The Father I Didn't Know

My father was distant when I was young. Not just emotionally but often physically. He was a quiet man. He spoke little and faced the world with an expressionless calmness. He also had a job that required him to travel extensively from our house in London. He would be gone for days in Europe and sometimes as far away as Australia. And to my way of thinking, that was how fathers were.

He was a man of enormous self-discipline. He went to work each day impeccably dressed. A liveried driver chauffeured him back and forth in an expensive car. On his return, he would change out of his suit into a sports coat and slacks. And then take in the news until my mother rang the metaphorical dinner gong.

To say he was conservative would be an understatement. I am not talking politics, although I suspect that was the way he voted. I mean he was by the book. As a member of the management class, his mission was to keep the capitalist machinery humming. And he seemed to be very good at it. And as such, he was not going to reinvent the social wheel.

He was the paterfamilias and the breadwinner. He provided protection, room, and board. And he raised his children, mostly by proxy, to be well-educated, good citizens.

Like all children, I grew up with the assumption that however you were raised, that was an acceptable way to be raised. And even though my father was a cipher, my mother stayed home, so I did not lack parental care. Until I was sent away to boarding school when I turned eight. Then both my parents were far away.

Looking back on it now, I realize that my father had been an actor. Rather than following his paternal instincts, he was playing the role. It was as if he had read a manual on fatherhood that said good fathers worked hard and provided financially for the family. But the emotional stuff was the woman's purview. And this seemed a satisfactory arrangement - to both him and me.

He was universally acknowledged as a good man. He never visibly lost his temper. Or beat me. Although I could accuse him of outsourcing that piece of child-rearing. During the decade I spent at two English, all-boy boarding schools, I was thrashed with a variety of instruments - including hairbrushes, hands, rulers, sneakers, and a birch switch. But I suppose he could hide behind plausible deniability, And besides, that was just the way things were.

After reaching maturity, I pursued a course of aggressive independence. I moved three thousand miles to return to America, my natal land. I set up shop in New Jersey. I contacted my father infrequently. It was in the days when a wired world meant only telephone lines. And people still wrote letters. Not that I recall writing him any. Or receiving any from him.

A few years later, he also returned, with my mother, to New York City. And we saw each other every Christmas. And also when he required me to chauffeur him and my mother to visit his father - my grandfather - in an assisted living facility in Connecticut. I would invariably show up late because I was an ass. And he valued punctuality. So, as silent as he was at the best of times, our trips to the country were wordless.

My grandfather was a big man with a shock of white hair, yellowed at the front by the constant stream of smoke that hazed from the 60 cigarettes a day he rationed himself. His wife had died before I was born. And our visits were an opportunity for him to vent about the meaninglessness of his life. In his widowerhood, he had traveled around the world three times. And he endlessly complained that he had nothing left to do.

My father absorbed this dismal routine with little reaction. He usually absented himself to take care of whatever arrangements needed to be taken care of in those sorts of places. My mother was left as the sympathetic ear into which my grandfather poured his nihilism.

Our duty done, I would return my parents to their Upper Eastside apartment. I would decline their pro-forma invitation to have tea with some lie about how hard it was to find parking. And I would flee through the Lincoln Tunnel to my suburban life. And live out what I refer to as my 'lost decade'.

Things changed. I married the woman I loved and had children - eventually. I had spent my youth in a series of comfortable relationships clouded by two thoughts. One that they would inevitably end. And two, that they might lead to an unexpected and unwanted conception. Indeed, all my relationships did eventually end, except the last. But fortunately, none were clouded by a pregnancy.

Time ripened to the point that maturer thought welcomed the idea of offspring. And my modus vivendi switched from terror at the prospect to an enthusiastic embrace of the concept. Nature, however, is fickle. And fatherhood is not a right. Nor is it guaranteed. The steps my wife, Wallace, and I took to address this failure are unimportant. It is enough, dear reader, to report that they were successful. And I was presented with a date on which my life would change dramatically.

The date arrived. Nada. The doctors assured us that all was well and nature was not ruled by humanity's clock. Days passed. I began to wonder if the birth would ever occur. Then it did. And I became a father to a little girl.

I called my parents. My father answered. "I have some good news and some bad news for you," I told him. "The good news is you are now a grandfather. The bad news is she looks just like you."

