My Father's Image

A portrait from memory

"Life can only be understood backward. But it must be lived forward."

-- Kierkegaard

Father's Day. My own father died in 1939. Now, in 2004, I am an old man, by any reckoning: 82 and not given to memory, except as a strict discipline, when I am trying to see what went right, what went wrong. Freud said, in effect, that the greatest loss in any man's life is the loss of his father. Freud seems less important these days. Yet I still lie in bed each morning remembering my dreams to stay in touch with myself, and then I spend a luxurious few minutes of memory and reflection to prepare for living the rest of the day: Here and Now. During that time I am often gazing at the portrait of my father on the wall beyond the foot of my bed, and wondering why I did not know him better.

1924 Memory

He is a lion. I sit on his lap and rub my fingers over the golden stubble of his cheeks, my 2-year-old hand closer and closer through his two-day-old bristles, nearer and nearer to his tightly grinning mouth, which he suddenly opens and snaps sideways at my fingers. His suit is black, his hair sunlight red. He dazzles me but stands me down, tired of the game. Tired of me.

2004 Reflection

He was already middle-aged. Born in 1875. A veteran of the Spanish-American War, which he and his father went to as foot soldiers. His mother had died and left him and his father adrift, to wander, to join the army, to escape Salisbury, N.C., where there seemed nothing left for them. But in 1924 he has a wife of 24 years, four daughters, three other sons and me, the fourth and last son and child. He's had too many children.

1925

We are going to the real-estate boom in Florida. But first we go up to North Carolina to tell his father goodbye and give him another chance to go with us. The old man sits on the porch with his cane and his dog. He wants me to feel the nub of his finger, shot off in the Civil War when he a boy of 12 carrying the flag. My father drags me across the porch screaming and makes me touch the nub so I will remember what the Yankees did.

2004

It seems totally unlikely in this century that my grandfather was a flag boy in the Civil War. And it seems both wicked and improbable that two grown men should have made a 3-year-old scream so. Of course my father wanted me to do what his father wanted. My tears did not, apparently, seem so important to a man who had seen so many of his children cry.

1925

Florida: There are orange trees in the yard, a lemon tree, a kumquat tree, a tangerine tree, spiky plants and a wire fence between me and a little girl next door, who is so adorable that I have tried to climb the fence to play in her sand pile with her and am stuck near the top. Suddenly hands with red-gold hair grab my waist and lift me down. My father laughs at me but approves of my adventure and ambition. The little girl has run into her house.

2004

It seems strange to me that I have never been able to throw away a small photograph of me and that little girl standing in a boat, tilted at an angle on a two-wheeled trailer. She is holding onto me and I am laughing. She is wearing a jumper, and my khaki shorts are buttoned to my khaki shirt with big buttons to hold them up. Every time I start to discard the picture, I remember the quote that precedes William Maxwell's Time Will Darken It, in which the painter Francisco Pacheco advises a bright tint for a picture "because time will darken it." And so paint bright the memory of my father.

1926