seemed to look on his dentures as a kind of trophy and kept calling them “ Earl Exley ’ s teeth. ” At one point he removed the plates from his mouth and laid them on the bar, beaming a drunken smile through elastic lips. Looking at the teeth, I was struck with the notion that they were not real false teeth at all but one of those vulgar novelty toys, and I expected that at any moment they might begin chattering away in a terrible chopping motion as they started moving down the beer-stained bar. I excused myself, told the man I was happy to have made his acquaintance, and left him staring affectionately at Earl Exley ’ s teeth.
In death, my father was another matter. He was, of course, tough no more. The lung cancer had done its job superbly; where he had once seemed to epitomize the plebeian, he might, in death, have been a patrician, perhaps a great poet who had died young. Outwardly calm, he looked as if he had been consumed by his vision, a wraithlike votary rendered dumb with excess of knowledge. But I was unable to sustain such images. He weighed seventy-nine pounds, and in one of those unforgivable jests we permit that profession to make on our corpses, the undertaker had removed the fixed and melancholy scowl; this, together with the wasted body, the carmine rouge and lipstick, and the heavy, sensual odor of moribund roses, conspired to gravely compromise his manhood. There was nothing here to suggest the interminable, anguishing months of his dying, an anguish that in its later stages reached such a peak that a young doctor, in a fit of impotent pique, had had to strike my father across the face. I don ’ t blame the man. My father had reached the point where maximum amounts of morphine no longer afforded comfort, and I suppose that the novice, terrified by his inability any longer to minister to my father ’ s unearthly pleas for calm, had struck out, not at my father but at his own ignorance. Still, it was quite a while before I understood and forgave. For years I harbored the secret yearning to seek out that surgeon, to knock him down, and to kick his teeth through the back of his skull.
No, now there was nothing to suggest either the kind of man my father had been or the life he had led. In death he carried with him the aristocratic nicety of drawing rooms, the inane chatter of teacups. At St. Paul ’ s church, a stranger in a profound-blue, rigidly cut, and expensive-looking suit wailed for all of us. His eyes were protected by great, green shades, from under which poured rivulets of shiny tears; once or twice there issued from him, amidst his crushing, incessant sobbing, an animal-like, tortured sound so terrible that provincial heads cranked themselves about, bringing every eye in that crowded chapel to him, eyes that made no more impression on him than a soft, beneficent rain. No one knew who he was. But afterward there was much surmise; and it was finally decided, against any evidence to the contrary, that he had been a boyhood friend of my father, one who was said to have “ gone away young ” and become a Prince of Industry.
That was how I remembered my father that June day on Park Avenue, while I stood in the shade of the awning—stood naked and stony with shame. On my father ’ s death, and even that day on Park Avenue, I had not known whether I loved him or not, whether he was the Earl Exley who “ beat up on ” people or the man whose strong hands went out to the dregs of this world. I was younger then and wanted to apprehend the world in terms of thrust and parry, of point and counterpoint, and could not see that he was both men and that in order to live successfully I would have to love both. Had such a thing happened today, I know I could have gone through with the interview, fake, suave father and all. My father was not without his subtlety and his humor, and I know he would have got rather a kick out of the whole business. But the denial of one ’ s father, in whatever spirit,
In death, my father was another matter. He was, of course, tough no more. The lung cancer had done its job superbly; where he had once seemed to epitomize the plebeian, he might, in death, have been a patrician, perhaps a great poet who had died young. Outwardly calm, he looked as if he had been consumed by his vision, a wraithlike votary rendered dumb with excess of knowledge. But I was unable to sustain such images. He weighed seventy-nine pounds, and in one of those unforgivable jests we permit that profession to make on our corpses, the undertaker had removed the fixed and melancholy scowl; this, together with the wasted body, the carmine rouge and lipstick, and the heavy, sensual odor of moribund roses, conspired to gravely compromise his manhood. There was nothing here to suggest the interminable, anguishing months of his dying, an anguish that in its later stages reached such a peak that a young doctor, in a fit of impotent pique, had had to strike my father across the face. I don ’ t blame the man. My father had reached the point where maximum amounts of morphine no longer afforded comfort, and I suppose that the novice, terrified by his inability any longer to minister to my father ’ s unearthly pleas for calm, had struck out, not at my father but at his own ignorance. Still, it was quite a while before I understood and forgave. For years I harbored the secret yearning to seek out that surgeon, to knock him down, and to kick his teeth through the back of his skull.
No, now there was nothing to suggest either the kind of man my father had been or the life he had led. In death he carried with him the aristocratic nicety of drawing rooms, the inane chatter of teacups. At St. Paul ’ s church, a stranger in a profound-blue, rigidly cut, and expensive-looking suit wailed for all of us. His eyes were protected by great, green shades, from under which poured rivulets of shiny tears; once or twice there issued from him, amidst his crushing, incessant sobbing, an animal-like, tortured sound so terrible that provincial heads cranked themselves about, bringing every eye in that crowded chapel to him, eyes that made no more impression on him than a soft, beneficent rain. No one knew who he was. But afterward there was much surmise; and it was finally decided, against any evidence to the contrary, that he had been a boyhood friend of my father, one who was said to have “ gone away young ” and become a Prince of Industry.
That was how I remembered my father that June day on Park Avenue, while I stood in the shade of the awning—stood naked and stony with shame. On my father ’ s death, and even that day on Park Avenue, I had not known whether I loved him or not, whether he was the Earl Exley who “ beat up on ” people or the man whose strong hands went out to the dregs of this world. I was younger then and wanted to apprehend the world in terms of thrust and parry, of point and counterpoint, and could not see that he was both men and that in order to live successfully I would have to love both. Had such a thing happened today, I know I could have gone through with the interview, fake, suave father and all. My father was not without his subtlety and his humor, and I know he would have got rather a kick out of the whole business. But the denial of one ’ s father, in whatever spirit,
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