Reflective Fathering
Father’s Day 2019
It is 107 years after the day my father was born, June 12th, 1912. Think about that. I do. Dates over a century ago tend to blur our concept of time and tax our limited memories and sense of immediate history. Our fathers would seem to dwell in our own, personal, immediate history; they sired us, raised us, and hopefully celebrated us into our current adulthood with praise and pride. But not always.
My father’s world of 1912 was, in many respects, ancient history to us, today. Photographs were still almost nascent in their innocence; hard to produce, harder still to maintain through the years. Posing required a stilted, stoic, standing-still of time and the resultant images reflected the stiffness of the medium as well as the remnant austerity of nature that still pervaded these barely post-Victorian years. High-necked women’s blouses, men’s dark, multi-layered, wool suits and vests and brogues hemmed in not only the physicality of the bodies that they hung about but one would have to imagine also that the fluidity of thought and movement that we enjoy today; the abandonment with which we fling ourselves through our atmosphere and our lives was a thing un-thought by those inhabiting this then new century with an old stiffness. Their fathers had fought in the Civil War. The other wars; those as yet unseen and experienced, were not even upon the horizon.
I never knew my grandparents.
Through a quirk of age and nature, I was a late-in-life surprise; my parents being forty in 1952 when I entered this world. My father’s family were well-off Washingtonians at the turn of that century, living swell on Chevy Chase Circle, a toney address if there was one, next door to the Cord motorcar company founder and down the street from Marjorie Merriweather Post of the Washington Post and Post Cereal’s fame. My father’s father, Walter, died at the age of fifty-two working a job on the military shipyards in Newport News, VA. after losing all the family’s remaining fortunes in a last-ditch effort to salvage the devastation wrought on them by the Great Depression. He had, just previous to that taken, my father and another brother to Florida and literally sold swamp land to tourists outside of Miami, then only a spec of sun-splashed wonder that Henry Flagler was flogging into today’s florid metropolis.
That did not go well. The only things left of that adventure were tales of swimming in lagoons full of alligators and the fear of mosquito-born fevers. In the end, upon my grandfather’s death, my father and his older brother traveled by train from DC to Newport News to bring his body home. My father and uncles delighted in telling the tale at Thanksgiving dinner about my grandmother, Tora, meeting them at the train. Before they transferred the coffin from the baggage car to the waiting cart, they casually tossed the boys bags off the train and onto the walk, shattering the bottle of bourbon they had smuggled aboard. As Tora promenaded grimly up the walk to escort the casket, she was met by her two sons, reeking of bourbon. Her Victorian distaste was palpable but her Victorian reserve kept her in check until later. Dinner that evening was not only solemn but silent and sober.
Tora went on to create another life and with the help of my mother-in-waiting, a dynasty she would not live to witness. She took what was left of their money and her four sons and bought a huge Edwardian house on Dupont Circle and started taking in boarders.
While I currently have the aches and pains and physical life history of all men and women my age I, as I’m sure most of my Baby Boomer kin do, I still identify as a much younger person than I am or have a right to be. Our life and times have been so incredibly fast-paced, change-filled, and fueled by an incessant need to “keep up with the times” that we understandably feel as if we are living a generation, at least, below what our chronology would insist we adhere to. Post-WWII life has been lived at warp speed and change and adaptability have been precursors to living any semblance of an adjusted adulthood. “You’re only as young as you feel” “sixty is the new forty”……our mottos and our mantras.
For me, Father’s Day has always been fraught with emotional pitfalls; guilt, and confusion topping the list. I never felt anything particular about my father, so I was continually egged on by the approaching special Sunday into a deep and foreboding sense of gloom and guilt that I did NOT feel any particular warm fuzzies or even any gratitude for his presence: guilt and confusion.
As a child in the 50’s, life was ostensibly simpler; social mores more rigidly defined, family structure paramount, appearances were everything. My life in the 50’s was anything but those things. Our family had all the outward trappings of those life-defining parameters. Still, we veered severely off course into a land of crazy-comparability where scary clowns and lurid funhouse mirrors were the norm and not the amusement. I have tried for generations to understand why; where was the Father Knows Best in my personal history?
The father I was conscripted to was born to an affluent Washington, D.C. family at the turn of the century…two turns ago! He was one of four brothers from a long, long, line of Olde New England founding fathers. He came of age after WWI and during prohibition on the streets of D.C. and the expectations for his future were, I’m certain, bright. His father and older brothers were in real estate and that is the crux of the family’s misfortune. The Crash of 1929 wiped out my family as it did so many. My grandfather and uncles were further degraded by their venture into selling swampland in Florida to the unsuspecting, newly burgeoning, tourist trade that Henry Flagler was flogging for his nascent railway to Miami and eventually, Key West.
The resulting complete catastrophe left my grandfather dead on a wharf in a Newport News shipping factory at the age of 52 in 1935 where he had gone to find any work at all in the throes of the Great Depression. My grandmother Tora, really the backbone and Southern Stock of the family tree, left behind in D.C. with one young son still at home, converted what was left of her family holdings in Virginia into a large Victorian mansion on New Hampshire Ave at Dupont Circle. She converted it into a boarding house, took in roomers, served meals to strangers, and fed her family. My mother, fresh off the train from rural Wisconsin with a job in the Civil Service, arrived at the boarding house door in December 1937. The family dynasty that my mother created in that boarding house and that city lives on in fractured but traceable filaments to this day but that is, as they say, another story.
