For My Father

I wrote the original draft of this last year for Father’s Day. The one posted here has been substantially revised.

It was a gift for my Father, the first I had ever given to him.

The essay’s development goes back as far as 1990. I wrote a related version during a Memoir Writing class I took about 5 years ago. Then parts of those two essays went into the Father’s Day piece written last year.

With time, the following will be enlarged, given more detail, and further revision. I look forward to a smoother and more fully developed version.

I offer this current draft in observance of Father’s Day.

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For My Father

I didn’t know my father. He abandoned my mother when I was about six months old. I never saw him again until I was five. He visited once, and at twenty-six he was a man broken by life and dying of Hodgkin’s Disease. I spoke to him on the phone maybe once or twice in the years before his visit. Odd, now that I think of it. I remember my mother speaking with him for hours on end, and I remember thinking that I would like to talk with him too. But that rarely if ever happened. For the gentler words which my mother spoke about him in front of me were that his failures weren’t his fault, what could anyone expect, after all, from ‘a man whose mother sends him fifty dollars a month for cigarettes while he is sitting in prison, and we don’t have money for rent.’ To this day, there is a recording I hear clearly in my head, a song I can get her to perform live if I push the right buttons: “What really got my goat was that Madeline could buy him cigarettes, spend her money on booze, and I didn’t know where the rent was coming from, let alone money for milk. You would think the woman could have at least have bought milk for her only son’s daughter.” The repetitions, the intonations, the story line are the same today as they were decades ago. A recording she played so many times, that when properly queued she repeats it without variation.

I also knew by way of the story line, courtesy of my mother, that once when he was drunk and she was pregnant, that he had pulled a gun out on her. And I knew by virtue of the same story line, that she had threatened to kill him if he did it again. I knew that he wrote poetry and letters. They were kept in a large rectangular cardboard box, many of the sheets stuffed inside were a thin pale blue colored parchment, and I could see his rounded cursive scrawled over pages and pages, some scrawl was in blue ink, some in red, some in pencil. My mother talked about what a gift he had for writing, too bad his life was such a waste of talent, such a tragedy that he could never make anything of himself because of that selfish, money loving family of his, nothing but a bunch of alcoholics, parents who sent him to military school because they didn’t want a son, and that the only person who had ever really loved him other than herself was his grandma Mary. Then one night during a rage she threw all of the sheets in the cardboard box into the fireplace, one fistful at a time, as I stood watching the blue parchment burn and go up in smoke. And I knew from her stories that he once fed and clothed a homeless drunk, an incident my mother subsequently built into a monument devoted to his inherent goodness, an act which revealed the person behind his bad behavior, his innate kindness being the reason she made a disastrous decision in marrying the man who then sired her only child. “I can’t say nothing good came from the marriage, because I have you, and you are all that’s left of your father.” One of her many repeated truths, frequently folded in among the invariable narratives.

But my mother’s stories were pale phantoms and far removed from substance. “Father” remained one of those elusive realities which gave other kids a home, the kind of home I conspicuously lacked: working father, emotionally stable mother, siblings to play with, a place to live where the walls weren’t painted with chaos and shame. “Don’t tell anyone your father is in prison.” “Don’t mention the word divorce.” For my mother was a god-fearing Christian (fear being the operative word), and her failed marriage to an alcoholic who would later be convicted of armed robbery thrust on her more complexity than dogma could bear. Consequently, silence was golden. Most important, it was the golden rule governing a household of secrets, in which The Gospel became the primary modus operandi of denial. Notwithstanding being told that I was “just like my father” when I misbehaved, I had little idea of what a father, or even my father, might be like in flesh and blood. When I saw my friend’s fathers while playing at their homes, they seemed to me an odd puzzle, an inaccessible reality that made me nauseous, a physical reaction which began in my stomach and constricted up through my throat, though I never dared say as much to anyone. Sometimes in church on Sundays during the Lord’s Prayer, I tried imagining “our Father who art in heaven,” but my stomach tightened as the emotional void grew larger and larger. I learned to make “Father” an empty concept, distancing myself from those pangs which made me physically ill.

