Fathers and Sons 

I looked through the little box next to my bed this morning, the one that contains the letter my mother sent to me before she died, advising me to work less and live more. The letter I’ve only been able to scan, not read slowly and contemplatively, as it deserves. The letter that whispers to me every time I set my eyes on that box.

I glanced at old photos and postcards – images of my life in Brooklyn, more than 60 years ago. Among them I found something else, a single page, typewritten and signed, simply, “Dad.”

It was a letter asking me to accept a check for $10,000 as a “house gift.” It must have been written in 2010 or 2011, when he was 81 or 82 (and I was 61 or 62), for it mentioned an operation that he’d recently had. They’d cut him open for some sort of intestinal problem, and then spotted the cancer that would – sometime later – kill him.

I didn’t remember having read it before. And yet there it was, in that keepsake box, right beside the letter from my mother.

Dear Mark,

I’ve asked D to deliver this check, your long-overdue house gift. Please don’t reject it or try to return it. Don’t think of it as money. My giving you money is like the proverbial sending coals to Newcastle or like me giving Warren Buffett a stock tip. Rather think of it as my finally fulfilling a promise I made to myself – that when each child was ready for family-making, I’d give them ten thousand to help with buying a house…

The next section of the letter was about his will. He explained that he’d revised it the day before his operation, noting that he’d complied with my wish to have the proceeds of his estate divided among my seven siblings, since I had no need.

In the last paragraph, he wrote:

What this means is not a matter of money but that you are one of my eight [children] that I love in eight different ways but with about the same amount of feeling…. Despite my growls, I am also proud of you… as a skillful businessman and a great giver…

The handwriting was elegant. (His mother was a schoolteacher and a disciplinarian.) The diction was clean. The sentiment was restrained. And the underlying message – which was barely mentioned – was about the gulf that had always existed between us, the gap that so often develops between fathers and sons during the latter’s adolescence, the gap that remains, however much they may try, later on, to bridge it.

This letter – this was all he could do. Just as all I can do is remember who he was and what he stood for.

My father graduated from high school when he was 16, in 1936, winning two citywide awards – one for math and one for English. He spent the next four years at Fordham University, studying English literature and dramaturgy, earning spending money by tutoring his fellow classmates in math.

Because of his natural gift for mathematics, he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. Of course, he didn’t know what sort of work he would be doing. They told him only that he’d be applying his math skills to physics, which intrigued him. But he had his heart set on becoming a writer. So after some deliberation, he turned down the Manhattan Project and went looking for a job as a writer.

He landed work as a script writer and part-time actor for an ersatz Abbot and Costello comedy special that was being launched on the radio. (No TVs back then.) But on December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He quit his job on the spot – actually in the middle of a recording session – and enlisted in the Navy.

He made his way up the ranks in the Navy quickly, but to his disappointment he never saw any action. He ended up captaining a ship in the China Sea (if I remember right) when the war ended.

After the war, he enrolled in a graduate program at Catholic University in Washington, DC. One of the courses he took was in dramaturgy. It was taught by a woman he instantly fell in love with. That is how our family began.

Soon after they were married, my parents moved to Guatemala, where he spent his daytime hours working on his writing and his evenings writing some more as a civilian security guard at the American Embassy.

That was in 1949, in the middle of an attempted coup d’etat that left 150 dead and 200 wounded. Their apartment was actually bombed. A shell came through a wall and landed, unexploded, in the bedroom. My father baptized my sister D, their first child, underneath the kitchen table.

Left with neither an apartment nor jobs, my parents came back to the States. To support his young family, my father got a job teaching English literature and drama at Fordham. Every year, a new child was born. He took on extra jobs on the side, but gave up his dream of being a writer in order to pay the bills.

He never griped about his decision. Throughout his adult life, he worked at least two, but often three, jobs. He and my mother taught their eight children that life is hard, and no one is entitled to anything. Work for what you want. Don’t complain if you don’t get it. Take responsibility. And leave the world – and every portion of the world that you inhabit – a little better than the way you found it.

My father was an academic and an intellectual. He had no interest in material things. For most of my childhood, the 10 of us lived in a small, four-bedroom house across the street from a municipal storage lot. I was embarrassed by our relative poverty.  I wanted, like my father, to be a writer and a teacher. But more than anything, I wanted to be rich.

By the time I bought my first rich-person’s house, my mother was already gone. My father visited many times, and he always made an effort to say something nice about the house or our luxury cars or something else that we had spent a grotesque amount of money on. It was clear that he wasn’t the least bit impressed by any of it. But he knew that becoming wealthy was important to me, and he was trying to breach the divide that always separates fathers and sons. Just as he was doing in that last letter to me.

(I don’t remember whether I cashed his $10,000 check or not. K tells me I didn’t. I hope I did.)