The Story of My Father (7 page)

In my recollection, my father never lost his temper. He kept us playing games. We sang along with him the hymns we all loved, several verses through. He sang to us his repertoire of nutty, naughty songs: “Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue,” “There Were Three Jolly Fishermen,” and “The Bulldog on the Bank”—whose lyrics were:

Oh, the bulldog on the bank
(BASSO)
And the bullfrog in the pool.
Oh, the bulldog on the bank
(BASSO PROFUNDO)
And the bullfrog in the pool.
Oh, the bulldog on the bank
And the bullfrog in the pool . . .
The bulldog called the bullfrog
A
green old water fool!

That was it. We loved it. Do it again, Pop.

There was “Thirty Dirty Purple Birds,” spoken thus: Toity doity poiple boids, sittin’ on a coibstone munchin’ woims an choipin’ an’ boipin’. Along comes Goity, the goil with the coils and the poils, and her boyfriend Hoibie, what woiks in a shoit factory in Joizey. An’
they
saw the toity doity poiple boids sittin’ on a coibstone munchin’ woims an’ choipin’ and boipin’, an’ they was p’toibed.

Where did this come from, some old vaudeville routine? His days in Boy Scouts? Undergraduate nonsense at Yale? His resources for the ridiculous seemed endless.

One summer we borrowed two cars for the trip—a favor, actually, to friends who’d moved to Massachusetts and needed someone to drive the cars east for them. One was a medium-sized sedan. My mother drove this one, with the bags and three of us children and her high-pitched temper. The other was an MG. We took turns riding in it one at a time with my father.

The MG was dark green. Its turn indicators were fingerlength arrows that dropped from either side of the car and pointed left or right. It had bucket seats upholstered in leather whose smell somehow hinted at a kind of life completely unfamiliar to me. I have never been in a more satisfactory car. And my father seemed as at home in it as Stuart Little—or even Toad of Toad Hall—had in his.

He was supposed to follow my mother on the road, and he did, more or less. But he often turned up at the agreed-upon stopping place somewhat later than planned, having taken a wrong turn here or there. Or here
and
there. He’d drive up to the sad-looking, overheated, waiting group with the smug privileged MG child, and Mother would let him have it. (In the meantime, the rest of us would have had to listen to the warmup. “Your father! That
man!
”) He was apologetic but basically impervious. He could never quite understand what the fuss was about. He’d gotten there, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that what counted?

At camp, as at home, my mother disappeared into chores— though here they were often shared with her sisters—and into adult pleasures. I can remember her long-limbed slow swim into the deepest water, away from us splashing children. I can remember that she and her sisters liked to sit together and talk over cup after cup of coffee and endless cigarettes, which they took from a seemingly inexhaustible red oval tin of one hundred. Pall Malls. In the evenings they did puzzles together and they talked, a joking, wisecracking kind of talk, full of puns and double entendres, which was too fast, impenetrable to me.

But my father was more available to us here than at home. He still worked every day, of course, scholarly work, usually in one of the smaller cabins. And he too had chores—painting and caulking the rowboats, chopping wood, hauling the foul brimming bucket from the outhouse to the dump. But in the afternoons, he was ours. Patiently and slowly he taught us the skills we needed to negotiate camp independently. How to row a boat. How to hold the canoe paddle, turn it, flutter it. How to do a dead man’s float. How to swim. How to pull the cord on the dinky outboard motor, how to make sure you didn’t flood it, how to steer the boat away from the hidden underwater rocks that studded our cove. How to cast a fly. How to troll silently. How to reel a fish in, kill it, clean it—what those body parts were, how they functioned. How to tell which mushrooms were poisonous, which you could eat. How to recognize the song of a thrush, of a vireo. Where you were likely to find a lady slipper. How to recognize different varieties of ferns—by size, by texture, by the smell they gave off when you crushed a leaf. How to start a campfire, how to douse it. He’d been an Eagle Scout; I still have his badge. BE PREPARED, it says. And he tried to see that we were, for a kind of life none of us would lead.

