Fathers & Daughters

Portrait maker Mariana Cook began focusing on fathers and daughters in 1990 as a means of exploring what she calls the “mysterious bond” between genders and generations. Four years later, that exploration has produced a book of 60 portraits of the famous and the unknown, captioned in some cases by the subjects and so revealing that writer William Styron, the father of three daughters and a subject of Cook, calls them “a substantial miracle of photography.” In his introduction to the pictures, Styron writes: “That all of these images and arrangements are not entirely harmonious, nor without emotional tension, adds to their appeal, and to their honesty. What matters is the poetic grace with which the artist has arrested for a moment the humor, the tenderness and, most often, the love that underlie one of the best of all human connections.”

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Who are these little people who sit on my lap? Strange creatures that we have made, who live in the world that Dominique and I have cobbled together and in a world that they are making up for themselves. . . . It seems at one and the same time that we have never lived without these two and that it was just yesterday that, childless, I prepared myself for fatherhood by thinking about Dada. Something I would soon experience and be helpless to prevent: total chaos. . . . Chaos is turning into harmonic anarchy as we all bumble along into the future, bouncing off each other, weathering our teacup tempests and days of bliss alike.

--THOMAS PALMER

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A lot of people assume it is wonderful to have a famous justice for a father. “Wow, it must be so exciting.” “Oh, you must be so proud.”

It is exciting, and I am proud, but there are costs. . . .

About two years after I was married, and after Dad wrote Roe v. Wade, he was scheduled to come to Boston to give the keynote address for the annual meeting of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He had never seen my house. I was in the early months of my first pregnancy, working full time, feeling exhausted and seasick. It was spring, and the buildup of pressure at the court to finish the year’s cases had begun, but I might have been able to invite him and Mother to drive the hour and a half roundtrip to where I lived if Mother hadn’t said, “Don’t ask anything of him, Nancy. He’s terribly tired.” So I made the trip to Boston three times in 24 hours, taking most of a day off from work to be able to hear him speak. When my baby was born, he didn’t come to see me. I took the baby to Washington to see him.

At such times it has been hard to sort out what is important. On this occasion it was a question of obstetrics in the abstract or in the concrete. Do I take care of the author of Roe v. Wade, and by extension all those women who don’t want to be pregnant and the obstetricians and gynecologists who provide their medical care, or does he take care of the woman who is his pregnant daughter and the baby who is his grandchild? This kind of thing has been confusing. What am I supposed to do with my anger, despair and frustration?

And yet, his are the most comforting hands to hold: square and warm and responsive. I like it that my own hands, not especially beautiful for a woman’s, look like his. At the onset of adolescence in eighth grade, a difficult year for most new teen-agers, he smoothed my path by reading me Sherlock Holmes and helping me prepare for, of all things, home economics quizzes. We got an A, of course.

We talk on the phone a lot, in a way that is best captured by the nearly untranslatable German word gemutlich. Gemutlich zusammen --warm and comfortable together. He has called more as he has gotten older, little conversations scattered through the week. I have learned how to make him laugh, and then he will end the call by saying, “Oh, I feel so much better now,” and indeed, I can hear it in his voice. I hate letting go of him to hang up, dreading that point in the future where there will be no more calls.

--NANCY BLACKMUN CONIARIS

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Her questions are coming from the end of the ages. Her silences are the slow heritage of uncertain millenniums. Her words are whispered as if she knew for a very short time all that--too soon--life will make her forget. Her answers, coming from the distant future, help me to understand what I desperately try to grasp from a flying past.

--JACQUES ATTALI

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Natasha was a bouncy, cheerful child full of fun and imagination. A father’s great illusion is that his daughter will always remain so; a source of infinite tenderness and unexpected surprises. The surprises do follow, but they are not always tender or funny. A person cannot enter and leave your living room forever doing cartwheels. First Communion is not an eternal event. Photographs fade, gauze gets torn, silk yellows.

I always laugh remembering that Natasha gave me a first intimation of mortality. She was four and skipped with another child through my study, where I was watching television. “Melanie,” she said, “this is my father. He is a hundred years old.” In this photograph we are both aging, in different ways, at different paces.

I am both far and near to her in this photo; so is she from herself. She is seen at a final, painful moment of adolescence, no longer confident, no longer at ease with herself or with me. She called it her “young grim winter,” finding ways to invent and reinvent herself over and over again, to please, to shock. Loud and silly sometimes, smooth and cool at others, surprising her teachers, correcting them, having read through the complete works of Artaud at age 14, about to become the child in the New Yorker cartoon whose teacher, gun in hand, starkly states: “You know too much.”

In this photo, she is about to go from being in the open or being in seclusion, to being with others. . . . She does not cling to me, I cling to her.

--CARLOS FUENTES

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Cora has always seemed to be completely in command of herself. This comes across in numerous small ways: her resolute choice of clothing each morning, her systematic preference for the company of other girls. I admire, perhaps even envy, the way she has cultivated an unusual degree of autonomy as well as the amazing equilibrium that goes along with it. I think these qualities are unusual in someone her age. They make her rare moments of dependency on me all the more precious.

--PAUL GILROY