The Lifelong Dialogue Between Fathers and Daughters

The shirts were everywhere, on the floor, the bed, the bureau. At first glance, the scene reminded me of that wonderful moment in “The Great Gatsby,” when the hero splays his beautiful, tailored shirts before his beloved, Daisy Buchanan, to dazzle her. But my father’s shirts were not laid out to dazzle. Nor were they of the same expensive, delicate stuff as Jay Gatsby’s. There might have been an old, restrained, custom-made Turnbull and Asser in the lot, but mostly it was an off-the-shelf spill of wide stripes in bold colors, all 16 1/2-35, my father’s shirt size til the day he died, Dec. 29, 1998.

My father died big--as he always was, certainly to me. He did not shrivel from cancer or any other wasting disease. His 78-year-old body just quit on him, the vital organs compromised, so that as he lay in his final bed in his final hours in the ICU at UCLA, he still looked ruddy and robust, as if he might rise up and put on one of his assertively colorful shirts with the thin white Windbreaker and white loafers he also favored, and set forth in his big white Lincoln--every inch the aging, vestigially handsome Hollywood director that he had been in his last years.

This is my first Father’s Day without him. The shirts have been given away; the house he lived in--with two wives and the children from both--has been sold. So, too, the Lincoln. All clear on the set.

But the roil of emotions continues in the heart of his lonesome, midlife daughter. I wasn’t done. I hadn’t said it all. My father and I were in the middle of an intense, lifelong conversation--a raucous, loving and sometimes combative arm-wrestle that often characterized the father-daughter relationship between men of his generation and women of mine.

He, after all, came from the World War II generation of men, much celebrated of late for their heroism, their old-school, stiff-upper-lip masculinity. My father was of that era to his bones, redolent--through much of my life and his--of cigarettes and booze and Dunhill after-shave, those generational manly smells. He expected to be in charge, to preside over and provide for his family.

I, of course, came from the women’s lib generation. I turned 20 in 1970, smack dab in the middle of the feminist upheaval, intent, like so many young women, to make my own way, state my own opinions--to whomever, whenever, wherever--and claim my own pleasures. We were, my friends and I, chips off the old paternal block. They pushed, we pushed back. We wanted respect, equality. They wanted their baby girls back. They patronized; we turned prickly and talked back. If they were not the easiest fathers to be daughters of, we, in turn, were not the easiest daughters to be fathers of, either. It was an epic struggle, the defining one of many of our female lives, played out again and again with husbands and lovers and bosses.

Some fathers dropped out of the struggle, retreating into an obdurate taciturnity or an adamant authoritarianism. Some daughters dropped out, simply stopped seeing their fathers or talking to them in any real way. Grandchildren came; everyone was polite. But there was no deep bond, no connective tissue.

But others of us hung in--fathers and daughters both, arguing over everything, from politics to books and movies, and laughing, if we were lucky, and trying to befriend each other under the new rules, the new roles. It wasn’t easy. And it took real guts for the men who did it, who got down off their high horses and went the distance with daughters like me. I realize, looking around at all the tender-hearted, nouveaux dads brandishing babies in backpacks or coaching their daughters’ soccer leagues--the real dads not the preening poseurs--that my father was part of a transitional generation, raised in one world, pushed into another, the key link in the evolutionary chain of dads.

I think often of something he said to me a few years ago. He’d called to compliment me on something I’d written, a habit he’d gotten into in later years. “I’ll probably be remembered,” he said quietly, “as your father.” My father had had noted success as both a director and actor, so the sentence was edged with a certain ruefulness along with his obvious pride in my doings. But it contained an entire revolution. He was part of the first generation of fathers in history who could expect their daughters to be as visibly successful out there in the world than they had been--if not more so. Such a fundamental change (now taken for granted); such a relatively short time ago.

The last time I talked to mine he was, as ever, loving and cheeky and demanding. “Hey, when you come tomorrow, bring me one of those mocha coffee drinks,” he ordered from his hospital bed as I left, smilingly taunting the nurse nearby who’d confiscated the last one. Hardly on his restricted diet. I smiled and shook my head. “Pop,” I said.

That was it, though we didn’t know it. Our conversation was over, this huge, noisy centerpiece of my life. I am now something unimaginable: a woman without a father to give a shirt to today--or maybe another of those white Windbreakers.*