Some Bittersweet Memories of Life With Father : A Father’s Verdict

Father. Fathers loved and fathers feared, close fathers and distant fathers, famous fathers and “ordinary” fathers. No matter what the relationship, he’s special. In the remembrances that follow, Times writers tell something of what that relationship has meant.

Dad’s wallet had been missing two days before a neighbor tapped at the front door of our pastel tract home in Westchester. The man from two doors away arrived with his 13-year-old daughter--given to ratted hair and little eye contact--and the cashless wallet she said she’d found in the bushes of her front yard.

Dad closed off the front room and sat down for a talk--two fathers and an adolescent no one wanted to confront in those polite days of 1962.

Quiet voices could be heard from the hallway reviewing the facts: Dad was out $200. The girl had visited my older sister the day the money disappeared. Through the muffled voices came a few bursts of denial.

Eventually I could hear Dad say: “No, no, if she says she didn’t do it. . . .”

No charges were filed; no compensation ever made.

“Why?” I remember asking indignantly.

“Because she said she didn’t do it,” Dad said.