It was one of my father’s favorite stories; the other was when Phillies Hall-of-Famer Robin Roberts was asked toward the end of his career why he had never developed a pickoff move in his youth. To which Roberts replied, “When I was young, there wasn’t anybody on base to pick off.” My father had worked as a peanut vendor at Connie Mack Stadium in 1950, the year Roberts led the Whiz Kids to their first World Series in thirty-five years. Needless to say, the Yankees wiped the floor with them in the Fall Classic, four games to none. This happened just two weeks before I was born; the Phils would not win another pennant for thirty years, by which point my father, like many old-timers, had given up on baseball. In this sense, my birth came either far too early or ever so slightly too late.
We traded many stories of this nature. I asked if it was true that Frank Rizzo, while still a cop on the beat down on Erie Avenue, had perfected the art of bouncing his nightstick off the pavement and making it ricochet between a fleeing man’s legs, breaking one or more of them in the process.
“So they say,” he replied. “They used to call him the Cisco Kid.”
At the end of each day I would leave the hospital and visit my mother or one of my sisters, who lived nearby. My mother stopped by the hospital a couple of times toward the end, more because of me than because of him. Perhaps she thought I would view it as small of her if she did not at least pop in to say goodbye. Their meetings were oddly formal and ritualistic, as if they had convened in a law office to settle a patent-infringement case. My parents spoke to each other in the way that elderly strangers conversed; they reminisced about a generic past they shared because of their age, not because of their marriage. My father had always insisted that he had never stopped loving my mother, an assertion she found either deceitful or irrelevant. In any event, the sentiment was not reciprocated.
Throughout these visits, as he tried to engage her in conversation, my mother sat in a chair on the far side of the room, emitting an arctic civility. He talked to her like a husband; she talked to him like a neighbor. It reminded me of the time I had taken her to a South Street restaurant of no great distinction five years earlier. She had expressed an interest in visiting the bar and grill because of its classic Irish name, Bridget Foy’s, admittedly not the sort of enticement that would induce most epicures to make a beeline for the establishment. Later, working our way back toward Reading Terminal train station, we collided with an older gent emerging from the subway.
“Hi,” I said to the man.
“Hey, buddy, what are you doing here?” he replied.
“Who’s that?” asked my mother, standing at my side, locked in that ethereal, trancelike state she had entered decades earlier, when the world failed her, a state from which she never fully reemerged.
“Well, you were married to him for thirty years, Mom,” I said.
My youngest sister, Mary Ann, would join me every day at my father’s bedside, but my two other sisters, one a year older, one three years younger, wanted nothing to do with him. Eileen, a health industry executive out in Harrisburg, visited just once; Ree, who worked for the Internal Revenue Service a mile up the road, never. He was, in their eyes, beyond redemption. There was a common fear among us that he might yet pull off a Houdini-like escape, that he might miraculously cheat death and hang on for a few more years, bringing fresh misery to us all, since one of us might be forced to take him in. Nix to that, was my older sisters’ attitude: If he cheated death, let him cheat it elsewhere. Children are not born with their hearts hardened in this fashion, not even Irish-Catholic children. They have to be taught by professionals.
I was hardly surprised by my sisters’ refusal to visit my father in his final days, as my own motives in this autumnal rescue operation were suspect. Over the past three years, my father and I had jerry-built a relationship of sorts, but it was never rooted in affection. It was more like the stillness at Appomattox, with both combatants exhausted by a war one of them had started, then wished he hadn’t, but each had needlessly prolonged. Prosperous, successful, and happy, I saw no reason to be cruel to my ancient enemy. My feelings toward him, however, derived not from love or respect or even pity but from a sense of noblesse oblige. It was not merely that I could afford to be generous to a vanquished adversary; it would have seemed tactless to do otherwise. This was more like a civic obligation; I was not so much a son as an escort.