According to my baby book, my first spoken word was “Dada.” But any connection I had to that person was severed when he went AWOL not long after those syllables left my mouth. No surprise that I was uncertain when he visited those three irrevocable days when I was five. Suddenly, I had a father, and his substance gave my life a previously unknown dimension. For three days, I was my father’s daughter, no longer living in a world of phantoms and stories; he was more than just a mysterious presence on the other end of the phone to whom I was denied access. He had arrived in flesh and blood. But my knight didn’t show up on a white horse. He arrived with three suitcases. Two were filled with countless brown bottles–experimental medications for Hodgkin’s, I learned in later years. His diagnosis was a death sentence in those days, his decision to be a medical guinea pig a last ditch attempt to leave something of value after his death. He was gaunt and perhaps the more uncertain of the two of us. For if I had never been a daughter, he had never been a father. His life had been bereft of responsibility, and his final request of my mother, to visit his only child, must have been the most difficult pill he had to swallow. For he had abandoned his daughter, the only vestige of him which would remain in the world after his coming death, having now only a few days to connect to his flesh, the child whose first words put him in the center of her world. He was, it seems to me now, awkwardly and painfully aware of his ill preparedness, but not aware enough to understand its consequent devastation on my life. Death, connection, regret for a life poorly lived, finally drove him to act, even if in fledgling ways. Foresight would have told him and my mother that a brief visit before his death would irreparably damage a five year old. But my father was a dying man grasping at straws, and my mother’s weakness was her much too handsome bad boy husband, the never do well to whom she could never say “no,” more than ever in his death. I recognize now that the last thing he wanted was to stay with my mother, underneath her roof and close to her habits. Rather, he wanted to be the father he could never have been in life: this was his only shot at something resembling fatherhood.

I remember vividly his visit to my classroom during first period, after he took me to school the second day of his brief stay. That ten minutes that he quietly spoke with my teacher in front of the class, for the first time, I joined the ranks of my classmates. I, too, had a father. “Who is he?” a couple of kids asked. And when I answered, “that’s my Dad,” an unfamiliar pride filled those yawning spaces of emptiness to which I had grown accustomed. Any questions my peers may have had as to why my father was there during first period talking with my teacher during school hours have slipped from my memory. I remember only him standing there, talking with my first grade teacher, smiling at me every so often, proud of his daughter, equally proud of his burgeoning fatherhood. During those moments, I watched the house that shame built vanish, and I saw a home emerge on the horizon. Of course it was an ephemeral construction and doomed to collapse. But born in those moments, to my hopeful eyes, there was an artifice resembling home. After school that same day, he picked me up, and we drove for an ice cream. There was a small mom and pop gift shop across the parking lot from the ice cream parlor. It was one of those shops whose dusty glass shelves are stuffed with over priced bric-a-brac which rarely sells. I easily persuaded him to step in. Among the painted tea cup sets from China and plastic, jointed dogs from Korea, I found three objects I couldn’t live without: a mermaid doll with a purple silk fin, a sleeping tiger kitten sewn on a royal blue velvet pillow, and a play make up set. These were my father’s gifts to me, acquired with the newly found magic words, “Please Daddy.” His legacy to his only child. And unlike my mother, from whom I had learned early on not to ask for anything, because she hated children who begged and money didn’t grow on trees, my father enjoyed buying these three treasures purchased with two priceless words. But three was the limit, because “we don’t want your mother to get angry.” And with these words an unspoken, mutual understanding arose between father and daughter.

