Finding Dad

by Kara Sundlun

  “We did. It was a late night, and I think Tracy is still asleep.”

  “You know, I’ve learned nothing good comes from staying up past midnight,” he answered with a grin. Feeling groggy myself, I figured he was right on the money.

  This Sunday wouldn’t be a day of rest for my father. Sundays usually meant parades, potlucks, and other political appearances. Normally, he would have expected me to go with him and “learn something,” but I got a reprieve with Tracy in town.

  “Listen, why don’t you take the day and spend some time with Tracy. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

  “That’s a great idea, thanks. Don’t work too hard,” I said, waving to him and the trooper as they left for what I assumed would be a long day.

  I was excited for a beach day. If my father had been with us, it would have meant spending the day at Bailey’s Beach club, which was certainly not a punishment. But since we were on our own, Tracy and I decided to go to the public beach in Narragansett, where the waves were bigger and we could meet cousin Fenton, who refused to step foot in the private beach club.

  It was the perfect day for relaxing and baking in the sun, and I was excited to get to have some great bonding time with the new family. We walked the sandy shores, drank the famous frozen Del’s lemonade that you’ll only find in Rhode Island, and laughed so much my face hurt.

  Fenton was thrilled to share his story about the press conference to Tracy. “You should have been there. It was amazing—she’s a star, and so much like your father.”

  “I can see that. She’s just lucky she’s a girl, since Dad was always better with women.” He shot out a good-natured laugh. Had my father been harder on his sons than he was being with me?

  Fenton stood up and grabbed my arm. “C’mon, let’s take a walk. Some kids I know are dying to meet you, and I promised I’d introduce them to ‘Kara from TV.’ ”

  While I was shaking hands and talking to some of the kids, I heard something that sounded like my name over the loudspeaker. I turned. “Hang on…Fenton, did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  Then I heard it again: “Kara Hewes, please come to the front desk, Kara Hewes, please report to the front desk.”

  Fenton smacked his forehead. “Oh my gosh, your father must be looking for you. He’s the only one who could be paging you at a public beach.”

  Long before everyone had a smartphone my father knew how to find someone anywhere. I had to run across the hot sand to the check-in desk, “Hi, I’m Kara Hewes,” I said in between catching my breath.

  The lady handed me the phone. “Governor Sundlun is on the line for you.”

  Uh oh…“Hello?”

  “Kara, this is your father. I’ve been home for almost an hour now. I’ve called everywhere looking for you!” I could hear the anger in his voice. Oops.

  “Uh, we came to Narragansett beach to see Fenton. I thought you wouldn’t be home until much later.”

  “No, I’m home now, and I was going to take you both out for a late lunch, but I guess I’ll have to eat alone.” Hmm, was he pouting?

  “No, no, don’t do that. Let me grab Tracy, and we’ll be home right away.”

  His reply was short and curt. “Goodbye.”

  Now, most teenagers would have found their father paging them at a beach more than a little intrusive, but it felt good that he was worried about me. Sure, he was acting like a baby, but it proved to me he really wanted to hang out with Tracy and me. As promised, we raced home. My father was used to beckoning people, and this was no exception. Under normal circumstances, I would have been ticked off, but my life was anything but normal, and I liked being summoned because it made me feel important to him.

  Back at home, we found my father sitting in the kitchen in his bathrobe, eating a donut. Yep, he was definitely pouting. His always-perfectly-coiffed hair was disheveled, and I couldn’t help but smile because I’d never seen him like this.

  “I’ve been home all alone, waiting for you two and had no idea where you were! I wanted to take you to Bailey’s for lunch— not even a note!”

  “Dad, you said you wouldn’t be around, so we did our own thing,” Tracy countered, with much more confidence than I had.

  “Dumb, dumb! You are both dumb, dumb!” he said, sounding more like a hurt four-year-old than a tough governor.

