March 19, 2013--Mt. Lebanon--The End (Concluded)

“Get up.  On your feet.  What kind of way is this for a grown man to behave?”  This familiar growl and its admonishment could only be my father’s.  “I always expected this is what you would turn you into.  Sniveling and acting like a girl.  If I wanted a daughter I would have had another child.” 

At his order, I immediately stopped sniveling.  As a young boy he had taught me to “steel myself” by having me lie on my back on the living room carpet while he tickled me, barking at me to stifle myself, to steel myself whenever I could no longer contain my laughter.  This basic training, as he called it, had been so effective that I not only lost my tickle-reflex but I would, at the sight of just his raised eyebrow, shut off my childhood tears.

“That’s better.  Now get up off of that and get over here,” he ordered, “I have a few things I’ve been wanting to get off my chest.”   At that I struggled to lift myself from the ground.  “And stand up straight.”  Standing rigidly at attention had also been part of the drill.  “You look like a shlump.”   Instinctively, as in the past, I thrust my shoulders back until they hurt and marched to the other side of my mother’s grave to where he was buried.  Since this was undoubtedly not going to be pleasant I thought to get as far from my mother as possible.  To shield her, as I had tried to in the past, from my father’s anger—she had had quite enough of that.

“I heard what went on over there.”  It wasn’t clear to me what he was referring to.  Sensing that, he said, “What your mother said.”

“Well she was upset with me for not having come to visit for such a long time.  I told her I had been busy and not feeling . . .”

“Maybe you think you can get away with those kind of lies with her.  Why don’t you try telling the truth for a change?  Say it, that you’re a grown man, say that you have your own life now and don’t want to be bothered any more with the rest of us.”

“No, no, that’s not it.  I do want to be bothered.  I mean, I do want to come here.  It means a lot to me to stay involved with you.  All of you.  I mean . . .”

“Stay ‘involved’?  What does that mean?” he was mocking me. “You need new material for your scribbling?  We didn’t supply enough already?  You seem to keep yourself quite busy with what you have.”

It was as if he could read my mind.  But I also felt secure and comforted by visiting them.  Even in their current state.  Just by being there.  Coming to Mt. Lebanon had been such a significant part of my life.  “It’s more than that.  Yes, it’s true, what Mom just told me is something I think I might one day want to write about.  To at least try to.  Actually, some of what she said about my work, though I have to think about it some more, could be helpful to me.  She said that I didn’t  . . .”

“I heard what she said.”  He pronounced each word separately as if they were intended to be distinct, crushing body blows.  “And I heard what you didn’t say.”

I managed to say, “I’m not following you.”

“What you didn’t say to defend yourself.  To stand up for yourself, for your work.”  This startled me—that maybe, could this be, that he regarded my writing as something worth standing up for, something worthy of defense?  My father who had nothing but contempt for books and anything he thought to be “literary.”  He would spit that word out contemptuously whenever I would on rare occasions in his presence utter it, always proclaiming that books and reading were the source of his brother Ben’s and my weakness, Ben’s and my affliction.

“Your mother loved books.  As she told you, the day we met she was reading something.  I forget what, but it was how I first saw her.  With a book in her hands when I crashed my car into the front of her tenement.  What a broken-down place that was.  Full of Polocks right off the boat.  But what she said to you, even though books and I never got along very well, about your stories, including the one about the washing machine, well she got it wrong.”  What he was saying now was beyond amazing to me.  That he would be seeing my work to be worth talking about and especially that he would think to disagree with her about a piece of writing. 

“She said that you caricatured me.  That to write a good story you needed to be more truthful, to write about all sides of things.  In order to be fair.”  Clearly, in spite of being seriously hard of hearing, he had pretty much heard and understood her. 

“The point often is not to be fair.”

Incredulous, I said, “What?”

“If you want to tell a good story, and I don’t just mean by that an amusing or entertaining one--a good one is about the truth, which your mother and you agreed was what you were trying to do.  But to succeed, to produce something worthwhile that anyone will remember for more than five minutes, being what she calls ‘fair’ can get in the way.”

“I’m not following you.”  Maybe hearing him say even one word about writing without being contemptuous was so startling, so unexpected that that in itself short-circuited my ability to follow his words much less comprehend them.  “I mean, Mom was right, wasn’t she, that when I turned what actually happened into that story about the washing machine, I failed to include any deep understanding of what caused the father to behave as he did.  That I . . .”

“You mean ‘the father’ or me?”

“Sort of.”

“What’s this ‘sort of’ crap?”

“Well you know, I fictionalize.”

“That sounds to me like one of the words you learned from my brother.”

“Can we maybe stop talking about him that way?  Books didn’t make him what he was.   He was gay, all right?  What was the big deal?”  I didn’t know where I found the audacity, that’s what had always been required, to confront my father this way.  We had had our fights about my plans for the future and my girlfriends—he objected to all of them, the plans and the girls—but about his homosexual, to him, disgrace of a brother?  This was something that I never had been able to manage to push myself to talk with him about, but here I was doing just that.  “In fact, books saved him from you and the rest of the Zazlos.  Just as they saved me.”  I expected him to hit me with a barrage of abuse, but he remained silent.  I thought that maybe it was a good time to leave.  To escape before he exploded and even get to my meeting before it ended.  I had had my say.

“You said,” he said softly—his calmness also was a surprise--“that you turn what ‘actually happens’ into stories.”  In fact I had and I did.  “Well if you have any plans to turn what your mother just told you, claimed actually happened that first day and thereafter,” indeed I planned to do so, “well then you had better know what actually happened.”

For this from him I had plenty of time.  “Shoot,” I said and immediately regretted my choice of metaphor.

“I won’t dispute that I was taking a shortcut through her neighborhood and that I had a flat tire and she brought me a glass of water.  It was as she said--a hot day in June.  And though I can’t know what she saw in me I can tell you what I first saw in her.”

“I’d very much like to know that.  Yes.  Please.”