The following afternoon was to be his last, his visit cut short for reasons which were never clearly explained at the time, though I was to learn later from my mother that he simply couldn’t deal with her expectations and demands. I had been told that our time together would be for a week, perhaps longer. But his abbreviated visit lasted just two nights and three days–well, two nights, one day, and two half days. And his last afternoon provided the specters which subsequently haunted my life, more than all the others which appeared with time. Late that afternoon, I was called into the living room by my mother. My grandmother was cooking dinner in the kitchen. My mother and father sat on the thread bare sofa against the living room wall; I stood behind the Naugahyde sofa perpendicular to them, which separated the living room from the kitchen. My mother told me that my father would be leaving the next day. “But I don’t want him to leave,” and I did the forbidden, I begged. Then I cried, I begged and cried, then begged and cried, and all I could think as the hole in my stomach expanded so quickly that I thought I would burst, was that I wanted her to leave and him to stay. My father looked down, his shoulders slumped, unable to look me in the eyes. My mother sternly said to me, her temper rising with my every plea, “there are things in this world you just can’t change. Be quiet and go to your room, now.” The matter was quickly settled with my mother’s iron fist, as my father sat impotent against her thinly reined in temper. Surprisingly, as much as these images haunted me growing up, the loss, the sense that somehow I wasn’t good enough, the anger and hatred towards my mother, and her hard wisdom forged from poverty’s fire and bequeathed to me in a moment’s frustration, what I never recognized until thirty years later, was that everything after those moments is blank. There is no memory of what follows. I don’t remember going to my room, don’t remember crying in my pillow, don’t remember eating dinner or spending the evening with my father. I remember nothing, unusual for a child with an almost photographic memory, a hypersensitive with an overly acute awareness of her environment, one who can set these images down with a clarity as if they happened yesterday–the worn corners of the avocado green Naugahyde couch, the defeat in my father’s face, my mother’s impatience brewing beneath the surface waiting to explode, the crackling of the fry pan in the kitchen behind me, and the thick smell of cheap grease and onions permeating the air as my grandmother cooked dinner. Everything after that moment is empty, and where those hours disappeared, I don’t know.

The next morning we drove my father to the bus station. The weather was oppressively hot and the air was difficult to breath. The Greyhound depot was relatively empty. We sat waiting for the bus to load. I watched the large depot clock over the ticket counter tick off the seconds. The atmosphere between my mother and father was tense and thick with emotional odors unrecognizable to a child. I asked my father if I could have a candy bar. My mother emphatically said “no,” fearful of bad habits and wasting five cents. My father reached into the pocket of his trousers, gave me a nickel, and I triumphantly walked to the vending machine and bought a Hershey’s chocolate bar. Running my fingers over the smooth brown wrapper, I decided to save the candy bar for later, thinking that if I saved it, something of him might remain. In awhile, the bus boarded. My mother left as I said good-bye to my father. I asked if I’d see him again, he said he’d try. I knew it was a lie. What I didn’t know then was that he was lying more to himself than to me. He told me to take care of my mother. As I watched the bus leave, the smoke from the exhaust obscured it, and the heat distorted its rear as it disappeared down the road. The candy bar started melting, and though I tried not to grasp it too hard, I felt my fingers tighten and the chocolate soften in the wrapper under my grip. I knew I’d never see him again. My mother had told me the day before, “there are some things in life you just can’t change,” so I didn’t cry. It wouldn’t have done any good, wouldn’t bring him back. I simply watched the bus drive away. We drove home. That evening, I ate the Hershey’s bar. Because I knew there are things you can’t change and understood that it was too small a trophy in a world from which I had already withdrawn.

The news of his death months later was perfunctory. My mother and I were visiting friends of the family from church. It was Sunday afternoon. There was a phone call, my grandmother wanting to speak to my mother. My mother talked for a minute, hung up the phone, quickly said something to her friend, and we immediately left. Driving home, my mother told me that my father had died. Of course he had. I knew that hot afternoon at the Greyhound depot that he would never return. And when he boarded the bus, the idea of home left with him. I had buried him months before, and further sequestered myself to a land of books and make believe, to make a hard reality bearable. She was oblivious to the nuances of my emotional machinations, and she asked me how I felt about his death. I had already become expert in quickly turning these things around, so I answered, “I don’t how I feel, how do you feel Mommy.” And as she started “discussing” things, I sat and watched the trees go by. It was a mild early December afternoon, the sky was blue and a few clouds hung bright and white in the sky, and as this was Northern California, green still covered the trees. I was six years old and silently looked out the car window and past the clouds as we returned to the house that shame built.