  My father was having a good old-fashioned meltdown because he missed us, and I’m sure it surprised him as much as it did us. His was such a simple, organic reaction, that my heart melted. He’d wanted to be with us and, rather than simply saying that, he hid his feelings by rebuking us. Thing is, he didn’t fool anyone.

  So what do you do when you have someone trying to act like he’s rough and tough, but showing he’s really a softie? You test the limits and inject some humor. “Oh, poor baby,” I cooed, walking over to where he was sitting. “We are so sorry!” I pulled out a brush from my beach bag. “Here, let me fix your hair…it’s a mess.”

  My father shot me stern look, but didn’t stop me from brushing his thick lion-like white hair.

  “What on earth are you doing?” he said, trying to sound gruff.

  “You’ll see…”

  I pulled his hair into a bunch and used the elastic on my wrist to tie it into a ponytail on top of his head à la Pebbles from The Flintstones.

  Tracy and Mrs. Schuster doubled over laughing, while my father sat crunching his brows together and refusing to unwrap his arms from across his chest. I pulled out my camera and started to take ridiculous pictures of him with his bathrobe and pony tail on top of his head.

  Tracy just shook his head. “See? I told you a girl can get away with a lot more with him.”

  So many times, we had fallen on humor to escape awkwardness, and I could tell by the softening in my father’s brow that this was starting to work. Try as he might, my father’s stern gaze melted into laughter.

  “Okay, okay, now get this out of my hair, and let’s get dressed…and no more running off anymore without telling me where you are!”

  Whatever ice was there between me and my new family was being broken. Humor really was the best elixir.

  The weekend went by too fast, and Tracy and I promised to stay in touch. “Once you get up to school, I’ll call you on Sundays.” And he’d kept his promise, often checking in from various cities around the world—in spite of his demanding schedule. Like my father, work made Tracy tick. He was a master at his profession, and he couldn’t separate it from who he was. Every time he took time out of his busy life to call me, I knew it was his way of trying to make things right, and I loved him for it.

  My youngest brother, Peter, was the next to visit. He was coming from Richmond, Virginia, and I hoped we would have as much fun as I’d had with Tracy. I felt more confident knowing at least one brother approved of me. When Peter walked through the door, it was like déjà vu. He was a taller blond version of my father and Tracy. “Hello, hello!” he said, giving me a big welcoming hug. “It’s so nice to meet the new family member in person.” He was alluding to having heard the rumors about me over the years and seeing the newspaper articles.

  I smiled. “It’s great to meet you too—for real.”

  Then he looked at our father shaking his head, “You needed a paternity test? Look in the mirror!”

  Wow, now that’s an ice breaker. We both laughed as our father shrugged his shoulders—uncharacteristically speechless.

  Peter talked about when my father told him about me and the news conference. He took it in stride like Tracy. “I told him he lost an engine, feather it.”

  Peter had followed my father’s love of aviation by becoming an airline pilot. But that’s where the similarities ended. Peter showed a sensitive, perceptive side that wasn’t as apparent in my father or Tracy. Where my father was tough and brief, Peter told long, loving stories about his wife, Karen, and I knew he was a good man who believed in the importance of family. He was also the only one who had ever met my mother.

&nbs
p; “I’m sorry I didn’t come and see you when you were a baby. Your mother called me, you know.”

  I was touched that he was trying to make amends, but I could hardly blame him for anything. “I know, she told me. But it’s okay. I know there was probably nothing you could have done.”

  He shook his head. “No I should have. I was just a college kid when your mom called and asked me to come meet my sister. I called Dad and he told me to stay out of it, so I did. I wish so much now I had done something different, and we all could have known you.”

  As great as all this made me feel, I could tell there was a “but” coming.

  “But why did you have to make things so public? Why couldn’t you just reach out to us in a private way?”