“All the girls I had known to that time were mainly the ones who came to our fraternity parties.  Girls mostly from good families in the city.  From places like Hunter College.  They were nice enough but they felt dry to me.  I don’t know how else to put it.  As if the sap had already been drained from them.  And all they were interested in was finding husbands, ones who would get good jobs as engineers or doctors and make enough money to rent a three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan or buy a house with columns up in Westchester or out on Long Island.  I didn’t realize it at the time but I was looking for something different; and I’ll confess that when I first set eyes on your mother, glowing in that sunlight she told you about, I knew in an instant that she was exactly what I had been waiting for.”

I stood there transfixed—to hear my father, the man who trained me not to feel, to have him confess to me how he felt, to talk about how my mother looked in the sunlight, this was not the man I had known, who I had grown up fearing . . . and despising.

“She to me seemed like something that had emerged directly from the natural world.  She was not of Brooklyn or any city.  She was more like a creature who had lived her whole life in a meadow or forest.  By saying this I do not mean to diminish her by comparing her to an animal.  Rather I want you to understand her power and her superiority.  She was a glorious human creature who gave back to the sunlight as much as she received from it.  She glowed with a life from within that was unlike anything I had ever seen or imagined.  I knew immediately why all the other girls I had been dating had not been right for me.  Yes, with some I did have some fun and occasionally one let me touch her; but until I saw your mother sitting on her patched-up stoop with her skirts pulled up above her knees, I hadn’t understood what I had been hoping to find.  Someone to lure me out of my comfortable and secure world.  To capture my imagination and fulfill my dreams.  Just as she told you that in me she saw someone with the potential to take her away from her stifling, old-world existence.”

“This is amazing Dad,” I stammered.  “I never would have thought of Mom this way.  Having this power.  I mean, how could I?  I was her son and could see her only very differently.”

“Stop blathering for a moment, will you.  Of course you couldn’t.  For a change this is not about you and your fictionalizing.  I’m telling you about me.  What I experienced and felt and what she meant to me.”

“I know.  I know.  I mean, I don’t know what to say or how to say it.  You’re catching me so off guard.  You know that . . .”  I was soaked through with perspiration though the sun was setting and it had become chilly.

“I don’t think you have the faintest inkling about the meaning and importance of what I’m telling you.  My point is that your mother and I began from our own versions of the same place, with our own powerful need to escape.  You heard what she sensed in me and now you know what I felt from her.  Do you at least have that straight?”  I nodded though I was by then totally confused—hadn’t he said that he had heard what she told me and that he disagreed with her story?  Wasn’t he now contradicting himself, claiming that they, in effect, had both been instantly and viscerally attracted to each other?

“I am confused.  It sounds as if both of your stories are in alignment, that they match.  I’m not getting where you disagree.”

“This, thus far, is the easy part.  The attraction, the passion, the falling in love, the deciding to be together, to get married.  Actually, the getting married part was not just difficult for her—her parents were very orthodox, as she told you, and thought I was worse than a gentile since I did not practice my religion.  I hadn’t even been bar mitzvahed.  But my parents too were against the wedding.  They thought she came from a family of Mokies—shtetl-brained peasants who spent all their time praying in schul for the Messiah to come.  So we didn’t get their approval or, much, less their blessing.  But still we got married.  

“Again, this is the easy part,” he continued, “and if you were to write about it that too would be easy.  It’s what happened next that is difficult and complicated.”

“I know.  That’s the part that Mom also said I didn’t understand.”

“And that’s my point—it’s about this that she and I disagree.  Take the washing machine for example.  It will . . .”

For the first time in my life I interrupted him, “But aren’t you jumping way ahead?  You were just beginning to tell me about getting married and the washing machine came so many years later.  What happened between . . . ?”

“We don’t have all day here.  They close this place at sundown and it must be getting close to that time.  And it isn’t important to talk about everything.  I want to concentrate on a few things that are essential to the story because they illustrate so much.  You can get too lost in too many details.  Listen to me—I’m telling you how to tell a story!”

“Clearly, I’m not that much of an expert yet.”

“You made a big deal out of that fucking machine.”  Here we go again I thought.  I caught myself starting to cringe.  “But you were right to do so.” 

“Right?”

  “Yes, because if you had really understood its meaning you would have achieved something.  Your mother told you what she thought was important.  And, as she and you would put it, the truth it represented.  That’s the way she spoke about it, right?  About getting to the truth?”

“Yes, the ‘essential’ truth.”

“Whatever.  No one ever said she didn’t have a better education than me, and a way with words.  So let’s leave it at that.  But here is where we diverge.  She and me.  She was right, yes, that I was a failure and . . .”

“No you weren’t Dad,” I interrupted for a second time.  I did not want to hear this from him.  It hurt too much.  “You worked so hard and tried so many things and you . . .”

“Look, we’re telling the truth here, aren’t we?  So we can cut the pretending and the bullshit.  I don’t have time for any of that any more.  You understand?”  Again, I nodded.  “That’s what I was, a failure at making money and plenty of other things.  I’m sure your mother gave you an earful about that too.”  I shook my head but admit that I hoped on another visit she would.  “And that did make me bitter.  She was right about that.  Especially what it felt like to have to go to work for my younger brother.  That didn’t help at all though I needed the job and the money.  You were about to begin college.  She said I felt emasculated.  OK, I’ll go along with that too.”  I was hoping he would go not further with this—just leave it out there as a metaphor.  “But she missed entirely two other things.  Which to my mind are at the heart of things.  From my point of view of course.”  He was now mocking himself.

