Hamilton Stark

Chapter 4. Her Mother Speaks to Her of a Man She Calls “Your Father”

NO, REALLY, DEAR, I mean it. It’s time everyone stopped all this dancing around the few trivial facts of the man and got right down to where you can stick your nose up against them, so to speak. Forgive me for saying it this way, but the man, your father, is a despicable man. Always was. Despicable, pure and simple, and everyone who’s ever had the misfortune to know him knows at least that much about him, and especially everyone who’s ever been married to him, among whom I count myself the first, as you know.

But you’re his only child, dear, you’ve never been married to him, of course, so that’s probably why you keep going through all this hero-worshiping nonsense with the man. But only child or not, don’t forget the facts you have to ignore. Life’s like that, it’ll let you keep on ignoring the facts, practically forever, if you want to go that far, but eventually it’ll make you pay for it — or your children, or your wife or husband, or maybe even your grandchildren. Anyhow, somebody ends up paying, and I don’t plan on being that somebody for you. No, you’re practically grown now, old enough to know the truth about your father. You think now that he’s somebody to imitate, someone to admire and recommend to all your friends, someone who’ll defend you against your enemies, a confidant, an advisor, a teacher, a chum. When I get through, dear, you’ll know better than to imitate him. You’ll know not to expect him to defend you against anything. Hah, you’ll need someone to defend you against him! A chum. Some chum.

You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all this now, why I waited so long to turn you against him. Well, blood is thicker than water, that’s how I always reasoned about the matter, and besides, I never wanted him coming back at me that I turned you against him, you his only child, the one he probably claims to love so much, but of course, only later, when you’re practically all grown up and it’s easy to love you, easy to be your father now — not that you weren’t a lovable child, no, of course not, you were a wonderful, cuddly, curly-haired little thing, everyone loved you, especially me, and I didn’t want your father claiming that I had turned you against him by only telling you the bad things about him, or only telling you things in a light that would make you think badly of the man your father. Let the child find out for herself, that’s what I always said, when people asked me if you knew what kind of a man your father was, and believe me, they asked, oh God, did they ever ask. They couldn’t believe it when you talked about him the way you did, when you bragged about his being a pipefitter, when you told people what a big shot he was, how he built the U.S. Air Force Academy all by himself, that place in Colorado, as if that weren’t one big lie. Brother, the things that man could tell a child. I remember my eyes filling with tears when I would hear you out on the back steps telling your little friends how your father had been a champion boxer. And when you told them he was a champion runner. And when you described his cars. His ability to play the saxophone. His enormous bicep. His black and thick hair. The curly mat of black hair on his chest. The broad shoulders, the hard-muscled back. The rocky thigh.

Well, you asked me for my thoughts and opinions and my memories of the man, and I’m going to give them to you, no matter what they do to your version of him. I know you’ll be asking the same of his other wives — or, I should say, ex-wives — so I won’t bother with what I know to be true of him after we got our divorce, because you’ll get plenty of that from the women who knew him later and better than I did during those particular years of his life. And who knows, maybe he’s changed. It sometimes happens. But even so, above all, I want to be fair to the man, because from what I’ve heard, he’s been fair to me. From what I’ve heard, he’s actually told people he still loves me, and that he loved me best of all, that I was his “true love.” I can understand that. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. We were so young, and you know what they say about young lovers, first lovers. Oh, I’ve gotten over him, all right, I mean, I can admit now that he was my first love, my true love, all that sort of thing, but I’m over him now. Because after all, you must remember he was the one who left. Not me. He was the one who walked out. Not me. He was the one who wanted the divorce, the one who got himself a lover while he was still married to me. Not me. I never did any of that. It makes it easier to get over someone if you’ve never done anything wrong to him. You can understand that.

But I’m sure that when he says I was his first love he’s telling the truth. I don’t think he lied to me about that, and maybe even after all these years he still does think of me that way. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing about him. You know what they say about first loves. We were young. I mean young. I was a fashion model then, for the Globe Department Store right here in Lakeland. A small-town girl, sure, but pretty. Some people said pretty enough to succeed as a fashion model in New York, even. You know all this, you’ve seen pictures, snapshots, and of course, you’ve talked to people who knew me then. Anyhow, that’s not important, except that naturally it helped me land your father.

