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I brushed aside some strands of his hair, which was something I had never done when he was alive. Sometimes, we would look at each other across a room. and I would see the desire to hold me. I would catch him staring at me with a warm smile on his lips. I could sense the struggle going on within him, the battle between the urge to embrace me, to kiss me, to be my father completely, and this iron restraint that snapped his head around or darkened his eyes or made him sigh and walk away.
Why?
Why was that inhibition there? What had I done to cause it-- or what had he done?
It occurred to me that he had fears, too; my strong and powerful father was afraid of something. Even with all his psychological techniques, his proven methodology, he was like one of his own patients, haunted by something too powerful to ignore or escape.
What?
What could possibly do that to him?
I missed my chance to ask him the questions the way he would ask them of me. That I did regret.
But I was about to discover that I didn't need to rush back here to ask the questions.
The answers were waiting for me. I had merely to look in the right places, behind the shadows that for so many years had kept them securely hidden,
2
A Letter from My Father
.
"Why is it." Daddy once asked at dinner. "that
people are more adept at deceiving themselves than they are at deceiving other people?' My adoptive mother raised her eyes to the ceiling so often in our house. I used to wonder if she actually saw something up there, or maybe someone, some compassionate invisible friend who sympathized with her daily turmoil.
"I absolutely hate it. Claude, when you bring home your work, when you use us as your sounding board and treat us as if we were your patients. I'm sure in your mind everyone but you is crazy," she said.
I shifted my eyes from him to her and to him as if watching a tennis match. but I dared not say anything or even look too hard at my A.M. I was a teenager by then but still under the rule she had laid down as gospel: children speak only when they are spoken to at the dinner table, especially at her dinner table.
You know I hate that term. Alberta. People are not crazy, They suffer from a variety of maladies, psychoses, and neuroses. It's difficult enough to get the public not to use the term, but the wife of a psychiatrist should be the last one to be heard uttering it," he said in his measured, soft tone. I often thought that no one, not even a Buddhist monk, had more self- control than my father.
My adoptive mother pursed her lips. "Yes, doctor." she quipped. All right," she said, returning to her food with a deep sigh. "tell us what you're talking about now. Who's deceiving herself?"
She lifted her head quickly and glared at him with fire in her eyes, just daring him to accuse her of having that fault.
"I didn't mean anyone in particular. Alberta. It's simply an observation about the human condition, a rhetorical question. I am just trying to make intelligent conversation."
She raised her eyebrows. "Oh, you're just making intelligent conversation. Yesterday. when I wanted to talk about redoing the pool decking, you barely grunted," she reminded him.
"That's not exactly the sort of conversation I was referring to. Alberta."
"It's conversation, isn't it? What? It's not intelligent enough for You?"
'Okay, okay," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you," he told her, and returned to his food.
Silence dropped over us like a lead curtain.
I remembered that question he posed, however, and it came back to me, flashing like a movie marquee when Aunt Agnes, Margaret Selby, and I returned to my house from the hospital. Surely. I thought the moment I set eyes on the stone pillars at the driveway entrance. I had been deceiving myself thinking I could live in this house without Daddy. Despite my adoptive mother's continual decorating and redecorating, it was his personality that loomed over every important room.
His chair at the head of the table would be terribly empty. and I could never get myself to sit in that seat. His favorite overstuffed armchair in the living room would still bear the imprint and wear from his body. and I could never look at it without seeing him in it, his feet up, reading one of his journals or his books. Certainly, his office was like the heart of the house. Rarely did he treat patients in our home, but important people still came to see him and went directly to it. From it, he would issue his orders to Miles and, when Amou was still with us, to her. All of his plaques, awards, and cherished photographs were on those walls. How could it ever be anything
else but my father's office?
Upstairs, his and my adoptive mother's bedroom remained the central suite. I couldn't see myself moving into it What would it become, a shrine? Perhaps I could give away his clothing the way we gave away my A.M.'s, but there were too many personal things of his that I would never relinquish, and as for the bed itself with its oversize headboard and canopy, why would I sell it?
And what about the walking paths? Could I look down any and not anticipate his lanky form trudging slowly back from one of his famous strolls? Or look at one of the benches along the way and not think of him resting, thinking, composing one of his scientific papers in his mind?