He paused to take a deep breath as if this was exhausting him.  “First of all, soon after I was thrown out of college, to tell you the truth more because of all the time I was spending with her—neither one of us could get enough of the other, shortly after that happened she went to teacher training school and did very well there.  She was always a good student, and all she thought about was becoming an elementary school teacher.  I was fine with that but felt after I started making a good living of my own she would quit and take care of the house and have time to be with her sisters and their children.  She loved children.  But very soon, which didn’t bother me at first, she started to correct me.  This began with my grammar.  It made her crazy when I mixed up ‘that’ and ‘which,’ or ‘who’ and ‘whom.’  One of her favorites was to criticize me, because that’s what it became—criticism, whenever I used ‘good’ when I should have said ‘well.’  And yes, ‘me’ and ‘I.’  Not that she was wrong about this, mind you, a scholar I wasn’t.  At first she did it with a smile, even flirtatiously—it was one of our games: she played the teacher and I was her misbehaving student.”  I didn’t want to hear more about this either.  “But over time she began to do this more and more in public and also started to correct and contradict almost everything I said.  If I pronounced a word wrong, she corrected me.  If I forgot who the Secretary of State was she jumped in before I could remember it. 

“Under ordinary circumstances this would not have been a major issue, I liked becoming better at things, to improve myself, but the circumstances that I was starting to find myself in were anything but ordinary.   My family always had money.  So when I was living with them I had what I needed.  More than I needed.  You heard about my convertible.  But when I was on my own and couldn’t make a go of anything, when I couldn’t support my wife and we needed to depend on her salary to live, not only did I become angry and frustrated, you got all of that right, but your mother, out of disappointment in me, turned on me.  Yes, that’s what she did—turn on me.  There were little signs of that initially, like all the correcting; but as one business venture after another failed, she began to distance herself from me, disassociating herself from me, as if to say ‘I am not part of this, not part of him and what he is becoming, what he has become.’  She held herself aloof and presented herself as the arbiter of competence and, harder to take, all virtue.  She became self-righteous in her pursuit of perfection.  The grammatical correcting expanded to include passing judgment on everything I said or did, on who I was or had become.  On the simplest level, if I hit my thumb with a hammer, I would hear her snickering in the background.  This hurt because I prided myself on the fact that I was physically adept.  If I wore clothes that didn’t match, she would walk one half-step ahead of me so as to make it look as if she wasn’t with me.  And this too cut me because even as I was failing I still took pride in my appearance.  I tried to put on a good front, especially with her family since she had so disappointed them when she announced to them that over their objections she was going to marry me.  But she took that away from me too.  My pride in how I looked.  These to you may seem superficial—being corrected, being judged for insignificant things; but I was feeling so wounded by feeling inadequate, from having let her down, by not holding up my end of the bargain, that her stream of judgments broke what little remained of my spirit.” 

I stood there by his side, wanting to get closer to him, but was obviously not able to do so or say anything that I thought might ease his pain.  “And then there are other things that happened, that even now, when claiming it’s finally time to strip away the pretending, there are things that are difficult for me to bring up, though I remember them well, things that are hard for me tell you.  Suffice it to say these were a part of our private life.  That’s how we referred to it in my day—our ‘private life.’

“So if you are going to continue to write about me, about us, and I suspect and hope, yes I hope you will (and, let’s be truthful, none of this should be a surprise to you—you are supposed to be a sensitive and perceptive person), what I am telling you must be a part of the story.” 

I realized he was right—I did know most of these things, at least I had intuited them from the daily evidence of their lives—but, again he was correct, I had failed to push myself to write about them.  They were too painful and, I confess, embarrassing to reveal since everyone who might read what I was writing would know my stories were derived from thinly-disguised incidents from our lives. 

It was simple--I lacked the courage to do that. 

“But there is more.  Remember I told you that there are two things you have not been sufficiently understanding or considering if you want to get closer to your truth?”   He in fact had, and for the moment, when mentioning “truth,” had ceased disparaging me.  “Did you ever wonder why we didn’t have children until after nearly ten years of marriage?”  Indeed I had.  “I suspect you thought there was something wrong with us.  I mean physically.  That I was shooting blanks or your mother was infertile.”  Indeed as the first-born I had had those thoughts.  I even thought I might have been adopted.  “Well, we were both fine.  At least in that regard.”  About this I wanted to hear more since in this he was talking about me.  “Your mother was desperate to begin a family, but I refused.  Don’t look so puzzled.”  Which I was.  “It was, though, the one thing I could do to hit back at her for what she had been doing to demean and humble me.”

“And?”

“But there you are.  Evidence that something happened, didn’t it?  To produce you.” 

“Yes?”

The wind began to whip through the huddled tombstones.  He had stopped speaking and its sound was all there was.  The light that remained lanced obliquely across the swollen graves.  The few other visitors had long since departed.  I assumed he had said all he intended.  It would be up to me to struggle to imagine what his refusal to participate in having a child had been like for my mother.  And, more profoundly, to understand more about his motives.

“We did still have a private life.”  I was relieved that he had more to say.  “As I told you, it too was no longer what it had been like at first.  But it must have been one night after I had had too much to drink at some relative’s wedding that I failed to protect myself, and two months later your mother told me she was expecting.  So I couldn’t make that work either!

“There was nothing to do about it.  She was thrilled and so there would be no discussion about ending the pregnancy.  If I had even implied such a thing, she would undoubtedly have left me for good, as she had at times threatened and gone back to live with her parents.  Maybe that would have been a good idea.  Who knows?

“But in those days, no matter the circumstances, no one ever divorced.  The most any couple did, if they had the room, was move into separate bedrooms.  We didn’t have an extra room, especially with you on the way; but we bought separate beds and placed a two-foot wide night table between them.  You remember that?  Back in our East Flatbush apartment?”  Indeed I had.  In fact, one day when home alone with the croup I had rummaged through the drawer of that table and among the tissues and envelopes and pads I found an illicit treasure—a flaming red box of Trojans.  It suggested to me that indeed, though separated by more than an arm’s distance, they still had a ‘private life.’

“But, Dad . . .”