My father died in Las Vegas, where he lived until his death. He had been released from prison when the death sentence was given, and he chose to live in Las Vegas presumably because his estranged father was there. He had no problems, even during his illness, in finding a second wife to care for him as he died. A year and half or so after that Sunday afternoon in early December, my mother packed my grandmother and I into the Studebaker, which ran on a prayer, and drove to Las Vegas in the summer heat. She wanted to visit his grave and honor my father’s memory. We arrived at the cemetery, wandered around for what seemed like hours, until we found the keeper’s office. She asked where he was buried. A man in a khaki uniform took out a large black leather bound book, hundreds of pages thick, and started flipping through it. He found an entry, quietly led us out the door, and we walked over a few hills to a vast area of grass. He took a knife out of his pocket, beads of sweat rolled down the side of his face, he bent over, stuck the knife in the ground, and said “it’s about here.” My father was buried in the pauper’s field. No one had bothered to put a marker on his grave, no one cared. Not his father who lived in the same city, his second wife, or his mother. My mother and grandmother looked at the knife and talked in murmurs. I didn’t know what to make of it all; it was hot, the sun was beating down, and all I could see was grass with a knife in the ground. With the encouragement of my grandmother, my mother paid over three hundred dollars on an installment plan for a simple headstone which read, “Beloved Father.” “He deserves a proper burial,” my grandmother insisted, “no matter the cost.” On my mother’s nurse’s aide income, that cost set her back for sometime.

For all of her shortcomings, my mother may well have been the only person other than his grandmother who loved my father during his life. No one had even visited the grave before we arrived–father, mother, second wife, sisters. No one. Money was no object; his mother owned the largest luxury hotel in Anchorage, wore a Tiffany inventory of diamonds, drove not one but two Cadillacs, and acquired prime real estate all over the country. What could anyone expect from a man whose mother had money to burn, and let her child be buried in a pauper’s plot? What could anyone expect from a man whose father allowed his only son to be buried without a funeral or memorial? What could anyone expect from a man whose family abandoned him not only in life, but in death? What could one expect from such a man, indeed. With all of my shortcomings, I am the best thing left of him, a man who loved to write poetry and letters, who painted pictures of me while in prison, based on photos sent to him by my mother. With delicate watercolor washes, he colored my hair blond and my eyes blue, just like his. I think that he wrote on blue parchment because blue was his favorite color. He loved the serenity, the way it reminded him of an early winter day when a few clouds hang bright and white in the sky, and one can look into the limitless expanse and feel an incomparable freedom in that moment, no matter life’s circumstances. I think he wrote poetry because he liked language’s music, loved the way certain words sound together, the coalescing of emotion and tone through meaning and rhythm. Perhaps he reveled in those moments when the muse visited, took him out of himself, and gave him the ability to make it all come together in language, sometimes better than others. My mother was correct, I am just like my father. I have no doubt that on those scrawled blue pages, my father was trying to make sense of the world, and trying to create beauty and meaning amid chaos, heartache, and love. When those blue pages went up in smoke, he left this world before his body was buried, his soul went up like an incense vapor, and the longings of his heart flew high like prayers burnt to heaven.

“Beloved father,” the man who bought me three treasures with two priceless words, who passed on to me through one little wiggly tailed spermatozoon an appreciation for blue and the love of language’s music. I am the best thing left of a man who was given few chances. I recognize that my father gave me in death what he could not give me in life, and it was more than he received from his own parents. After decades of blaming him for the devastation of that visit, I understand what he was saying in his own way, the best he could. He wanted to be the father he never had, and he gave me memories forever writ between the two of us. A classroom visit, an afternoon trip in the car, an unspoken understanding, and a Hershey’s candy bar, because the iron fist didn’t always have the last say. My father loved me, and he wanted me to know that before he died. It took me a long time to see it, but I do now. I am my father’s daughter, and I honor the man who gave me life and love, today with these words.