Father
Charles B. Strozier, Center on Violence and Human Survival
My father lives in the mist of my memories. He was everything for me in my childhood, and believed I was special even when I doubted it myself. When I was 15 he died suddenly, even somewhat tragically, in his prime while heading up Florida State University and under consideration for the presidency of the University of Chicago. He went like all his 10 brothers: young, of clogged heart arteries. They thought his chest pains in the months before he died were heartburn. But then what could they do in that age before bypass surgery?
I remember his smell. He loved two stiff bourbons after work and smoked Camels and Kools in the time warp before dinner. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on his lap and sucking on his whiskied ice. It kept him alive in my mouth as he talked incessantly to all of us, to Mother, and any guest who might be with us. He was stocky and soft in warm, human ways. He felt good to touch, like a teddy bear. The cigarette smoke filled the air, the taste of the ice lingered.
He often brought friends from the university home for drinks. I listened intently to the talk, which alternated between banter and serious discussion of important topics. I later came to think of this cocktail talk as conversations in the Platonic sense. But all I knew as a child is that I wanted to remain there to listen to every word of what was said. For the most part, I had no understanding of the words. But I grasped the form and warmed to the style. Always there were jokes to leaven things, quick comebacks and laughter to offset commitment. Dad was a liberal Democrat but also a comfortable bourgeois who had come out of the struggle of the 1930s determined to enjoy the affluence of the 1950s.
Sometimes Dad would trot us out to perform. It wasn't malicious on his part. This jolly man said he always wanted a three-year old in his life. He loved young children, and told me often I should remain little like Peter Pan (which left a corner of me guilty for maturing). We were his toys, though. I performed the manual of arms in my grandfather's World War I uniform. During World War II, Dad had been in charge of recruitment for Georgia and somehow learned the manual. He took pride in the diligence with which I on his command practiced and performed the drill for him and his tipsy friends. Since I later became an antiwar radical during the 1960s, it turned out that doing the manual of arms at age six in my oversized uniform was as close to the military as I ever got.
Dinner was a set piece in our family. My mother's task was to have it ready and the table set just as cocktails ended. I don't think she ever failed once to meet the exacting timetable. As she finished putting the plates on the table, the rest of the family filed in from the living room. My active memories of dinners begin around age four and proceed from our first apartment in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago (where Dad was a French professor and a dean) to Tallahassee, Florida, where we lived from my ages of 13 to 16 in much
splendor in a huge house with servants. But from relative poverty to pretentious splendor in the huge white house with columns that looked like something Jefferson Davis might have lived in, dinners always had the same character: Dad and his imposed rituals dominated. Certain markers defined his dignity and position. He had butter on a special plate next to him; the rest of us ate margarine. It was often proclaimed that only he could tell the difference and so the cost of giving butter to everyone would have been wasted on us philistines. Needless to say, he always sat at the head of the table, in the best chair, placed at the end of the table away from the kitchen.
Mother didn't really like to cook, however, and a central family myth was that the only real cook was Dad. And, in fact, he was good in the kitchen, knew sauces, and was well versed in French wines. On vacation and some special days we were treated to his cooking. That required much "oohing" and "ahhing," and the quality of the dish became the main topic of conversation. I kept by his side in those precious moments, watching and learning, staying close. I am sure it was why I grew up liking to cook, something that stood me in good stead much later during my years of single parenthood.
Before any food was served and immediately after we had pulled our chairs to the table, came a special prayer that was never altered in a single word or syllable. It was a solemn Episcopal moment that Dad surely treasured, and connected with the rich church life into which he married and in which his children were so heavily involved. He even attended confirmation classes and formally joined our Church of the Redeemer just down the street from where we lived. But there was always a note of irony in Dad's relation to our High Church Episcopalianism. I don't think he really liked it. He joked too much about all the jumping up and down during the services and how, as the incense filled the air and our men and boy's choir sang the glorious music of Bach, he longed to belt out "Beulah Land."
