The Story of My Father by Sue Miller Page A

labors on our behalf. These labors were ceaseless, and although in the letters they were described cavalierly, as though she undertook them gracefully and lightly, there was another note struck in her later written recollections and in her poetry—the grim note of enduring her fate, bitterly enduring it. Blaming my father, blaming us, for our existence, for the
work
we made for her. And this is more the note we were aware of at the time, the note that made me, as a child, cautious, careful not to anger her, not to ask for too much. Never to be a
bother.
    It was my father who brought gaiety and fun to our lives. This isn’t fair to my mother, of course. He didn’t have that endless round of chores connected to us to wear him down. He wasn’t responsible in the world’s view, or in his own, for how we looked, how we behaved, how we did in school. But it wasn’t simply a matter of the division of labor. It was temperament too. He was by nature patient and attentive. He saw the humor in small things. He was charmed and amused by his children—by most children, in fact. He was steady; he was emotionally reliable.
    My mother wasn’t, then or ever. Speaking her name— “Mama . . .”—could bring, unpredictably, any one of a variety of responses. Loving: “Yes, Susie?” Or frantic: “What! What
is
it? What do you want?” Or just: “
Will
you children leave me alone for one minute?” and then tears, tears. Her pleasures were all in turning away from us, in privacy. The cigarettes and coffee lingered over when we’d dispersed after breakfast, the crossword puzzles, the endless games of solitaire, the mystery novels, with their lurid and—to me—compelling covers. Illness was something she particularly cherished. She could shut her door. She could rest. She could ask my father for help. Her letters are full of it, the lavish, loving descriptions of the latest thing that’s gone wrong with her body.
    My father was the one who played with us. Who wrestled, who sang goofy songs. Who read to us as we all jammed together on the couch in his study. Who took us to special events. But most of all it was he who was attentively, evenly, perhaps a little abstractedly too,
always the same.
He was safety.
    It was my father who was gone when these pictures were taken. And I think that is the source of the tension I see in my sister’s face and mine, of the caution and reserve we project while we freeze ourselves, while we sit still—so still now!—for the strange kind man taking the pictures, whoever he was; and for our father, waiting to see us in a distant country.
    I would guess, actually, that my mother was relatively happy during this period. There was no baby who pleased her more than my gentle-tempered, easy, fat little brother. During my father’s absence, she had found a house for sale in the neighborhood and it seemed we could afford it. Perhaps soon we could move out of the apartment where four children and two adults lived in five rooms. The letters written by her in this period are full of that: color schemes, curtains, who would be put where. And of course there was the pulling together of finances to make it happen: loans, mortgages, income from possible boarders. These were things that made her feel competent, things she enjoyed.

    But she had emerged from a deep depression only the year before, and though none of her children remembers that episode specifically, I think that for all of us its symptoms—the profound retreat from us into sorrow, the sound of weeping behind a closed door, the sudden tearful recoil from what seemed a harmless remark—these were already part of who she was for us, happy for the moment or no.
    The child I was then questioned none of this. My mother was who she was; my father was gone. But it seems strange to me now, almost unimaginable: my father left my mother for six months. He left a depressive woman of twenty-nine with four children under seven to take care of, one of them