The Book of Dads

by Ben George

  On this night, Sean was drinking and being funny, and he had started an argument with one of Carol’s friends who had come to visit; he had said things to his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Carol’s Edgar, making fun of his English accent, and he took offense when Tom called him out for having too much. What happened, Beckworth found out later, was that when Tom walked away from the fire, Sean followed him, and tried to confront him about the remark, bringing up that he had given Tom a place to stay in New York. It was all the pathology of too much wine, and when Tom refused to be drawn into the altercation, Sean began swinging at him. He was too drunk to do much damage, and Tom wrestled him quickly to the floor.

  By the time Beckworth reached them, they were in the little foyer at the front of the house, Tom holding Sean down on the floor, Sean kicking and cursing. “Let me up, let me up.” Mary was there, too, and they were both trying to calm the young man down. Beckworth’s wife, Ann, had tried to separate the two boys earlier, and was now standing there, helpless, also crying, but trying to calm everyone, talking to the boy and repeating the phrase, “We love you. We all love you.”

  And so Beckworth stepped in: he took the boy by the arms, helped him rise, and then held him as he pulled and strained to free himself. Now it was just Beckworth and his son, faltering and pulling at each other, moving to the side door of the house and out onto the porch, Sean yelling, “Let me go. I’m leaving. I’m going back to New York. Just let me go.”

  “You can’t leave, son. You’re in no condition to drive.”

  “Let me go!”

  Beckworth held him, was being pulled by him to the end of the porch, where, with all his remaining strength, he got the boy in a forced embrace, using the corner post as an anchor. “I’m not letting you go, son,” Beckworth told him. “I love you. You might as well stop this.”

  The boy kicked three slats out of the porch, struggling to free himself, and now Ann was holding him, too.

  There were people off in the dim yard, beyond the circle of dying light where the fire had burned so brightly only a few minutes earlier.

  The struggle went on, and Mary and Tom stepped in, too, holding Sean there on the porch.

  Beckworth had let go, had walked to the other end of the porch. But all the boy’s rage was still aimed at him. “I’m sorry I’m not a big sports figure, Dad! I’m sorry I’m not a baseball player!” They were holding him, keeping him from going off to his car, and he was still trying to free himself, but also looking at his father, shouting at him while the others held him. “Go ahead, walk away, Dad—like you always did.”

  None of it made any real sense. Beckworth had never pushed sports; he had never been distant. Yet he felt the hurled accusations as elements of some truth, something he could not explain away.

  “Go ahead, Dad. You were never there anyway. I’m sorry I’m not a famous baseball player, Dad.”

  Beckworth went into the house and stood at the kitchen sink and wept.

  Later, talking with Tom, he wondered if his failure as a father was in not paying enough attention to the boy’s feelings about the very wit everyone appreciated. All of the children were talented, and Beckworth had encouraged them about their gifts—but the girls had music, as Tom did, and Sean had not gone that way. Sean wanted to make movies; his best gift was his wit. By disagreeing with him, or taking contrary positions in talk—remember the father’s and the son’s tendency toward the dogmatic in discussions—Beckworth was unwittingly denying this gift. “He may be a genius,” Tom said. “But that doesn’t make him right all the goddamn time, either.”

  Beckworth stood there admiring this oldest of his children. Twenty-seven years old and wise.

  “Did I ever push you guys about sports—or anything?”

  “I think he just remembered all the movies about bad fathers he’s seen and he just threw it all at you because he wanted to hurt you and he knew it would hurt.”

  Sean spoke to others about that night. He questioned how he could’ve said those things to his father. “Why would I say that stuff to Dad? I love Dad.”

  Those things were reported to Beckworth. He never heard them from the boy, directly. Sean returned to New York, and went on with things. He and Mary broke up, and he came to the house to visit with another young woman. And then still another. He stopped drinking; he had come to the acknowledgment that he had a problem with it. But the slats in the porch remained broken. Years passed. Beckworth remembered the pathology of that night, and it was all tied up in the terrors of the earlier time—that period of days and weeks when the news kept getting worse, and the whole family was in the grip of awful possibility.

  He doesn’t live in that house anymore. The marriage ended. He moved to another state. The children are all grown and when he sees them now there is always the complication of the divorce—the sorrow of it. Sean has done well in New York, is married, and is happy by all accounts. He has no communication with Beckworth, who keeps up with him through the others, through Tom, who in the heartbreak of seeing the end of his parents’ marriage still kept all lines open.

  Beckworth thinks of Sean’s continuing rage at him, and then remembers the porch, and the broken slats. Always now, his memory of Sean is tied up with fault: those many times when he could have done better—could have paid more attention, or paid the right attention, or said something encouraging, or kept quiet at some crucial moment. But there is also the simple truth that sometimes, when the particulars are counted up, and one allows for the fact that the actors in the drama are all human—sometimes a son can get it wrong, too.

  Now there is another child. Two and a half years old. A girl. A bright, wonderful little girl. Beckworth is trying again to be the best father a child can have, and again, of course, he is, as always, faltering and failing. The days pass, the years.