Dinner itself was entirely free of childish disruptions and filled with conversation that moved into the concerns of our days. Only rarely did Dad and Mother engage in talk that excluded us. There was only one conversation at any given moment, and somehow Dad was always at the center of it. The favorite topic was to recall and laugh about family stories: the play my older brother Bob had written yesterday, the upcoming
vacation to Long Lake in Wisconsin, the fun party we had after Dad won the Legion of Honor. It was a family-centered discourse that implicitly privileged our experiences over all others in the cosmos. I felt warmly enveloped in the family myths we spun out and eager to wallow in Dad's unconditional love.
Sometime after our move to Florida, Dad sensed I was in turmoil and, despite the tremendous pressures he was under, took the time to talk with me. Our conversations began around issues of religion. Upon our arrival in Tallahassee we had began attending the local Episcopal Church. I found it profoundly dissatisfying, and was particularly bothered when the arch minister one day gave a sermon that explained why the Bible
supported, indeed required, black inferiority. It seemed absurd to me. But I felt I understood the contradiction between my reaction to the sermon and my reddening neck as I attempted to blend in with my new redneck friends. I guess I saw acceptance of local customs as different from theology and ethical ideals. However, that sermon and my general obnoxious rebelliousness that was emerging called into question all of
Christianity for me. I remember filling out a form at school early in that first semester and putting "atheist" in the category of "religious preference." I was called into the principal's office and coerced into changing it to "Episcopalian," a submission I have always regretted.
I was going through an adolescent crisis and Dad found a way to take long walks with me in the late evening around our grounds and let me vent my frustrations about God and church. He made me believe in my heartfelt anger and trust my new insights. I honestly felt I was the first ever to have doubts about God. He not only didn't mock my adolescent musings, he treated my views with respect. He asked questions, Socraticlike in true University of Chicago style, but basically he listened to my thoughts. It was a profound
experience for me, and has forever given me the sense that my views on things matter. I knew Dad died knowing I had potential.
His death was awful. He left for Chicago on Tuesday, April 19, 1960, to give a speech. That night, staying at the home of a doctor friend in Hyde Park, he woke up with chest pains. His host rushed him to the hospital where he spent the rest of the night in great pain and died early on the morning of April 20. Mother got a call during the night of his illness. When we left for school we didn't know he had already died, only that he was sick and Mother was leaving to catch a plane for Chicago out of Atlanta. I walked around school in a fog. At 10:30 in French class the loud speaker came on and called me down to the principal's office. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach and later relived that moment in ten years of migraines that began at 10:30 in the morning. Someone was there to drive me back to the home, though neither he nor anyone in the office would tell me what had happened. When we drove up to the house there were already a bunch of cars parked in the driveway. I walked in and Mary Call Collins, the Governor's wife, came over and at last told me Dad had died and gave me a hug.
The next few days were a blur of people and sour faces -- a drunken woman making jokes about people all evening to relieve the incredible tension, people everywhere trying to comfort me. I bitterly and irrationally resented the presence of Bob, the unfortunate namesake for Dad. There was a huge memorial service that I stumbled through without any sense of the actual proceedings. Mother then said Bob and I were to take
Dad's ashes and throw them into the sea outside of our coast cottage. Bob and I drove to the funeral director's and met a typically dour man in a black suit who had us sign a paper. He then gave us Dad in a round yellow can the size of a cigar box. We put it in the front seat between us as we drove to the coast. We got there at low tide. I held the can and walked out a good 50 yards into the water but it was still only up to my knees. I gave up and decided this would be as good a place as any to throw them. I hesitated, wondering what kind of a ceremony would be appropriate, but Bob, still on the shore, was impatient and urged me to throw the ashes in the water. Uncertain, I opened the can. The ashes were stark white and had some bumps mixed in, as I guess happens in cremation. I looked at the ashes for a moment, then threw the contents of the can in an arch that spread them in the water as though I had been casting a net.
|
