My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (14 page)

continues. I can hear my father calling my name. My aunt, thinking I haven’t heard his cries, comes to get me. Still overwhelmed and unable to stand, I tell her that I will return as quickly as I can. But it is ten minutes before I am composed enough to take my father’s hand and reassure him that in fact the operation is a success and that he will have his sight back the following day. Once he is quieted, he reassures me that he is not in pain. We both marvel at his report of being able to overhear the doctor’s talking during the operation and to feel the pressure of their tools resting on his chest as they proceeded with the delicate procedure. By the time he is ready to doze off, I am exhausted too.

I leave with my father’s cries ringing in my ears. I am ashamed by my inability to respond. Since my father does not have tubes leading to and from his body, I know it is the emotion of the moment, not the sight of medical paraphernalia that has caused me to black out. But what is the emotion of the moment? Am I frightened for him or for myself? It feels like I absorb my father’s cries directly into my body. I am defenseless against his panic, at the same time as I am named as its cause—“I told you I shouldn’t have the operation. I knew it was too risky. Why did I listen to you?” Sucked into the maelstrom of his emotions, I am unable to swim to the shore of rationality or to throw him the flimsiest buoy of reassuring words to which he might cling. My father feels himself to be the helpless victim and has tried to make me one too.

I wondered then, and continue to wonder now, why it was me and not my mother who he called, who he blamed, and who he ultimately trusted to tell him the truth.

My father’s feelings of betrayal are justified. Not because I used his name in my articles on gay politics or because I recommended the operation he thought had failed, but because I am claiming new powers as he has difficulties retaining old ones. And above all, because I will live and he will soon die. Asserting my difference at the exact moment when he needs me to be the same, to protect him from the on-86 n jonathan g. silin

slaught of old age, my father lashes out with a fundamental emotional truth. Betrayal is at the heart of our relationship. I have abandoned him, refusing the identification that he thinks would ensure his future.

In fact, I left my parents’ house long ago, during my early twenties, when I realized that my survival depended on constructing a life far away from the emotional morass in which they lived and through which they tried to control their children. Although I know this rejection was a source of deep pain for them, I have no regrets. Now that I have been drawn me back into their world, the conflicts that were packed away in old cedar chests, the resentments left hanging in upstairs closets, the ambivalence buried in basement storage bins are revisited. The demands of the present don’t leave much time for such musings, and I am suspicious of nostalgia anyway. I move forward by generating fresh texts and by giving life to new stories. It’s a confusing enterprise, however, for the process of separation is occurring at the same time as moments of the closest physical connection—when a dry mouth must be swabbed with a glycerin stick, a feeding tube filled with sustenance, a soiled diaper changed. Even as I write to differen-tiate myself, to leave them behind, I assure my continuing connection. After all, they have become both the subject matter without which I cannot work and from which I hope to free myself.

Yet at times I can’t help but agree with Nancy K. Miller who, in
Bequest and Betrayal,
describes her own effort to write about her father as the ultimate act of bad faith. In the Jewish tradition we are commanded to bear witness and to remember. At the very same time, however, we are asked to honor the biblical injunction not to look upon our father’s naked body, to respect his privacy. We are caught between contradictory demands. Writing the details of his life offers revenge for the wounds that he has inflicted, continues to inflict. In answer to the exposure that his death threatens, I make him vulnerable in my texts. He is needy, childlike, out of control. He is ego-centric, thankless, and without remorse. I write suspended between m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 87

anger, with its risk of mandatory repetition, and compassion, with its potential for idealization.

I lie to my parents when they ask about my work. My gerontolo-gist friend would call it a therapeutic lie. I tell them that I am writing about childhood. “Is it about, you know, that homosexual stuff?” my father probes. He still can’t use the word “gay,” and when he says “homosexual,” it sounds remote and forced. Hearing that he is detached but not disdainful, I take a deep breath and venture a little closer to the truth. “Well, dad, you know that I am writing about my own childhood, and so it’s got to include some gay stuff. Everything I write has something in it about being gay.” Tempted to go further, the gay stuff no longer the stumbling block, I wait silently for more questions, but none come. Like the good sex educator, I try to give enough information to satisfy his curiosity but not more than is actually being requested. Mine is a sin of omission.