He came south to Florida that winter, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father, your grandfather. Someone’ll probably go into all that in detail, so I won’t bother here. It’s a fascinating story, though. Whenever I tell people about it now, they simply refuse to believe that I believed it then, that he had killed his own father, I mean. But I always say, “Listen, if he believed it himself, why shouldn’t I believe it too?” Not many people can come up with an answer for that one.

Anyhow, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father that I first met your father. He came south to Florida, hitchhiking, with nothing more than what he could put in a single battered suitcase. Why he chose Lakeland I’ll never know for sure, but I think it had something to do with a construction job that was going on then. A lot of plumbing was involved, connecting up a couple of lakes in the area for a town water supply, something like that. I never paid much attention to the jobs he worked on, never really understood them very well, though of course I was a good listener and always made sure to praise him highly for his work, both to his face and behind his back.

He chose to stop running in Lakeland, after running all the way south from his family home in New Hampshire in the middle of the winter, hitchhiking on trucks, sleeping alongside the highway in places like Red Bank, New Jersey, and Raleigh, North Carolina. He had just turned twenty-two years old, big and strong and not afraid of anything or anyone, except the police, of course. I often think of him, now that you are doing the same thing at almost the same age, hitchhiking all over the country, sleeping by the side of the road and all, not afraid of anything or anyone, and you aren’t even afraid of the police, naturally, because you don’t think you have killed your father. Anyhow, I often think of your father during those years, and it gives me some slight comfort, because after all, he did the same thing, and no harm came to him for it.

I did say that he was big and strong then, didn’t I? Well, indeed he was. Never in my life had I seen a man as big and strong as your father was then. It’s where you get your height. He was wearing a T-shirt that showed all his muscles, and work pants, and he had come into the Globe to buy some underwear. He had just gotten off work at the pumping station. They were building a new pumping station that year and he had walked up to the foreman with his suitcase in his hand, and the way he told me later, he just said to the foreman, “You probably need pipefitters, and I’m the best damned pipefitter you’re ever going to get the chance to hire, so you ought to hire me whether you need pipefitters right now or not.” The foreman, who later tried to become your father’s friend, Bucky Walker, you remember him, he said, “Anybody thinks that high of himself is either so damned good I can’t afford to let him go, or so damned bad it’ll be a pleasure to fire him. So you’re hired, pal.” That’s how your father told it, and later, when Bucky told me the story, it was the same story, and Bucky had no reason to lie about it, because by that time your father had gone back up north and had left me with you as a baby here in Lakeland. Actually, Bucky was kind of interested in me then. He was hanging around the apartment a lot after work, drinking beer and talking about your father, wondering why he had gone and done what he had done. I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone along with Bucky the way he obviously wanted me to and had even married him after my divorce. And after he had divorced Sally, naturally. I mean, he was kind of a sweet man, and God knows, he was in love with me. I guess I never really told you much about all that, did I? Well, it doesn’t matter, because I was still so in love with your father that I couldn’t see the good side of any other man, even a man as sweet as Bucky Walker.

But I’m getting away from the thing I wanted to describe to you, how your father looked to me when we first met. I was modeling a pink one-piece Esther Williams bathing suit in a swimwear fashion show on the mezzanine of the Globe, and I had just started down the ramp when I caught sight of him coming up the stairs from the first floor, where he had bought some underwear. He told me later that, noticing a sign about the swimwear show upstairs, he’d decided to come and take a look. There wasn’t a beach at Lakeland, as you know, it’s so far inland, and at that time he had been in Florida for over a month and hadn’t seen a single woman in a bathing suit, and as he always said, that’s what Florida was to him, “Women in bathing suits and Coney Island with palm trees.” He’d seen the Coney-Island-with-palm-trees part, but so far he hadn’t seen anything of the women in bathing suits. So he decided to walk up the stairs to the mezzanine and take in the fashion show. Your father was always like that, very direct and not at all self-conscious. It didn’t matter to him that he was the only man in the place, or that he was dressed in a construction worker’s clothes, all dirty and sweaty and everything.