“I’m getting to that.  Back to you, your favorite subject.  But first there is a little more I have to say.  The months raced by and soon I had to rush your mother to the hospital and eighteen hours later you were born.  You looked like a skinned rabbit you were so long and skinny.  The doctor said you were the longest baby he had ever delivered.  And you were ugly--this is about the truth, right?—so ugly that if they hadn’t kept you and your mother in the hospital for ten days, which is what they did back then, and you hadn’t gained some weight during that time, I was planning to bring you home at night so none of the neighbors would see you.”  I had heard that version of the story before—it was part of the family folklore—but what I had just heard about him not wanting children provided another explanation to the plan to sneak me out of the hospital after dark.

“And to my own surprise, though I did not want any children for the reasons I already told you about, I began to be interested in you.  Even more than that--to be drawn to you.  To pick you up out of you bassinette and hold you.  Why should I hold back now—it is also true that I began to feel love for you, in spite of myself, and to want to be responsible for you.  I had no interest in the feedings and the diaper changing, that I will acknowledge, but I did want to be a father.  A real father.  You remember when you were about five how I used to ask you ‘Why are you such a lucky boy?’ and trained you to answer, ‘Because I have a wonderful father.’”  I did remember that.  “I wanted to be that wonderful father.  I couldn’t wait for you to become old enough to understand what I meant when I called you ‘son.’”  His voice broke.  I had never heard that from him before or anything like this.

After a moment, again fully composed, he added, growling in a more familiar manner, “But she wouldn’t let me.  When your mother sensed my interest, which wasn’t hard to do, in small ways she withdrew you from me.  She made it clear that you were her child.  All I had done as far as she was concerned was perform a biological service.”

“How did she . . . ?”

“By lavishing so much attention on you, by making you so totally dependent on her, the need for me diminished.  Yes, we still did things, you and me, but they were simple things like roller skating together or playing catch in the driveway or occasionally shopping for a new pair of pants or a jacket.”

“I do remember them Dad, and I really . . .”

“I’m happy to know that, but I wanted to do more.  I came to want to be a father who on the weekends did more than throw a ball back and forth with his son.  This is where my much deeper frustration came from.  Yes, I wanted to be a better provider.  What man didn’t?  Yes, I wanted to be respected in the family.  Her family.  But more than anything else I wanted to be a good father to you and to your brother when he came along.” 

Again he paused to gather himself and then said, “I’m almost done.  But here’s the worst of it.”  I could hear him breathing deeply.  “As a result of all the attention and devotion and love your mother gave to you, I am ashamed to admit it even now, I became jealous of you.  I began to compete with you.  And at times this jealousy and competition took strange forms.  If you ever wondered why I gave you such a hard time about your grades, even when they were excellent, it was less to motivate you to do better than to pull you down.  I suppose down to where I thought I was.”

I could not stand there any longer listening to this and so I exploded, “This is pure bullshit.  In effect you’re saying because you and Mom couldn’t make it work, because you couldn’t figure out how to do better, or minimally talk to each other about what had been happening between you that was eating away at you, about what you had originally found in each other—wonderful, loving things—since you couldn’t do any of that, you now look back on what happened and claim it was all my fault?  This is totally outrageous.  You now say that if I hadn’t been born, things would have gotten better between you.  If you had been able to be a real father to me, you now contend, you would have found a purpose for your life.  Bullshit like that.  Well, I’m not buying any of it.  I’m not accepting your version of things to be the truth,” I spat “truth” out as if now mocking myself, “In fact, I think you’re the real fictionalizer in the family.  And if you ask me whose version of reality I believe—yours or Mom’s, since they are irreconcilable--I have an easy answer for you.  Which you don’t want to hear.  And beside that  . . .”

“Again,” he cut me off, but gently, “you’re not understanding.  You’re missing the point.”

“And what might that be?” I snapped back at him.

“It was all my fault.  Everything.  I made stupid business choices.  I went into things that anyone with his eyes only half-open would have realized were doomed to fail.   When your mother showed the first signs of concern, I did nothing but ignore her.  I cut her off and eventually she pulled back from me.  And when I did that, in spite of her efforts to talk with me about what I was experiencing and feeling, when I as a result turned passively aggressive toward her, her concern turned into disappointment and then that hardened into contempt.”  He let me take that in and then said, “Which I now confess I deserved.

“I thought, feeling sorry for myself, trying to justify how inexcusably I was behaving toward her, turning my disappointment in myself into anger directed at her, and eventually you—the washing machine being a case in point—I wondered, in moments of clarity and honesty, about which I of course said nothing:  Whatever happened to that girl in the sunlight?”

For the second time that day, in the setting sun, I found myself sobbing at the graveside of one of my parents.

“It breaks my heart, but I know.” 

It took all my strength, all my pride to keep from again hurling myself to the ground.  For what purpose, to do what, after all this time, I still do not know.  And as I struggled with that and to steel myself, using the well-honed techniques he had drummed into me, he said, “If you can manage to compose yourself,” he was back to his old self again, “let me now bring this closer to home.”  With tears still streaming, exhausted, I thought—can there still be more?  “I want to bring this back to you.  And we’re no longer talking about your mother and me and what you, in your writing, have been attempting to do while reflecting on our lives.  Though you could certainly do better at that.”  Of course, I thought, here we go again!  “There is something of greater importance that you need to pay attention too.  And immediately.”

“And what is that?”  I truly couldn’t imagine.

“I’m talking now about Rona.  About you and Rona.” 

This caught me so off guard that I almost fainted.  But I quickly realized that, thankfully, this would have to be brief since they would be closing the gates to Mt. Lebanon is fewer than fifteen minutes.  More than anything else, I didn’t want to get locked in there for the night.  I had heard stories that this had happened to some visitors.  And I was afraid to think about what might have happened to them.

“That Lydia wife of yours.  That was her name, am I correct?”  If this was going to take us back to my first disastrous marriage, whether they locked the gates or not, I would be there all night.

“Yes, that was her name.  And . . .?”

“I never liked her very much.”

“Indeed that was abundantly evident.  You stopped talking to her entirely during the last five years we were together.”