But even at home in Chicago it was he who showed us things. In the bitter Chicago winters, he took us on ice skates onto the flooded midway, one after another over the years, guiding us around under his power until we could push off and glide away on our own. He ran alongside the bicycle until we wobbled free down the street. He sat calmly reading in the passenger seat as we learned to drive by tooling around the empty parking lot at the Museum of Science and Industry in the evenings. (Occasionally, if you stalled out or the car lurched too dramatically, he’d lift his head and focus on you for a few minutes, offering a suggestion for improvement, but basically he read.) And because it had been decided I was the artistic one in the family, the musical one (we were each assigned separate strengths, I suppose to keep us from being competitive), he took me with him to performances of music in Rockefeller Chapel, to shows at the Art Institute, and
talked
to me about them afterward—me, a child of eight, or ten, or twelve. About how complicated the tenor’s part was, about how much play there was in Picasso’s work.

He was patient and respectful—a born teacher, I think, because he was a learner himself, always curious and interested in the world, in other people of any age. I remember how he embarrassed me when he drove me and my friends to dances or parties because of his careful and polite inquisition about what they were studying, what their interests and extracurricular activities were, the colleges they might apply to. God! Why couldn’t he just be put-upon and silent, like most parents?

I remember, too, trying to teach him to jitterbug in the back living room. I took the lead, spinning him out, yanking him around to Jerry Lee Lewis, but he was hopeless. Game but hopeless. And in the end, we were laughing too hard to go on anyway.

And then, when I turned sixteen and went away to college, he vanished from my life suddenly—I can’t find him in memory in any sustained way for twenty years or so. I simply stopped knowing him in any real sense.

I think the prime reason initially might have been that, by the unspoken rule in our family—in most families then—my mother was in charge of correspondence, and letters became my connection to home. Actually I tried for a while to enlist my father. I’d become very estranged from my mother from early adolescence on; the mistrust I’d had of her as a little girl had grown into active dislike at this stage. For several years there was nothing she could do that didn’t offend me. When she entered a room, I felt compelled to leave it. It was in that mood that I went off to college, with the result that for the first half-year or so I addressed my letters home exclusively to my father or to the family in general, never singling my mother out. Finally my sister wrote to me and asked me to stop, saying it was just too upsetting to my mother, with whom she was still very close. After that, I wrote to them as a unit, and after that it was, of course, only my mother who answered me.

I lived at home for only one more summer after I turned sixteen. I married at twenty, directly after finishing college. By then I’d begun a real rapprochement with my mother, based in some measure, I think, on my wish to see myself as an adult, an equal. But after I had my only child, at twenty-four, I became truly comfortable with her: her love for my baby son was a balm, a healing element to our troubled relationship.

My marriage ended when I was twenty-seven, and I saw more of my parents after that. Occasionally I got to spend time alone with my father, for the most part when we went hiking in the White Mountains near the house they rented in the summers now in New Hampshire, but my mother always dominated our times together. It seemed to me that once her children were grown, she transferred the strong need she had for adult attention—that clear wish to be recognized as the most fascinating, the most charming person in the room—to us. It was now us whom she wished to charm, us whom she wished to seduce. My father had become her competition when we were all together. He was still, of course, her beloved—she never stopped adoring him also—but in this context he was also her rival, her enemy.

I remember one Friday night when I arrived mid-evening at their summerhouse to spend the weekend. I had gotten Ben to bed upstairs, and the three of us, my parents and I, were sitting around in the old wicker furniture, drinking beer and talking for a little while before we went to bed too. My father, unusually enough in this situation, was telling me something—I can’t remember what—and I was listening to him attentively when out of the blue, Mother, her voice strident, began to talk too, interrupting him, overriding him, pointing out some peculiarity in the shoes he had on.

We all fell silent, it was so strikingly odd and rude, what she’d done. So desperate. And then he said, “If I may just complete my sentence,” and continued.

This stands out in my memory because he spoke up for once; he was, if not quite rude himself, at least firm with her. But I remember it also because the whole event seemed to me an apt metaphor for what had happened in my relationship with my father—in my ability to talk to him, to know him: it had been
interrupted.
For years it had been interrupted by my mother’s desperation, by her need to be the absolute center of attention.

Chapter Five

I AM YOUR quintessential WASP—without the family money. Both my parents could trace their roots back through old New England families who left England and Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the first ones arriving on the
Mayflower.
Gravestones scattered in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Maine bear their ancestors’ names: Tappan, Choate, Hastings, Parsons, Winship, Peabodie, Shaw, Noyes. And the wonderful given names are like a calling up of colonial history: Mehitabel, Content, Abiel, Jerusha, Mindwell, Gideon, Mercy, Ephraim, Xenophon, Abigail, Amos. As my father was, so both my grandfathers were ministers; and both their fathers—my great-grandfathers—had been ministers too. On my father’s side of the family, the line of clergy goes even more deeply back. So my parents’ backgrounds were in almost all ways similar, even down to the large size of their families: four children in my father’s, five in my mother’s.