I was walking down the platform, with mostly older women shoppers seated around the platform, my boss, Polly Prudhomme, describing the bathing suit I was wearing to the shoppers while I walked along, turning, strolling, kneeling, and then I saw your father’s head as it came over the top of the stairs. Oh, I couldn’t believe it. It was like a dream. A huge, smiling, suntanned face, a great toothy grin, tiny ears, dark eyes twinkling, a mass of black curly hair, a neck like a tree, and then his broad shoulders, thick chest, great brown arms swinging as he came up the stairs, and then that tiny waist of his, the long muscular legs, until finally he was at the top of the stairs, standing there with his legs apart, his hands in fists on his narrow hips, a big smile across his face, good-natured like a boy’s, only somehow hungrier than a boy’s could be. I was so taken by his appearance, especially the way it had gradually come to me, piece by piece like that, like a mirage floating up from the floor — first the head, then the torso, then the legs — until at last standing there before me was a grinning giant, the handsomest man I had ever seen. Anyhow, I was so taken by his appearance that I stopped midway down the ramp, stood still, and stared straight at him, and I smiled. I smiled! All the women in the audience and all the girls waiting to come behind me and even Polly Prudhomme herself followed my gaze until they too were staring straight at him, most of them with their mouths open. Polly had stopped describing the bathing suit I was wearing and was gaping like the rest of us. It was a strange moment, silent, no one moving, your father standing at the top of the stairs, grinning, while maybe fifty women stared back at him, with me motionless up there on that ramp, smiling at him, as if I was a slave girl or something being auctioned off and he had suddenly appeared from the desert to save me from a fate worse than death. It was like the movies!

Well, like the old song says, those may have been the best of times, but they were the worst of times too. At least for me they were. Your father, when he wanted to be, was the most charming, thoughtful, witty — oh, God, could he be funny — intelligent, tender, sexy, and all-around interesting man you’d ever want to meet. And when he was, those were the best of times. I was never a happier woman than I was then. I sang all day long until I got off work and could meet him at the door of the Globe, where he’d be waiting for me, standing there in the late afternoon sun, dirty from his job at the pumping station, chatting with the janitor, old Eddie Coy, who locked the door after the store employees had left. I’d come out the door, and your father would see me, and holding his lunch pail under one arm, he’d whip the other arm around me, and he’d lift me right off the ground and spin me in a half-circle and set me down again, and then he’d stare down into my eyes, and he’d say, in that deep, throaty voice of his, “Hi.”

It was really something. I get a little weepy just remembering those days, the best of them. When it comes to the worst of them, though, all I have to do is remember a single one of them, just one of those days, and my eyes clear up pretty fast, let me tell you. There were Friday nights back then before we were married when I’d get off work and would come out the door, expecting your father to be there, as he’d promised, to take me out to dinner, and not finding him, would ask Eddie Coy if he’d seen your father, and Eddie would shake his head, No, not yet, so I’d wait and wait and wait, a half-hour, an hour, and hour and a half, until finally I’d know that he wasn’t coming, and I’d walk on home to my apartment, fix myself some supper, take a long bath, and try to sleep — until along about one in the morning, when I’d still be awake, tossing and turning, and there’d come a loud banging on the door. Jumping out of bed, I’d rush to the door, and when I opened it, I’d see him, standing there, a vicious snarl across his face, bloodied lips and cut eyes, bruises and scrapes, torn clothing, with a half-emptied bottle of whiskey in his hand. “Ran into a little bit of trouble down at th’ Tam,” was how he’d explain all the cuts and bruises. Then, using nothing but the foulest language, he’d describe in gory detail how he’d single-handedly beaten up half a dozen sailors or brickmasons or electricians or “crackers,” though I was never sure what he meant by the word, who he was referring to, exactly. Probably just anyone he couldn’t identify any other way by uniform and such. Anyhow, he’d stagger into my apartment, brushing off my foolish attempts to clean him up and bandage his cuts, pushing me and any sympathy I might have away, physically shoving me into a corner of the room, where I waited, slowly growing frightened of him, as he talked to himself, only to himself, and drank the whiskey from the bottle, growling like a dog, literally growling and curling his lips back and showing his teeth, snapping and snarling, rambling on about his “enemies,” turning everyone into an enemy — his parents, his sisters, his friends in New Hampshire and the people he’d met here in Florida, and of course, even me. Then, after a while, especially me. I was becoming his worst enemy. Every time he came in that drunk and torn up from fighting in the taverns, he would end the night by cursing at me, spitting out horrible names, a little more horrible each time it happened, a little more personally cutting, slicing into the parts of me that were the tenderest parts, taking the cruelest advantage of whatever fears and secrets I might have revealed to him some other night when we had been holding each other tenderly. Teasing and mocking me for my fears, threatening to expose my secrets, he’d call me “stupid” and “idiotic” and “sentimental” for a while, and then “selfish” and “insensitive” and “cruel,” and finally, “whore” and “leech” and “nag”—those last three, it always came down to them, whore and leech and nag. That’s what probably made them hurt so much, the fact that it always came down to the same three names. If he had just been lashing out at the world in general, he might’ve ended up calling me lots of awful things, sure, but all different. But because he always called me only those three, and all three, never one without the other two, he made me think that he really believed it about me, that even when he was sober and being kind to me, he still thought of me as a whore, a leech, and a nag. And of course, because I loved him and he was a man, I started seriously wondering if I was a whore or a leech or a nag, and there was just enough guilt for my own sexual interests in life, just enough dependency, and just enough nagging for me to slip slowly into believing that I was those things he was calling me, until I too thought of myself as a whore, a leech, and a nag. I even felt sorry for him for having to put up with me, for having fallen in love with me. So when he asked me to marry him I was so grateful, and so eager for the chance to prove by my loyalty that I wasn’t a whore and by my wifely support and devotion that I wasn’t a leech and by my trust and obedience that I wasn’t a nag, that I said, “Yes,” I said, “Oh, yes, yes, oh God, yes! Yes, yes,” I said, “yes.”

