My Father's Image

My sons and I live hundreds of miles apart but we end every telephone call with the acknowledgment that we love each other. It is not a perfunctory statement. It is enough and it is sustaining.

1975

The day I become a full professor with tenure, I buy plants for my office on campus and hang the picture of my father. My students know immediately that he is my father. Years later other students think it may be me when I was younger. An older sister has died, and I hang her photograph of him in a back hall at home and explain to my young sons that he is my father in the same way I am their daddy. They never seem very interested.

2004

My father, my mother, and all my brothers and sisters are gone. My sons are a continent away. Only paintings and photographs are left. Now I have eight portraits in oil and watercolors of four generations of my family hanging on the walls. When I go to look at retirement homes, I find in my mind a place for each painting. I seldom look directly at the images, yet they comfort me.

1976

It is the Bicentennial, and I try to emphasize to my class how really new and experimental this amazing nation is. I remember my grandfather with his nub of a finger on the porch of his house. "My grandfather," I say, "shook hands with a man who shook hands with George Washington." A deep voice in the back of the classroom says, "I never did hear anyone go so far to drop a name."

2004

Bastards really do sit on the back seats.

1976-1987

During my years of teaching, I have become intrigued by the absence of the father in student writing and in American literature. I ask a guest lecturer, the columnist Harry Golden, about it, and he says it is because in America, society is the father, and man does battle with society.

I begin assigning Kafka's famous 40-page accusing and accepting letter to his father, which he never mailed. The letter is perhaps the most open and accessible of all of Kafka's work I have read. He shows his father his bare heart.

I often ask students how many have been told by their fathers that he loves them. Many girls and few boys say yes. The same is true when I ask how many have said to their fathers, "I love you." The girls yes, the boys few. Soon many students choose, instead of a third, required story, to write letters to their fathers.

2004

A good many students have told me years later that writing those letters to their fathers was the most important thing they did in college. One father has written to thank me.

2000

To begin the new century I have the walls of my condo painted. It is a way of saying to myself, at least, if not to my sons, that I will not go to a retirement home. In the redecoration, I move the picture of my father from a dim hallway, where I had thought it would fade less, to the wall beyond the foot of my bed. He is the first thing that I see each morning.

2004

The portrait of my father is fading fast. The hair is now pale yellow, not orange-red, or golden, as it was among the tangerine and lemon trees of my childhood, and the ruddy face is white. Sometimes in the earliest dawn light it is a skull, but if I wake later it is a ghost. Fully awake and in the morning sunlight, I see my own face in the portrait, as my students did. And in it now I also see the lifetime of yearning.

Max Steele was head of the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina, 1966-1987, and an adviser at The Paris Review and Story magazine.