“In fact, I had no use for her.  What was she anyway?  A dancer?  What kind of a thing is that to do for a grown person?”

“A good thing as far as I was concerned, but it’s true we did have our differences and things didn’t work out.  And . . .”

“Differences? You certainly have a way with understatements.  You never told us much about being married to her, but I can only imagine.  And she was frigid too?”  I wasn’t going to get into this.  That would keep me at Mt. Lebanon at least through the weekend.

“But Rona is another matter.  I have no idea why she wanted to become involved with someone like you who’s already an old man and could never keep a job.  How many times is it that you’ve been fired?”

“Look Dad, we’ve been over this ground before.  Yes, I am a little older and I did early on have difficulties in my career, but over time I think I managed to do pretty well for myself.  For example, I . . .”

“Including taking advantage of her.”

“Now that’s a new one.  And frankly I have no idea what you’re talking about or where this is coming from.  We have a very good . . .”

“I assume you can still get it up,” again territory I was not prepared to enter into, “though after what you did to yourself and what those surgeons must have had to do with your prostate, one can’t be sure of that either.”

“Why don’t we agree to talk about something else?  Actually,” I flamboyantly checked my watch, “it’s getting near closing and I have to get back to the city.”

“OK, next time you come for a visit we’ll talk about the weather.”  This was something he used to say sarcastically decades ago whenever we would get into a disagreement about politics or one of my girlfriends; but by deploying my college-perfected debating skills I would get him all twisted up and lost in his own misuse of logic.  Achieving that was among my occasional malicious triumphs.

“That suits me fine.”  I began to gather my book bag and jacket and rummaged through them for the car keys.

“But before you go, I have one more word of advice for you—You are in danger of doing to Rona exactly what I did to your mother.”  He let a beat go by and then added, “Have a good drive back to the city.  I hope you don’t run into too much traffic.  Or bad weather.”

But he had me.  “Go on,” I said.

“I don’t want to keep you.  I know you have more important things to do.  I’ll see you again in a few months.”

“No, no, no.  You can’t just drop that on me and then send me on my way.  Not after what you just told me about you and Mom.  No, no.  Let me have it.   Whatever’s on your mind.  I’m ready for you.”  I folded my jacket and tossed it back on the bench to indicate I wasn’t leaving.

And so he said, “Didn’t I read in one of your things how you boasted about how all you cared about was helping Rona become strong and independent?  To overcome the things that had happened to her during her childhood?  Or was that one of the things you were making up.  How did you put it—‘imagining’?”

“Yes, I think you saw Crazy Rona.  That was a few years ago but that one included very little fictionalizing.”

“That’s what I meant to say—‘fictionalizing.’  Very impressive.  But I’m not interested in arguing with you about that because if what you wrote about yourself there is true, and I hope it is, than you’re not doing a very good job of it.  In fact, because of some of your shenanigans you’re doing the opposite.”

“Once again,” I shot back, “which is par for the course today.  But still, I’m not following you.  What ‘shenanigans,’ pray tell, are you referring to?”  I had had just about enough from him.  He was long-gone but there I was seemingly not able to escape from him or his relentless criticism.  Indeed, I thought, if he wanted to make comparisons between his life and mine, it would have been more appropriate to see that what he was doing to me then and there was the very same thing he had accused my mother of inflicting on him--endless streams of criticism.

“She saved your life didn’t she?”

“What?  Who?”

“You ignored your health and all the symptoms, which we do not need to get into here.  Didn’t you?  To a point where you considered committing suicide?  You even wrote a note, didn’t you?  All sorts of poetic bullshit as if the note was more important than the act of killing yourself and its consequences.  What pretentious crap.”  How did he know this?  “Quite the man you were.  Quite the inspiration for her.  You proclaimed, even in print, how essential it is to take responsibility for your life, about how important it is to be strong in spite of anything that might have happened to you.  To not pass along the blame to others or blame things on situations in which you might have unfairly found yourself.  And in that way to become independent and, what, happy?  Or as you prefer to put it—to pursue happiness.   Do I have that right?” 

He did. 

“But I can’t believe your hypocrisy.  You set her up to believe all this.  And in you.  And then what did you do?  You get her to take all the risks involved in trying to live this way and then you plan to take a self-indulgent dive onto the rocks in the Mediterranean.   Beautiful.  How romantic.  And what then would have happened to her?”

“Well I’m still here, aren’t I?”  I couldn’t believe how pathetic I sounded.  Even to myself.  He had me dead to rights.

“Only because of her.  That’s why.  She found you rolled up in a ball wallowing in your own piss with the crumpled ‘suicide’ note next to you.  You didn’t even have the courage to tear it up and throw it away.  You wanted to be sure she saw it.  Maybe even save it so it could one day be published after the Great One was gone.  What a man!” 

I continued to say nothing.  There was nothing I could think of to say that wouldn’t be a lie.  “She forced you to get up and dragged you to the doctor and then back to New York and to the hospital.  She went to every medical test with you.  She held your hand so you wouldn’t cry out in pain when they took your blood or stuck a tube up your ass.  She slept in your hospital room in a broken-down chair night after night to make sure you saw a familiar face when you woke from your sleep and to make sure the nurses didn’t do anything to make your condition worse.

“And then, after the first operation, when they hooked you up to that bag, who cleaned it out?”  I didn’t respond.  “I’m asking you, who cleaned up your shit?”  He waited for me to say something and, when I didn’t, he bellowed loud enough to awaken Richard Tucker from an operatic reverie, “I’m asking you—Who cleaned up your shit?”

“She did,” I whispered as if to myself.  “Rona did.  And” I added soundlessly, “other things you’ll never know.”

“I did hear about other things.  Maybe not so life-and-death, but still important.  From years ago.”

I waited for him to continue but when he didn’t I thought, Maybe the only way to get free of him, and this, would be to try to tell him what had happened.  More, to confess to him as he had to me; and, how I hated to acknowledge this, that he was right.  I had been that hypocrite.  So I turned my back to him and, as if speaking to the wind, which was now lashing Mt. Lebanon and me, I took a chance.

