It is a cautionary tale...The rest...start to finish.
[[[The cards in all the stores and the ads in all the papers are cheery and warm. The poetry of the day is primitive and heartfelt. But it's a picture of a father I don't know anything about. And there must be millions of Americans on this day who pay lip service to the same myth, make the phone call (if the phone call can still be made), tart themselves up in a fondness they don't feel except out of respect for appearances. They strike the right posture, they say the right things, they smile, they nod. "Yes, dad, how are you?" Or, "poor dad, we miss him so. Dad taught us the lessons, he gave us the strength. Good old dad."
---Then they treat themselves to a stiff drink and think, "You old bastard, I beat you."
---My father was a handsome man, tall and proud and thin. He was a woefully hard worker. Yet he was shy in an almost pathological way. He hated to meet new people --- he hated to do anything. He truly enjoyed nothing. He had no hobbies. He didn't care about sports. He never built anything. For a while, he planted things, but, there was no joy in it. He held, he nursed, he cultured grudges --- against his colleagues, against his wife, against his children.
---He was terribly unsure of himself; he was terrified of losing his job, or of being undercut or made to look foolish. For a time, he was quite a success, but he could not live with it. He had everything you were supposed to have in the '50s --- a house in the suburbs, four kids, two cars. Yet, he took no pleasure in any of it. He had impossibly high standards for us, but worst of all for himself. I think he'd been damaged severely his own father, by all accounts a vicious, alcoholic old patriarch who thought his children were worthless. My father took this pain and simply passed it along. In the end that, as much as anything, killed him.
reply
share
Culburn (3638)
6 years ago
---I think we were secretly pleased when he died. He was drinking almost constantly by that time and if he hadn't had tenure they would have let him go long ago. He was in all kinds of trouble it turned out, with the IRS. He was spending money crazily, and we didn't know what on. His disappearances lasted longer and longer. So we could all say we saw it coming and we could all say that maybe at he'd found some peace from whatever it was that was chewing him up.
---It was, however, a squalid death. (((he'd been tossed out of 14 stories up)))) There was an element of ambiguity to it. There are certain sections of any city where you don't go late at night if you want to stay alive; he had been there often. He had a secret life, in other words, and it was a soiled, pathetic secret life, like an ending to an O. Henry short story as it might have been imagined by Edward Albee, which seems at first to solve everything but really solves nothing.
---The piece in the Chicago paper was a least circumspect, though you could read the code if you knew it. "University Professor Slain in Robbery," the headline read (and working for a newspaper, I knew just how laconically the item had been handled by editors, how small a deal it was, how it filled a hole in today's Local section, and tomorrow somebody else's death would fill the same hole) and went on to relate that two young men had lured him to an apartment and killed him there; they had been arrested rather quickly, one of them nabbed at the bus station where---he must have been a real piece of sleaze the stupid sucker---he'd actually been wearing my father's seven-year-old Timex.
---My brother had it the worst. Nobody else was home , and they reached him first, so he had to go down to the morgue to make the ID. He said dad didn't look too bad, it wasn't gory, it wasn't anything like the movies. He also saw the two guys they arrested. "Just crackers," he said. "worthless crackers."
reply
share
Culburn (3638)
6 years ago
--My dad's only surviving brother came to the funeral, as did quite a number from that that side of the family. They are prosperous farm people from a semi-rural, vaguely southern state where, I'm told, the family is locally famous and huge, with the cousins and uncles and sets of aunts spread all over several counties. My dad had hated that, fled it, and brought us to the city. And so seeing my dad's brother that weekend for the first time in 20 years was a real shock. He was a stockier through the body and much stronger. And he had a farmer's temperament ---his heartiness, his love of weather jokes and folksy sayings---and he was touchingly naive about what had happened to my father in the city and would not --- could not, I suppose ---really believe it. Yet for all that was different about him, his face was shockingly the same. It scared me a little. I've been invited out there a hundred times since and I always so no and I always will.
--The service, conducted by unctuous university chaplain, was mercifully brief. He asked us to remember dad at his best. I tell you I tried. But I have never understood what little dark thing hid inside that man. When I tried to remember the good things, I thought of all the other things too.
--I guess he loathed himself so deeply that he loathed everything else. He hated it when his kids failed and he resented it when they succeeded. He never let my oldest brother forget how second-rate he was, what a disappointment he was and then, when Phil went out and became a success, dad used to hold up to the rest of us as an example.
--When he drank - and it was often - he turned grotesque. He loved to hurt people when he was drunk, because he didn't have the guts to hurt them when he was sober. When he drank, all sorts of terrible things gushed out. He'd say anything to anybody.
--The last several times I returned homed, with my pretty wife and my good job and my healthy pleasant life he was simply gone.
reply
share
Culburn (3638)
6 years ago
---"I think he was cremated. I don't even know where the ashes are.
Yet I saw my dad a few days ago in some pictures. It was all there: the receding hairline, the thinning hair, a peculiar thickness between ear and crown: the funny way he had of cocking his head and squinting when he listened; the awkwardness of the body, held in tightly, the body of a man never truly at ease. The slight paunch, the sloppy clothes. He is holding a child---a son---and it's hard to read much from the relative postures of the figures. There's some awkwardness there, a little tension. The kid has a pugnacious handsomeness, a wildness to him, and the father is clearly a little unsure about the whole business---he doesn't know where to stand, where to yield.
---But I like to tell myself there's some love in that picture too, and, I hope, enough to build on. Because it's my dad's face all right, but, it's also mine, and that's my son I'm holding.]]]
- "Father of Darkness" - an essay by Stephen Hunter
reply
share