Father's Day Remarks

Martha Hodges - 2007-06-17

I was a child of the fifties and sixties – the days of “Father Knows Best” and “Ozzie and Harriet” – the television families in which the father came home from the office, hung up his hat – remember hats? – and called out, “Honey, I’m home.” The fictional homes where mom came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, saying “How was work, dear?” My father, however, never watched television. He did his best to be a good father without benefit of these fictional role models of the “involved father.” In those days, men were less likely to define themselves first as fathers. My father, like others of his generation, understood and followed his duty as he saw it: to be the breadwinner, the professional, the citizen.

We were his second family. He had left his first wife with two pre-adolescent children. Growing up, I found the existence of this shadowy family on the other side of the country deeply disturbing. How could he leave his own kids, I wondered. If he could leave them, could he leave us? Fifty years later, thirty years after his death, I wrote to these “other children,” now in their sixties. I felt sad and even guilty that I had had the benefit of growing up with our father while they had not. I thought I could somehow make amends.

Well, I couldn’t of course. I heard their stories of a father who seemed to bear no resemblance to the one I’d known. Someone who was narcissistic and immature. A hard drinker and a flirt – or worse. Conscious of my privileged position in the second family, I never told these first children how different our father was by the time I knew him.

He still liked his scotch. He still put his work first and was pretty quiet – not given to emotional display, and fond of the kind of oblique and witty comment that could cut. But I saw him as a man who was essentially shy, afraid of showing any kind of need in case that need should be rejected. A man whose emotional and physical desertion of that first family left him with such feelings of failure and regret that he stayed away from those memories as much as he could, at great cost to those half-siblings of mine.

The father I remembered was one I didn’t dare to tell them about. The father who read David Copperfield to us all every night after dinner, and the Pickwick Papers, Sherlock Holmes, and the Hobbit. The father who, when prevailed upon, would dance the Charleston. The one who taught his daughters to write, who was merciless with his blue pencil. The one who was deeply disappointed in his career, the frustrated artist, the one who, in my sister’s words, wanted all three of us girls to grow up to be editor of the New York Times. The man with the needy heart, and the wounded spirit that he covered over with cynicism and humor. The father who was crazy about my mother; the one whose tenderness sometimes broke through, despite himself.

I miss him. He died when I was twenty-one and still in the throes of a delayed adolescence – too young to forgive him his failings, too young to ask him the questions I wish now I knew the answers to. But not before he taught me a lot of things – to love books, to know pompousness and pretension when I saw them, to live beyond my means, to defuse a tense situation with the well-timed wisecrack, to hate snobbishness, to risk doing the work you love, to grab your chance, to risk everything for love. It is because of him that I am here, with you, and for that, I am so grateful.