The Story of My Father

by Sue Miller

  My mother wrote poetry—lyric poetry, of course. And that concentrated focus on one’s own feelings, one’s own remembered agony and despair and joy, marked her personality as it marked her work. It was terrifying to me as a child—and something I resist in myself and others as an adult—that insistence on high drama, that inability to let go of or to integrate painful memory. It was why I sought refuge then in my father’s calm, his forgetfulness of self, if that’s what it was. It may be part of why I now write fiction, why I choose to move around imaginatively in other, invented people’s joys and agonies. And it may also be why my own memory is so spotty. Why it so often comes at things from an angle.

  My first memory of my father, for instance, is not truly of him but of his absence. Actually, it’s one of my first clear memories of any kind. My earlier recollections are fragmentary, odd home movies that show only an out-of-context scene or two before breaking off and flickering dark. This memory, though, is sharp and clear—it has meaning for me as well as detail. And the meaning is that my father has left us; he’s gone away.

  This was the scene: I was five. My father was in Germany for a long stay, a half-year stay. On a warm early summer’s day, a friend of my parents came to take pictures of us—of my mother and my younger sister and baby brother and me—to send to him. Peculiarly, I can remember clearly the chair we sat in to be photographed. It was painted a bright blue. It had been set out in the backyard for this session. The backyard was a communal one, behind several apartment buildings on the south side of Chicago in the university neighborhood—Hyde Park. The yard was hard-packed dirt for the most part, worn barren by the play of all the children who used it daily. The chair looked strange to me, out of place and wrong, plopped down out there.

  What I remember most of the picture taking was the sense of yearning connection I felt, thinking of my father as I looked straight into the camera. Thinking of my picture, but not me, going to him, far across the ocean. He had been away at that point for three or four months—he’d left soon after my baby brother was born—and would be gone about three months more.

  My memory, then, is not really of him but of the effort of trying to construct him in my mind, of struggling to imagine him, of missing him. My memory is of memory, working to find its object.

  There were perhaps a dozen or so photographs from that day in one of our family albums. I still have two or three—the pictures were divided up after my mother’s death and distributed evenly among us. In them my sister and I look strained, solemn and tired. We’d recovered only a month or so earlier from chicken pox. In one of the pictures of me holding David— he seems almost too big for me to be holding safely, but I am— you can still see the shadow of several pockmarks sprinkled on my face. The photographer was someone we children didn’t know well, and that’s on my face too: a shyness, a reserve. I’m not smiling.

  It’s easy, of course, to read too much into the accidents that are family snapshots. We were, after all, normal, bright children, well cared for, every nuance of our development noted and described in the long letters my mother wrote to her mother—which were then circulated through my mother’s large family and have come back, after all these years, to me. But I think these pictures of us as grave, cautious children reveal something. I think they speak of a certain aspect, anyway, of my family’s life. Because my mother—who was alone with us that summer—didn’t take much joy in us as children. We were too much her life’s work, her project. She reserved her vivacity, her charm, which could be enormous, for other adults. Those same long letters that chronicled our growth described all her labors on our behalf. These labors were ceaseless, and although in the letters they were described cavalierly, as though she undertook them gracefully and lightly, there was another note struck in her later written recollections and in her poetry—the grim note of enduring her fate, bitterly enduring it. Blaming my father, blaming us, for our existence, for the work we made for her. And this is more the note we were aware of at the time, the note that made me, as a child, cautious, careful not to anger her, not to ask for too much. Never to be a bother.

  It was my father who brought gaiety and fun to our lives. This isn’t fair to my mother, of course. He didn’t have that endless round of chores connected to us to wear him down. He wasn’t responsible in the world’s view, or in his own, for how we looked, how we behaved, how we did in school. But it wasn’t simply a matter of the division of labor. It was temperament too. He was by nature patient and attentive. He saw the humor in small things. He was charmed and amused by his children—by most children, in fact. He was steady; he was emotionally reliable.

  My mother wasn’t, then or ever. Speaking her name— “Mama . . .”—could bring, unpredictably, any one of a variety of responses. Loving: “Yes, Susie?” Or frantic: “What! What is it? What do you want?” Or just: “Will you children leave me alone for one minute?” and then tears, tears. Her pleasures were all in turning away from us, in privacy. The cigarettes and coffee lingered over when we’d dispersed after breakfast, the crossword puzzles, the endless games of solitaire, the mystery novels, with their lurid and—to me—compelling covers. Illness was something she particularly cherished. She could shut her door. She could rest. She could ask my father for help. Her letters are full of it, the lavish, loving descriptions of the latest thing that’s gone wrong with her body.

  My father was the one who played with us. Who wrestled, who sang goofy songs. Who read to us as we all jammed together on the couch in his study. Who took us to special events. But most of all it was he who was attentively, evenly, perhaps a little abstractedly too, always the same. He was safety.

