The Holy Grail

From the memoir Missing History

From the day I was born I was taught by a person who didn’t think most people knew what they were talking about. Not living ones, anyway. Bland food, for an infant? My father liked to tell the story of the alacrity with which at several months of age I gobbled up pickled herring, when my mother wasn’t looking. Received wisdom was, by its very nature, suspect. So habitual in fact was questioning, the Socratic method at work in daily life that, later on in his, hypertrophied by grumpiness, it came to be applied even to small talk. “Looks like a nice day, Dad.” “Don’t count on it. It’s clouding up over there.”

By the end of his life he was so impatient with the world’s progress in going about the sensible way of doing things that he could often only mutter, Oh, the hell with them. Those goddam idiots. Those damn fools. Goddam faculty wimps, he’d complain about what he perceived to be certain cautious, hypocritical members of academe. All talk and no action. When we were both on the faculty at Marlboro College, I avoided sitting next to him in faculty meetings; most of the time he’d confine himself to swearing under his breath—Oh, Jesus—or doodling on the agenda, but if the meeting lagged he’d begin tapping his pen on the table with increasing force. He’d come to teach there when I was a sophomore, after the parenthesis in his academic life when he’d worked for Comsat in Washington, DC The first year, people referred to him as “Katie’s father”; the second, to me as “Corky’s daughter.” I noted this, yet didn’t resent it particularly, or wish he hadn’t come. Having grown up on a college campus (St. John’s, in Annapolis, whose Great Books Program decreed what was worth learning and what wasn’t), my father had always been inextricable from college.

I took two classes with him, once as an undergraduate, a seminar on Nietzsche; the other time, ten years later, when I’d returned to Marlboro in my own first teaching job, a seminar on language. In both cases I was interested in the subjects and he was the only person teaching them, but the first time I also wanted to be visible to him as a student, someone with a worthwhile mind, as well as a daughter.

In class, however, I sat in a welter of vague embarrassment, embarrassed for him, afraid my presence would show him up, reveal him to be a person. I felt as I had at faculty–student softball games as a child when he was up at bat. What if he didn’t get a hit? Having felt so deeply that shame myself, I didn’t know if I feared it on his behalf or my own. I’d studied him so carefully for so many years that I could tell what he was feeling by the slightest shifts in expression. Was he pretending? Wasn’t this all an act? This ease and sense of purpose. What if he manifested the same discomfort that I, a first-year instructor, felt in the classroom? What if he revealed himself to be the difficult and vulnerable person that I, as his daughter, knew him to be?

Perhaps he felt something of the same danger in my presence in the room. I had a hand on the curtain, and who knew when I might wrench it open? His response seemed to be to pretend I wasn’t there. Even on the rare occasions when I ventured a comment, he seemed as surprised as if one of the chairs had spoken. (My brother, who once took a seminar with him at St. John’s, had the same experience.) He, perhaps, feared my revealing myself. He responded politely but made no effort to draw me out as he did other students, following up a student’s half-formed remark with questions until the student was so entangled in his or her own illogic that...