  HERE COMES THE SUN

  NICK FLYNN

  [A TELEGRAM MADE OF SHADOWS]

  (2007) This black and white photograph in my hand is an image of my unborn daughter—this is what I’m told. It’s actually a series of photographs, folded one upon the other, like a tiny accordion. I was there when the doctor or the technician or whoever he was made it with his little wand of sound. I sat beside him, looked into the screen as he pointed into the shadows—“Can you see her nose, can you see her hand? Can you see her foot, right here, next to her ear?” I was there when each shot was taken, yet in some ways, still, it is all deeply unreal. It’s as if I were holding a photograph of a dream, a dream sleeping inside the body of the woman I love, a woman now walking through the world with two hearts beating inside her.

  Here’s a secret: all of us, if we live long enough, will lose our way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn’t happened to you yet consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else—an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood. Or it may be easier to blame the map you were given—folded too many times, out of date, tiny print. But if you are honest, you will be able to blame only yourself. If you are lucky, you will remember a story you heard as a child, the trick of leaving a trail of bread crumbs through the woods, the idea being that after whatever it is that is going to happen in those woods has happened, you can then retrace your steps and find your way back out.

  One day I hope to tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way.

  This, at least, is the version I hope to be able to tell her.

  [PROTEUS]

  Proteus lives at the bottom of a steep cliff, down a treacherous path, at the edge of the sea. You can see him from the top of the cliff, lolling on a flat rock, staring into the endless nothing of the sea, but to reach him is difficult. You’ve been told t
hat he has the answer to your question, and you are a little desperate to have this question answered. As you make your way down, you must be careful not to dislodge any loose gravel, careful not to cry out when the thorns pierce your feet. You must approach him as quietly as you can, get right up on him, get your hands on him, around his neck. You’ve been told that you have to hold on while you ask him your question, you’ve been told that you can’t let go. As you hold on he will transform into the shape and form of that which most terrifies you, in order to get you to release your grip. But if you can hold on through your fear, he will return to his real form, and answer your question.

  My mother told me a story, just once, of how as a girl she’d been tied to a chair, the chair teetering at the top of the attic stairs, her captors threatening to send her end over end, tumbling down. I don’t know if they did this more than once, and I don’t know what they wanted—a question answered, a promise made—beyond the usual childhood cruelties, or if they ever got it.

  And then there’s my father, and the stories he tells. The two are nearly inseparable, my father and his stories—the same handful over and over, his repertoire. A liar always tells his story the same way, I’ve heard said, except that some—most—of my father’s stories have, improbably, turned out to be true. The story of his father inventing the life raft, the story of the novel he’s spent his whole life writing, the story of robbing a few banks—all true.

  This morning, in my inbox, I find this note from Julia, a friend in Berlin:

  I was standing on the Teufelberg (The Devil’s Mountain) with a friend last night, listening to Patti Smith playing in the stadium below, and I thought of you. The Teufelberg is made from all the junk of the war, the broken houses and so on. It is a big mountain, and we stood there looking out over my strange and terrible and beautiful city. Where are you?

  Teufelberg. Devil’s Mountain. All the junk of the war.

  Here I am, I think, writing about my mother (again), and here I am, writing about my father (again), writing about my shadow. If asked, I’ll sometimes say that I’m writing about the way photographs are a type of dream, about how shadows can end up resembling us. Sometimes I’ll say I’m writing about my unborn daughter, and sometimes I’ll say I’m writing a memoir of bewilderment, and just leave it at that. What I don’t say, what I should say, is that what I’m really writing about is Proteus, the mythological creature who changes shape as you hold on to him, who changes into the shape of that which most terrifies you, as you ask him your question, as you refuse to let go. The question is, often, simply a variation of, “How do I get home?”

  [A BOX OF DOLLS]

  Two months before our daughter is born we go to an infant CPR class. I have taken CPR classes before, but never specifically to save an infant. The woman leading the class is passionate about safety, pumping us with gruesome details of what could happen if we fail to put our child in a secured car seat, if she swallows a penny, if we spill hot coffee on her. “One day you will come upon your baby and she will be blue,” this woman says. “What will you do?” At her feet sits a box of dolls with removable rubber faces and chests that can be compressed only if the air passage, the “windpipe,” is opened. As she speaks she wraps a face around each skull, assuring us that each has been sterilized since the last class. “I take them home and boil them,” she says, as she places a doll face-up on the table in front of each of us, along with a packet of alcohol, so we can give the doll’s mouth one last wipe before we attempt to revive her. By the looks on the faces of the others in the class, we are all a little freaked out. “Take two fingers,” the teacher says, “place them just below your baby’s nipples, in the center of her chest, and push.”

