Among the Missing (11 page)

Now, as they are growing older, I am aware that hatred is a definite possibility at the end of the long tunnel of parenthood, and I suspect that there is little one can do about it.

Not long ago, when I insisted that he come down to dinner, my youngest son called me a “stupid idiot.” I did not spank him, or wash his mouth out with soap, as my own father might have done; I simply set him up on the “time-out” stool—our preferred method of punishment—and scolded him while he kicked his legs and sang defiantly. His eyes sparked at me, and I
could clearly see the opening of a vortex I would eventually be sucked into, against my will.

Once, I recall, when my oldest son was about five years old, he asked me if he could have my skeleton when I was dead. He told me that when he was grown up, he wanted to own a haunted house. He would cover my remains with spider webs and charge people five dollars to look at them.

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.” I even smiled, as if it were cute. I did not act as if I was offended. But the truth is, my throat tightened. You’ll be sorry, I wanted to say. You’ll be sorry when I’m gone!

Do you know how sorry I was? You should have seen me at my father’s funeral. I look back on this with some embarrassment, because I truly lost control. I wailed and tore at my hair. My children may have been too young to remember seeing this.

When my grandfather died, my father wept silently. Tears ran out of his nose, and I remember that it took me a long time to figure out that he didn’t simply have a cold. At the funeral, he stared straight ahead, rigid, almost glaring, his jaw set.

One time, I remember, we were at the county fair. We were walking back to our car through the parking lot, when a group of older teenagers began to make fun of us. This was in the early seventies, and the teens were what we then called “hippies”—shaggy, raggedly dressed, full of secrets. As a child, I was warned to stay away from them, as they might kidnap me in one of their Volkswagen vans and force me to smoke marijuana.

In any case, they were amused by us. We must have looked ridiculously corny to them, and I remember one of them calling
out, “Look! Here comes Mother, Father, and the Children!” And the others joined in: “Hello, Mother! Hello, Father! Hello, little Wally!”

My father acted as if they weren’t there, though his face became stiff and his eyes fixed harshly on some point in the distance. He just kept plodding forward, as if he couldn’t hear them. That was the look, I thought, that he had at the funeral.

The times in my childhood that I remember seeing him cry, they were always because of music. He was frequently brought to tears by some old, unbearably sentimental song. I remember this one called “Scarlet Ribbons,” and another that went:

This song, in particular, used to drive me crazy, and when he would play it I would leave the room, if possible. It wasn’t only because of the maudlin tremor in the singer’s voice, or because of my father’s solemn canonizing of my grandfather, a man who had once burned my father’s arm with a red-hot fork, leaving a scar which still remained. (“It taught me a lesson,” my father said. He was being punished for having cruelly burned his younger sister with a match.)

It wasn’t the hypocrisy that repelled me. It was simply that I understood the implications of the line: “To me, he was so wonderful.” By which the singer meant, “No matter what, my father seemed wonderful to me.” And I knew that my father wasn’t weeping because he was extending this grace to his own
father. No: He was weeping because he was wishing it for himself. He hoped that I would someday sing “O My Papa!” He cried for himself, and each tear said, “Someday you will love me unconditionally. Someday you will forgive me. Someday you will be sorry.”

Which was something I didn’t want to hear at the time.

I’ve suffered a little. Along with his sentimental side came a nasty temper. I got my share of what my father called “lickings,” a term which, even in the extremity of my punishment, would cause me to smirk into my hand. I was beaten with a wire brush, a belt, a length of hose. And I was the victim of verbal and emotional abuse. I don’t know whether I mentioned this or not, but once my father hit my mother. I stood by watching.

Nowadays, I meet a lot of people who were never beaten when they were children. They never witnessed any sort of violence in the home and the idea of striking a child is so aberrant to them that I enjoy shocking them with tales of my abuse—most of which are quite true.