Well, that’s way behind me now, and I’ve forgiven him, forgiven him for all of it. Really. I have. Part of it was my fault, I’m sure. I mean, I didn’t understand him very well, so it was hard for me to give him what he really wanted and needed — though I’m not sure any woman would have been able to give him what he wanted and needed. He was lonely, terribly lonely, I could tell that much. I could understand that. A stranger in a strange land, like they say. No friends, except the few rough pals he made at work. No family, and unable to be in touch with his family in New Hampshire because of what he was sure he had done to his father. And Florida was just not the place for him — he said he was a man of cold winds and ice and snow. I remember him telling me that, very serious, as if he was telling me he was Catholic or Methodist or Episcopalian. He hated the heat, the sun, the white light of noon, said it made him shrivel up inside, said it made him feel closed off from the world. He was always complaining about the palm trees. “They’re not trees. Why d’yer call them trees? They’re giant weeds, that’s what. Weeds,” he called them. And he disliked the people who lived here, called them “crackers,” even when they were from places like New York or Ohio. “Life in Florida,” he would grumble, “is like living in a motel full of crackers.” So actually, I wasn’t surprised when he left Florida. I expected it. What did surprise me, though, was that he did it alone, that he didn’t take the two of us along with him, his wife and his baby.

We hadn’t been getting along for quite a few months when he left — not since I first told him I was pregnant, as a matter of fact, and you were three months old when he left, so that means we hadn’t been getting along for about a year. But I had blamed that pretty much on myself, on the pregnancy and all and the way I was right after you were born, the way I was all wrapped up with being a mother. Like I said, he was lonely, and after I got pregnant it was hard for me to help him not be lonely.

Oh, what am I doing this for? What’s the matter with me? I sat down here to tell you the truth, and I’m not doing it, I’m lying, sliding over things, leaving important things out. I’m not telling the truth at all. It’s just that I don’t want you to be hurt by him any more than you already have been. But I can’t keep on lying to you.

Life with your father was horrible for me right from the start. First there was that affair with Polly Prudhomme. Then there was the drinking. And after that there was all the violence, the fighting, the times he actually hit me. Then came the silence. He went silent on me. Shut everything down and just sat in his chair, reading sometimes, or looking out the window, or leaning back, his hands behind his head, and looking at the cracks in the ceiling. When you were born, he would come into the room where I was sleeping with you, and he would stand over your little bassinet and stare silently at you, no expression on his face at all. It was the strangest, scariest thing I had ever seen. It was as if he had died or something. I started going a little crazy from it. You can imagine the pressure it created, that silence, his expressionless face. I’d sob, “Do you love me?” and he’d say, “Sure,” just that, as if he was answering a question about a new hat I’d bought. “How do you like this one, hon?” “Fine,” he’d say. Except that I’d be sobbing, “What do you feel about me? What do you feel about the baby?” And he’d look up from the newspaper and say, “Fine.” No expression at all on his face, no depth in his voice. Well, I know I went a little crazy from it. I’d sometimes find myself in the middle of the night lying on the bathroom floor, my face pressed against the cold tiles of the floor, sobbing hysterically, “Why don’t you leave me! Get out! Get out!” And he’d be at the door, leaning casually against the frame of it, looking down at me with a strange curiosity in his eyes, and he’d say, “Fine.” The next morning, silence.