  It was a valid question, and my heart went out to him. “I never wanted this to become a huge media circus. The problem was I did try to reach out privately. I wrote letters, and even after I met him and the DNA test proved I was his daughter, he still refused to acknowledge me. I felt like I had no choice. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

  He nodded slowly. “Well, that makes sense. It sounds like him,” he said with an “I know it all too well” undertone. “You know, he wasn’t around much for us either. He’s a businessman first and family man somewhere down the list.” I could tell he still carried the hurt.

  The one thing Peter did inherit from my father was an analytical mind. After our weekend together he seemed satisfied that I had answered all of his questions, and he was ready to embrace me just like Tracy had. Today, Peter is the one brother I can count on to never miss anyone’s birthday, and always calls on holidays. He is a wonderful father to his son, Hunter, and devoted husband to Karen for more than twenty-five years now. And he’s the only one in our family who is handy, often fixing all the little broken things in my house when he comes to visit. He chose to live life differently than my father, and though he is a pilot, he’s anything but a jetsetter, preferring to be home to go to all of Hunter’s swim meets and help with homework. I often think he healed himself through the love he gives to his family, and I am happy to be on the receiving end of his sincerity.

  The last to visit was my middle brother, Stuart, the handsome bachelor with the thick curly hair and blue eyes that apparently came from his mother. He was a jetsetter like Dad, doing business all over the world, but also sweet and funny, like the boy next door.

  He was wearing his trademark blue Lacoste shirt and Levis when he arrived at Seaward after taking a train from New York City, where he lived on the Upper East Side.

  “Hello! So nice to meet you,” he said hugging me right away.

  “I’m so happy you’re here, I have heard a lot about you.”

  From everything I’d heard, Stuart was the special one. Like my father, he went to Harvard, and was a great athlete, and was now making his mark in the world of finance.

  Over dinner, Stuart told me how he’d first heard about me, which was a carbon copy of how Peter and Tracy had found out, only by the time my dad called Stuart he was running out of time, and even more brief. “Dad called me up and says, it’s your father, I’m having a press conference in fifteen minutes, you have a sister, I’ve gotta go. By the time I stammered out an ‘okay,’ he’d hung up. Click! That was it.”

  You would think these stories made my father cringe, but he didn’t say anything—as if he embraced his perfect imperfections. Instead, we all just laughed, since that was so my father. His abruptness was part of what made him who he was, and my brothers had learned to expect it. I was learning my new family was unabashedly honest, despite its deficiencies, and I think that’s why my brothers took to me so easily. They had learned to roll with the punches. After four marriages, and several step kids, nothing seemed to surprise them anymore. My father was who he was, and you could drive yourself nuts, or just focus on the good—and laugh at the rest.

  I looked forward to getting Stuart’s story of how he really felt about my arrival when we could be alone. In the meantime, my father seemed happy that all of his sons were being so open to me, especially since he had clearly kept a lot from them in the past few years.

  When we got back home, Stuart and my father took off their blazers and ties, and we all sunk into the couch in the study for the traditional Oreos and goodnights. Just like with Tracy and Peter, Stuart and I stayed up in the study talking about life.

  ”Well, are you okay with all that’s happened?” I asked in between bites of Oreos. “What do think about all of this—about me?”

  “I feel great, Kara. You’re smart, you’re pretty, what else is there to worry about?”

  It was obvious Stuart had inherited my father’s suave manner, and it was clear they both had the ability to make women love them. I had heard Stuart was living with the famous model Margaux Hemmingway since they were both in a People Magazine story together, and he was featured in her E! True Hollywood Story as the businessman who helped her recover from alcoholism.

  “Well, I guess we both have People Magazine in common,” I said, trying to crack a joke.

  “That’s true,” he beamed back.

  Stuart was brilliant and could talk about anything, but he spoke to me, not at me. He was the easy-to-get-along-with middle child, and I felt proud to have a “cool” brother like him.

  Stuart visited Newport often that summer, since he loved to spend weekends playing tennis and relaxing at Bailey’s Beach, where he was also a member. He was gracious and kind by always introducing me to everyone as his “sister.” When some people gave him a funny look and remarked about not knowing he had a sister, he would laugh and say, “Neither did I!”

