The Story of My Father by Sue Miller

discreetly but deliberately reached up and turned off her hearing aid.
    My mother wrote poetry—lyric poetry, of course. And that concentrated focus on one’s own feelings, one’s own remembered agony and despair and joy, marked her personality as it marked her work. It was terrifying to me as a child—and something I resist in myself and others as an adult—that insistence on high drama, that inability to let go of or to integrate painful memory. It was why I sought refuge then in my father’s calm, his forgetfulness of self, if that’s what it was. It may be part of why I now write fiction, why I choose to move around imaginatively in other, invented people’s joys and agonies. And it may also be why my own memory is so spotty. Why it so often comes at things from an angle.
    My first memory of my father, for instance, is not truly of him but of his absence. Actually, it’s one of my first clear memories of any kind. My earlier recollections are fragmentary, odd home movies that show only an out-of-context scene or two before breaking off and flickering dark. This memory, though, is sharp and clear—it has meaning for me as well as detail. And the meaning is that my father has left us; he’s gone away.
    This was the scene: I was five. My father was in Germany for a long stay, a half-year stay. On a warm early summer’s day, a friend of my parents came to take pictures of us—of my mother and my younger sister and baby brother and me—to send to him. Peculiarly, I can remember clearly the chair we sat in to be photographed. It was painted a bright blue. It had been set out in the backyard for this session. The backyard was a communal one, behind several apartment buildings on the south side of Chicago in the university neighborhood—Hyde Park. The yard was hard-packed dirt for the most part, worn barren by the play of all the children who used it daily. The chair looked strange to me, out of place and
wrong,
plopped down out there.

    What I remember most of the picture taking was the sense of yearning connection I felt, thinking of my father as I looked straight into the camera. Thinking of my picture, but not me, going to him, far across the ocean. He had been away at that point for three or four months—he’d left soon after my baby brother was born—and would be gone about three months more.
    My memory, then, is not really of him but of the effort of trying to construct him in my mind, of struggling to imagine him, of missing him. My memory is of memory, working to find its object.
    There were perhaps a dozen or so photographs from that day in one of our family albums. I still have two or three—the pictures were divided up after my mother’s death and distributed evenly among us. In them my sister and I look strained, solemn and tired. We’d recovered only a month or so earlier from chicken pox. In one of the pictures of me holding David— he seems almost too big for me to be holding safely, but I am— you can still see the shadow of several pockmarks sprinkled on my face. The photographer was someone we children didn’t know well, and that’s on my face too: a shyness, a reserve. I’m not smiling.
    It’s easy, of course, to read too much into the accidents that are family snapshots. We were, after all, normal, bright children, well cared for, every nuance of our development noted and described in the long letters my mother wrote to her mother—which were then circulated through my mother’s large family and have come back, after all these years, to me. But I think these pictures of us as grave, cautious children reveal something. I think they speak of a certain aspect, anyway, of my family’s life. Because my mother—who was alone with us that summer—didn’t take much joy in us as children. We were too much her life’s work, her project. She reserved her vivacity, her charm, which could be enormous, for other adults. Those same long letters that chronicled our growth described all her