YOUR FATHER BRAGGED about his abilities as a pipefitter. He had no humility. He was convinced that, compared to him, all the men he worked with and for were stupid, lazy, and unskilled.
YOUR FATHER WAS frequently impotent, sexually inadequate. I won’t go into it any further than that because there may well be reasons for it that we can never really know about, matters outside my experiences with him, childhood experiences and that sort of thing, but your father, I thought, was not quite right sexually. He talked too much about some of his friends’ (men friends, mind you) muscles. Also, he seemd to enjoy a certain kind of intercourse which, I’m told, only homosexual men do regularly. You know what I’m talking about.
YOUR FATHER HATED cats. I won’t tell you about how one time he killed a whole litter of kittens. It was horrible.
YOUR FATHER CHEATED at cards. Even bridge.
YOUR FATHER STOLE government property.
YOUR FATHER LIED about his taxes. He also told strangers that he made more money than he really did make. Sometimes he even told them he was making money on the side by playing the stock market, betting on the horses, betting on dogs, winning sports pools, bowling. He had me believing (until I had my lawyer check it out later) that he owned a lot of real estate in New Hampshire. “Half the side of a mountain,” was how he put it, but my lawyer told me that your father’s parents owned an old rundown farm, and your father owned nothing.
YOUR FATHER THOUGHT all flowers were ugly, though he once admitted he liked blue hydrangeas. “Mainly because they don’t look like they’re real,” he explained to me.
YOUR FATHER DIDN’T know how to swim. He said it was on principle, but of course it was because he didn’t want to be in a position of having to learn something that most people already knew about.
YOUR FATHER DIDN’T know how to ride a bicycle, either, and that too he said was on principle. I could never understand that.
YOUR FATHER HATED people of all races, creeds, and colors. He was an extremely prejudiced man, the worst I have ever known, even after living my whole life in the South. He would make fun of a person’s background, no matter what it was. “Stupid Polacks.” “Grabby Jews.” “Dumb niggers.” “Drunken Indians.” “Thick-headed Irishers.” He hated them all — even what he himself was, which he referred to as “common white trash” or sometimes “snot-nosed Yankees” and “backwoods New Hampshire shit-kickers.” But whenever he used these terms, he somehow said them with a certain note of endearment. Somehow these slurs became affectionate nicknames. Not so for the others, though.
YOUR FATHER COULD play the saxophone well, but he only played it when he was alone or thought he was alone. He did not, as he claimed, play in the Guy Lombardo orchestra. He often referred to himself as “one of Guy’s Royal Canadians” when people asked him about his saxophone, which he displayed ostentatiously on the coffee table in the living room of our apartment.
YOUR FATHER HAD a smile that people loved, and when, because of their love for his smile, they got close to him, he stopped smiling and never allowed it to be seen again. I cannot recall his smiling at me after we were married, and actually, I can’t recall his smiling at me from the moment I told him that I was falling in love with him, which happened the fourth time I went out with him. Of course I know he must have smiled at me then, many times. It’s just that I can’t recall it.
YOUR FATHER TOLD wonderful jokes, but only to strangers. When he told jokes to people who were not strangers, the jokes were cruel and dark and only funny in a way that made you feel guilty if you laughed.
YOUR FATHER WOULD sneer at old people on park benches as if they disgusted him.
YOUR FATHER KICKED dogs and dared them to bite him for it.
YOUR FATHER WAS a jaywalker.
YOUR FATHER GROWLED. Like an animal. At night, if a car drove up, or if someone knocked on the door, your father would start to growl, low and deep from way back in his throat.
YOUR FATHER OFTEN ate the same thing for lunch that he knew I was fixing for supper.
YOUR FATHER LIED about having been a champion boxer. He was, however, a very good, that is, a successful, barroom brawler.
YOUR FATHER LIED about having been a champion runner, though he did have very muscular legs and seemed never to be physically tired, so he probably could have been a champion runner if he had tried. But he never even tried.
YOUR FATHER THOUGHT he had killed his father, but he never confessed to having any guilt for it. He blamed it on his father. Otherwise, he never talked about it with me. I’d ask him to tell me about it and he’d say, “It was all my old man’s fault,” and then he’d roll over and go to sleep.
YOUR FATHER TALKED incoherently to himself when he was drunk, and he was drunk at least one night a week, usually Friday night, after he had gotten paid.
YOUR FATHER HAD piles, which was unusual for a man as young as he was then.
YOUR FATHER WAS too big.
YOUR FATHER WAS afraid of going to the dentist. Also, he refused to see a doctor when he was sick or for his piles, and he refused to take medicines of any kind. Even aspirin. He was convinced that it would only make things worse. He always said, “If things can get worse, they will, but there’s no reason to make it easy for them.”
YOUR FATHER WAS afraid that his penis was too small, and in a way he was right, because, while his body was unusually large, his penis was normal-sized. Unfortunately, because he asked me, I told him that one night. He never made love to me afterward, but that came fairly late in the pregnancy anyhow.
YOUR FATHER SAID he loved his mother, but once when he was drunk he started to cry and roll around on the floor, yelling about how much he hated her.
YOUR FATHER WAS not a happy man. But he said it was on principle, and that it was for him a moral principle, what he called a “moral imperative,” and that was why he tried so hard to make other people unhappy too. I could never tell for sure when he was joking, but I think he was joking then. But he may not have been. He certainly acted as though he thought everyone should be unhappy, that it was for him a moral thing and, therefore, by making people unhappy he was somehow making them better.
YOUR FATHER WAS the worst thing that ever happened to me.
YOUR FATHER REFUSED to admit that he was lonely, even though he had no friends he could confide in. But he said that was on principle, too, I mean the part about being lonely. I think he would’ve liked to have had a few friends, so long as he could’ve kept on being lonely at the same time. But he had too many principles.
YOUR FATHER HATED me.
OH, GOD, HOW he hated me.
CHAPTER 4 Addendum A
THROUGHOUT THE PRECEDING monologue, Rochelle listened attentively to her mother, motionless and almost completely silent. Or at least that is how she would later describe herself. She smoked cigarettes one after the other. When she had smoked one down to the filter, she would crush it out in the seashell ashtray on her mother’s Danish coffee table. Crossing and uncrossing her long legs with that unself-conscious, almost inevitable grace of hers, she never once took her alert eyes off her mother’s expressive, changing face. The only sounds in the room were the continual drone of the air conditioner and the soft, southern voice of Rochelle’s mother and now and then the noise of a car in the midday Florida heat slipping past the apartment building.
It’s difficult to know how the content of her mother’s jeremiad affected Rochelle. We have only her self-description, offered much later, when her attitude toward her father had been altered considerably by the things she had heard from her father’s four other wives, from the testimony of numerous people, including myself, who had known him over the years in one capacity or another, from a lengthy interview with his dying mother and another with his sisters and a brother-in-law, and when she herself had, as they say, “gotten in touch with her anger.”