My father would have been just as outraged to hear of a parent who
didn’t
use corporal punishment. You couldn’t really reason with a child, he would have said, but you had to make sure they obeyed. They had to learn to respect before they learned to think. The idea of a world filled with unspanked children would have made him frown grimly. For what would become of society, once these children grew up? The children would be spoiled, and the world would be filled with rude, disrespectful, dishonest, shiftless adults.

He worried about me being spoiled. By “spoiled,” he didn’t
mean what my mother means when she says that she can hardly wait to see her grandchildren at Christmastime. “I’ll spoil them rotten,” she says devilishly, and I say, “Oh, they’re already so spoiled it’s not funny.” And we laugh.

To my father, the word still retained a large part of its older, more serious connotations: “Spoiled” meant “ruined,” and the act of
spoiling
had flickers of its archaic meaning—to pillage, to plunder. In my father’s estimation, a man who spoiled his children was robbing them, for a spoiled child would never be capable of the higher emotions: love, patriotism, self-sacrifice, honor, duty. Though he wept when the father made the son shoot the pet deer in
The Yearling
, he felt that the father did the right thing. We got into a heated argument about this one night about a year before he died. “It had to be done!” my father had insisted, and his voice rose, almost cracking with emotion. “That’s how it was back then, damn it!”

“Well, do you know how it is now?” I said—I immediately saw the opening I’d been waiting years for, my chance to educate him. “Do you know what would happen to a man who burned his child with a red-hot fork? He would be jailed and his children would be taken by the state!”

My father could not help but look at his scar—the tattoo of his father that he would still be wearing as he lay in his casket.

(I saw it there—I pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, smoothing my fingers over that paper-dry corpse skin, and there it was. I touched the scar, and that was the last time I touched my father.)

My father stared at the four smooth lines the fork had left
just above the wristband of his watch. “Do you think my dad loved me any less than you love your kids?” he said. “Is that what you think?”

And we were both silent.

I don’t know the answer, even now. Maybe love, like suffering, is relative. My wife’s psychologist friend once told me, judgmentally, that sarcasm is more damaging to a child’s spirit than a slap across the face. Emerson once said that the civilized person actually suffers more than those primitive people who are inured to hardship because the genteel person is more acutely aware of pain. I used to call this Emerson’s Princess and the Pea Theory, but maybe it’s true. We all require a certain amount of pain to justify ourselves later, and if we aren’t lucky enough to have parents who beat us and force us to shoot our beloved pets, the stab of an unkind word or a neglectful shrug of the shoulders will do just as well.

Still, sometimes when I hear the stories of other people, I feel a little ashamed for complaining. I once knew a girl whose father raped her, regularly, when she was between the ages of two and six. Another of my friends, a guy from Cambodia, lost his mother and four brothers to the Khmer Rouge; his own father informed on them. Listening to such stuff, I feel like an anorexic in a country of starving people. Why was I so angry at my father? What’s the point of my complaint? I’ve suffered very little, relatively speaking, so why do I feel so bad, so maudlin?

I’m not even sure I’m going to die right away. I might easily—75 percent chance—recover. According to the books,
“the five-year survival rate for patients with localized disease is 75 percent.” But I could live twenty more years. Or fifty! What’s the point in even wondering?

That’s what my father used to say when I asked him about death: There’s no point in wondering, in worrying about it. It will come to all of us, sooner or later, he said, very solemn and sagelike, though I was thinking, “Duh—I
know
that.” You could get hit by a truck tomorrow, he continued, and I sort of shut him off after that, his thoughtful droning. Why had I even bothered to ask?

Actually, I do remember one other thing he said—though whether he said it that time or another I can’t recall.

“Our children relive our lives for us,” he said. “That’s the only kind of afterlife I believe in, just that we live on through our children. I don’t know whether that makes any sense. It probably doesn’t now, but it will. You try different things, you make different choices, but it’s still all the same person. You. Me. Your grandpa. We get mostly the same raw material, just recycled. We’re more alike than different, you know.”

At the time, the thought seemed ridiculous. I’m not you, I thought. I knew for a fact that I was much smarter and more capable than he’d ever be.

