Free Fatherhood by Thomas H. Cook

sounds came out, nothing I could make sense of.
    â€œIt’s a blank page,” I repeated. “There’s nothing on it.”
    My father shook his head violently, clearly denying what I had just told him.
    â€œThere’s nothing on this page but the number,” I told him.
    He nodded fiercely.
    I looked at the number. “Thirteen?”
    Again he nodded wildly. Then with great effort he said, “Never … never.”
    So the argument had been about me, had something to do with the number thirteen, something my father associated with the word never.
    â€œMe,” I said, turning the first of my father’s words over in my mind. “Thirteen. Never.”
    And suddenly I knew what he was struggling to tell me, what the number thirteen could only mean in relation to me, and what he must have said to my mother about that relationship.
    â€œYou told my mother that you’d never allow me to be bar mitzvahed?” I asked.
    He nodded solemnly.
    I saw my mother as I knew she must have been at that moment in her life, that moment as they sat with the rain thudding around them, and she saw him fall like a man through a gallows floor, fall utterly from the world they’d once shared, the rabbinical student my father had once been, how deeply my mother had expected to live as a rabbi’s wife, and how different that life had become, the suburban life of a professor’s wife, unrooted and unmoored, as she must have thought of it, though never, never as utterly lost to all that was holy until that moment in the storm when my father had effectively told her, and no doubt bluntly, that her son was not to be a Jew.
    I could only imagine the utter fury with which my mother must have received this final proof of my father’s demonic secularism, proof once and for all of how arrogantly he had discarded the sacred values, how deeply and irrevocably he had dismissed the commandments and commentaries, the centuries of accumulated wisdom, and with it the fierce need she must have felt to flee this dead-souled modernist, this despiser of ritual, of all the honored customs, this pragmatist who believed in quick solutions, in getting rid of obstacles, this radical assimilationist who was ashamed of his own people, felt no pity for the great heaps of European dead, who wished only to throw off the yoke of the past, make himself new … this American .
    He eased himself back into his pillow and released a long deflating breath, so that I saw that even now he remained unsure of what he’d done, whether he’d been right or wrong, even though this seemed to matter less to him at that moment than what I would do with this strange revelation.
    He tried to speak, but nothing came. So after a moment, and with what appeared to be the very last of his vital force, he motioned for me to give him the volume of Poe. I rose and sat on the bed beside him, holding the book open and turning the pages until he found the verse he wanted.
    â€œBe that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,” I shrieked, upstarting —
    â€œGet thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
    Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
    Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door!
    Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
    Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
    He placed a single, trembling finger on that final word and looked up at me quizzically, no doubt wondering, perhaps quite desperately, if I could intuit the question his eyes asked. Will you answer as the Raven does? Will you refuse to abandon me ?
    For my answer, I took the book from his hands and read the last stanza of Poe’s great poem:
    And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
    On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
    I looked up and saw that he understood.
    â€œI won’t leave you alone,” I assured