Life without father

IF you happened to be on the East Coast that fall, you wouldn’t have been able to avoid the stories -- Nelson Gross, a prominent New Jersey Republican and former aide to President Nixon, went missing on Sept. 17, 1997, and his body was found a few days later down an embankment along the Hudson River. Gross’ death and the trial of three youths arrested in the crime occupied New York metropolitan papers for months -- and the use of FasTrak technology to determine that Gross’ car crossed the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan later prompted a debate on the possible threat that electronic toll collection poses to one’s right to privacy.

But if you happen to open Dinah Lenney’s memoir, “Bigger Than Life: A Murder, a Memoir,” only a few of these facts peek above the surface in the life of Gross’ only daughter, a struggling actress, a wife and the mother of Eliza and Jake. At the book’s beginning, she admits that she hasn’t yet been able to tell her children what really happened to their beloved Pop. Is her reticence because her younger child is so sensitive that he worries about being kidnapped or robbed? Though Lenney acknowledges that “the Towers came down, that we anticipate the Big One in Southern California every day, that breast cancer claims friends and neighbors with terrible regularity,” she also boldly asserts that what guides her silence is a resolution “to live practically forever, and any other conclusion is unimaginable, unacceptable as far as I’m concerned.”

Does Lenney’s irrational, yet acknowledged, sense of entitlement make telling her children the truth about her father’s death feel so monumental? Does her natural inclination to protect her children from the threats they fear make her hesitate? Perhaps the answer lies in an ominous brown file, overstuffed with a year’s worth of newspaper articles, condolence letters and court transcripts that Lenney imagines arranging in some emotional or chronological order and sharing with her children -- when she decides that they’re ready to hear it.

Or is there some deeper reason? Understanding someone after their death is a daunting task, not unlike the work of the New York detectives who investigated Gross’ murder, working backward from the crime scene to uncover the motives, means and opportunity of the killers. But despite the book’s subtitle, “Bigger Than Life” is only tangentially about Gross’ murder. Its overarching, and ultimately more important, goal is to detect and uncover the mystery of his life and relationship to Lenney, whom Gross saw infrequently after divorcing her mother and remarrying.

Theirs is a complicated relationship, made more so by Gross’ single-minded stubbornness and goading remarks that often reduced the adult Lenney to speechless anger, even during their last meeting before his murder.

In fact, the residual anger with which Lenney writes some of the initial chapters of the book is somewhat off-putting as she carps on the details of her father’s quirks and snipes. Why waste trees reading about such a dysfunctional relationship, one initially wonders? And why is Lenney still angry about it, especially given the way we know her father died? Don’t the dead, especially those taken from us by violent means, deserve some respect? But self-examination is good for the soul, and one is ultimately more disarmed than angered by Lenney’s sometimes harsh examination of her blended family (her mother also remarried, to a man Lenney considers as much of a father as Gross was).

At times, “Bigger Than Life” reads more like a familial exorcism than a memoir, as Lenney seesaws between the past and present. But somewhere in the middle of the book, as in the middle of the grieving process, the painful memories are shouldered aside by a greater desire to understand the role that this person, this father, played in his daughter’s life. “Recollection after recollection about fathers,” she muses, “is characterized by searching and yearning to know the real guy.” Which for Lenney meant understanding not only her parents’ marriage and her mother Leah’s own foibles, but also how Nelson and Leah both protected and damaged a child they loved.

This affecting memoir ends on a note of grace as Lenney acknowledges her hard-won peace with her father’s memory and his murder (she eventually visits the site where his body was found and attends the sentencing hearing) -- as well as a sort of rapprochement with her divided family and her own fractured childhood. In the process, she comes to appreciate the lasting imprint Gross made on her life and that of her children, from facial features to mannerisms that carry the promise of immortality. Such transcendent realizations elevate “Bigger Than Life” (a title in the American Lives Series edited by Tobias Wolff) beyond an account of the bombastic life and brutal death of Nelson Gross to speak of life and healing found in the midst of tragedy. *