Life With Father

My father was a high school English teacher, a demon of adolescent hell with his diagraming of sentences and assigning of weekend homework. He slung adjectives at Hawthorne High students from 1955 to 1972 and, often, at me, too. In an era when many fathers tried to befriend their sons, Dad treated me like one of his students, for better and, occasionally, worse.

Dad fit the English teacher stereotype, with a twist: Mingled with his love for language and books was the toughness of a street fighter. He spoke in the machine-gun staccato of a Philly wise guy, but always in perfect sentences that flowed into beautiful paragraphs, whether the subject was Jane Eyre or the laying of bricks. His words were Shakespeare, but just beneath lurked the sense of doubled fists, of Hamlet cruising for action with Studs Lonigan.

He was not a man to fool with. If a movie were made of my youth, it would be titled “Dad’s Way.” I did what he wanted, in the fashion he preferred, or suffered the consequences, in a physical sense, right away. Apart from the usual household chores, the main thing he wanted me to do was read certain books. The other was to listen.

My friends got lectured about the facts of life or the smoking of cigarettes. My father delivered talks on novels, short stories and authors as we drove to the hardware store or waxed the car. It was understood that I’d read whatever books he talked about. Was it hard? No harder than reading Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” at age 9 or John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” by 10. And by reading, I mean knowing a book well enough to pass the oral exam he’d give days or weeks later. Much of the time it was fun. When it wasn’t, I did it anyway, just like the other kids I knew who endured piano lessons or stumbled through ballet. Besides, there was this thing about Dad.

His attitude could be summed up in 10 minutes of an afternoon I spent in his summer school classroom, sitting through a lecture he was delivering to kids who’d flunked English earlier in the year. I was 8, fresh from lessons at the nearby pool and still in my swimsuit, watching my father describe, with his welterweight’s quick energy, the scene from Joseph Conrad’s “Youth” in which the ship’s load of smoldering coal explodes.

Suddenly the door flung open, and an enormous boy-man of the fullback type burst in to confront another kid seated in the back row, delivering punches to the latter’s face before he could rise from his seat. The sound was a horrid smacking amid shouted curses. Desks fell, students scattered, but I looked only at my father, whose face darkened beneath his wisp of hair.

Dad strode to the rear of the class and pushed the door open, then turned to the two boys, now wrestling on the floor. He grabbed one by the hair and threw him outside, where he landed hard and stayed put. My father spun around and returned to the classroom, where the other boy wielded a chair, prepared for war. Dad pointed his finger at the boy and said in the growl of a Philly tough, “Put down that chair or you’ll be pulling it out of your ass.”

The chair went down and the boys went to the principal’s office. Ten minutes later Dad resumed his lecture in the cool tones of a librarian. He never mentioned the incident and I never asked.

You don’t say no to a man like that.

And I knew that I was being spoiled in a way, given special teaching, quality time before that phrase was invented. I had the sense of privilege and, more than anything, of being close to my father, whom I loved fiercely, to the depths of my heart.

Sometimes it was wonderful: By 10 I could help grade his students’ papers, and did, missing “Gunsmoke” to catch dangling participles while the terror of the ninth grade sat smoking in front of the tube, resplendent in his undershorts. No Little League hero ever felt better after a home run than I did, sitting next to my father, awash in the cool silence that meant I had done well.

Sometimes it wasn’t wonderful: Quite a few of my afternoons were ruined because I couldn’t pull something from a novel that a graduate student might have missed. Dad took no prisoners; you either knew what Stephen Crane, Jack London and Mark Twain had in common or you went back, red-faced, to find out.

In my memory he sits, blowing cigarette smoke at the ceiling, asking, “What’s the main idea of the story?” After I sweated that out, he’d give his version, always ending with the question: “What’s the best passage in the book?”

And so I learned to keep one eye on the story and the other on the text, to compare every page with the one before and to always ask why this thing, this character, this event? I got into the habit of reading a chapter twice, then reading the whole book again straight through. I ditched class to hide out in the school library, reading my fiction and the biographies of authors in the Britannica.

Sometimes we had words over books--hard words, because he was good with them and I was a faithful apprentice. On my 12th birthday we had an epic battle over Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” whose essence I’d failed to find within its murky matrix of whaling history and cetacean anatomy. In truth I’d only skimmed the book, preferring to consume “Life on the Mississippi” a second time. It was the first of our big fights, but others followed as I grew into my own tastes and values. By the time I was 14, our conversations over books had become intellectual wars over content and meaning, often becoming debates over the Vietnam War or descending into bickering over haircuts.

I felt that he was reaching out to me, but his method was the lecture, which left me only the student’s role. Apart from that, we both expected the other to be perfect, the surest prescription for disappointment. By the time I was 15 we had almost stopped listening to each other at all.

I was 16 when he died, on a crisp October morning. He was 49. In our last conversation he brought up “Moby Dick,” still concerned that I hadn’t found the kernel of that book, more than four years after our argument. He asked me if I’d read it again; I didn’t answer. It seemed that we would fight, but he just turned away from me and left for his last day at school.

Hawthorne High dedicated its yearbook to him that year, describing him as “a tough little man with the honest red face and the big voice and the huge heart.” The teachers association renamed its award for excellence for him the following spring.

On my bookshelf stands a black-and-white picture of him wearing a dark gray suit and a teacher’s bow tie, sitting at a tiny desk in room 20-1 of Hawthorne High School. His face is asking a question.

When I meet him next I will answer that “Moby Dick’s” essence is found in Chapter 36, where Capt. Ahab calls the Pequod’s crew together to demand the death of the white whale. In it we see Ahab’s design, and the depth and color of his madness as well. There we also find two of the best scenes in American literature: of Ahab nailing a gold doubloon to the mast as a reward for the man who sights Moby Dick, and of the crew toasting the whale’s death from a pewter flagon, as the harpooners drink from the upturned sockets of their lances.

In case you were wondering, it’s the best passage in the book.