Today I am reflecting on what happened to my father. Where did the promise and the future he had from birth disappear? The depression alone was not the culprit. His two older brothers went on to successful careers in real estate and property management. My father married my mother, a border in his mother’s house, in 1939 at the Washington National Cathedral, no small justice of the peace wedding for my social-climbing mother. I believe SHE believed she had married up, and in many ways she did; from farm girl of immigrant background in Wisconsin to the heart of the Nation’s Capital. But what and more importantly why had my father ever married?
I believe his was never a love match but an obligatory rite of passage he was pre-destined to perform. It was some fifty years later that my mother outed my father to me as gay, on my own 40th birthday, that I began to re-jigger the puzzle pieces of my tormented youth and fragmented family into something that I could set down on paper and review in some logical progression. Their decision to marry, and reproduce, was what they were socially proscribed to do in that era. Full stop. Even though it was apparently “known” within my father’s family that he had a secret, I have no understanding of how deep that knowledge ran. My only anecdotal clue was that my two older uncles went to my mother-to-be and warned her not to marry my father; “He’s not the marrying kind…” was the carefully coded disclaimer.
But marry they did and the socially sophisticate-wannabe that was my mother pushed him farther than his stunted, gay-washed, psyche would normally have allowed of him.
He worked as a night clerk at the Chastleton Hotel on 16th Street while putting himself through George Washington Law School. I came across my father’s law degree in his things after his death; that and his Certificate of Good Standing to practice before the Supreme Court. I also found a framed, engraved, invitation to the inauguration of Herbert Hoover astonishingly designed and engraved by my artist uncle, my father’s oldest brother. He also designed much of the paper money we still use. So, what happened to the promise of this man from this family?
How did I end up with the beaten-down version of the father that I remember?
My father missed WWII. He was a student, a father of a young daughter, and the sole support of his family and increasingly his aged mother as well; exemption granted. All of his brothers, older and younger, served. There is a degree of suspicion, distaste, embarrassment, and unspeakableness that pervaded the entire family after this moment in history. My mother and father NEVER spoke about this, ever. There were snide asides by his two surviving brothers on occasion, or at least references to their “service”. Was my father’s un-acknowledged homosexuality somehow at play even then? I’ll never know. I do know that my mother never let that bit of ammunition grow cold and unusable over the decades, at least in her private life with him
After all his efforts to gradate law school, pass the bar, and feed his family my father never practiced law, ever. And he never even mentioned that he was a lawyer…..ever. No one in my entire extended family EVER mentioned that my father had achieved these astounding benchmarks in the midst of the depression. I subliminally knew this information, but it was not until I held his diplomas in my hand and read the words on them that the import of what he had done penetrated my rational mind. It was the only moment of pride I had ever had in my father. More than that, it was the only human moment I had ever glimpsed of the man other than the tempestuous, angry, beaten-down person who shared my living space for eighteen years but never occupied a place in my soul or my life.
On this Father’s Day I reflect on my own father but realize that it was my mother who molded, threatened, harangued, and blistered open wounds onto his personality, wounds that would scab over and scar the man who once was and never became.
Did she use his homosexuality against him the way she used mine against me? Chances are more than good that she did. I was witness to the sneering derision that was their relationship literally all of my life. I did not understand it at the time, it was just what my life as a child was; uncomfortable, scary, fraught with danger and an unspoken warning not to get in the way. They were combustible. She was a tiny (5’4”) factory of venom and he was a huge (6’6”) red-headed volcano of temper. She lit the match; he was the predictable eruption. Rinse and Repeat.
The story line has always been that my father didn’t practice law because it was the War and he had a family to support so he took a good “steady” job as the business manager for a major, family-owned (mob?) meat packing firm in D.C. He stayed 25 years. He ended his career as a building service manager for a cancer research facility in suburban Maryland. He was a janitor.
The seething resentment he felt towards my mother; his failures, the place he had landed after so much promise, and possibly his own sexual shame was palpable. It was unnamed during his life but expressed in a thousand fatal fireworks of frustration. His anger was legendary, his impatience a badge of dishonor that plagued him all his life. Like me, my father was an extrovert; a gregarious man who would talk to anybody about anything (mostly to avoid talking to my mother) but this genuinely human and endearing characteristic was continually derided and thwarted in a shameless openness by my mother. Her own sisters and his brothers were embarrassed for the both of them, but the charade of family had to continue. It was the 50’s, the 60’s, the 70’s; to divorce and maybe, just maybe, find some peace was not in the cards for people who came from social roots that penetrated back to the ground from which they had sprung.
My father lived a life of not-so-quiet desperation; tinged with regret, anger, debasement, embarrassment, and shame. And what did he leave me?
He left me the lessons of another era and the courage to find my own way despite the confluence of confusion that was my heritage. He left me to learn lessons from his history; not consciously but they are there for the finding. After thirteen generations in this country (1644-present) the family name ends with me. There are no more male heirs and so a name that traces back through the ages of time; through kings and queens (of all sorts!) ceases upon my death. It is an intriguing position to be in. I get to write the entire history, tell the entire story.
My mother gave me curiosity. My father, through his weakness, gave me strength.