Tonally, though, their growing up couldn’t have been much more different. My mother’s family was intensely female— there’d been four daughters, my mother the oldest, before a son was produced. They were spirited and lively. They liked to laugh. There were endless family stories they all knew and told and retold. There was a party for every occasion and always a crowd to celebrate it. My grandmother was warm and energetic, seemingly imperturbable, and my boisterous grandfather loved any kind of family gathering. At his ninetieth birthday he presided in a yellow T-shirt that read on the front VITA BREVIS ? and, on the back, NOT THE REV’S.

But they were competitive too, particularly my mother, the oldest—it almost seemed she needed to assert that no one who’d come after her was quite as important, quite as magnificent, as she was. And they sometimes seemed almost swamped by their memories, as though they enjoyed the past more than they could the present. Nonetheless, we lived more in my mother’s family, in their history, their liveliness and jealousies, their ritual gatherings and family ceremonies.

Of course we knew my father’s history perfectly well, too. We knew and loved our aunts, his sisters, and the men they married. We visited too with the families on that side and played with those cousins. But the attachments were less charged and therefore in childhood less compelling, the reunions less ritualized and fraught. The comings and goings of my father’s side of the family into and out of our lives, and our comings and goings into and out of theirs, simply didn’t
count
as much in our childhood. It was my mother’s emotional life, after all, that set the tone for us; it was naturally her emotional connection to her family that mattered more.

And my father’s family? Well, it was shaped by my grandfather, who was old by the standards of the time when he married: thirty-seven. He was born in 1874, a Victorian to his bones, so forbidding to his wife’s younger sisters that they called him “
Beau-frère
” rather than risk the informality of his first name. He was forty-two when my father was born, and he’d begun to teach church history at Auburn Theological Seminary.

My father’s family might have been very different if his mother had lived, but she died young, when he was just eight, and her death marked a change for all of them; afterward there was a chilly quality to their life together.

Two years after my natural grandmother’s death, my grandfather remarried. My father, who was incapable of disloyalty, even when it was deserved, was deeply attached to his father and very fond of his stepmother, but my aunts on that side of my family, at least two of whom were devoted to calling a spade a spade, spoke often of a difficult and gloomy growing-up. When the two youngest girls were called back from the home of the beloved aunt they’d been sent to after their mother’s death (my father and his older sister stayed home with their father and a housekeeper), they were made to call my grandmother Winifred “Mother.” They were all discouraged from ever mentioning or remembering aloud their own mother, Marjorie, again.

My grandfather was a patriarch, remote and exacting and almost childishly quick to anger. I have on my mantel a chipped marble bust of Homer that was once his, its nose completely gone and various dings decorating the rest of its head. It’s damaged because my grandfather returned home one day to find the maid had
polished
it. He was enraged; one did not
polish
marble! He had a tantrum. He pronounced the bust utterly ruined and took it outside and threw it violently into the ash heap.

My aunts could tell other tales of his temper, of a way he had when irritated of flapping his jowls in frustration or anger. What I remember of my grandfather was the formality of our visits to him late in his life; they were virtually audiences, where we terrified children stood silently to be viewed by an equally silent, unsmiling presence. My father was always careful and respectful to his own father on these occasions.

There is and was a characteristic note sustained in the personalities of my father and his sisters, perhaps genetic but more likely in response to their history. Though all of them were wry, some with sharper wit than others; though all were gracious, curious, interested, and engaged with the world; though all led full and useful lives which brought each of them, I think and hope, enormous satisfaction, there was in all of them a sense, finally, of deep reserve. They were warm but not easily affectionate. Attentive, interested in others, but never demonstrative. I think my father must have been drawn, in part, to the noisiness and energy of my mother and her family. I think, too, that he may have sensed a need for someone like my mother— almost as though he were completing himself by marrying her.

The story of how they met is part of our family’s lore. He was getting his doctoral degree at the time. His sister Jane was a classmate of my mother’s, and my father had come to Jane’s college to visit her. At some point they decided to play tennis. My father hadn’t planned for it, and he was unequipped. They found a racket for him to borrow, but he had no appropriate shoes. Where, at a women’s college, to find tennis shoes big enough to fit a man?

