Worlds Of Our Fathers

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Every so often I dream that I am with him. It is always the same situation. We are at home--the home where I was a child--and he is telling me something instructive. (What else would he be telling me?) I try to pay attention, but I am so happy to see him alive that I simply stare at his face. When I begin to wake up, I struggle to crawl back into sleep, into the dream, like a fish flapping breathlessly at the edge of the ocean.

I used to feel like a fish out of water in his presence too, not only because of the normal distances between fathers and sons but also because his world of preference and pleasure reached into a different America from mine. Father's Day makes one aware that fathers and children are separated by cultures, even when biology seeks to narrow the gap. The worlds in which fathers live carry parts of their existence, and our affection does not always distinguish between the man and the matter.

What I liked most about my father's world was its moments of surprised delight and its celebration of occasions. To be surprised by anything at all these days is merely to indicate how out of it one is. My father's generation seemed to be surprised by everything--a TV set, automatic shift, snow--and to be enchanted by the smallest event. "A martini!" my father would say, as if he had not mixed it himself. "Pie a la mode!"--with a lusty accent on "mode," as if he were recalling a village in France and not a scoop of ice cream.

As for occasions, there could be nothing more deeply satisfying for him than a formal family outing--say, on Father's Day--to a good, though never ostentatious, New York City restaurant. In dresses, hats, jackets and ties, we would trudge through the heavy, reluctant revolving door and enter the place of civilization and ceremony. "This way, doctor." This way to the weighted silver plate and the thick linen tablecloths and napkins, and the pie a la mode.

Things that made my father happy: Perry Mason; any Broadway musical starring Gwen Verdon; fishing for blues with doctor cronies off Montauk, on New York's Long Island; Corona Corona cigars; a straw skimmer hat; Herman Wouk. Things that drove him up the wall: misinformation about medicine in movies or on TV; strangers calling him by his first name; my frequent playing of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' I Put a Spell on You; and me, at least before I achieved the age of 25.

After that we grew quite close, drawn together by a common mode of conversation, the same general appreciation of comic nonsense (though sometimes he would issue a cold, dry laugh at something that seemed absolutely sensible to me), and by some unspoken sense of sadness. We circumvented the subject of politics whenever possible. He was appalled by my liberalism; I was enraged by his approval of Nixon and the Vietnam War.

His desire for order often led him into prejudices against style when he privately approved of the substance. When traditions were yoked with social unfairness, he would often side with tradition on the theory that in America inequities would eventually right themselves, but traditions, once dispensed with, could never be retrieved. The two of us fought like Golden Gloves boxers. After his first heart attack, we talked more and more about our Yankees.