My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

want the cold soda offered in its place. Oddly enough, I don’t want to be home nor do I want to be back at camp. For the first time in my life, I have become a displaced person.

In retrospect, I understand my tears as tears of ambivalence. They express anger at my parents for having succumbed to my premature demand for sleepaway camp as well as my happiness at being home again. Although I have returned, my trust in their decision-making powers has been shaken. Something has been inexplicably lost at camp that summer, a bond irreparably damaged.

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These memories of childhood separations, of my father’s sadness and my own, call me away from the current crisis. They allow me to place some distance between the immediate moment and myself. At the same time, they allow me to place my father’s tears in context and to know that they will be managed. Although the 1997 throat surgery saved his life, it left him with a greatly diminished capacity to swallow. The unanticipated insertion of a feeding tube to insure sufficient liquids and sustenance that he has just undergone is a permanent acknowledgment of defeat. My father will not recover the ability to eat or drink as we had all hoped. He has, indeed, experienced a terrible loss. In the hospital he focused on recovery, on coping with the minute-to-minute exigencies of institutional life—the two hours on a gurney in the hall awaiting an x-ray, the stream of unknown doctors and nurses who all insist on asking the same questions about the day of the week and the president of the United States, the new medications and intravenous fluids that must be monitored for fear of error.

At home, and with time, my father lets down his guard and experiences emotions that he previously kept at bay, including his deep ambivalence about living with such diminished capacities.

My father, who sits directly across the table, still does not look at me. His head is collapsed into his chest as he continues to randomly shuffle papers. I am aware, however, that our conversation isn’t over.

Suddenly I find myself asking about the death of my grandfather, and I don’t know why. Perhaps I am really asking my father to have sympathy for me, to remember himself as a loving son, and to imagine that I too might have feelings of sadness and rage. Perhaps I want to distract him as well, to help him find comfort in the memory of someone whom he revered and idolized. He tells me that his father died quickly, six months after cancer was diagnosed at the age of seventy-three. At that time my father was only forty-five, nine years younger than I am now. He starts to sob again.

When he first began to cry I wanted to reach across the table and 60 n jonathan g. silin

take his hand, but I was afraid he would strike out at me with his terrible anger. Now, newly determined not to be intimidated, I place my hand on top of his tightly clenched fist. It is unyielding to my touch.

I am sorry that he rejects a human connection that might offer some comfort. More selfishly, I feel helpless in the face of his despair and disappointed that he does not recognize my own efforts on his behalf, but he has nothing left to give anyone else.

Finally, my mother, who has been silently watching this scene, gets up from the sofa with great difficulty and walks over to my father just as she had done six weeks before. Now she does not plead or seek to persuade. Instead, she simply stands behind him and puts her arms around his shoulders. She runs her hands along the back of his neck and across his chest without saying anything. I fear that he will push her away too. Miraculously, he accepts her reconciling touch, slowly stops crying, and begins to collect himself. He looks exhausted but calmer. I am taken aback by this receptiveness to her ministrations and pleased that something other than his bitterness and recriminations can still pass between them.

The next day my mother begins our phone conversation by uncharacteristically crowing, “I bet you were surprised, didn’t think he had it in him.” She expresses pride in my father’s honest display of emotions but will take no credit for her ability to comfort him. As I continue to remark on her quiet but starring role in the drama, she says modestly,

“Well, there’s a lot of history there. It ought to be worth something.”

And yet, from my perspective, it is that very history that makes my mother’s ability to offer succor, not my father’s display of emotion, the most remarkable part of the story.

Despite its modern trappings, my parents had a traditional marriage. First cousins who grew up in different cities, they only came to know each other as young adults. A certain kind of snobbery made marriages among close relatives in Jewish families (my grandmothers were sisters) not uncommon in those days. Who else would be good enough? While both my parents attended Ivy League colleges before m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 61

dating each other, it was my mother who earned an advanced degree.

A photograph taken circa 1936 for my mother’s official identification card as a “New York City Social Service Provider,” shows a slender, delicate woman of twenty-six whose long hair is pulled back softly and knotted at the nape of the neck. She wears a plain blouse, wool skirt, and suede jacket left open. The appearance is neat yet informal, serious yet relaxed. It is easy to imagine her as the good student she was, someone who studied the new, Freud and Franz Boaz, as well the old, German and Yiddish. It is also easy to imagine her as