The Story of My Father

by Sue Miller

  I won’t, I want to say. But then I’m aware again of that part of me that yearns for faith—and for my family, which seems so embedded in it. I stand there silent for a while—he waits—and then I ask my father whether he had a “call.” I’ve read about calls; I certainly know the story of Paul. I have very much wanted a call myself, a sign from God that this is His world, that He wishes to claim me. It is in some measure feeling that no such thing is possible that has turned me away from whatever believing might otherwise have been for me now.

  No, my father says, there was not a moment as such for him. It was far more gradual, far more the result of following steadily where his beliefs and feeling led him. And then he makes an analogy I have never forgotten. He compares faith to falling in love; and, more, he says that for him the experience of both was as though he’d entered a room backwards—backed into it—so that by the time he was able to look around and understand where he was, he was already encircled by it, held in it.

  And I feel a doubled yawning sorrow enter my life. I’m so sure I’ll never feel this way—encircled, either by love or faith.

  The study was also the room where my father read to us. He was a wonderful reader, taking all the parts in whatever the story was. He loved doing a falsetto for women and girls, being them and mocking them at the same time, something I would remember later when he was so easily contemptuous of the chirping cheerfulness of the mostly female residents of Sutton Hill. He read whatever we picked, without judgment or censure. He read Winnie the Pooh and Treasure Island and Swiss Family Robinson. He read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which I hated and my sister loved. He read Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. All the classics, the approved texts. But he also read Archie comics and Katie Keene and Little Lulu. We all loved Lulu, and we especially loved the voice my father gave her: high-pitched and ridiculous, yes, but also somehow sturdily competent.

  When my little brother was old enough for read-aloud books, he got to pick them, and we older children drifted away. We’d heard most of them several times by then anyway. But every once in a while, I’d go and sit on the daybed too, just for a few minutes, drawn by my father’s voice. And often I’d listen to the story from my bedroom with my door open while I did my homework, not quite able to hear the words, but noting the changing inflections, Pooh to Piglet, Tubby to Lulu. He once did such a convincing and self-pitying Eeyore that it brought sudden tears to my eyes.

  Where else do I see my father? Where else do I remember him clearly?

  In Maine, of course, at my grandparents’ camp—a group of small cabins scattered in a clearing in the woods by a pristine lake. We went there every long academic summer from the time I was three until I was in my teens (except for that summer my father was in Europe), and there was no part of that experience that wasn’t stamped indelibly on my mind, my heart.

  Even the long trips getting there. We would be packed in, three in the front seat, three in back, the luggage area and the top of the car overloaded with duffel bags of clothing for the whole summer, with diapers, with my father’s papers and books, with food for the trip. There was always a dog too, standing across several laps or sitting on someone, hot and sticky, perspiration spooling down lavishly from his dangling tongue. The interstate highway system was only beginning to be developed, so it usually took us four or five days of slow meandering loops on two-lane roads, through small towns across the Midwest and then in Pennsylvania and across upper New York State, to get there. Someone was always carsick; someone else had to pee—Now! Someone had pinched someone, encroached on someone else’s sacred sense of space, taken all the crayons, read over someone else’s shoulder, breathed on someone too hard. As an adolescent I once asked to change seats because the wind was blowing my hair against my carefully arranged do. My mother grew frantic with all of us. She reached around, slapping people randomly; it didn’t matter who, the person probably deserved it or would shortly. She smoked, she yelled, she wept.

  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 w
ere 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.