  [SELF-PORTRAIT AS AN INFANT IN MY FATHER’S ARMS]

  In the photograph he is sitting in a chair, and I am the infant in his arms. We are both looking into the camera, or at least at whoever it is that is taking the photograph. My mother, I imagine, since I found it with her things. The look on his face is heavy, as if I were a burden, as if he were burdened, though perhaps I am simply reading into it, knowing that he will be gone in a few months. Impossible not to read into it. How old am I? He was gone by the time I was six months old, or I was gone, my mother taking me, us, away. Choose a version, choose a victim. The look on his face is a tunnel, leading out. No one would call him happy.

  And now I have a picture of me with my daughter in my arms, almost the same picture, all these years later. Now I am older than any of them, older than my mother made it to, older than my father before he walked into that bank with his forged check, smiling into the camera. I have her in my arms, and I am smiling so broadly that I barely recognize myself. It’s a form of ecstasy, my face. I thought it would break me, before she came, and it did, but not in the way I feared. First Lili cried her Electra cry, then Maeve cried her first breath cry, then I cried, with a newfound joy. And at that moment I thought of my own father—it surprised me to think of him at that moment. And it surprised me that I felt sad for him, having denied himself this, this simple moment, having given it away. “I had car trouble,” is how he explains his absence now, but we both know it was the vodka.

  [HERE COMES THE SUN]

  Every Christmas, for a few years, which seemed and still seems forever, the new Beatles album waited beneath the tree. Some years there were even two—1968, the Year of the Monkey, there were two—two perfect squares wrapped in red and green tissue paper. We already half knew most of the songs, but we didn’t know all the words, we didn’t know which followed which, we didn’t have the pictures. One opened up like a kid’s picture book, John Paul Ringo and George looking out at us in the uniforms of some psychedelic army; John Paul Ringo and George walking across a street in white suits and black suits and barefoot and in jeans. Before that day we’d had to sit in the car and wait for “Here Comes the Sun” or “Hey Jude” to end—no one until that moment, nowhere on earth, had ever heard “Hey Jude,” but from that moment on it would always be here, from then on it would never not be here.

  A few years after the Beatles broke up I was delivering newspapers before the sun came up. Sometimes my mother would drive me, if it had snowed in the night, if I was late for school, her car warm and waiting after I trudged back between houses, the radio playing low. Most mornings I was alone, on my bike or walking, and I would pause under a certain streetlight to see what was happening in the world. I would follow a story for the days or weeks it would appear, first as a headline, then as it moved further and further into the body of the paper. Watergate. Patty Hearst. Vietnam. One morning the photograph on the front page was of a plane that had crashed at Logan Airport, thirty miles to the north. The plane had tried to take off but something had held it down—maybe there was ice on the wings, maybe one of the wings was broken, maybe a screw was loose. I can’t remember now, I’m sorry. All I know for certain is that it crashed, the photograph of the wreckage there on the cover of the Boston Globe—plane parts and body parts, or at least word of body parts. Logan is on the sea, there is a breakwater around it, huge blocks of granite for the waves to break themselves on—as I write this I now think it was trying to land, I think it went down too soon, I think it slammed into the breakwater and flipped over. Too far or not far enough, too fast or too slow, something happened, everyone died, that is, everyone except one man, and this one man, this survivor, was the reason I read the paper every day, searching for news of the wreck, which soon became news of this man, whose name I remembered for years but cannot locate now in the vault of my mind. A Latino name, I think—Humberto, Eugenio, Emmanuel—I thought it was a funny name. Wait—Manuel Tavares, maybe that’s it. Tavares sounds right. Let’s call him Manuel—Manuel stayed alive for days, and then weeks, horribly burned, 80 percent of his body, wrapped in gauze and immobile but alive. I searched the paper every day for word of him. Something inside me wanted him to live, something inside me was desperate for him to make it, to pull through, for one person to walk away or be dragged awa
y from this impossible disaster—if he died on me then no one would have survived.

  [DISSOLVE]

  I wake up early, carry Maeve from the bed to the living room, let Lili sleep in. Maeve smiles at the daylight, at the shadows crossing the brick wall outside the kitchen window. She seems happy that the sun came back. It’s so simple. At dusk she looks in terror out the windows, seemingly confused by the darkness, by where everything goes. In this she is like me—I smile in the morning, and as the day progresses I get more and more confused by everything coming at me. Overstimulated, they call us. At sundown she cries, simple as that. “Nothing you can do that isn’t done,” I sing to her, swaying slowly around the kitchen with her in my arms—“nothing you can sing that isn’t sung.”

  For a long time after my mother’s suicide—ten years or so, off and on—I lived on a boat. When my father got himself evicted and ended up homeless I was still on that boat, I still hadn’t made my way to shore. My twenties, you could say, were water, you could say I was more of the ocean than of the earth, you could say that whatever was solid in me was slowly dissolving. I had read somewhere that nothing should change after a “serious trauma,” in the face of “such a loss.” I was away at school when I got the call, but when I came home it was no longer my home. I dropped out of school but I never spent another night in that house. If I tried I’d wake up, hungover, slouched in the front seat of my car, the car itself sideways in the driveway. The boat was on land in a friend’s yard, and I’d often go to it in the middle of the night, crawl aboard. We put her back in the water that spring.