Memories of a Father

I struggle to describe my relationship with my father. My parents divorced when I was six after he kicked open the locked door of the guest room where my mother was sleeping and attempted to strangle her.

She escaped to a neighbor’s house. Awakened by the crashing of the broken door, my cries led my father to carry me into their bedroom, which is where several neighbors and police officers found us. His story was that he was comforting me after a bad dream and that he had no idea of his wife’s whereabouts.

That is the story that my mother finally told me when I was in my teens. I only have her version. It’s not that I don’t believe her but I never had the opportunity to press my father for his. He stuck to his original story for as long as I knew him. By the time I felt bold enough to challenge him, he was nowhere to be found.

My father stayed in our house while my mother, sister and I lived in a series of rented apartments and houses around Baltimore. My sister and I continued to visit him on Sundays and for a week in the summer. No one appeared to be concerned that he would harm us.

I wasn’t afraid of him. He took good care of us when we were with him. I remember him making roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy. Or taking us out for crab feasts. In the summer, he often took us on trips to Fort McHenry in Baltimore’s Harbor, Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, and the Luray Caverns in the Shenandoah Valley.

But we often argued, usually about my mother or about taking us back home when our visiting time was up. When my mother remarried, he started calling me by my stepfather’s last name. And frequently tossed the insult/compliment “you’re just like your mother”.

I felt exhausted by these arguments and began to resent having to visit him. When I was about 13, he suffered some type of mental breakdown. I never learned the details of what happened. He was hospitalized for a time and then, except for an opal ring that appeared on my 16th birthday and a savings account with several hundred dollars in it that appeared just before I entered college, he disappeared from my life.

In the late 1970s, I learned that after his release from the hospital, he stayed with his sister in New York for a while. At some point, he returned to Baltimore where he collapsed in the street in 1977. His death certificate states that he never married and had no children. He was 55 years old.

When people ask me about my father, I usually stick to the basics: he and my mother divorced when I was six and I was about 13 the last time I saw him. The roast beef dinners, crab feasts, and road trips rarely make the cut. Long-simmering anger and disappointment kept me from wanting to share more. But two memories surfaced recently (as buried memories are apt to do) that reminded me of two bright spots in our troubled relationship.

The first one happened when I was about eight or nine. We were watching the movie South Pacific together. My father served in the Navy and was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II. He really liked that movie. I guess it brought back some of the better memories of his war-time experiences. I do wonder if some of his problems stemmed from his time there. In the movie, two of the American service members, Joe Cable and Nelly Forbush, become romantically involved with island residents. Cable sings a song about the conflicts they feel called “You’ve Got to Be Taught”.

“You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late. Before you are six or seven or eight. To hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

I was very confused by this song and asked my father about it. He said it was about prejudice, that it wasn’t something you were born with. Rather it was something that you learned, sometimes from your family, sometimes from the place where you grew up. He was emphatic that prejudice was wrong. It seemed very important to him that I understand that.

I usually attribute most of my social justice values to my mother. But I know now that my father also had an influence on my world view and I am grateful for that. It makes me wonder if that was one of shared ideals that brought my parents together.

The second memory occurred when I was ten and in the throes of Beatlemania. I had to have a large planters wart removed from the bottom of my left foot. The surgery was done in the hospital and I was there for a couple of days. My roommate was a girl my age who had her tonsils removed. We were both frequently sick from the anesthesia and the nurses were annoyed with us. My dad came to visit me, bringing a giant poster of John, Paul, George, and Ringo with him. The nurses weren’t too happy about it but my dad was handsome and could be very charming so they didn’t stop him from taping it on the wall above my bed. After he left, my roommate said “you have the coolest dad!”.

Although at the time, it was a relief when he disappeared. It was just too much for me to deal with at 12 or 13.  But as I got older, I felt the void of not knowing him better. Of not knowing how cool a dad he might have been.