“I will tell you a story,” I began in a hush, as if to assure he would not be able to catch more than the intonations.  “Just one, but I will attempt to make it true.”

“I’ll let you know how well you do.” 

So he was hearing me.  In any case, I had resolved to do this and so I continued.  “Not too long after we became involved with each other, it became clear that our  . . .”

“I thought you said ‘one story’?  Now you’re talking about when you met.  I don’t have all night to . . .”

“For a change, try to be quiet and be a little patient and let me do this my way.  OK?”  I took his silence to mean I should proceed.  “Well, though I was my usual oblivious self, problems emerged almost immediately.  Rona had not as yet developed the self-confidence to confront me or them and so they accumulated and inevitably, like everything that’s ignored, they festered.  Things like my

 canceling plans that she had taken the initiative to make for us.  Things like my grumbling every time she wanted to have dinner on her own with one of her friends.  She was a part of a book club that met once a month; and if she didn’t call in to let me know how things were going and, more important to me, when she would be coming home to me, I would give her attitude—what she called ‘the silent treatment.’   One of the few things that was good about her parents was that they didn’t monitor her behavior—she depended on being unfettered, having that freedom.  So what did I do?  I pressed in on her, claiming it was because I loved her so much that I wanted to be with her every free moment; while in truth I wanted to rein her in, tie her more closely to me than all the inequalities in our relationship would on their own naturally ensure.  I used all my subversive guile to make her even more dependent on me, and thereby slowly sapped away some of what she valued most--her freedom.” 

Now I needed to take in some air.  “I’m sure you’re wondering why I did that while proclaiming I longed for her to fully come into her own.  To develop an independent sense of herself.  I didn’t at the time understand very much of this but soon Rona began to question me and eventually, aggressively confront me since one of the techniques I employed to control and manipulate her was to act as if she what she was accusing me of was unfair and not based on any specific evidence that she could cite.  And worse, if I am attempting to be honest here, and I am, when I needed to be most self-protective, when she was close to breaking through the armor of my defensive logic and I was thus in danger of having her confront me with what I was really up to, in spite of my claims that the opposite was true, I would in response puff myself up and pretend to grow calmer as a cynical strategy to incite her anger and turn it into rage.  So as to make her feel as if she was, in her passion and fury, not just in a rage but crazy.  Which you can only imagine set off deeply-rooted bells-and-whistles from her childhood. 

“I, her closest friend, her advocate, confidant, and trusted lover, I too was calling her crazy, though carefully and perversely brilliantly I did not use the word itself--and how thus this made my claims more effective!  I also, as I stood there smugly and mockingly smiling down at her as she thrashed about the room, engulfed in tears, like her parents, I too was making her feel like she was indeed Crazy Rona.”

My father continued to remain uncharacteristically silent.  If he weren’t in his current condition, I would have worried that something had happened to him.  But I had more to say and pressed on.  “And this is not all.  I am ready to tell you that one story.”

He broke his silence and said sarcastically, “It’s about time.”  I could almost see him tapping on his watch as he had done so many times in the past when exasperated with me.

Undeterred and determined to conclude, now casting aside any pretense of getting to my meeting, not even caring if cemetery officials locked me in for the night, still not facing him, I said, “This is hard for me to say but I did other cruel things.  And it took me a long time to understand why I would do this to someone I so genuinely loved, though you may understandably be doubting that what I felt for her in any way resembled love.  But as difficult as it is to believe, while I was behaving this way, we also did have a good life.  We had friends who enjoyed being with us.  We did things that gave us pleasure.  We had common interests.  We liked being alone with each other.  We liked to read and listen to music.  Passionately, we passed Hotel du Lac and Crossing to Safety back and forth between us and wore out the Budapest’s recordings of Beethoven’s late quartets and anything by Miles Davis.  We took great pleasure in languid Sunday naps and when we trekked in the Tetons became intoxicated by the same landscapes.  We enjoyed cooking and baking together and agreed that life was too short not to drink good wine.  Especially our favorites, Cos D’Estournel and Leoville Las Cases.  At NYU we worked together successfully.  And we even enjoyed, if that is the best way to describe it, our spats and arguments, for me as long as they didn’t hit too close to home.  We had what you would call a satisfying ‘private life.’  To everyone who knew us we presented the picture of happiness.  Many thought we were an ideal couple.  Rare these days.  And in many ways they were right--We were that couple.

“But there was another side to us.  My need to have power, continuing unabated, to reach in and influence, possess, and control the very heart of Rona’s being.  I must have been fearing that if she came fully into her own, became self-assured enough not to let me get away with my manipulations, she would lose respect for my ability to arrange and take care of things, and her.  And that she would eventually come to conclude that she didn’t any longer need me.”

He continued to listen, “Doesn’t this sound preposterous and pathetic?  And where’s the internal logic—did I need to continue to chip away at her self-esteem, reduce her in order to elevate my own essentialness?  Was I, am I that fragile and insecure, in spite of my public bluster and seeming ability to understand the most complex situations and take responsibility for getting things right, that I needed to do this to her?   That in order to provide for her, take care of her most delicate needs, I felt compelled to behave in ways to cause her to become even weaker, more self-doubting and less confident?   This must be so because I persisted in doing just that.

“But here’s the story.  It’s not about very dramatic things; but in its mundaneness and seeming innocence, even its overtly beneficial effects for her and us, just below the surface something more malevolent was relentlessly at work.”  

I felt that my father was straining to follow me as I took this torturous route to get finally to my point.

“I know you must be wondering why Rona remained with me.”  I realized I was off again on another tangent but hoped he would see all of the connections I was attempting to make.  “It was in part that I was very clever at my manipulations.  Very skillful in covering my tracks so that often, especially early on, I could get away with convincing her that what I was doing to her was all for her benefit.  But over time Rona began more and more to see through that deception; but still, she remained because of the deep investment she had made in getting me to stop the pretending long enough so that we could clear away enough emotional debris to allow us to talk honestly about what we both, yes both, had allowed to happen.  If we could do that, she hoped, perhaps we would be able to recalibrate our relationship.  And, complicated as it is to comprehend, we were still very much in love with each other.  Rona and I.”

