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In this closing passage from Wolffs memoir, he mourns the passing of his father and, gazing down at his sleeping children, reflects on his own role as both father and son: the shame, the longing, the failures and disappointments, the pure and abiding love. In its timeless evocation of filial conflict and devotion, it reminds us of the connections between Shakespeares stories and our own.
I had felt ashamed of my father in her fathers house, and now I was ashamed of my shame, and ashamed to be there at all, under that roof. It was as though to accept their hospitality were to collaborate in their judgment of my father. I thought I knew what they thought of him, and I knew what they thought of me. Sometimes in that house I felt Priscilla look at me through her parents eyes, and I thought that house in Narragansett was a place where my father would not have been made to feel welcome. I tried to forget the night of his death that neither had he been welcome those past ten years in my own house, and in my eagerness to forget this I repudiated all of them, my wife and her parents, and now Priscilla says she has never seen me so cold or so angry. She withdrew, would not dishonor any of us by seeming to feel what she did not. I wanted her to love my father now. I wanted to love my father now. How could she, if I could not? She has never seen him, had heard his voice once across telephone wires. We had promised him and ourselves a visit to California, but we never went. Every time we settled on a date to show my father his first grandson, and then his second, something happened, he got put away again or pulled a fast move on me or we decided wed rather visit Madrid, ski in Austria.
I think that for a few hours that night I hated my wife. I drove to a seedy Narragansett roadhouse, a rough bar with a tropical motif where surfers hung out. I wanted a fight. I sat at the bar drinking whiskey chased by beer, scowling and muttering at friendly strangers wearing cut-offs and clean, jokey T-shirts. The beachboys were tan, pacific, easy; surfers had no beef with me. I shut the place down and drove flat out to Kays house. I wanted to explain to her, at once, why I had thanked God that my father was dead. I wanted her to know that my words were not an atheists unfelt exclamation, and that they did not only display relief that my children were alive. They also meant what they seemed to mean, that I thanked someone that my father had been delivered from the world, and I had been delivered from him.
I woke my friend three hours before dawn. I had first met Kay at her California ranch nine years earlier, the day after I left my father in the San Diego jail. Two of her daughters were Priscillas lifelong friends, and one of them I had courted. Like everyone who knew him I had idolized her husband, and he and I had traveled in Spain together. One night he had crawled out the window of our Madrid hotel room, swaying drunk on a narrow ledge ten floors above the street because I had just told him a sad story. A couple of his children helped me snag his good leg and haul him to safety, and the way they looked at him that night I guessed they had had to save him from himself many times before. A few days before he shot himself, with his wife and children as witnesses, Kay had written me to wish me well in my courtship of Priscilla, and her letter was full of energy, wit, love, and delight with the future.
It was too cold to sit on the terrace, but my friend lit the Japanese lanterns out there so we could see them from the living room. Above the fireplace a motto was cut into the mantel: Kind friend, around this hearthstone speak no evil of any creature.
The morning with Kay changed me. She spoke of her dead husband and I told of my dead father; we traded scandal for scandal, and soon we were laughing. I told how my father despised prudence, savings accounts, the idea of savings accounts, the fact of savings accounts, looks before leaps. Yes, her husband too, hobbling along the pitching deck of a sailboat he had chartered to sail solo before he taught himself to sail. It had been fun to be her husbands wife, and my fathers son. This was important to understand.
Kay led me through my fathers history, let me begin to apprehend him as a critic of the conventions, a man who caricatured what he despised. Is it Yale men you like? Okay, Im a Yale man, see how easy it is? Nothing to it but will and nerve. My friend led me to understand how lucky I was to be free, that there was a benign side to my fathers dishonor, that I had never had to explain or apologize to him any more than he had had to explain or apologize to me. Much of this, of course, was casuistry. I dont believe now that my father was truly a critic of society, or that his life was any more happy than it was defiant.
Never mind. I had come into that night alienated. I was becoming handy with repudiations of every kind, and learning to nurture anger solicitously. I had felt betrayed by my father, and wanted to betray him. Kay turned my course. She had the authority of someone who had passed through the worst of fires. I listened to her. I saw again what I had seen when I was a child, in love with my father as with no one else. He had never repudiated me or seen in my face intimations of his own mortality. He had never let me think he wished to be rid of me or the burden of my judgment, even when I had hounded him about his history, had quibbled with its details like a small-print artist, like a reviewer, for Gods sake! He didnt try to form me in his own image. How could he? Which image to choose? He had wanted me to be happier than he had been, to do better. He had taught me many things, some of which were important, some of which he meant, some of which were true. The things he told me were the right things to tell a son, usually, and by the time I understood their source in mendacity they had done what good they could. I had been estranged from my father by my apprehension of other peoples opinions of him, and by a compulsion to be free of chaos and destructions. I had forgotten I loved him, mostly, and mostly now I missed him. I miss him.
When I finally left Kays house I felt these things, some for the first time. I drove home slowly, and stopped at stop signs. The door to the room I shared with Priscilla was open when I came in, but I didnt go through that door that night. I went to my childrens room. I stood above Justin, looking down at him. And then my son Nicholas began to moan, quietly at first. They did not know their grandfather was dead; they knew nothing about their grandfather. There would be time for that. I resolved to tell them what I could, and hoped they would want to know as much as I could tell. Nicholas cried out in his sleep, as he has so many times before, dragging me out of nightmares about his death with his own nightmares about his death, his dreams of cats with broken legs, broken-winged screaming birds, deer caught in traps, little boys hurt and crying, beyond the range of their parents hearing. Sometimes I dreamt of my son bleeding to death from some simple wound I had neglected to learn to mend.
Now I smoothed his forehead as my father had smoothed mine when I was feverish. Justin breathed deeply. I crawled in bed beside my sweet Nicholas and took him in my arms and began to rock him in time to Justins regular breaths. I stunk of whiskey and there was blood on my face from a fall leaving Kays house, but I knew I couldnt frighten my son. He ceased moaning, and I rocked him in my arms till light came down on us, and he stirred awake in my arms as I, in his, fell into a sleep free of dreams.
Geoffrey Wolffs latest work is The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John OHara. In addition to The Duke of Deception, he has written six novels and a collection of personal essays. Mr. Wolff is the director of the graduate fiction program at the University of California, Irvine.
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