My Father More or Less
by
Jonathan Baumbach
For you, G.B.
Dearest Father,
You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.
1
I had a dream the night before last in which I had already made the trip to London and had unwittingly got into a fight with my father at Customs. We had both bought souvenir penknives from an airport shop and as a joke, as what I thought was a joke, were slicing the buttons off each other’s jackets. He gets angry for no apparent reason — I had done nothing he hadn’t done first — and he says, Tom, I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll remember for as long as you live. I say I’m sorry, but he jabs me with the knife, ripping a fist-size hole in the side of my jacket. The knife withdraws with a rosebud of blood at its point. You’ve gone too far, I say, astonished at the blood. He shuffles around, taunting me with the knife, saying, Come on, come on, let’s see what you’re made of. Although I am angry, I mean only to defend myself, not to strike back. When he thrusts his knife at my heart — it’s as if he really means to kill me — I spear him in the back of the hand, the blade sticking, snapping off at the handle. It seems not to bother him and he comes at me again, slashing the air, pricking me in the thumb, the blade of my knife lodged like a wing in the back of his hand. You shit-faced son of a bitch, he yells. His thrusts are without force, are easily defended against. At some point I notice that the front of his shirt is thick with blood. I think, How will I get back to America if the old man dies.
I keep making this trip to London in my imagination, the same trip to visit my father, sit each time at a window seat in the No Smoking section of a Pan Am 747, the plane taxiing down a runway, changing direction, stopping and starting, trapped in indecision. There is almost always an unspecified delay that prolongs itself beyond my patience. And then without further announcement, just when I think we’ll never go anywhere, we tear loose from the earth. The plane ascends with heartbreaking abruptness, Kennedy Airport reducing itself to abstraction in the distance below. I am on my way, though unready for the trip, without expectation of what awaits me on the other side.
I have a copy of one of my father’s novels on my lap, a book called Interior Corrosions, which I will make an effort to read. Oddly, I have never been able to read any of his books word for word from beginning to end, though I had tried — give me that — had pretended to read them, had carried them with me when I was younger as though they were medals earned in battle. I had never given up the idea of some day reading his books as I had never really fully given up the idea that he would one day return to our family. He left us when I was four and Kate seven, returned inexplicably when I was five and left for good two days after my sixth birthday. Since he had left forever once and returned, I saw no reason why it couldn’t happen again. My mother certainly acted as if she expected him to return, talked of his absence as if he had gone to the supermarket and forgotten the way back. I assumed that he would eventually tire of whatever he was doing (I thought of him as being like Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita) and return to us, his faithful family. As much as five years after he had walked out, his bed, still talked of as his, remained alongside my mother’s awaiting his momentary return. We are still waiting, though with smaller investment of hope than before. He has been gone twelve years, has lived in a different state for most of five and in a different country for the past two.
I mean, it was not that we never saw him after he left. It was that there was no longer any pleasure in his presence for us, that he visited seasonally like a salesman, selling his time at inflated prices. He seemed like an imposter, this visitor from another planet, this salesman of damaged goods, an inadequate stand-in for the father we had lost. I mean, he went through the motions of being our father, tried to buy us with unexpected kindnesses. Nothing we got from him lasting or satisfying, we became tougher and tougher customers, my sister and I. Kate got married when she was twenty and moved to Colorado, got divorced the following year but stayed on among the vanished bison. She would not talk to him again, she said, unless he called to apologize for twenty-one years of damage he had done her.
Although it is a No Smoking section, the conservatively dressed black man in the seat next to me lights a cigarette, takes two drags, then holds it out absent-mindedly as it burns down, the smoke crowding my space. I cough, but say nothing, brush the smoke away with the back of my hand, expect retribution to come from one of the stewardesses passing among us, taking orders for drinks.
“It’s your father’s opinion,” said my mother, “that I make it difficult for his children to see him, but as you can see the opposite is more nearly the truth.”
I had been saying I didn’t know whether I wanted to go to London and I saw no reason to go if I didn’t really want to.
“There’s no question that you’re going,” she said. “You told your father that you’re going and you’re not changing your mind.”
“Come on,” I said. “Okay? He’s changed his mind when it came to seeing me any number of times. Why is everything the way he wants it?”
Her answer to that was made from under the drone of the dishwasher turned on in midsentence, and I had to ask her to repeat her remark.
I had to follow her to her room to get an answer, such as it was, from the other side of a closed door. “It’s important that you have some sort of relationship with your father,” she said, sniffling. “I’m not defending or attacking him. I don’t want to talk about it any more. Is that clear?”
When I pushed the door open — the scene plays itself in slow motion — my mother let out a small cry and lifted the blanket up over her breasts, which were in any event fully clothed.
“Don’t you dare,” she said or something equally inappropriate. “You don’t come into this room without knocking first.”
I open my eyes to glance at my watch — we’ve been an hour and twenty minutes in the air — read a few more lines in my father’s book. How much silence could we bear without beginning to rave, how much talk that was only silence amplified and distorted into language? Her face pressed to the window, she watched the discolorations of the leaves as if they were… His sentences exhaust me and I close my eyes to filter the words, to sift the meaning from the sound.
A stewardess named Marlene is talking to the man next to me. She holds her smile as if it occupied her face against her will. “And what about you?” she says to me.
“I’d like a beer,” I say. “What kind do you have?”
“How old are you?” she asks.
“How old do I have to be, Marlene?”
Kate had a stomachache that day. She tended to get sick whenever my father came to take us the way some kids get sick when they have to take a test in school. My mother said that I should go alone with him because she didn’t have the energy to fight with Kate and she didn’t want to listen to her whine.
I said if I had to I would.