by Dan Chaon
“Hello?” my wife will say, and I’ll smile as she nudges me. “Are you there?” she’ll whisper.
PRODIGAL
Mine is the typical story: I used to despise my father, and now that he is dead I feel bad about despising him. There’s not much more to say about that.
When I was young, I used to identify with those precociously perceptive child narrators one finds in books. You know the type. They always have big dark eyes. They observe poetic details, clear-sighted, very sensitive: the father’s cologne-sweet smell, his lingering breath of beer and cigarettes, his hands like ___. Often farm animals are metaphorically invoked, and we see the dad involved in some work—hunched over the gaping mouth of a car, straightening the knot in his salesman’s tie, pulling himself into the cab of his semi-truck, on his hands and knees among the rosebushes. We’ll see a whole map of his wasted, pathetic life in the squeal of his worn-out brakes, in the wisping smokestacks of the factory where he works, in the aching image of him rising before dawn to turn up the thermostat. The mom will peer from behind a curtain as he drives away. Her hands tremble as she folds clothes, washes dishes, makes you a sandwich. Something you don’t quite understand is always going on, and you press close to the bathroom door she is locked behind. You’ll probably hear her weeping.
Now that I have children of my own, this bothers me. This type of kid. Sometimes, when I feel depressed and stare out the window while my kids pester me for attention, or when I lose my temper and throw a plate or whatever, or when I’m in a good mood and I’m singing some song from the radio too loudly and too off-key, I think of that gentle, dewy-eyed first person narrator and it makes my skin crawl. It doesn’t matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you’re not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.
My father is a good example. My father used to whistle merry little tunes when he was happy and soft, minor key ones when he was sad. I can’t remember when exactly this began to annoy me, but by the time I was eleven or twelve, I could do a pretty amazing parody of it. I’d see him coming, loping along with his hands behind his back and his eyes downcast, whistling some dirge, and I could barely contain my private laughter.
Once, when he was visiting, he began to whistle in an elevator, completely oblivious of the obvious codes of silence and anonymity that govern certain public places. The second the doors slid shut, he abruptly puckered his lips, like a chaste kiss, and began to trill, filling the air with melody, accenting the tune with grace notes and a strange, melodramatic vibrato at the climactic parts, until everyone nearby was turned to stone with horror and embarrassment, staring straight ahead and pretending they couldn’t hear it.
He was on his last legs by that point—“last legs,” he said, as if he had more than one pair. I didn’t believe him at the time, in part because those words seemed so trite and goofy. I felt that any person really facing death would conceive of it in much grander terms. Even my father.
One time my father hit my mother. I wish you could’ve seen his face: the bared teeth and bulged eyes, the mottled redness of the cheeks and forehead, the skin seeming to shine like a lacquered surface. If someone had been there to take a photograph, to freeze the expression in the moment before his hand lurched up to grab my mom by the neck, in a purely objective picture, you would not be able to identify the emotion in that look as rage. You might assume that it was pain or terror. There’s a great photo from the Vietnam war—you know the one, of the guy screaming as he’s shot through the head. That’s what my dad looked like at that moment.
I never saw him look like that, before or after. But if I close my eyes I can see that face as clearly as I can picture the school portraits of my children on the coffee table, or the blue LeSabre that is waiting for me in the garage, or my first and only dog, Lucky, who, on the night of my parents’ fight lay under the table in the kitchen, his long snout resting warily on his paws.
I’m sure that my father never realized how easily I could graft that face over his gentle one, how much more easily I could conjure up that image instead of some thought of his good qualities. It probably would have made him cry. He wept easily in his last years. I recall seeing him sitting in his easy chair, touching his fingers to his moist eyes as he watched a news special about poor orphans in Romania. When he and my mother had their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and he stood up to make a speech, his voice broke. “This woman,” he said, and he choked back a sob. “This woman is the first and only love of my life.”
I don’t know. It’s hard to decide if the waver in his voice was authentic or not. Who knows what he was really thinking as he spoke, as he stood there with my mother beaming, glistening-eyed, up at him—whether that strangled “love of my life” was tinged with regret, self-pity, whether it was because he was standing in front of all those people who knew that he and my mom hadn’t had the most pleasant of lives together. But it also might be that he said it with true, honest feeling. In the end, there probably isn’t much difference between being in love and acting like you’re in love.
I don’t mean this as a put-down either. I really don’t believe that it’s possible to be in love all of the time, any more than it’s possible to always be good. So you must go with the next best thing. You try to pretend.
There are times when I would do anything to be a good person. But I’m not. Deep down, most of the time, I’m not. What can you do? You have a flash of goodness and you try to hold on to it, ride it for all it’s worth.
There was this one time that my kids and I were playing with clay, the three of us together. I don’t know why this moment was special, but it was. We were all quiet, concentrated on our work, our fingers kneading and shaping. We were making an elephant, and I remember how excited they were when I rolled out its trunk, a careful snake between my palm and the surface of the table. My youngest was about three at the time, and I remember how he rested his cheek against my arm, watching me. I remember how soft and warm that cheek felt. The older one was pounding out a flap for the ear, and I can recall my voice being gentle and perfect when I told him how great it was. He gave it to me; I pressed it to the elephant’s head.