After another pause to gather myself, I said, “Then I took ill.  This is not the story. But when Rona took me to the hospital for the first time nothing short of a tectonic shift for us was about to occur.

“It was 5:30 in the morning.  The second day after my operation to divert my colon to form a stoma, a colostomy, in the hope that it would allow my intestines and bladder to calm down enough to enable the infection to heal so they could a few months later perform the surgery to cure my condition.  As had happened the day before at the same early hour, Dr. Weinstein, my surgeon and his team of residents burst through the door, switched on the bank of overhead lights and, slapping his hands together with such force in the now blazing room that it sounded like a thunderclap.  Rona, who had again stayed the night with me, curled up as best she could on a hard chair, with that awoke from her restless sleep and leapt to her feet.  Without a wasted motion, she thrust herself between him and me, immobilized in my bed where I lay attached to six drains and tubes, as if to protect me from this predawn invasion.

“‘Well,’ Dr. Weinstein said, again clapping his hands as if to show his professional enthusiasm, ‘he’s doing well, but we can’t as yet rule out cancer.’ 

“Though groggy, Rona snapped back at him, ‘You said the same thing yesterday; and though when I questioned you about the chances you would find cancer you told me they were infinitesimal.  But here you are again talking about cancer.’  I was now fully awake in spite of the narcotic power of my epidural.

“‘That’s true,’ Dr. Weinstein said, ‘but still, cancer can’t be ruled out.’

“‘I’m no doctor,’ Rona said, ‘but I know at least two things about this,’ I tried to hoist myself up on my stack of pillows to get a better view of this potentially incendiary confrontation, ‘First,’ she said, ‘if the likelihood that he has cancer is as slight as you claim,’ he nodded, ‘than what are you trying to accomplish by announcing every day that it can’t be ruled out?  We know that.  But why does it have to be the first thing you say to us?  And second’ (he was staring at her incredulously at her as if to say, “No one talks to me this way—I’m a surgeon and you are only the wife of a patient but you clearly do not know your place”) and second,’ Rona pressed on unintimidated, ‘is it necessary to storm in on us as you did with all your minions trailing behind you, and, as you did yesterday, turn on all the lights, clapping your hands like you’re at a boxing match, and by doing so scaring us half to death?  Don’t you have any awareness of what this does to someone who is seriously ill and trying to get rested and healed?’  He remained mute.  ‘Well I can answer that one for you—it doesn’t help at all.  And’ she concluded, wheeling on her heel and striding over to stand beside me, ‘I would appreciate it if when you come to see Lloyd tomorrow, you knock on the door first before entering and I will let you in.  And I expect there will be no more talk about cancer until you have something to rule in or, more likely, out.’ 

“She stared across at him through the tangle of I.V. lines.  In my weakened condition, though I concurred with everything Rona said and admired her ability to confront him as she had, still I trembled, fearing that as a surgeon he would not take what he would see to be a reprimand from a layperson, and as a result, would fire me as his patient.

“But in the blazing fluorescent light I thought I saw on his face the flicker of a sly smile.  A form of begrudging respect, I felt, for Rona’s standing up for us, and confronting him as she did.  And for her defense of me.  A more subdued Dr. Weinstein said, “No more cancer talk because I am sure we have nothing to worry about.  I’ll see you tomorrow morning at 8:00 sharp.”  He emphasized the later time and shoed his resident acolytes from the room, following them out, being sure to turn off the lights and gently closing the door.”

I wasn’t certain if my father was understanding what I was attempting to tell him about Rona and me by recalling this incident with Dr. Weinstein.  And so I continued, “Later that night, much later--it was about 1:30 a.m.—I heard Rona stirring in her chair.  It was chilly in the room and I thought she was rummaging around looking for another blanket.  But she in fact had come over to my bed and was checking the pump that was connected to my epidural line.  It was making a strange sound.  With a flashlight that she had brought from home I saw her checking the dials on the pump and the bag that contained the pain medication.  I heard her say to herself sotto voce, ‘The damn thing is almost empty.  We’re about to run out of painkiller.’  With that I awoke with a start and at once began to shake and sweat when I thought about the implications of running out of the medicine. 

“Without a word Rona disappeared.  I assumed to alert the nurse on duty.  In about five minutes she returned and told me, now fully awake, that the nurse was attempting to locate the anesthesiologist on night duty since only he was authorized to deal with epidurals.  She paced the room watching as the medication level relentlessly dropped, checking the door every few seconds for any sign of the nurse or doctor.   For certain, within half an hour the bag would run dry and I would be writhing in agony.  Realizing this she raced from the room, I assume back to the nurse’s station.  A moment later, out of breath, she returned.  ‘They tell me the one anesthesiologist on call is in surgery, dealing with a kid who was brought in severely injured in a car accident.’  In spite of this distressing news Rona remained calm and brought me a cold compress in an attempt to keep me from overheating and hyperventilating from fear.

“But she couldn’t contain her frustration and said, ‘Where’s that fucking nurse?  Maybe she’ll be able to give you a shot or something to help with the pain until the doctor shows up.  I have no idea in the first place why nurses can’t replace these bags.  It has to be a doctor?  That makes no sense.  It’s more bureaucratic hospital bullshit.’  And as she said this I saw a new thought come to her, ‘Do you remember because this is a private room, when we checked in, the Medical Director came by to give us his card and said, “Call me if you need anything”?   Well, this qualifies.’  And with that she was dialing his cell phone number.  It was a little past 2:00 in the morning, but remarkably he answered.  I heard Rona telling him about the situation.  When she hung up she said he told her he would do what he could.  And what he could do was just what we needed to happen because in less than five minutes the head nurse was in my room and said if the doctor wasn’t there in ten more minutes she had orders to give me a shot of Demerol which would tide me over.