Ultimately, my attitude toward him was rooted in the sense of Christian duty I had learned as a child, for even after I stopped believing in God, I did not stop believing in Christ, who said that we were obliged to feed the poor, not to like them. I was determined to be at my father’s side when the end came, not because he deserved it or would appreciate the gesture but because having a bad father does not give anyone the right to be a bad son. One night, when I was walking out the door to return to Philadelphia during those final days, my ten-year-old son wandered out into the hallway to say goodbye.
“You’re taking good care of your father, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “Take notes.”
My father had his own reasons for cultivating our tenuous liaison over those last couple of years: My wife and I had the scratch to bail him out of a jam. To his credit, he never asked for large sums of money, turning down any amount greater than $250 because being flush would only lead him into temptation. Yet I was more than a steady source of petty cash to him; my way of life intrigued him. His attitude toward me was rooted in a sense of wonder. He was fascinated by my ability to make my way in the world, not only as a writer but as a husband and a father. He seemed amazed that anyone genetically linked to him could possibly amount to anything. He saw the hand of God at work here, not his own.
Puzzled by my success, not entirely sure what I did for a living, he would carry around clippings of articles I had written and show them to friends at AA meetings. Yet on the few occasions when he would introduce me to his neighbors or fellow alkies, he did not speak in the lovingly proprietary way most fathers speak about their sons. Instead, his tone suggested that I was some personable chap he had crossed paths with a few years back, and that against all odds we had somehow managed to stay in touch. Once he even asked me why I had never changed my name.
“Why would I change my name?”
“Well . . . because you might not want to be associated with me.”
“It’s my name. Anyhow, it’s not like you’re famous or something.”
“I know, but I thought you might not want people to know that I was your father.”
“Well, you thought wrong. I like my name. And you are my father.”
People who saw us together could not decode our relationship. If this really was your son, how come he never invited you home for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner? How come you saw him only a couple of times a year and almost never brought along his grandchildren? To an outsider, like my father’s landlords, the two Yuppies who ran a prissy candy shoppe on the ground floor and a repellent flophouse on the second, our relationship must have seemed incomprehensible. It was an indisputable fact that I was his son; it was right there in the court records. But there was no way to tell from the way we behaved around one another that we were related. Seeing us together, it would have been easy to mistake me for an industrious census taker gathering data on my appointed rounds and him for one of my accommodating clients. We never gave the impression that we were chums, pals, family.
There is no universally accepted protocol for dying. Some people become alarmingly chatty and forthright as the end draws near. Others clam up entirely in the presence of the Grim Reaper. Some people want to make amends. Others would like to get a few things off their chest. Deathbed confessions are by no means rare. But this is not how my father chose to make his exit. Whenever I was in his room, we would maintain the fiction that he had merely stopped by for a routine checkup. We did not discuss cancer, death, the Last Rites, absolution, or getting his affairs in order. We acted as if this whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, a kerfuffle that would soon blow over. Of course, I could have begun grilling him about unexplained family mysteries, but that would have been a clear signal to him that he was dying. He did not want to believe this; who would? So we pretended that everything was shipshape and never got around to reckoning our accounts and closing the books. He never asked why I wrote that
Newsweek
article. I never asked why he went out of his way to supply such copious material for the essay. He never asked if I was really trying to kill myself that torrid August night. I didn’t ask how his little sister died. He didn’t ask when I realized that I did not want to be a priest. I didn’t ask when he realized that he would never be a monk. He didn’t ask if any of us had ever loved him. I didn’t ask if he had ever loved us.