At home again, I seek reassurance. On the shelf just above my desk, I find the purple-jacketed hardcover edition of Ruth Behar’s
The Vulnerable Observer
. Recommended two years previously by a close colleague, it has retained a place of primacy on top of my all-important stack of recently read books. A committed feminist and anthropologist, Behar intertwines her own stories—the death of her grandparents—with those of the people she studies—the mourning rituals of a village in southern Spain. She unashamedly writes to make sense of her own life as much as to understand larger social phenom-ena. I am deeply moved by her work. She encourages me as I struggle to write about my parents and childhood, my life, and the schools that I visit regularly.

It is a young student who, noticing a connection between Behar’s work and my own, refers me to an essay that at this moment confirms my decision not to talk further with my parents. Here Behar reveals the bitter enmity she endured from her father upon the publication of her first book,
Translated Woman
. None of her insights into the complex ways that personal and professional stories intersect make any 88 n jonathan g. silin

difference to her parents. Like my own father twenty years ago, her father rails against the way she dishonors
his
name. Unlike my father’s complaints, his are specific. She has written that that he is ashamed of his own father, a poor peddler in Cuba. She has described how he vindictively destroyed the letters she wrote him while away at college.

She airs the family’s dirty linen in public as a way to get back at him, spiteful revenge. Her mother, whom Behar has taken the liberty of referring to as a typist rather than using her full title of Diploma Aide, comes to the point, “Mira, I’m going to tell you something, Ru-tie . . . ‘La mierda no se revuelve, porque apesta. Don’t stir up the shit, because it will stink.’ ” Unable to resolve the difficulties with her parents, relations remain strained. Behar decides not to share her writing or the nature of her professional life with them in the future.

Why do we write? Who do we imagine will read the text? How do we know that we have represented others responsibly? I worked in the school-reform project for three years before writing anything other than the official documents required of our formal evaluation. I fulfilled my professional responsibilities while remaining at a distance, my feelings kept closely under wraps. I told myself that many others had already described the urban decay, social dislocation, and racism I was witnessing. What could I say that hadn’t been said before? If Jean Anyon’s carefully documented history of school corruption, Jonathan Kozol’s biting description of the savage inequalities in American education, and Valerie Polakow’s heartrending ethnogra-phy of children growing up in the Other America hadn’t brought about change, why would my writing be any more effective?

Eventually I began to suspect, however, that the emotional detachment with which I went about my work, the much-vaunted stance of scientific objectivity that I assumed, and my reluctance to tell our project’s story were not so much a tribute to what others had already seen and written as a defensive maneuver against what I was feeling. I simply wasn’t strong enough to become a vulnerable observer in poor urban schools. Behar argues that such personal vulnerability is required to successfully enter another culture, to become m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 89

aware of how our own histories are reflected in what we see and what we don’t see, what we choose to report as “data” and what we choose to call irrelevant, “beyond the limits of this study.” By going beyond the limits of traditional studies, we seek to engage the adult reader in the way Proust reminds us that young people can be engaged in an absorbing work of fiction. But for social scientists the pleasures of the text alone will not suffice. So we risk the personal and the confes-sional to highlight the social and the political in the hope of moving others to action.

In contrast, from the first days of my mother’s hospitalization, I did not hesitate to record my thoughts and feelings. I scribbled notes on the late-night bus home from New York City and early in the morning before beginning work. Although, once these notes began to accumulate and my file folders to expand, I had paralyzing reservations about how to organize them into a larger narrative. I did not see my parents’ story as unique. Nightly conversations with friends were now filled with diatribes about the refusal of parents to accept help from adult children, the complexity of their care, and guilt about our inability to do enough. Despite the fact that I could not imagine an audience interested in such concerns, I continued to write.