But it didn’t last for long, that moment. I am sure that neither of them remember it as I do, for pretty soon they started arguing, whining about who had more clay and so on. It was a jolt; I could actually feel the goodness moving out of me, the way you can feel blood moving when you blush or grow pale. “Come on, guys,” I said, “let’s not fight. This is fun, isn’t it? Let’s have fun.” But my gentle voice was just an imitation, I was mimicking the tone of those enlightened parents you see sometimes, the kind who never seem to raise their voice beyond the steady monotone of kind patience, like the computer in that movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But even parents like that won’t be forgiven, you know. My wife’s friend is a psychologist, and she spent her life explaining things in the most calm, reasonable voice you can imagine. She never raised her voice. Even when her kid was two years old, she was out there saying things like, “Please don’t run in the street, because, even though you’re excited and it’s hard to pay attention, some people drive their cars too fast and they might not see you,” et cetera. Now, naturally, her adult son won’t talk to her. At all. He finds her unbearably manipulative. Repressive. Repulsive. Good words like that.
I recall when my wife’s friend first told us about this. How old was I? Twenty-three or twenty-four maybe, and the son might have been twenty. I was sitting at the kitchen table across from this old, heavy, smooth-talking gal, the leader of some women’s group thing my wife went to, and I was holding my sweet, sleeping baby in my arms. I can recall giving her that stern, bored stare I used to reserve for people I thought of as adults. She was almost my father’s age, and her angry so
n was only a few years younger than I. She was a failure, I thought then. I stared down at my sleeping baby’s face, the long-lashed eyes, the softly parted lips that moved slightly, as if he dreamed of nursing, and I thought: That will never happen to me. I will never let them hate me.
Now, as they are growing older, I am aware that hatred is a definite possibility at the end of the long tunnel of parenthood, and I suspect that there is little one can do about it.
Not long ago, when I insisted that he come down to dinner, my youngest son called me a “stupid idiot.” I did not spank him, or wash his mouth out with soap, as my own father might have done; I simply set him up on the “time-out” stool—our preferred method of punishment—and scolded him while he kicked his legs and sang defiantly. His eyes sparked at me, and I could clearly see the opening of a vortex I would eventually be sucked into, against my will.
Once, I recall, when my oldest son was about five years old, he asked me if he could have my skeleton when I was dead. He told me that when he was grown up, he wanted to own a haunted house. He would cover my remains with spider webs and charge people five dollars to look at them.
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.” I even smiled, as if it were cute. I did not act as if I was offended. But the truth is, my throat tightened. You’ll be sorry, I wanted to say. You’ll be sorry when I’m gone!
Do you know how sorry I was? You should have seen me at my father’s funeral. I look back on this with some embarrassment, because I truly lost control. I wailed and tore at my hair. My children may have been too young to remember seeing this.
When my grandfather died, my father wept silently. Tears ran out of his nose, and I remember that it took me a long time to figure out that he didn’t simply have a cold. At the funeral, he stared straight ahead, rigid, almost glaring, his jaw set.
One time, I remember, we were at the county fair. We were walking back to our car through the parking lot, when a group of older teenagers began to make fun of us. This was in the early seventies, and the teens were what we then called “hippies”—shaggy, raggedly dressed, full of secrets. As a child, I was warned to stay away from them, as they might kidnap me in one of their Volkswagen vans and force me to smoke marijuana.
In any case, they were amused by us. We must have looked ridiculously corny to them, and I remember one of them calling out, “Look! Here comes Mother, Father, and the Children!” And the others joined in: “Hello, Mother! Hello, Father! Hello, little Wally!”
My father acted as if they weren’t there, though his face became stiff and his eyes fixed harshly on some point in the distance. He just kept plodding forward, as if he couldn’t hear them. That was the look, I thought, that he had at the funeral.
The times in my childhood that I remember seeing him cry, they were always because of music. He was frequently brought to tears by some old, unbearably sentimental song. I remember this one called “Scarlet Ribbons,” and another that went:
O my Papa!
To me he was so wonderful!
O my Papa!
To me he was so good!
This song, in particular, used to drive me crazy, and when he would play it I would leave the room, if possible. It wasn’t only because of the maudlin tremor in the singer’s voice, or because of my father’s solemn canonizing of my grandfather, a man who had once burned my father’s arm with a red-hot fork, leaving a scar which still remained. (“It taught me a lesson,” my father said. He was being punished for having cruelly burned his younger sister with a match.)
It wasn’t the hypocrisy that repelled me. It was simply that I understood the implications of the line: “To me, he was so wonderful.” By which the singer meant, “No matter what, my father seemed wonderful to me.” And I knew that my father wasn’t weeping because he was extending this grace to his own father. No: He was weeping because he was wishing it for himself. He hoped that I would someday sing “O My Papa!” He cried for himself, and each tear said, “Someday you will love me unconditionally. Someday you will forgive me. Someday you will be sorry.”