  It was my father who was gone when these pictures were taken. And I think that is the source of the tension I see in my sister’s face and mine, of the caution and reserve we project while we freeze ourselves, while we sit still—so still now!—for the strange kind man taking the pictures, whoever he was; and for our father, waiting to see us in a distant country.

  I would guess, actually, that my mother was relatively happy during this period. There was no baby who pleased her more than my gentle-tempered, easy, fat little brother. During my father’s absence, she had found a house for sale in the neighborhood and it seemed we could afford it. Perhaps soon we could move out of the apartment where four children and two adults lived in five rooms. The letters written by her in this period are full of that: color schemes, curtains, who would be put where. And of course there was the pulling together of finances to make it happen: loans, mortgages, income from possible boarders. These were things that made her feel competent, things she enjoyed.

  But she had emerged from a deep depression only the year before, and though none of her children remembers that episode specifically, I think that for all of us its symptoms—the profound retreat from us into sorrow, the sound of weeping behind a closed door, the sudden tearful recoil from what seemed a harmless remark—these were already part of who she was for us, happy for the moment or no.

  The child I was then questioned none of this. My mother was who she was; my father was gone. But it seems strange to me now, almost unimaginable: my father left my mother for six months. He left a depressive woman of twenty-nine with four children under seven to take care of, one of them only a few weeks old. Left her to go with a group of professors to Germany on a mission to help heal the postwar university system there, decimated by the flight and murder of Jews and resisters. Left her to travel after the academic year was done through Italy, Switzerland, and France, meeting with colleagues, looking at art and documents of interest to him in his work. And left us waiting for his safe return to our lives. I didn’t think of it, of course, until years later, how much he must have wanted to go.

  This is my memory then: the blue chair, the hot day, the big happy baby balanced on my lap, the stranger with the camera. This is the way I have to tell this story, moving from these details into my parents’ lives, my father’s history. Into how it was for us. And all the while I feel
behind me, over my right shoulder and my left, the sense of both of my parents, of how differently they would tell it, of how different the terms are in which they understood it and felt it. Of how my representation itself makes the story mine, not hers or his. But uneasy and unsure as I sometimes feel as I call up the memories and the words to cast them in, I am the one who has the need to do it.

  Chapter Four

  WAS THE CHAIR BLUE? As I look at it in the black-and-white photos I still have, I think not, actually. I think it was a desk chair of my father’s, the wood stained dark. I think the blue chair must have been another, later, chair, and I’m confusing the two. But I wonder why. Is it my unconscious impulse as a writer to get at the blueness of the two little girls who miss their father? Could I be that corny? It’s possible, I suppose, though it’s not fun to think so.

  Was the ceiling in my father’s study in our Chicago house really papered with silver stars in a night sky when we moved in? And if it was, when did they disappear? Some things I’m just plain not sure of. Some I am. Could you not ride one stop past our house on the commuter train from downtown if you wanted to, and see it as you passed? See the windows at its back—my bedroom, my brothers’—the kitchen door, the sagging porch, the grapevine, the mulberry tree arched over the garage and the scraggly yard; see it all laid out as it must have appeared to those thousands and thousands of travelers who flashed by over the years we lived there, who never gave any of it a second thought? Yes. Yes, indeed you could.

  This is the way those years come back to me. These images. And then sometimes a detail from them triggers a set of associations that calls up scene and dialogue and also, nearly simultaneously, a larger sense, an emotive sense. What we might call the sense of how it was. And if one or two small things are wrong, I let this go. It’s the Proustian triggering action I’m grateful for. It’s the feeling I want to get at.

  When I write fiction I rearrange memory, I invent memory in order to make narrative sense of it for a reader and for myself, to explain why it’s important—exactly how it was. If I have a call, I suppose it is that: to try to make meaning, to embody meaning, in the narrative arrangement of altered and invented bits of memory. To be compelled to do this, actually.

  But in this case, in this book, I have to work differently. I have to rely purely on what happened as I remember it, and somehow to make narrative sense of that. This is harder. And it begs the question, Does life make narrative sense? Certainly we would like it to. Maybe the recent fin-de-siècle success of the memoir was an expression of that desire and a kind of resulting conviction: yes, it can. It can make sense. If I phrase it just right, look at it just right, it can.

  But it’s possible too, I think, that this wish to give life narrative coherence may be a substitute for all kinds of other more-or-less vanished beliefs about other kinds of coherence, beliefs about what life means. We’re stuck now insisting that, at the very least, it ought to make a story; it ought to have a shape.

  In any case, here is my father, in memory. Here, look at him, sitting in his study, almost in silhouette in front of the one window. He’s a small handsome man, Semitic looking, which runs on the male side of his family—a strong down-curving nose, skin that shadows to olive. He has dark hair, hair he will keep until he dies, hair that will remain untouched by gray until much later in his life. He wears glasses when he works, and often a jacket and tie.