Afterward, I wished I had pinned him down on what really happened with the military police when he was arrested after going AWOL and what horrors befell him in the military prison in Georgia where he spent three years after being convicted of desertion. Perhaps I should have used that time to find out why he had been shot as a teenager (I had long since ceased to believe in the ricocheting-bullet explanation), how my mother’s brother Henry had died, what circumstances had turned my father’s brother Johnny into a career criminal. I would have liked to learn why my father married a woman who did not love him—and never tried terribly hard to disguise the fact—and why the two of them even bothered to have children in the first place. I would have also liked to know what pleasure could possibly be derived from beating children. Did making us worthless make him feel less worthless? Or had he perhaps not noticed that we were unhappy? Hadn’t a family-wide rash of suicide attempts and nervous breakdowns and seventeen-year-olds bolting off to New York twenty-four hours after graduating from high school been a tip-off that all was not well? But these subjects were never discussed, because we had never established any effective mechanism for communicating with each other and had a hard time getting the conversational ball rolling. The emotions we had relied on in our dealings for the past five decades were hatred, resentment, condescension, distrust. There was no possibility of a full debriefing or a chimes-at-midnight heart-to-heart now. We were like battered warships that desperately sought to engage but could never maneuver close enough to get the grappling hooks secured.
We did discuss the war years. My father had been out of the country just once, when he was shipped to New Caledonia during the Second World War. New Caledonia was a French colony in the South Pacific, populated by people who were, in his words, as black as the ace of spades. There were still a few Japanese hostiles on the island when he arrived, but not many; the colony had little strategic importance, and the infantry was merely there to mop up. My father loved New Caledonia; throughout his life, he would make references to those years before suddenly dropping the subject, fearing perhaps that it might lead to unsettling questions about his dishonorable discharge and imprisonment. He was not unlike Fletcher Christian and his shipmates in
Mutiny on the Bounty
. He, like they, had fallen hopelessly in love with a tropical paradise, where he was liberated from all responsibility and found himself surrounded by affable, nonthreatening aboriginals. Then he fell ill, perhaps with malaria, and was forcibly recalled from this personal Eden. My father would have made a better life for himself had he never returned from the South Pacific. It was, I believe, the only place he was ever truly happy.
As his life wound down, I avoided all but the most statutory physical contact and any attempt to simulate emotions we did not, in fact, possess. Late in my childhood, my father had developed the habit of hugging his children and telling them that he loved them. He may have learned this from watching television; there was a good deal of choreographed paternal affection in programs of the era. These gestures we found both repulsive and inappropriate, an invasion of privacy, a charade. I am not sure he was ever aware of this. An unreciprocated embrace, the glacial resistance one feels when clasping another human being who does not clasp back, is almost impossible to go undetected. When I was small and defenseless, he had used his arms to beat me. He could not redefine their function now. The statute of limitations on parental affection had long since run out; if you didn’t show your kids that you loved them when they were young, it was too late to do it when you were old. I didn’t mind my father hugging my kids, because he’d never beaten them with his belt buckle, or abandoned them in a blizzard, or left them alone in a housing project gnawing uncooked spaghetti at midnight while he was out in a taproom getting soused. But I didn’t want him hugging me. The nerve endings he was trying to reach had been dead for thirty-five years.
As per my policy for the previous quarter-century, I was keeping my distance, physically, emotionally, even verbally. I was not going to blame him, harass him, badger him, cross-examine him. I was taking the high road. The father I had feared and loathed and wished to see incarcerated or incinerated or flattened by a tractor-trailer had vanished, his place now taken by a harmless, defanged old man. He had not wrecked my life; he had merely wrecked my childhood. And for this he had paid the price. I would rather have suffered any amount of physical abuse as a child than be an adult so reviled by his own children that they wouldn’t even come to see him before he died. As he lay there in that Philadelphia hospital, being eaten alive by cancer, it crossed my mind that the God he had long professed to love so deeply was finally evening up the score for a lifetime of transgressions. All his life, my father would rattle on about the lonely passion of Christ Crucified; now he had a chance to find out exactly what it felt like to be Jesus that Friday afternoon on Golgotha when His so-called friends ran away and left Him to face the Romans all by Himself. I did not enjoy watching my father in the throes of agony; I merely felt that his torments did not seem inappropriate. He had done bad things to God’s children, and now God was doing bad things to him.