Ah! Of course! Judy Beach.

The shoes were, in fact, slightly
too
big. My mother was taller than my father, which made her an imposing woman and him an average-sized man. But he was slender and compact and modest, he spoke quietly, he moved in such a contained way that he seemed smaller than he was.

My mother seemed larger. She was long-limbed and wildly expressive. She had long feet too, slender and beautifully arched, with, as far back as I can remember, bright red polish on her toenails in summer. She was excessive in all she did. She spoke in italics, in absolutes: “I will
never . . .
”; “a complete and utter
fool!
” She had a loud, gay, genuine laugh, and then too a loud, gay, artificial laugh.

All her life, my father was charmed by her, amused by her, excited by her, and I think occasionally annoyed by her. But he was never, even when she was at her most unreasonable, openly critical of her.

And she could be unreasonable. Sometimes it was funny.

One of my uncles told me a story at her memorial service of coming into the primitive kitchen of the camp in Maine early one morning to find Mother alone there in her bathrobe, her face still puffy from sleep or lack of it, drinking coffee, smoking, glowering. She looked at him balefully—he was a cheerful person—and, before he could speak, said, “Don’t you
dare
say good morning to me, Jim Alter!”

Others outside our family also found her wonderfully eccentric and amusing. Several of my cousins told me after her death she was their favorite aunt. One of my father’s students said she was the most interesting, the most stimulating, of all the faculty wives.

It was harder to live with her daily, to have her moods be the emotional weather you faced on any given morning. But if there was anyone suited to do it, it was my father. Steady, patient, changeless himself, he rolled with whatever the punch was—though sometimes that detachment, that distance, was the very quality that drove her mad.

Late in his life, but before he was obviously ill, I spent long parts of several summers alone with my father, and he talked to me more than he ever had before about himself. During that time he occasionally expressed regrets to me about this distance. He thought he had hurt my brothers by not being more involved with them as children. He blamed himself for not helping my mother control her drinking, her smoking. But this was a brief period, really, in his long life—only a momentary dwelling in introspection and regret. Very quickly his dispassion, brought on this time by his disease, came to him again. The dying of his brain took away the possibility of some new way of looking at things which he seemed on the verge of finding. And perhaps, after all, this was a variety of kindness.

Some researchers now think that these processes, the processes that caused parts of my father’s brain to die slowly, probably begin much earlier than we’ve realized before in Alzheimer’s sufferers. Their work suggests that Dad could have been a victim of the disease for much longer in his life than even the most careful observer might have guessed.

The markers for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are the plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that accumulate in the brain and slowly kill the neurons—the nerve cells—of which the brain is largely composed. These plaques and tangles aren’t visible in the living brain through any of the current technologies. It is true that when you scan the Alzheimer’s patient’s brain for activity, parts of it are blank—wide Seas of Forgetfulness in the fissured, moonlike surface. But this could be caused by any of a number of other diseases or insults to the brain. In fact, until recently, the only way to know definitively that someone has had Alzheimer’s disease was retrospectively, posthumously, by autopsy—by looking at the dead brain for those characteristic plaques and tangles.

The tangles—neurofibrillary tangles, or NFTs in the literature—are altered neuronal elements: actually formerly part of the brain but changed both in structural appearance and chemical nature. The plaques—senile plaques, or SPs—are extracellular deposits of aggregated proteins, an abnormal and complex material, waxy and translucent, primarily composed of beta-amyloid. Normally the protein is benign and soluble. In the course of Alzheimer’s disease there is an increase in its amount and also a change in its form, so that it becomes fibrous and toxic to neurons.

When you look at microscopic pictures of these plaques and tangles, stained, there’s a Jackson Pollock quality to their appearance. The tangles appear the darker of the two, like small distinct blobs of paint thrown hard at the canvas—so hard that often a thin tail is left streaking out behind. The plaques are bigger, more amorphous blobs than the tangles, with less-well-defined edges.

There are smaller dark squiggles visible under the microscope too, called, in this world, “curly fibers.” They are threads made of swollen synaptic nerve fibers—nerve endings normally involved in the passage of electrical impulses—which have now become fibrillar: fibrous. In the house I grew up in there was a linoleum on the kitchen floor that, though more riotous in color than any of the available stains used to reveal these structures, bore some resemblance in its splattered pattern to this picture of disease.