Father’s Day Fever

I was passing through the kitchen one night when my father, alone there, called me over.  Then he did something very unusual.  Well past the time when I thought such a thing could happen, he picked me off the ground as if I was still a toddler and hugged me close.  Then, lips to ear, he asked me a secret.  “Tell me,” he said softly, so as not to be overheard elsewhere in the house, “that you will love me no matter what I do.”

I found his words more mystifying even than his lifting me off the floor.  I didn’t understand them as foreboding.  After all, he was my dad.  I remember pausing to try to figure out what he was talking about before I answered him.  Nothing came to me, and all I could think of to say was, “Sure I will, Dad.”

I was 10 years old.

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In many respects, my father was a standard 1950s-issue American dad.  He was a U.S. Navy veteran of World War II, entering service in 1942 after his college graduation.   He served as an officer on warships in the battle with Japan in the Pacific Ocean and–as with most of the veterans of that war–spoke little of his service in the years that followed.  After the war he came home to Indiana, joined the family architecture firm begun by his father, married and started his own family.  By the end of 1953 he and my mother had four children aged six and under.  Ours was a conventional family for the era:  Mom gave up her career as an executive assistant to manage the busy home front, while Dad worked hard in the family firm, very often six days a week, designing buildings and supervising their construction in our small city and around the state.

His parenting style also closely fit that of the era.  My father was not an emotional or expressive man, and he didn’t spend much time with his kids.  But he was unquestionably the head of the household, the breadwinner and chief disciplinarian.  What times he did spend with the children were infrequent and highly structured.  These included attending Sunday Mass and taking very occasional road-trip vacations–to Michigan, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts.  While the former was basically a rote activity, I recall the trips fondly as times of exploration and fun.  To the child I was then, this all seemed normal, the way things should be, as if inscribed in nature.  My father was manly parenthood itself.

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But at some point in the middle of elementary school, I came to feel that I wanted something more from him.  I wasn’t aware of developing this feeling.  Instead it came upon me suddenly, an emotional surprise, one warm spring Saturday afternoon when I was 10 or 11.  Unusually, Dad had stayed home that day to do some yard work, and Mom had decided at the last minute to take all of the children to a movie downtown, one of our favorite events.  That’s when I surprised everyone, including myself.  I announced that I didn’t want to go to the movie.  Instead, I wanted to stay home and help Dad pull weeds from our flower beds.  And I already had learned to hate that kind of work!

I simply wanted to be with Dad, and even more so to be alone with him, to share this activity especially with him.  Although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I wanted to know him better, and have him know me better.  And so we pulled weeds that afternoon.  I don’t recall what we spoke of while we worked, but I know I enjoyed the time with him.  Just as we finished our work on our hands and knees, Dad leaned back, reached into his pocket and pulled out two quarters, not a small sum in those days of penny candy and dime sodas.  He handed them to me and thanked me for my work.

I was stunned.  The money was nice to have, yes.  But I hadn’t stayed home and pulled weeds to earn money!  I had stayed home to be alone with my father, to share more deeply our lives in some privileged way.  And he had simply monetized our exchange, as if it had been simply an employment matter, like getting my weekly allowance for doing my regular chores.  I was too young to fully process my hurt, but I certainly felt it.

Not long after I had a related experience of disappointment in my father, although on a quite different front.  One of my younger brothers and I had gotten into a fight with a neighborhood kid, and he had handled us both.  I went home humiliated and came upon Dad in the living room.  Again I surprised myself, this time by fairly yelling at him through my tears, “Why didn’t you teach us to fight?”  He said nothing as I stormed through the room.

I was beginning to compare dads, if in narrow, traditional male ways.   I knew other dads who taught their sons to fight, to fish and hunt, to play sports.  My father showed no interest in teaching his sons such things, or in having them coached by others.  My mother introduced us to such sports as we were introduced to, and she preferred non-contact sports like swimming, golf and tennis over the higher status sports basketball and football.  In the basketball-crazy state of Indiana, I failed to make the 8th grade team because even then and there I didn’t know that you had to dribble the ball if you wanted to move around with it.

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By then the real trouble had already begun.  My father had started not coming home nights.  Early on, this behavior had some cover:  that he was working overnight to complete architectural designs on deadline.  But soon enough the ‘deadlines’ came more and more frequently and often involved several nights in a row, and the cover dissolved.  He was dating and staying with other women.

My experience of this was awful.  A year earlier I had convinced my parents to let me move my bed to the playroom of the house because I wanted to escape the tiny bedroom I had been sharing with my two younger brothers.  Because of the design of our modest ranch house and driveway, the family entrance was through my new bedroom.  I’ve always been a light sleeper, and so I woke up every morning knowing whether or not my father had come home that night.  As a result there were so many mornings that I awoke with a knot in my stomach and aching for my mother’s growing pain and humiliation.  Divorce was not an option for my Catholic mother, nor was escape for me.  I was in sixth grade.  And I had promised my father that I would love him no matter what he did.

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The consequences of his endless betrayal deepened with the passing of months and years.  A very private person not given to revealing her grief to friends, my mother instead put me in the role of confidante, sharing her pain and humiliation with me though I was a grade schooler.  (In her later years she sometimes slipped and called me by my father’s name, long after their divorce, which he had had to initiate.  The slips suggested that she had replaced him with me as someone not only to confide in, but also as someone to rage against, as she irrationally did on many occasions in my adulthood.)  But at that tender age I was powerless to do or say anything about her great pain, least of all to speak to my father about his awful behavior.  Between his many sexual sorties, my family carried on as if nothing were amiss, attending Sunday Mass, celebrating graduations and holidays, participating in the routine life of our community.

