My Smiling Father

Washington, D.C, late 1980s-mid 1990s.

It was my final psychoanalytic session, after almost eleven years on the couch. In the last few minutes, I got up and sat facing Gene. He was smiling. His look brought back a loving image of my father's face: Dad in his happier years. I remembered the moment as I was writing this chapter. So I went looking for a photo of Dad smiling, but I had a hard time finding one. My father was not a smiling man. Most photos show him frowning or sporting a distant look. It took some digging, but I did find an exceptional one—and it is now my favorite.  

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During my analysis, I became acquainted with my adult Mom, the frail woman who raised me with a confounding mixture of love and obligations. This was the Mom whom I had barely gotten to know in the few years we spent together.

The same thing happened with Dad. Fresh memories of Dad, or old ones that I could see in a new light, came back. They also helped me get reacquainted with a more well-rounded man. I spent a great many sessions on the events of my adolescence, focused on a father with whom I did not get along. Back came the two alternating portraits of my mother staring at us in our living room after she died. One, of a younger Mom, which had meant so much to him yet little to me. The other, of an older Mom, a photo I loved but that did not seem to move him. I remembered the inscription on her grave, ¡Riqui!, about which he had not consulted me and which had distanced us. Or his self-reliance in going to the hospital with me in tow and pretending that he did not need anyone—me, to be precise—and how I hated him for it. Or his insistence that he had “his” things—like the transistor radio—and I had mine, and that I could not borrow his stuff. This was the Dad of my teen-age years: the ogre.

By the time I was telling Gene these unhappy stories I had already learned of Dad’s running from his origins in the Levant, of the burning of Smyrna, of his brother’s death by suicide, of the Goldstein & Galanis wine company in Samos. I had already met several of Dad’s Italian, Greek, and English relatives whom he had left behind and never mentioned. I had learned of his attempts to save them at the outset of the Second World War and how they had rebuffed him. I recognized his lonesomeness, his disconnection. And I cried in sadness for the losses he had never mourned or healed. I cried for how we had grown apart,   unable to mourn our common loss.

“I still can’t figure out why he was silent about his life, why he never mentioned his family,” I often said to Gene. “Why did he go to the other side of the world and never return?”

Endlessly, I tried out my own answers—guilt, pain, depression—until one day Gene made a comment that has stuck with me. “His was a slow-motion suicide,” he said, cryptically. “I’ve seen such things.” I am still thinking about that.

But it was the telling and retelling of the day of Mom’s death thirty years earlier that revealed things I had not previously understood. The events of that day shed a great deal of light on why my remaining years with Dad were so difficult. For starters, I vividly remembered my grandmother hissing that my father was a stubborn man, and that if he only had not gotten a third-floor walk-up apartment, Mom would still be alive. It was not hard to understand that her comment lay blame on Dad for my mother’s death.

“I think that, like Omi, I also blamed him for Mom’s death,” I said. “I don’t remember seeing him cry—ever. . . I even thought that he didn’t love her.”

As usual, Gene remained silent for a while before commenting. “Well, those who are left behind when a loved one dies unexpectedly often need answers for the shock,” he said. “And the easiest thing is to blame someone . . . We need to feel that if it had not been for this or that, they might still be alive.” And he added, “We need to feel that even death is not out of our control.” That insight went a long way to lifting the blame I had laid at Dad’s feet.

Yet the one memory that came back in a new light was from a few minutes after the neighborhood doctor had pronounced Mom dead. I recounted how Dad had ordered me to call Onkel Max to give him the news. How bewildered I was. How I could not say the word, dead, muerta, and how my eyes begged for the adults to relieve me from this burden.

Gene was silent for a minute or so, and then he asked, quietly, “It must have felt to you like you had to play the adult in the room, didn’t it?”

His question startled me, mostly because it produced a long-suppressed burst of anger. I was again thrust into a role for which I was not equipped. Not only Mom, but now I had to take care of Dad too. “What?!” I almost shouted at Dad’s ghost from the couch, “You couldn’t call yourself? Why did you ask me to tell Onkel Max that she had died?!”

The phone incident turned out to be a pivotal event in the relationship with my father. It was the start of several years of ministering to his increasingly frail health. It was the beginning of my resentment and rebelliousness. At the end, I wanted him gone, not so much to move on with my own life, but to be relieved once more of the responsibility of taking care of an ailing parent. And the rage got worse in my late adolescence. So much so that in 1968 when Dad died and I went through both of my parents’ things up in our apartment, I got rid of as many of their objects as I could.

It became clear on the couch that, on those final days in BA I was angry with my parents. The private bonfire I carried out ahead of my emigration to America and about which I told you in Chapter 12, My Baggage Starts Rumbling, was not simply getting rid of my parents’ objects. The objects were my parents. That was a profound insight. I painfully relived those moments in BA when I was up on the closet ladder tossing their stuff to the trash: her hats, his photos . . .or finally grabbing his transistor radio. On the couch, I felt the guilt I had long-suppressed. Guilt for wanting my parents gone forever from my life. Guilt that, deeply buried in my valise, came along to the US. And on the couch I also realized that my lifelong obsession to recover as many of those objects as I could was nothing more than trying to get my parents back.