It went on like that for many weeks until finally one morning I got out of the bed I slept in, looked over at his bed and saw that it was already made, thought I’d overslept, and rushed out to the kitchen to make his breakfast. He was gone. He never left before seven-thirty. I looked at the clock on the wall. Seven o’clock.

He never came back. He didn’t love me. He didn’t love you. You were only a baby. He never even told you any night-time stories or sang you any songs. You were only a baby. He should’ve loved you for that at least. But he didn’t. I loved him. He might have loved me back a little for that. But he didn’t. So he left us. Packed a suitcase, walked out, got on a bus, disappeared. He left me with some money in the bank, and once he wired me a hundred dollars from Colorado. Six months later, I got a typed post card from him. It said:

Better get a divorce under way. I’ll pay. My father is alive and well. Your lawyer can reach me c/o my parents, Barnstead, New Hampshire. Everything’s going to be all right for you now. The hard part is over. For you, I do feel guilty, if you’re wondering, but it won’t do you any good. It doesn’t even seem to do me any good either, so I won’t be feeling it for long. As ever,

H. Stark

That was all. Six months later we were legally divorced, and I never saw your father again, though, as you know, I did hear from him again, numerous times. But I was lucky enough never to have to see him again.

There were the post cards he sent you, but you also might as well know that your father called me for years afterward, usually late at night, often on a sentimental occasion, like our anniversary or my birthday or yours. He was always drunk when he called, and because I would be less than enthusiastic, he’d turn sour and angry almost immediately and would hang up on me. I never bothered at the time to tell you of these calls because you were too young to have understood, and he eventually stopped calling, probably when he was with his second wife, whom, I’m told, he loved intensely for a while, though frankly speaking, I don’t believe it.

Your father beat me at least fifteen times in the year that we were married and living together. By “beat me” I mean hitting me more than once on any given occasion. I’m not counting all the times your father hit me only once.

Your father swore and cursed at me constantly. He mocked my clumsiness when I was great with child.

Your father lay in my own bed with my best friend, Polly Prudhomme, who also happened to be my boss until I was too pregnant to model even the maternity dresses and had to quit my job at the store. He told me about it after everyone in the store and practically everyone in town already knew about it, and then when he told me about it, he gave me all the details of their times together. He praised her especially for her skill at giving him what he called “head,” which meant sucking on his penis (you’re old enough to know all this by now) and letting him ejaculate into her mouth and, he said, she swallowed the semen, though that’s a little hard for me to believe. Yet he insisted that’s what she liked to do and that she did it so well he almost became addicted to it. He told me they even had a code worked out so that he could make an appointment with her by teasing her in front of me, and I remember, when he came to the store to get me after work, his saying to Polly, as if he was teasing her about her name, “Polly want a cracker? Polly want a cracker?” And she’d laugh and say, “Naw, not tonight,” or, “Later, maybe, after supper for dessert.” I would scold him afterward for making fun of her name. “Besides, she doesn’t know what you mean by ‘cracker,’” I would say to him, and he’d just laugh, knowing that actually I was the one who didn’t know what “cracker” meant.

Your father drank whiskey until he passed out on the floor, and he always did it on nights when he had promised to take me out to dinner and dancing.

Your father had a fistfight with my only living relative, my Uncle Orlando — beating him senseless in his own front yard in front of his own wife and horrified children — all because Orlando had enough courage to stand up to your father and tell him what a selfish and cruel man he was to be treating me the way he was then (this was only a week before your father left me).

Your father bragged about his abilities as a pipefitter. He had no humility. He was convinced that, compared to him, all the men he worked with and for were stupid, lazy, and unskilled.

Your father was frequently impotent, sexually inadequate. I won’t go into it any further than that because there may well be reasons for it that we can never really know about, matters outside my experiences with him, childhood experiences and that sort of thing, but your father, I thought, was not quite right sexually. He talked too much about some of his friends’ (men friends, mind you) muscles. Also, he seemd to enjoy a certain kind of intercourse which, I’m told, only homosexual men do regularly. You know what I’m talking about.

Your father hated cats. I won’t tell you about how one time he killed a whole litter of kittens. It was horrible.

Your father cheated at cards. Even bridge.

Your father stole government property.

