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Memoir Of My Father
- Red Hen Press
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Memoir Of My Father My father came home each night from the factory at six or six-thirty (seven was late and we’d be starving, dinner held). He carried a briefcase, full of mail; used the upstairs bathroom; then settled down in his living room easy chair, both before and after dinner, to open and read all the mail and toss the envelopes and unwanted letters on the floor around him, where I was expected to pick them up and stuff them in the nearby wastebasket, which he disdained to use. He seemed perpetually brooding, silent and withdrawn; and I feared his angry reprimands, often when I went against my mother somehow; feared his apoplectic red face, his bulk, and his stentorian voice, which at its most violent pronounced a “damn” or “hell,” but never any other curse. Early after our move from Wayne to a new house in nearby St. David’s, in imitation of my older brothers Jack and Chuck (and keeping up to their legends was my pattern), I stole forbidden matches from my mother’s desk and sneaked outside at night to the dark and hidden path within the rhododendrons, stuck matches in a row in the ground, so one would ignite the next, then lit one and watched them go. I wasn’t caught at that, but felt so guilty and afraid of being found out, and especially of Dad hearing, that I went on my own to confess to Mom, and begged her not to let Dad know, as if his punishment would be as swift and merciless as Calvin’s God’s. And she scolded and warned me and as if sharing my fear of Dad and his outrage, she promised not to tell and didn’t. Also, as far back as I can remember Dad, there was the oddness—long before I had any explanation for it—and tension that he couldn’t drink anything alcoholic, even desserts that had a mint liqueur, but that on special occasions Mom, and then later my brothers, could. Out for dinner or at another grownups’ party, there would be, when he was offered cocktails or whatever, a stiffened refusal, almost angry, and right there, a sense of odd and shameful difference from “normal” parents. Liquor was the ultimate forbidden, not so much as sin, though there was that element too, but as a poison, something that led to unthinkable damage and ruin. The slightest 1 2 safe suicide taste of anything alcoholic and he would, I was made to feel, fall instantly and terribly ill. Assumed also was his difference in other ways, that he was maimed somehow and withdrawn from society—though Mom “loved” people—with the exception of immediate family, his mother and sisters, whom we’d dutifully and regularly visit and be visited by, and some very old business friends; that he was sulking and remote and demoted from any family authority, except as ultimate punisher. At the same time I have another early St. David’s memory of sometimes being woken in the night by violent thunderclaps and lightning, and groping terrified out of my bed and down the hall to be with him and Mom, to crawl into their beds—his bed (they had twin singles), which was nearest the door—and sleep with him for protection. I know he welcomed me, gently, warmly, reassured me, and I was afraid of the long, awful scar on his left leg, where the flesh folded in. He had had an infection that involved his bone marrow as a teenager, and a piece of bone had been taken out—at least that is the garbled version I squeamishly absorbed—and he reassured me it was all right, but I was afraid of somehow falling into the scar. I ran to them three or four times this way, and then was made to feel I shouldn’t, that I was too old for that, and it was more manly not to need them; and I don’t remember being scared of lightning after that and felt proud that I wasn’t, though I did have other night-time fears. A recurrent one was of some kind of intruder, who would climb up on one of my windows and I would see his dark form against the lighter night, or somehow an intruder had gotten in and was looking for me in the dark, and in panic, trusting the darkness itself for protection, I...