his nervousness. "But I feel that you are my daughter in many ways and I love you."
Of course I knew he loved me and I loved him too, but I seriously don't think he had ever said the words to me before. I assured him I loved him too and said I was sorry for ignoring him the last few days and we hugged. Touching for Captain Gregg was an ability he treasured and I know it made a very big difference in our relationships with him.
He liked and so did we the fact that the clasping of hands, a hug, or a tweak of the noise could demonstrate assurances.
"I am your daughter, I told him and I remember the look on his face, a memory that is forever etched in my mind. It was the first time I had ever said that to him, but I meant it a thousand times over. Ever since that day at the age of 10, when he took a frightened little girl and let her be a part of his world.
No, he isn't physically alive, but he is still my father. He came to all my games, invisible at first, but there, all my school open houses, (likewise), and came to hear my speech when I ran for sophomore class president. He did actually appear for my graduation, looking so wonderful beside Mom in his new suit, I smiled so hard to see them him I thought I'd bust. By then he and Mom had come up with a plan for the towns people and our relatives so that he and Mom actually were able to date and eventually marry. He fit into our world so well, that sometimes we forgot he really belonged to another. Not that it mattered.
Daniel Gregg has blue eyes, curly hair with red tinge and muscles in all the right places. He is handsome beyond words. Even though he has aged himself over the years to ease my mother's own aging process, she still maintains, that he is magnificent. And he is. His lifetime dream was to live in a house by the ocean with the woman he loved and be surrounded by family and friends. That fact that the second half of that wish took a hundred years after his death to come true doesn't bother him in the least.
I know it may sound cliché to you, but he was the one who read to me when I had the flu, the one who feed me macaroni and cheese when I had the measles and I didn't want anything else, the one who sat with me all night when I got scared watching a silly scary movie on TV, the one who taught me how to row faster than the strongest boy on the team and taught me how to make every kind of knot, faster and better than any of his men--a fact he would brag about long and loud.
He was the one who gave me ice cream and let me cry over my first breakup with a boy and helped me feel better about myself. He fought against his general dislike of humans to take me to the father-daughter dance my 10th grade year and he instilled in me a great love of the sea.
I loved my father and all the sweet memories I had of him, but I loved Captain Gregg as well, and I wanted to let him know that in a tangible way. When I arrived at my decision, I think my mother was surprised and then pleased and she backed me up when I approached my grandparents with the idea. But looking back on the eight years that I had lived under the same roof as the Captain, I knew that there was nothing I wanted more than to become his real daughter.
I went to my mother first. I was only 16 and therefore had very few legal rights as a child and none as an adult. I knew that she loved Captain Gregg just as much or more than she had my father. I also knew that at times she wrote under the pen name of Joy Gregg, (because Carolyn means a joyful melody). I also had figured out by that time that she and the Captain considered themselves to be husband and wife in every way and that when he talked to his friends or strangers for that matter, about Jonathan and I, he would refer to us as his children. But I wanted to be a Gregg, 100.
Mom got all teary when I asked her about it and she hugged me tight and told me that my father would have been very proud of me. "Good." I had breathed a sigh of relief," because I'm not saying I don't love him or want to remember him, I just feel that I want the Captain to be my legal father. Dad can't do that anymore."
And so we began the long and tedious process of me becoming Candace Marie Gregg. I knew it would be hard, but hadn't actually realized how difficult it would be. But since I wasn't marrying the Captain or being adopted by the Captain there really wasn't any other way to be the Gregg I desired.
To change my name legally would involve filling out papers, a large sum of money I didn't have and didn't feel right about asking my mother for. I knew that even though by then she was a successful writer, that money did not grow on trees. And if Jonathan wanted to join me, then it would be double. Not to mention because we were both under 18, well 18 for him, 21 for me, our grandparents could actually say,' no, we forbid it' and I was sure that not even the supreme court would argue with either Ralph Muir or Bradford Williams about anything.
I had just about given up, the Captain telling me, that I would always be his little girl and not to worry when I found this gem in a legal book at the Castine Public Library. It was a book of antiquated, but still legal laws and I jumped up and down when I read it. Most state courts have held that a legally assumed name (i.e., for a non-fraudulent purpose) is a legal name and usable as their true name, though assumed names are often not considered the person's technically true name.
It was good enough for me. And it wasn't as hard as you might think. Mom went to the principal before school started that fall and explained to him that I would be using the last name of Gregg from now on. If he thought it strange, he didn't say so and apparently had talked to my teachers because in the homeroom roll, I was listed as Candy Gregg. The only person I remember ever saying anything about my choice was Penelope Slughammer and when she made a not so kind remark about my Mom and Captain Gregg, the new boy Ben Adams, stood up for me and we started dating just a few weeks later.
And if anyone should ask you, using a last name as your own does work. When I took my college entrance exam with the last name of Gregg, no one batted an eye and my acceptance letters were likewise addressed to Candace Gregg. My driver's license also bore the name of Candace M. Gregg and my social security number--which means the government considered that to be my legal name.
Shortly before my 18th birthday, Captain Daniel Gregg and Carolyn Muir were united in holy matrimony and two weeks later, I became Candace Marie Gregg again. Jonathan also became a Gregg using Muir as his middle name.
Among my colleagues and patients I am Dr. Gregg and have been since my first job at Keystone General. Even when Ben and I were married in 1987 at Schooner Bay Presbyterian and I legally became Candace Marie Adams, I still went by Gregg in my practice. Ben doesn't mind, he says it's who I am.
We have had five children over the years; Robert, Amy, Marti, Lyn and John; all of them bearing the Adams name. But our oldest son carries Gregg as his middle name. I feel that in this boy, I have a tribute to the two best man I've ever known. Both of them my fathers, both of them loved, and both of them mine.