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Sunday 12 October 2008

Farewell, my father: the sun sets on my horizon

Charles Glass pays tribute to the man who was his measure in all things, and whom he thought, like all sons, would be there forever

In an unexpected way, 15 years after I left California’s sunsets, Dad had occasion to take pride in his prodigal. He was in Los Angeles airport, he told me in London the next day, having a drink while waiting to board his aeroplane. Above the bar, a television news report announced that an American hostage in Beirut had escaped his captors and was on his way home. Everyone in the bar, Dad said, stood up and cheered. He did not tell them that the escapee who had somehow outfoxed the Shiite Muslim kidnappers was his son. When he told me about it, he was as proud as if I had scored a touchdown at the Rose Bowl. It compensated a little for the hell I had put him through that summer.

During our reunion after the kidnapping, he broke a lifetime’s restraint to hold me in his arms and kiss me. I was 36, he 66. The training his generation had received from their fathers suddenly deserted him: men shake hands, men remain stoic, men don’t cry. The only time I had ever heard him cry was over the telephone between Los Angeles and London, when he told me his younger brother, my gambling playboy Uncle Tommy, had died of cancer. Dad was merely passing on the news, until, as unexpectedly for him as for me, he broke down.

In my father’s house I recently found photographs of Dad and Tommy as children in prohibition-era Los Angeles. They dressed in suits like little men. Until now, no one had ever shown me these dozens of pictures — Dad as an infant on a tour of the Rocky Mountains, visiting relations in Chicago, playing on the farm in Oklahoma and posing in the wilds of barely populated southern California. There was his father, shooting ducks in the north of California. Suddenly I was seeing them all, younger than I had known them, my Aunts Rosemary and Eileen as coquettish little girls, my grandparents stolid and stable even in their twenties, the great aunts and uncles and long-dead cousins, the new Packard cars and three-piece suits, the ladies’ fox stoles and outlandish hats.

I looked at those relics, but it was too late to ask Dad about them. He lay at home in bed, where I held his hand. For the first few days of my return to see him, he promised to take me out and give me a big breakfast. I believed him. When he stopped talking, I still believed him. He was the sun on the Pacific horizon. He would be there forever. Then, he wasn’t.

I have never written anything before this that I did not send him to read. He was 87. I am 57. What is my measure now?

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