Fatherhood's Fear Factor

He sits in the same chair, day after day. Waiting. Watching. “Do you want to go out, Clare?” he asks. Her response is always the same. Nothing. “Maybe tomorrow,” he tells the aide. “I think we’ll just stay in today.”

It has been the pattern of my father’s life for the past two years. When my mother was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, his ambitious plan was to keep her at home and take care of her. When it subsequently proved too much for a man in his 80’s to handle and she had to be moved to a nursing facility, he persuaded the administrators to let him accompany her. “Clare needs me,” he said. That his insistence was reinforced with the advantage of a sizable bank account and the right political connections made it easy for them to break the rules and admit a spouse who was still healthy and mentally competent.

I haven’t seen either of my parents for 27 years, a fact that puzzles the caregivers who send me updates from an ocean away. One of them sent me two crates of old photo albums along with a note that my father had wanted me to have them. For over a week, I poured over each volume, scrutinizing the faces and body language for some sort of clue as to when life first unraveled.

He met my mother - a model and musician -just before World War II. When he announced his intentions of joining the Navy, she delivered the ultimatum that it was the Navy or her. Committed to the cause of defending his country, he left, only to return at war’s end and discover she had married someone else just to spite him. Two years later, he won her back, unaware that her first husband was more than happy to escape her manipulative and controlling nature.

I thumb through the black and white snapshots of my father cradling me as a baby, tying my shoes as a toddler, teaching me how to flip pancakes so they wouldn’t land on the floor. In each of them I see a forced smile, a shimmer of trepidation in his dark eyes, a fragile distance maintained. Was this handsome young man totally bewildered by the responsibilities of fatherhood and afraid I might break? Or had his spirit long since been broken by the woman wielding the camera?

In the 50’s and 60’s, it was anathema to talk of divorce. Many a night I’d lay awake listening to my mother scream at him and tell him she was only staying in the marriage because of me. Accordingly, I felt it was my responsibility to jump out of bed, run out and hug them, and beg them to please stay together. In later years, I came to realize the perverse pleasure she derived in using me to make my father feel guilty. It took longer, however, to recognize he was probably staying with her out of fear she’d be awarded custody and that maybe he’d never see me again.

From the time I was old enough to date, she let it be known that the only reason someone would ever marry me was to marry into the family. Money – my father’s money – was the governing factor in her universe. The repeated threats to cut off my allowance – and, later, disinherit me – if I went against her wishes only fueled my desire to break free. In her eyes, I was plain, I was stupid, and there was no point in my going to college because my only “job” was to snare a husband whom she not only approved of but who would also dote on her. She further impressed upon me that it was better to be loved than to love. “I’ve never loved your father,” she informed me with an underscore of pride, “but he’d do anything I told him to in order not to lose me.”

Was my father that clueless not to know, I wondered. My respect for him steadily diminished as I watched him bend over backwards to keep her happy and to make excuses for her multitude of transgressions including alcoholism and infidelity. Unlike my mother, he encouraged me to go to college and acquire employment skills in order to support myself. “Don’t count on marriage to give you a safety net,” he once said. Was he speaking from the pain of personal experience and warning me not to let history repeat itself?

I tried to maintain a relationship with him after I had moved away from home but my departure only encouraged my mother to dig her claws into him even deeper. She openly condemned my pursuit of theater (“she’s probably a lesbian”), ridiculed my writing (“it’s not as good as mine”), and continued to find fault with every aspect of my appearance. Before I knew it, my father was starting to agree with her. What few times I saw him during their periodic separations were fraught with tension, accusations and parroted criticism. “If you had turned out better,” he chided me on one occasion, “your mother wouldn’t be having so many problems.”

The irony, of course, is that I graduated with honors, enjoyed a broad circle of friends, achieved the successful writing career I always dreamt of, and married a smart and wonderful man with whom my father might have enjoyed golfing and debating issues of the day. The further irony, my husband points out, is that the very qualities he most admires in me – intelligence, loyalty, and determination - are those which had to have been inherited from my father. He even opines that he probably would have liked him as a father-in-law if my mother hadn’t been part of the package.

For over a quarter of a century, my father has been out of my life, a product of his fear that he might fall out of her favor and suddenly find himself alone. Not until my mother’s health deteriorated to the point she no longer knew who he was did he ask his attorney to locate me. He’s proud that I’ve done well. He’d like me to come and visit. He reminds me that I’m the sole beneficiary of their respective estates. The only thing he hasn’t said is that he’s sorry. Perhaps he feels he doesn’t need to, having made the ultimate sacrifice of his own freedom during my childhood just so he could stay in the picture and watch me grow up.

I look through the albums again and I find only one photo in which he truly looks content. We’re both sitting on the couch. He’s reading a magazine. I’m just a toddler but I’m imitating him with a magazine of my own. Was this his escape, I wonder – losing himself in the enjoyment of a good story? It’s interesting, I think, that his only child would grow up to be a writer.

A recent email from one of the caregivers reminds me that my father had asked her to order one of my books. “I walked by their room the other day and he was reading it,” she said. “I thought you’d like to know he looked pleased.”