“I know, Dad, I’m going on forever with this, but I’m almost done.  It’s important.  The anesthesiologist did show up and connected a new bag and I was eventually fine.  That though is not the point.”  

He was clearing his throat and I realized I had just a few moments of uninterrupted time remaining.  So I raced on.  “I’ve been telling you about this not so you would know the details of my operations and hospitalizations.  None of that’s important.”

“But you did get better because of them.”

“Yes thankfully, but my point here is about what Rona did during that awful year when I was so sick.  Up to that point all my rhetoric about wanting to see her and help her come ‘fully into her own,’ as I’ve described it too many times, was just that—rhetoric.  As I’ve told you, confessed to you, for everything I did to encourage that I did something opposite to keep her depending on my vaunted capacity to make decisions, keep threats at bay, and know the best thing to do in all circumstances.  Well, after what she shouldered day after day in the hospital—and there were four hospitalizations and dozens of tests and procedures during that year—how she took charge of my treatment and became such a forceful and effective advocate for my proper and appropriate care and treatment, not only did she do magnificently in that role but there was also a significant spillover effect into the rest of our lives.

“When we emerged from the clutches of doctors and hospitals Rona was a very different person.  Transformed.  And you know,” I paused for emphasis, “so was I.”

“I think it’s almost time for you to go,” my father said.  It in fact was almost dark.

“I know.  Soon.  But I need to tell you that the equation between us had been rebalanced.  Rona has been more than transformed.  About many things we both realized she was as least as capable as I.  In truth about many things, much more capable.  She now manages our finances, and they are very complicated.  For the first time she, and thus we, have a clear picture of our investments and other assets.  I had pretended to run things but in truth had substantially ignored them and they were not in very good shape.  Rona is now an equal partner in all our decisions—ranging from plans about the future to where to have dinner tonight.  And everything in between.”

“So this is the story you wanted to tell me?  I thought it was going to be about something else that was malevolent, wasn’t that your word, that you had done to Rona.”

“Give me one more minute please.  You might be wondering if somehow I feel reduced.  If . . .”

“To tell you the truth, that thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.”

“Well, it’s an important issue to me.  One that I suspect from your own life you might be able to understand.”  Here I had been telling him all these damning things about myself and I wasn’t now about to let him get away with any of his tricks or mockery.  So I pressed on, “You spoke about always feeling measured and judged by Mom.  How her criticism of you, her expecting you to be perfect was a burden under which you eventually broke.”

“That’s not how I put it.”

“OK, if you didn’t break under it--and I have my doubts that you’re right about this—but you did say that you brought things down on yourself, didn’t you, that you felt as if Mom was judging you to be a failure?  Better?”  He remained silent.  “Well, the reason I didn’t and don’t feel diminished by Rona’s newly acquired power is because it has had the effect of releasing me from some of her unrealistic expectations.  One’s, as I’ve said, I encouraged her to have.  I was never as able, as smart, as creative, as decisive as she attributed to me.  And which I in my need to dominate her had evoked.  We together shaped a culture of expectations and perfection which was an enormous burden to both of us—for her to dampen her desires and aspirations and competencies, for me to pretend to be all knowing and always correct.  The same kind of culture of perfection that you claim, unfairly I am certain, Mom devised for you.  We are both, Rona and I, as a result, becoming free of this and beginning truly to become happy.”

“So this you’re telling me is the story?”

“Actually, it isn’t.  It’s about something else. Related but I admit I got lost in what I told you and never got to it.”

“But it must be an important story if you kept assuring me you were getting to it.”

“Maybe then it isn’t.  I mean, important.  But since so much of this is about stories and the truth they attempt to contain, it’s maybe best that there are some that remain untold and will have to wait for the next time.  But right now I want to get home to Rona.”

“And when will that be?”  I sensed annoyance.

“This evening.  I had a meeting I now missed, but Rona and I are planning a nice dinner.”

“I’m asking when is the next time you’ll be coming?  When you'll be telling that story?”

“Oh that.  Sorry.  Soon.  I promise soon.”  And I meant it.

“I know you are going but before you do there is one more thing.”  This would go on forever I feared.  Though after this the notion of forever did not disturb me.  Perhaps my confession had rebalanced other relationships as Rona and I had rebalanced ours.

“It’s about my sister.  Your Aunt Madeline.  You remember her?”
”How could I not?”

“What she told you about Morty.  Her third husband.”

“I remember him.”

“She didn’t tell you the truth.”
”What?”

“What she told you earlier today at Mt. Hebron.  About how she controlled him by constantly disapproving of whatever he did.  Especially when he did nice things for her.”
”I’m not following you.”  I indeed wasn’t.

“She didn’t tell you the truth.  It was a true love affair.  In both directions.  I envied them.  It reminded me of what your mother and I let slip away.”

“So why did she tell me that . . .?”

“Because she loved you and wants you to be happy.  She thought by making up that story she would warn you about what might happen to you and Rona.  Obviously she doesn’t know about the things you told me today.  The next time you go to see her you should tell her what you just told me.”

“That’s incredible!  And I promise that I wlll.”  And with the beginning of an unburdened spirit, with a wink I said, “It seems a lot of people in this family make up stories.”

“Whatever makes you happy,” he said.

Which reminded me, “Do you remember, dad, years ago, when I told you that I didn’t want to go to medical school because I felt it wouldn’t make me happy and you said, ‘What does happiness have to do with anything?’  I spent a lot of years thinking about that and what I should say back to you as an answer.  One that would be truthful.  And now I have one--it has to do with everything.”

I was half way down the path to where I had parked the car when I thought I heard him say back to me—“You were right son.  It is everything.” 

Then he added, “I’m happy here”

And, as I opened the car door, I heard my mother say, “Darling, it’s cold out.  You’ll get a chill.  You should have brought along a sweater.”