I wonder how my own children would react if I told them my father’s theory. I doubt that it would make any more sense to them than it did to me, though they are not old enough yet to be repulsed by the idea, I don’t think.

Still, it’s hard to guess what they imagine I am. I doubt that they think of it much; I am “Dad,” that’s all. It’s strange how easily we fall into those roles—the form-fitting personalities that my children think of as “Mom” and “Dad.” As they’ve grown, we have increasingly given over pieces of our lives to these caricatures, until the “Dad” part of me casts a shadow over what I think of as my “real” self. I feel like an old soap opera actor who, after years of playing the same part, begins to feel the character taking on a presence in his soul. My wife and I have not yet taken to calling one another Mom and Dad, as my parents used to, but much of the time, this is how we think of one another. We are already lost, even to ourselves. We slip helplessly into parody.

There is no way for my sons to know this, no possible way. They don’t even really believe that the world existed before they were born. They know it intellectually, of course, but at the same time it’s as unfathomable as infinity, or zero.

I start my chemotherapy tomorrow, and they don’t know that either. They know that I am going to the hospital, but very little else. We have decided, my wife and I, that it would be too much for them to handle. And so they go on with their everyday lives: playing outside, squabbling at the dinner table, watching some cartoon on television and laughing uproariously, interrupting me as I talk on the phone to the doctor. I turn to my youngest fiercely, cupping my hand over the receiver. “Will you shut up! Can’t you see I’m on the phone?” And in that moment, I see him blanch, hurt and resentment flickering across his face. One more piece of me disappears.

Later, standing at the edge of their bedroom, watching as they play checkers, I want to tell them. I want to say: “I might
die soon.” I want to shake them. “Can’t you see me? Can’t you see that I’m real?” But what I say is, “Hey, bud, I’m sorry I was sharp with you when I was talking on the phone. I didn’t mean to snap like that.”

He shrugs his shoulders, absorbed in his game. “S’okay,” he says. He doesn’t look up.

Once, my father hit my mother and I stood by watching, smirking into my hand. For a long time in my life, every bad thing that happened seemed bitterly hilarious. I felt that I had a heightened sense of the absurd. When my father was dying—dying of the same cancer I now have, if you want the truth—I was almost giddy with the terrible irony of it, the sarcasm of God. It was about two months after the retirement he’d been talking about, hoping for; for years he had been planning to buy a Winnebago, to go traveling across the country with my mother. He was diagnosed shortly after he’d purchased the thing.

That time he hit my mother, they had been arguing for a long while. I don’t remember what it was about. It must have been very important to them at the time, but I saw how minuscule it was, how little it mattered in the grand scheme of things. What could I do but try to contain my private laughter? Back then, I believed that I had no connection to these strangers, these two foolish people who didn’t realize that they were already summed up. Their lives were already over, I thought then. Nothing they ever did could change things.

And so, in giddy and adrenaline-fueled shock, I clamped my hand over my mouth. I saw my father’s face twist as he turned to
me, and I wonder what he thought I was thinking. His eyes widened and his mouth moved. We looked at one another; I think now that he hoped that I could save him.

Why do we think that, we parents? Why do I think it even now, standing in the dark, watching my sons sleeping? Save me, save me, I think. And yet they can’t, of course. Already I am halfway gone. Even from the beginning, when their infant’s eyes begin to focus on your floating face, the way a cat will watch the moon, already you are a ghost of yourself.

He must have known that, too, my father. He must have seen it in my face as I stared back at him. I sit down on my youngest son’s bed, as my father might have sat on my bed late one night when I was a child. We look down, we touch the child’s ear, watching him stir a little.

But no matter how hard we try, we are disappearing. Oh, my child, you will never save me. You will never be what I wanted to be, you will never love me in the way I need you to, you will never give me myself back.

And yet, I forgive you. You won’t know this until a long time later, my little narrator, my wide-eyed camera. You won’t know it, but I forgave you a long time ago.