The Divided Father"What children of a marriage rarely witness is the nature of the love that brought the whole thing - themselves included - into being in the first place." The most surprising thing my mother ever told me was her account of the time she put a .38 Saturday Night Special in her purse and went downtown one bright sunny day to shoot my father. For almost three hours she waited for him to come by, standing first on the street corner, then inside Woolworth’s looking out through the large plate glass windows fronting Main Street before finally giving up and returning home. We were standing in that same Woolworth’s looking out that same front window when she told me this. I was thirteen or fourteen. It was a cold winter day, but sunny and bright, and we were waiting for the bus inside where it was warm. It must have reminded her of that day. As she told me this story in her matter-of-fact way, a bit sheepishly, I listened to her words without the slightest comprehension. It was impossible for me to visualize what she was telling me. I could not imagine this calm, placid, undemonstrative woman, my mother, driven by a passion so strong that she would put a gun in her purse and resolve to murder her errant husband. Except for this single glimpse into their personal lives, through all their years of trouble, through his drinking, carousing, flagrant display of girl friends and, finally, abandonment, never did she reveal emotion, never did she complain or discuss her problems with anyone, not with her family, not with his family, not with my brother, not with me. He had gone from our lives for good by then and we rarely spoke of him. My brother, who is fourteen years older than I, claims our father was different than the person I knew and two aunts both agree. They say my father was a good, god-fearing man, a deacon in the church, a devoted and loving family man, a man who gave thanks before every meal, a man who got down on his knees every morning and every evening and led the family in prayer and gospel songs. They say he was a responsible man, hard working, caring. I think they have my father mixed up with some other person; this was not the man I remember, not the law-skirting, skirt-chasing good time Charley who loved bowling and boozing with the boys, the cigar-chompin’, gamblin’, back-slappin’, “buy the bar a drink on me” big spender who, when he bothered to think about it, regarded his wife and kids as a pain in the ass, an anchor around his neck, a drag on life and a distinct threat to his future. But then, maybe I’m being a little hard on him. Assuming for a moment that my brother and aunts are right, then there were two distinct periods in our family’s life separated roughly by my birth. In the first period, the period before I was born, they were a close family, rooted in Amish culture and conforming to a religious tradition tempered in the crucible of the Protestant Reformation. Their speech, their thought, their dress, had been passed down, unchanged, from generation to generation for three hundred years. It was an austere life, a life of endless work and struggle centered on the husbandry of animals and land, a life of humility based on scripture. It was, my parents had been taught, the path to everlasting peace and joy with God in the kingdom of heaven. This was a family of whom I have no knowledge. I would arrive too late. In the second period, the period after I was born, my father was a distant shadow who appeared only occasionally and smelled of cigars and booze. By then he had already shed the church and was in the process of shedding us like an old skin. I now understand it was nothing personal, it was just that, for him, commitment to family and the nurture of others no longer worked. My mother did what she could to hold him, to preserve her unraveling life, not understanding that no matter what she did, he was already done with her, the connection was broken and he was not coming back. She did not understand that he no longer felt loyalty and obligation, that he had lost faith in their shared beliefs and strayed too far from the narrow path of their ancestors to ever return. While she adhered to the old ways and waited patiently for his return, he did what he did unchecked. For years. And finally she had enough, and in a single moment of blind rage and despair at the public flaunting of his latest mistress, a red-haired floozy named Polly with painted lips and nails to match, decided to track him down and put an end to his profligate ways and her humiliation. Robert Yoder |
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