She also looked like me. Which was not surprising as I look a lot like my father. So alike were my baby girl and me in looks that the joke had it that, while we knew she was mine, could we sure she was my wife's? I'll let you decide if it is a good joke or not.

Soon after, I called my father again. And when he answered, I apologized to him. Because parenthood changes you. I went from being my father's son to also being a member of the same club he had joined when I was born as his first child. And it took me only days of parenthood to realize that we are our parents' harshest critics.

I don't mean that I found fault with all he did. As I have said already, he did very well, by the metrics of his manual. I only mean that we judge our parents through a one-way mirror. We are quick to consider what they bring to the relationship. We rarely analyze what we do.

That changed with my fatherhood. I could see the world through my father's eyes. And I was embarrassed by the petty insults, such as being constantly late, I had serially inflicted on him.

We became close. And talked as friends. I had a second child. And with that, I realized something that people without children may not. There is a limit to what parents can do to mold their children. Because kids come with most of their software pre-installed.

Parents can teach their children manners, read to them, encourage them in their homework, and provide a safe and nurturing environment. They can stress the importance of education and critical thinking. They can instill a moral code. But much of what parents do is superficial.

Children are born the way they are. Gregarious or shy. Neat freaks or slobs. Right-brained or left-brained. Fidgets or dreamers. And most importantly, with such fundamentals as their sexuality. And that becomes an important consideration later in this story.

I have a sister who was a daddy's girl. My father obviously adored her. I never minded that she was his favorite. Because he never favored her when candy was being doled out. Or when it came to birthday presents and Christmas gifts. He was scrupulously fair in the equal distribution of the loot. And as I have said, he was not that overtly emotional, so it wasn't like she got all the hugs while I got none. And I was my mother's favorite.

By then my sister lived in Australia. And she had never married or had children. In fact, I had never known her to be in any kind of romantic relationship.

The internet was now well established. And my father emailed her regularly. She shared her antipodean news while he reported to her the events in the American branch of the family. And all was stable.

My children learned to walk and talk. And once a month we would go to the city to have lunch at the same local restaurant. After lunch, we would all go back to my parents' apartment. My wife, mother, and the two girls would play and talk in the living room. My father and I would retire to his study. Put a game on the TV. And chat.

We also talked on the phone at least twice a week. Often for as long as an hour. My father was my best friend. And he still cared deeply for my sister.

One day, sitting in his study watching the NY Giants throw another game away, he said to me,

"I wish your sister would find someone she could settle down with. I'm so afraid that she will grow old alone."

This caused me to hesitate. I agreed with what my father said. But I thought there were two things he had not considered. The first is that she might be a person who preferred to lead a solitary life. Not as a hermit, mind you. She had a posse of long-term, good friends. A lot of them like her, single women of a certain age.

It might be that she just did not want to have to accommodate herself to someone else's needs. And there was the second consideration. The elephant in the room, if you will.

You know how, when the unexpected hits, you can sometimes sort through all your options in a split second? And based on that consideration, formulate an answer without much hesitation? I did that. And offered something that had long been on my mind.

In reply, I said to him, "Did you ever consider that maybe she's a lesbian?"

To which he instantly replied, "I couldn't care less. I would just like Ashley to find someone."

At that moment, I realized that my father was as good a father as there is. My sister and I could not have been more blessed. He showed in that one sentence that he had sensitivity and empathy he never allowed anyone to see. It is too bad that he never gave himself the freedom to express the love that was all too plain to see.

It did not matter what his opinion on the subject was. He just wanted my sister to be happy. And although he was raised as an only child by a strict Catholic mother, and he had been an every-Sunday church attendee, I suspect he was an atheist. So my sister's possible attraction to other women would not have offended his religious code.

However, he was raised in a pre-Stonewall world. At a time when the DSM still listed homosexuality as a mental illness. And yet he could not have been indifferent to the social mores that painted gays as perverts and somehow broken.

I do not know if my sister had come out as a younger woman, if he would have been so instinctively protective, so genuinely indifferent to her sexuality. I believe he would have been. Because the man, who showed me that Sunday afternoon, his deep, unconditional love, had always been there. And I just didn't know it. Thank God I got to meet him later.