Your father lied about his taxes. He also told strangers that he made more money than he really did make. Sometimes he even told them he was making money on the side by playing the stock market, betting on the horses, betting on dogs, winning sports pools, bowling. He had me believing (until I had my lawyer check it out later) that he owned a lot of real estate in New Hampshire. “Half the side of a mountain,” was how he put it, but my lawyer told me that your father’s parents owned an old rundown farm, and your father owned nothing.

Your father thought all flowers were ugly, though he once admitted he liked blue hydrangeas. “Mainly because they don’t look like they’re real,” he explained to me.

Your father didn’t know how to swim. He said it was on principle, but of course it was because he didn’t want to be in a position of having to learn something that most people already knew about.

Your father didn’t know how to ride a bicycle, either, and that too he said was on principle. I could never understand that.

Your father hated people of all races, creeds, and colors. He was an extremely prejudiced man, the worst I have ever known, even after living my whole life in the South. He would make fun of a person’s background, no matter what it was. “Stupid Polacks.” “Grabby Jews.” “Dumb niggers.” “Drunken Indians.” “Thick-headed Irishers.” He hated them all — even what he himself was, which he referred to as “common white trash” or sometimes “snot-nosed Yankees” and “backwoods New Hampshire shit-kickers.” But whenever he used these terms, he somehow said them with a certain note of endearment. Somehow these slurs became affectionate nicknames. Not so for the others, though.

Your father could play the saxophone well, but he only played it when he was alone or thought he was alone. He did not, as he claimed, play in the Guy Lombardo orchestra. He often referred to himself as “one of Guy’s Royal Canadians” when people asked him about his saxophone, which he displayed ostentatiously on the coffee table in the living room of our apartment.

Your father had a smile that people loved, and when, because of their love for his smile, they got close to him, he stopped smiling and never allowed it to be seen again. I cannot recall his smiling at me after we were married, and actually, I can’t recall his smiling at me from the moment I told him that I was falling in love with him, which happened the fourth time I went out with him. Of course I know he must have smiled at me then, many times. It’s just that I can’t recall it.

Your father told wonderful jokes, but only to strangers. When he told jokes to people who were not strangers, the jokes were cruel and dark and only funny in a way that made you feel guilty if you laughed.

Your father would sneer at old people on park benches as if they disgusted him.

Your father kicked dogs and dared them to bite him for it.

Your father was a jaywalker.

Your father growled. Like an animal. At night, if a car drove up, or if someone knocked on the door, your father would start to growl, low and deep from way back in his throat.

Your father often ate the same thing for lunch that he knew I was fixing for supper.

Your father lied about having been a champion boxer. He was, however, a very good, that is, a successful, barroom brawler.

Your father lied about having been a champion runner, though he did have very muscular legs and seemed never to be physically tired, so he probably could have been a champion runner if he had tried. But he never even tried.

Your father thought he had killed his father, but he never confessed to having any guilt for it. He blamed it on his father. Otherwise, he never talked about it with me. I’d ask him to tell me about it and he’d say, “It was all my old man’s fault,” and then he’d roll over and go to sleep.

Your father talked incoherently to himself when he was drunk, and he was drunk at least one night a week, usually Friday night, after he had gotten paid.

Your father had piles, which was unusual for a man as young as he was then.

Your father was too big.

Your father was afraid of going to the dentist. Also, he refused to see a doctor when he was sick or for his piles, and he refused to take medicines of any kind. Even aspirin. He was convinced that it would only make things worse. He always said, “If things can get worse, they will, but there’s no reason to make it easy for them.”

Your father was afraid that his penis was too small, and in a way he was right, because, while his body was unusually large, his penis was normal-sized. Unfortunately, because he asked me, I told him that one night. He never made love to me afterward, but that came fairly late in the pregnancy anyhow.

Your father said he loved his mother, but once when he was drunk he started to cry and roll around on the floor, yelling about how much he hated her.

Your father was not a happy man. But he said it was on principle, and that it was for him a moral principle, what he called a “moral imperative,” and that was why he tried so hard to make other people unhappy too. I could never tell for sure when he was joking, but I think he was joking then. But he may not have been. He certainly acted as though he thought everyone should be unhappy, that it was for him a moral thing and, therefore, by making people unhappy he was somehow making them better.

Your father was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

Your father refused to admit that he was lonely, even though he had no friends he could confide in. But he said that was on principle, too, I mean the part about being lonely. I think he would’ve liked to have had a few friends, so long as he could’ve kept on being lonely at the same time. But he had too many principles.

Your father hated me.

Oh, God, how he hated me.