Yet, my rebellious adolescence and my confusion with Dad’s reaction to Mom’s death had also dimmed the loving side of my childhood with him. I had forgotten the Windsor knots; the aroma of spirits-infused tobacco when he opened the humidor; the Sunday morning visits to the company where he was an accountant. He worked at a textile firm and  they had a chem lab filled with test tubes, Bunsen burners, and round-bottomed flasks. It was that lab that awakened my lifelong love of science. One by one, all of those memories reappeared. I learned to love Dad for the good things he did after Mom had left us. His trying to teach me some financial common sense (you may recall the budget collision that ensued with Omi when she was passing me money under the table); the bar mitzvah he organized for me at a Jewish community center two years after Mom died, a place which then became a source of many lifelong friends. I understood how, knowing that he would soon die, he assured my immigration to America. In the last years of his life, he stopped smoking his beloved Monte Cristos in favor of less expensive cigars, so he could save the meager difference for my uncertain future.

He was deeply distraught on the death of his beloved Riqui but had limited time and repertoire for healing either of us. In the end, he managed the best he could for a sick man of seventy-five with a son of seventeen. After my years on the couch, mi Viejo, my Old Man, emerged as a mensch, selfless and generous. Sure, he was distant. But sadly, Dad and I experienced his silence in very different ways. Contemplating the very nature of silence, the writer Anaïs Nin in her Diary, says that it “. . . can be both a shield and a weapon, protecting us from further hurt or inflicting a lasting blow.” Dad was protecting himself from further hurt but I—thirty years earlier—had felt it as a blow.

All that looking back through the fog of time led me to think of the psychoanalytic couch as a Hubble telescope. The Hubble had to be sent beyond the haze of earth’s atmosphere in order to look into the past and more clearly see the universe’s galaxies when they were young. The couch worked the same way. It lifted the angelic curtain of Mom’s death and the harsh one of Dad’s, and let me see my childhood years in a sharpness that I had forgotten. My decade with Gene also helped reverse the fear of closeness I had felt after my parents died. Intimacy, in the early chapters of my life, was a guarantee of immeasurable loss and I did not want to put myself in such vulnerable position ever again. Yet I also found out that the lack of closeness hurt even more than the panic of its contemplation. Bruno Bettelheim, the Austrian psychoanalyst, has a useful metaphor that involves porcupines in winter: they prick each other when too close but cannot stand the chill if too far apart. That was I in my young years, a porcupine in winter.

After more than a decade of analysis, the time eventually arrived when my sessions came to an end. I had become attached to Gene, not a bad thing for someone who had run from attachments. I had become dependent on his presence and interpretations to help me navigate the emotional confusions of my life. I had learned on the couch that not every separation, not every goodbye, would be another death. And that not every death would threaten to destroy me if I mourned it. But as I reached the end of analysis, it still felt as if another death was approaching.

Gene and I knew that the very end would be the most healing event of all. It was as though the whole point of our relationship would be the leave-taking. We both wanted it to be a parting without denial and stoicism, not yet another dash from closeness. I had tried to abort the course of sessions many times, suggesting, for example, that I was done and ready to leave in two days' time. Gene would have none of it. I had tried to set dates, many dates, all of which came and went, mired as I was in my inability to leave and my anxiety at staying. Gene patiently pointed out how troubled my attachments and departures were. Finally, after many such attempts and frustrations, we set a date two months away.

Driving to the last session, I imagined that, instead of laying on the couch as I had done for more than ten years, I would sit up staring at Gene. I had a knot in my stomach as I walked into the room, feeling restless after a night of poor sleep. But as I walked in I went straight for the comforting couch. Almost instantly the tears poured into my ears and on to the absorbing napkin. They were tears of parting, the normal sadness of saying good-bye to a beloved friend. To paraphrase Freud, I had succeeded in transforming my neurotic miseries into ordinary unhappiness. They were also long-delayed tears of good-bye to my parents. The tears did not stop for most of the hour.

With a few minutes left Gene suggested that I sit up. "You know," he said, this time looking straight at me. "I’ve never had a patient whose parents dropped dead in his adolescence and left him to fend for himself. I was curious to see how you had managed . . . Pretty well, I think . . . I’m gratified that we’ve accomplished a great deal together.” And, in a sweeping grand finale he added, "How interesting it is that you were eleven years old when your mother died, about the same length of time we have spent together."

Before I had a chance to catch the depth of his last interpretation, he got up, took my hand warmly in both of his, looked me in the eye, and said with affection: "I would be pleased to hear from you, Jorge. Have a good life.”

"It will be a better life because you were in it, Gene," I replied. "Thank you."

I don’t know why my time on the couch ended after almost eleven years. Maybe my unconscious, like a horse going back to the barn without direction from its rider, timed it just right. Or maybe Gene added a poetic touch to make the ending easier. It doesn’t matter. It worked. I felt like an adolescent of forty-eight who had been given a second chance to say good-bye to his parents, this time with “ordinary unhappiness,” not neurotic misery. I slowly let go of his hand, turned around, and walked out of the room.

After that, like two old friends we had lunch every now and then. He passed away in 2005.

***

The only photo I found of Dad smiling was taken in 1962, during my bar-mitzvah party. It shows him toasting and celebrating, a well-rounded mensch at last.