  Just like our father, he knew how to use humor to change the mood.

  Sometimes my father tried to encourage Stuart to settle down. “You’re wasting your life, you need to get married and have children.”

  Stuart would roll his eyes—it was obvious he’d heard this many times. “Someday, Dad, someday,” he said, unfazed by my father’s prodding. He knew how to placate his commander.

  Stuart has a heart of gold, but I wonder if he avoided marriage in fear that he might be wired too much like our father, and didn’t want to end up with the same bad track record. Today, he is a wonderful uncle to my two children. They call him “Uncle Jungle Gym,” since they love to climb on his big strong shoulders. He spends nearly every weekend at our home in Newport during the summer, and I love watching him go from buying toys for the kids at a Thomas the Train outing, to a black tie gala where the ladies are waiting for a dance. He may never be the type to settle down, but I’m so happy when he presses the Pause button, it’s with me.

  As a journalist who covers spirituality on my talk show, I have met many gurus who speak about past lives and say we are part of a soul group that chooses to incarnate time and time again to learn our lessons on Earth. I’m not sure where I am with all that, but all I can say for sure is that my brothers didn’t feel new to me. Just like it was with my father, the connections we shared were easy and strong. Filling in my family tree with smart, successful men made me feel more grounded. Their love settled in my core and made me feel more solid.

  My brothers and I represent pieces of my father. He had been a runner like Tracy, a pilot like Peter, a businessman like Stuart, and a broadcaster like me. We are all spokes of the same wheel, connected at the center by our love for and likeness to this man who helped shape who we became.

  As summer drew to a close, we promised to keep in touch and meet at my father’s home in Middleburg, Virginia for Thanksgiving. My brothers were now the borders to my tapestry, with all four of us now joined in a way that assured me it wasn’t going to unstitch the minute I turned my back and went off to college.

  The day I left, I hugged my father goodbye at the same threshold where my new life had begun a few short weeks ago. He squeezed me extra hard. “Make sure you call when you get home to Michigan to let us know you made it okay.”

  “I will. And thank you for everything—I’ll mis
s you so much.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said smiling, but I could see in his eyes that he’d miss me, too.

  I hadn’t called him Dad yet, but with a little more time, I knew I would. I just wanted it to be special.

  I had to teach my father how to share his feelings, and that would take time. In later years, he never hung up without saying “I love you,” but it took many times of me saying it first. It’s not that he didn’t care, he was just afraid to show it—or didn’t know how. Eventually, we both felt safe enough to open our hearts—and it started with him opening his home that summer.

  My father had a state trooper escort me to the airport. I gazed out at the ocean as we pulled away from Seaward, and a part of me wished I could stay forever. My life had been indelibly changed, and I didn’t want the dream to end. This time, there were no cameras waiting for me at the airport. Finally, the show was over, and I was so grateful we had created something real.

  13 A Whole New Me

  August, 1993

  I came back home to Mom’s open arms. “I missed you so much,” she said, squeezing me.

  “I missed you, too.” And I did. But looking at her and our apartment, nothing felt the same. I was looking at my life here through a new filter, and I felt like I’d just stepped back in time. I needed to find my footing. My entire being had been transformed in a life-altering way, while nothing back home had changed at all. I needed to readjust to the old world, all the while knowing that very soon, another new world would open at college. I was standing in limbo land.

  More than anything, I didn’t want to hurt my mom, so I didn’t say much about private beach clubs and helicopters. Instead, we set off to do our favorite thing together—shopping! This time the trip would be a rite of passage as we set out to get everything I needed for my college dorm room. Mom had already secured a great deal on a green and white striped mini couch that rolled out to a bed, much more chic then a typical futon she thought, and it would still fit in my tiny dorm room below the loft bed my roommate and I were going to have built by the college guys on campus on move-in day.