  This was his room, the only room in the house that revealed much of anything about him. Three of the walls were nearly covered with bookshelves, the books in them an odd mixture of his professional library—these often in German or French and in any case of no interest at that time to me—and the books he and my mother read or had read for pleasure. His big desk, and even sometimes the floor around it, was always stacked with papers; one of the books he was writing while we lived on Harper Avenue, or student essays or bluebooks, or an article for the journal he edited, Church History. Framed pictures of figures he was interested in hung on the wall. I remember a sepia-toned photograph of the Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt staring down from his desk, in his study. The door onto the hall was always open.

  I think that open door drove my mother a bit mad. She saw her role as protecting my father’s privacy. If we came into the house with a bunch of friends, she was on guard: “Don’t you take all those children up there. Your father’s working.” If we made it past her, she’d holler, “Are you up there bothering your father?”

  The study was physically at the heart of the house; the door faced the top of the only flight of stairs to the second floor. Whenever you came up—whoever came up—if you stepped just slightly forward out of your path to your own room, you could see him there at his desk. And he could see you.

  As he watched the parade in the hallway, he always seemed mildly amused, tolerant of us all. You could actually hide in his study from others, and he would just raise his eyebrows for a moment and then go on with what he was doing. I think in fact he chose the open door. He seemed to enjoy the racket. Maybe this was because his protection against it was, in a sense, built in: he simply absented himself from whatever might interfere with his thoughts. It just didn’t register.

  My aunt Ellen, my father’s oldest sister, once counted eighteen children in the house when she was visiting and noted that my father was undisturbed by it. In fact, he worked through it. Clearly the contrast with her own father was an important part of the delight she took in this—she, unlike my father, remembered my grandfather’s intolerance of noise, of children, of any interruption in his sanctified routines.

  For a while a little girl from down the street—Judith Kaplan, my younger brother’s age—became infatuated with my father. Whenever she was over, she’d find her way eventually to his study. She’d stand by his desk—her head barely level with its surface—and watch him writing. Her question became famous in my family, the pesterer’s question: “Whatcha doin’, Mister Nichols?”

  And he answered her—that seemed even funnier to me. Politely, graciously, he told her, every time. “Well, Judith,” he’d say, “I’m trying to work.”

  “Whatcha working on, Mister Nichols?”

  Look at him again. This time I’m standing in Judith’s place, a tall ungainly girl of twelve or thirteen, come to my father’s study to complain to him of the biblical passage that says, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

  I’m outraged by this and I want my father’s confirmation of that outrage. I’m thinking of all that’s required in Christian life, all that’s insisted on—all the kinds of goodness, both of intention and behavior. The passage simply isn’t true, is it, Pop? Hah! His yoke, easy? His burden light?

  And my father says, well, it is and it isn’t true. He knows what I mean; he knows a lot is demanded, that there is a lot you must demand of yourself, if you are to be truly Christian. But with grace this may sometimes feel easy. Like a lifting up, he says. But of course it isn’t easy in reality. No. He agrees. It isn’t. I have a point.

  And then he says maybe I should be thinking more about the words yoke and burden—they’re there too, aren’t they?— and less about the adjectives. Maybe then the passage won’t bother me so much.

  Another time: I arrive—at the age of fourteen—to tell my father that I won’t be taking communion anymore. I’ve listened to the invitation to my first communion, calling on me to give my whole heart to the service of Christ and His kingdom, to serve the Lord and keep His commandments all the days of my life, and it has set me to wondering: Do I regret my sins?

  Not enough of them, I know that. I’m aware, actually, that some of them even please me.

  Do I love Jesus Christ? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

  Am I in perfect charity with all men? I am not. And I’m not sorry about it, either. I have been a very good littler girl, shy and anxious to please, trapped between two more willful and attractively dynamic siblings. But being good has got me exactly nowhere. Now I’ve set about enjoying my resent
ments, my hatreds. I cherish them, in fact. I think of myself as a hard case. It is, as I see it, what I have. All I have. To pretend I’m someone I’m not puts that at risk and takes something precious away from me, something even more precious than the comfort I’ve drawn from the sacrament. I tell my father I can’t, in conscience, any longer participate.

  My father has turned from whatever he was doing to listen to me in all my conscientious self-importance. This is his gift, this full, generous, disinterested attention. It is how he approaches everyone. After his death I will read a testimonial from a student of his describing his quiet, careful listening in his office hours, and I will recognize this extraordinary generosity. You never knew—never even had a sense of—what he put aside to give himself to your pressing concerns. But he was there. When you asked him to be, he was absolutely there.

  Now my father says he’s sorry I feel this way but he honors my decision. He says it’s all right. I don’t need to take communion right now. I should do what I think is right.

  Instantly I feel a kind of retroactive rage. It’s all right? “But why did you make us go to Sunday school and confirmation classes and stuff if it doesn’t matter?” So much of my precious little life, wasted.

  He says it’s not at all that it doesn’t matter, just that I should make up my own mind. He says that what he and my mother have wanted for all of us by giving us religious training is for the path to faith to be familiar to us. Later, he says, if my thinking changes—as he hopes it will—I’ll know how to find my way back to believing, and to the church too.