Free The Story of My Father by Sue Miller Page A

us things. In the bitter Chicago winters, he took us on ice skates onto the flooded midway, one after another over the years, guiding us around under his power until we could push off and glide away on our own. He ran alongside the bicycle until we wobbled free down the street. He sat calmly reading in the passenger seat as we learned to drive by tooling around the empty parking lot at the Museum of Science and Industry in the evenings. (Occasionally, if you stalled out or the car lurched too dramatically, he’d lift his head and focus on you for a few minutes, offering a suggestion for improvement, but basically he read.) And because it had been decided I was the artistic one in the family, the musical one (we were each assigned separate strengths, I suppose to keep us from being competitive), he took me with him to performances of music in Rockefeller Chapel, to shows at the Art Institute, and
talked
to me about them afterward—me, a child of eight, or ten, or twelve. About how complicated the tenor’s part was, about how much play there was in Picasso’s work.
    He was patient and respectful—a born teacher, I think, because he was a learner himself, always curious and interested in the world, in other people of any age. I remember how he embarrassed me when he drove me and my friends to dances or parties because of his careful and polite inquisition about what they were studying, what their interests and extracurricular activities were, the colleges they might apply to. God! Why couldn’t he just be put-upon and silent, like most parents?
    I remember, too, trying to teach him to jitterbug in the back living room. I took the lead, spinning him out, yanking him around to Jerry Lee Lewis, but he was hopeless. Game but hopeless. And in the end, we were laughing too hard to go on anyway.
    And then, when I turned sixteen and went away to college, he vanished from my life suddenly—I can’t find him in memory in any sustained way for twenty years or so. I simply stopped knowing him in any real sense.
    I think the prime reason initially might have been that, by the unspoken rule in our family—in most families then—my mother was in charge of correspondence, and letters became my connection to home. Actually I tried for a while to enlist my father. I’d become very estranged from my mother from early adolescence on; the mistrust I’d had of her as a little girl had grown into active dislike at this stage. For several years there was nothing she could do that didn’t offend me. When she entered a room, I felt compelled to leave it. It was in that mood that I went off to college, with the result that for the first half-year or so I addressed my letters home exclusively to my father or to the family in general, never singling my mother out. Finally my sister wrote to me and asked me to stop, saying it was just too upsetting to my mother, with whom she was still very close. After that, I wrote to them as a unit, and after that it was, of course, only my mother who answered me.
    I lived at home for only one more summer after I turned sixteen. I married at twenty, directly after finishing college. By then I’d begun a real rapprochement with my mother, based in some measure, I think, on my wish to see myself as an adult, an equal. But after I had my only child, at twenty-four, I became truly comfortable with her: her love for my baby son was a balm, a healing element to our troubled relationship.
    My marriage ended when I was twenty-seven, and I saw more of my parents after that. Occasionally I got to spend time alone with my father, for the most part when we went hiking in the White Mountains near the house they rented in the summers now in New Hampshire, but my mother always dominated our times together. It seemed to me that once her children were grown, she transferred the strong need she had for adult attention—that clear wish to be recognized as the most fascinating, the most charming person in the room—to us. It