Behind this show of normalcy, I withdrew.  I kept my own counsel, not even sharing what I knew and felt with my siblings, to say nothing of my friends.  I ‘quit’ school by ceasing to do my work and watching my grades erode.  In its place I retreated into fantasy play alone and watching late night comedy shows to all hours on school nights (unobserved by my parents because the rest of the family slept at the other end of the house).

Once, when I was 15, I finally did something proactive.  One night, out riding with an older friend who had his driver’s license, I spotted my father in his Volkswagen bus in the parking lot of one of our family’s favorite restaurants.  He was speaking with a woman who was standing outside the bus, and I immediately assumed nothing good was happening.  He hadn’t been home for several days.  When I arrived at our house minutes later, my mother met me in the playroom, very agitated about his long absence.  And in a first for her, on that very night she said she was going out to look for him.  I told her I would go with her.  Then I decided to out him, to a point.  After we got into her car I told her that I ‘may’ have seen his VW bus at the restaurant.  Here I hedged things–I did not say that I saw him, let alone with a woman.  But I was ready for my mother to find him (and her) and to confront him publicly.  I was willing, finally, to have it–something–be blown up.

We did not find him that night.  He had moved on by the time we reached the restaurant, so we drove around the city to no avail.  Again he did not come home that night.

What I did find was that I had lost respect for my father.  He had been ruining my mother’s security and sense of self-worth for years already, and inflicting on his children hurtful emotional and material losses (as he was spending money on other women).  At a life stage in which I needed guidance and support, my father was absent.  In a period in which I needed to acquire youthful maturity, he had rushed me into a particular kind of adult hell.  And what right did he have to discipline me, given his major moral failures?

Not long after our nighttime search had failed to find him, my silent moral and emotional conflict with my father came to a sort of head.  One Saturday afternoon we found ourselves alone in the dining room, where he was chastising me for some recent failure of mine–probably to do an expected chore.  As I listened to him I became aware of resentment heating within me.  HE should judge me for something like that?  I replied with a disrespectful comment, not about his infidelity–I didn’t dare–but instead with some sort of sideways rejection of his authority.  He approached me with that look in his eyes, and I was ready when he swung his right hand around to slap me hard in the face.  Without thinking, I blocked his assault with my left arm.  But as I did so, a dark thought formed.  If he comes around with his other hand, I’m going to not only block that, too, but I am going to start swinging back with my fists.

He didn’t throw the second blow.  Instead, he simply turned and walked away from me in silence.  Maybe he saw my eyes.  Though he was still larger than I was–I was a stick figure of a boy–I had been ready.  I might have been proud of standing my ground, but instead I was only saddened and perplexed.  Where was my DAD?

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He finally moved out of the house and initiated divorce proceedings in October of my sophomore year in college.  Now I was perplexed to be saddened.  Years of daily angst–Would Dad come home tonight?  How would Mom be?–had come to an end.  But this final break seemed to extinguish a wisp of hope I hadn’t realized that I had held onto:  that I might one day find my father.  But for the rest of his life he never made amends for nor even spoke of the mayhem he had visited upon his family.  It was as if he never recognized it.

After the divorce, my father remarried and moved around a lot, living and working in Chicago, Southern California, and Iran before the 1979 revolution there.  In our outward behavior at least, we reconciled and visited with each other over the years that I was building my own family on the East Coast.  There were no more eruptions like the one in our dining room years before.  Instead, we hosted each other at our homes, laughed at stories, shared meals, almost as if we had erased the past.

A remarkable thing happened in the latter years of his life.  Having been diagnosed with cancer and beyond the reach of conventional treatments, my father called to ask me to come to California to help him make his funeral arrangements.  I was surprised to be asked, since of all of my siblings my relationship with him had been the most fraught.  But I went.  He and I visited the mausoleum and made all the arrangements–his wife was unable to participate in this as she found it too fearful.  At his home I asked him what he thought about as he anticipated his death.  He replied only that he thought of his children and how proud he was of them.  He began to inherit me with artifacts from his life, including those from his architectural career.  I refused some dear items, telling him he should keep them because the new experimental treatment he was undertaking might heal him.  Because I was still teaching classes at the university that spring, and coaching my own son in Little League baseball, I couldn’t stay long.  But I was taken with how momentous the occasion was and how it had brought us a bit closer, even if his reply about his children had struck me as well off-key.

He recovered and lived another 12 years.

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I don’t remember ever celebrating a Father’s Day with my Dad.  Oh, I regularly sent Father’s Day cards cross-country every year, but each time I felt the irony in the gesture, mixed with a twinge of pain.

The last time I saw my father was several weeks before his death.  He was in care and mostly bed-bound and easily tired by then.  The cancer had returned for a final time and he was fading.  My wife, son and I had a brief but good visit with him.  As we prepared to leave his room that late summer day, my wife bent over his bed to hug him, and he wrapped his left arm around her shoulders.  Then my son did the same, and so did my father.  Finally, it was my turn.  I bent over to hug him and . . . he lay there, motionless.  No return hug.

I left his room that day dry-eyed, and grateful that my wife and son had made me a father.