Which was something I didn’t want to hear at the time.
I’ve suffered a little. Along with his sentimental side came a nasty temper. I got my share of what my father called “lickings,” a term which, even in the extremity of my punishment, would cause me to smirk into my hand. I was beaten with a wire brush, a belt, a length of hose. And I was the victim of verbal and emotional abuse. I don’t know whether I mentioned this or not, but once my father hit my mother. I stood by watching.
Nowadays, I meet a lot of people who were never beaten when they were children. They never witnessed any sort of violence in the home and the idea of striking a child is so aberrant to them that I enjoy shocking them with tales of my abuse—most of which are quite true.
My father would have been just as outraged to hear of a parent who didn’t use corporal punishment. You couldn’t really reason with a child, he would have said, but you had to make sure they obeyed. They had to learn to respect before they learned to think. The idea of a world filled with unspanked children would have made him frown grimly. For what would become of society, once these children grew up? The children would be spoiled, and the world would be filled with rude, disrespectful, dishonest, shiftless adults.
He worried about me being spoiled. By “spoiled,” he didn’t mean what my mother means when she says that she can hardly wait to see her grandchildren at Christmastime. “I’ll spoil them rotten,” she says devilishly, and I say, “Oh, they’re already so spoiled it’s not funny.” And we laugh.
To my father, the word still retained a large part of its older, more serious connotations: “Spoiled” meant “ruined,” and the act of spoiling had flickers of its archaic meaning—to pillage, to plunder. In my father’s estimation, a man who spoiled his children was robbing them, for a spoiled child would never be capable of the higher emotions: love, patriotism, self-sacrifice, honor, duty. Though he wept when the father made the son shoot the pet deer in The Yearling, he felt that the father did the right thing. We got into a heated argument about this one night about a year before he died. “It had to be done!” my father had insisted, and his voice rose, almost cracking with emotion. “That’s how it was back then, damn it!”
“Well, do you know how it is now?” I said—I immediately saw the opening I’d been waiting years for, my chance to educate him. “Do you know what would happen to a man who burned his child with a red-hot fork? He would be jailed and his children would be taken by the state!”
My father could not help but look at his scar—the tattoo of his father that he would still be wearing as he lay in his casket.
(I saw it there—I pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, smoothing my fingers over that paper-dry corpse skin, and there it was. I touched the scar, and that was the last time I touched my father.)
My father stared at the four smooth lines the fork had left just above the wristband of his watch. “Do you think my dad loved me any less than you love your kids?” he said. “Is that what you think?”
And we were both silent.
I don’t know the answer, even now. Maybe love, like suffering, is relative. My wife’s psychologist friend once told me, judgmentally, that sarcasm is more damaging to a child’s spirit than a slap across the face. Emerson once said that the civilized person actually suffers more than those primitive people who are inured to hardship because the genteel person is more acutely aware of pain. I used to call this Emerson’s Princess and the Pea Theory, but maybe it’s true. We all require a certain amount of pain to justify ourselves later, and if we aren’t lucky enough to have parents who beat us and force us to shoot our beloved pets, the stab of an unkind word or a neglectful shrug of the shoulders will do just as well.
Still, sometimes when I hear the stories of other people, I feel a little ashamed for complaining. I once knew a girl whose father raped her, regularly, when she was between the ages of two and six. Another of my friends, a guy from Cambodia, lost his mother
and four brothers to the Khmer Rouge; his own father informed on them. Listening to such stuff, I feel like an anorexic in a country of starving people. Why was I so angry at my father? What’s the point of my complaint? I’ve suffered very little, relatively speaking, so why do I feel so bad, so maudlin?
I’m not even sure I’m going to die right away. I might easily—75 percent chance—recover. According to the books, “the five-year survival rate for patients with localized disease is 75 percent.” But I could live twenty more years. Or fifty! What’s the point in even wondering?
That’s what my father used to say when I asked him about death: There’s no point in wondering, in worrying about it. It will come to all of us, sooner or later, he said, very solemn and sagelike, though I was thinking, “Duh—I know that.” You could get hit by a truck tomorrow, he continued, and I sort of shut him off after that, his thoughtful droning. Why had I even bothered to ask?
Actually, I do remember one other thing he said—though whether he said it that time or another I can’t recall.
“Our children relive our lives for us,” he said. “That’s the only kind of afterlife I believe in, just that we live on through our children. I don’t know whether that makes any sense. It probably doesn’t now, but it will. You try different things, you make different choices, but it’s still all the same person. You. Me. Your grandpa. We get mostly the same raw material, just recycled. We’re more alike than different, you know.”
At the time, the thought seemed ridiculous. I’m not you, I thought. I knew for a fact that I was much smarter and more capable than he’d ever be.
I wonder how my own children would react if I told them my father’s theory. I doubt that it would make any more sense to them than it did to me, though they are not old enough yet to be repulsed by the idea, I don’t think.