Sometimes I felt myself drowning in the vast sea of my parents’

practical and emotional needs. Although I knew I would be a better caregiver with a stronger defense mechanism in place, I could not find a more distanced perspective from which to view their situation. At the same time, I wondered how my work as an educational researcher might change if my emotions were less tied up in the knot of my parents’ final years. I don’t believe we have some finite amount of emotional energy or that my experiences with poor, minority children and my white, middle-class family are equivalent. Their very real discomforts aside, my parents are receiving the best care possible in the setting of their choice, the apartment they have lived in for forty years.

The wrath of my father is the wrath of a man who remains ambitious for himself and for his children, not the wrath of a man who has directly suffered social injustice.

90 n jonathan g. silin

In the schools I visit there are too many children whose basic health and educational needs aren’t being met and too many teachers who have little or no control over their professional lives. The contexts that I move between and the potential remedies to ameliorate the problems I observe couldn’t be more different. In one I am the ultimate outsider—a white, Jewish, highly educated male, part of an effort to change poor/working-class elementary schools populated by African American and Latino children. In the other I am the ultimate insider, the son who bears responsibility for his aging parents. Nevertheless, I have become curious about the ways that these disparate experiences live within me.

Each is a story of loss, and as Ruth Behar suggests, we can only write them with “an awareness of how excruciating are the paradoxes of attachment and displacement.” I grieve for the lives that my parents have lived, for my own childhood, and for the belief in immor-tality that will ultimately be pierced by their death. At the same time, I grieve for the lives that many children in poor urban schools won’t live, for the missed opportunities to teach meaningful lessons about education, social change, and personal efficacy, and for the coherent communities that once existed in the today’s fragmented neighborhoods. Both projects demand that I bear witness to the suffering of others and that I be absolutely pitiless with myself.

I try not to give in to hopelessness. I resist the rescue fantasy that seduces me into believing that I can prevent my parents from further pain, even death, and that the educational reforms we propose will change the life prospects of the children in our project’s classrooms. I replace the lure of rescue with the reality of living alongside another.

And I struggle to make sense of what is happening within me and those I write about, between my life as caregiver and my life as researcher. For I have come to believe that it is in these awkward spaces and unexpected relationships that I may just find a story that hasn’t been told before.

6

Unspoken Subjects

Once
home
was a far away place, I had never been to but knew well out of my mother’s mouth.

She breathed exuded hummed the fruit smell

of Noel’s Hill morning fresh and noon hot, and I spun visions of sapadilla and mango as a net over my Harlem tenement cot in the snoring

darkness rank with nightmare sweat.

au d r e l o r d e ,
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
When I was growing up, my parents did not speak longingly of another time and place. There was no mythology to master and little poetry to imbibe. As Jews of Eastern European descent, we were heirs to a tradition that more often reminded me of dark, cramped shtetl rooms with hard wooden benches for Talmudic study than lush, sun-filled days in tropical settings. We lived in a permanent Diaspora, yet I never really believed myself to be in exile or that my parents wished to be elsewhere. Of course there was always the ritual singing at the close of the Passover Seder—“Next year in Jerusalem!”—signaling that our true home was only to be found in Israel. My primary sense of connection was to an overbearing intellectual heritage, peppered on 91

92 n jonathan g. silin

occasion with the domestic humor of
Yidishkayt
, not to a rich spiritual life or one that promised sensuous pleasures of the body.

I will never know if the fact that my grandmothers were sisters had anything to do with it. But they both married men who were serious scholars, active in the Jewish community, and successful in the “dry goods” business. They personified a certain time period, a wave of Jewish immigrants who placed an exceedingly high value on learning for themselves and for their children. I can’t imagine that my grandparents were disappointed in the large number of Ivy League diplomas and advanced degrees amassed by their offspring during the 1920s and 1930s, who in turn sustained similar ideas about the value of education.