My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (4 page)

tensify its effects, and a mood stabilizer to prevent sudden outbursts of anger.

I am, however, unprepared for the emotion in my father’s voice when he finally answers the phone. “It’s been two days since we’ve heard from you. I was terribly worried. I thought something had happened to you.” In a hurry, but wanting to acknowledge his concern, I remind him that my days in the field are very busy and that I am on my way to see him now. He is immediately relieved, and there is nothing more for me to say. Later that night I will play back two messages on my home answering machine and two more on my office voice mail. All are in the same plaintive, raspy, hardly audible voice,

“Jonathan, this is your father. Where are you? I’m worried.”

Despite these words of concern, when I settle into my seat for the brief ride to the city, I am apprehensive about my visit. I wonder if the sudden attacks, which have greeted me throughout the preceding year, are over. Will there really be no battles over money or arguments about the qualifications of his health aides? I am not yet trusting of the new drugs, although there have been other indications of their positive effects. Just this Saturday my father called early in the morning to say that he had been awake all night deciding to give up his obsessive attempts to redeem some very old and very worthless insurance policies. He did not admit that his calculations have been wrong or that the company’s are right. What he did say is that the policies are not worth fighting about and that he would be happier doing other things.

I didn’t want to say anything to give him second thoughts. I told him it was a good decision because it’s too exhausting to fight all the time.

When I asked him why he was ending a four-month battle that has consumed his every waking hour, he said that sooner or later, “the family” will get the money. I have learned enough in these years not to contradict him by insisting on the truth.

The real test of the medications came the same afternoon, when my father called again to ask why I hadn’t sold the insurance policy, as he had directed me to do. I summoned up my best early childhood 16 n jonathan g. silin

education skills, walked him through our earlier conversation, and patiently waited for his acknowledgment at the end of each statement. “Remember when you called this morning?”

“Yes.”

“And you said you had been up all night thinking about the insurance policies?”

“Yes.”

“And you said that you were tired of fighting with everyone about them?”

“Yes.”

“And you said we would get the money in the end?”

“Yes.” Finally he seemed to remember the first decision and to be reassured that it was the correct one. I was unnerved by this need for a step-by-step rehearsal, glad to have found the right strategy this time, and concerned about my ability to find the appropriate tone on future occasions.

Calm and composed, my parents seem genuinely glad to see me when I arrive at their apartment. After a few minutes of family news and recent doctor reports, I find myself listening as my father describes his daily schedule. I don’t know how this recitation begins and why it is taking place, but I try to follow it with interest. Then suddenly, without any warning, somewhere in midmorning after the opening routines of the day and the regular phone conversation with my brother in Taipei, my father hits a brick wall. He bursts into inconsolable tears, overcome, as he soon admits, by what he sees as the emptiness of his life. Wanting to comfort him but also to understand what is happening, I wonder out loud why he has become upset at this particular moment. “It’s only when I describe my life to you that it seems so bare.

Only then do I remember what I once was, only then do I feel despair at what I have become.” Suddenly, I am the mirror, the person who forces him to look at his life, and the one who is blamed for what he sees.

My father goes on to inventory the two things that make his life m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 17

bearable, that provide some reason for going forward—my mother’s presence and my brother’s phone calls. I am thrilled that he names my mother first, and he even turns to look at her as he speaks. Over the last two years he has found continuous fault with her efforts to care for him. The sweater she offers him is too light or too heavy, the water she brings to soothe his radiation-scarred throat is inevitably too warm or too cold, and her attempts to reach the doctor, too frequent or not frequent enough, seem only to occur at the wrong time of day. Harsh and overbearing, he sees her as the cause of his suffering. If she were dead, he has said, he would not feel obligated to go on living. But for the moment, my mother beams with his approval.

I am also pleased that my father receives such satisfaction from his conversations with my brother about investment strategies. He even manages a smile through his tears when he concedes that my brother is getting pretty good at the stock market. Here he permits himself a moment of real pride even as he declares the work unfinished, thus certifying his ongoing importance as paternal mentor.

Now, as the tone is less somber, I take the ultimate plunge into the icy waters of self-affirmation. “And what about me?” I ask.

“You . . . ” my father stumbles, embarrassed, caught by my directness. “You I don’t talk to that much.” I am momentarily silenced by this willful lapse of memory.

“Come on,” I cajole, “I can’t always answer your calls immediately, but we do speak at least once or twice a day.” I don’t mention the hours of calls I make each week to insure that the health aides are always present, that the doctors are speaking to each other, and that the needs of the accountant, banker, and lawyer are satisfied. In short, I defend myself without feeling at all defensive.

Curious and interested in my father’s feelings but experiencing neither anger nor offense, I am not drawn into the emotional maelstrom he creates as he continues to weep. I am baffled by the sudden-ness with which the storm has hit. Then, the words welling up from deep inside him, a new wave breaks as I hear my father say, “I feel so terrible about the way I have treated you. The way I have fought with 18 n jonathan g. silin

you all the time.” I am taken aback and wonder if it was my own question that elicited this admission. But just as I felt no anger at my absence from his earlier thoughts, I feel no vindication in my new presence. Mostly, I am sad for him and worried for myself, fearing that he won’t be able to regain control of his emotions. When I point out that conflict has been part of our history but that over the last month we haven’t had any disagreements, my father cuts to the heart of the matter. “Yes, I know all that. But I guess it’s my subconscious that is troubling me. I have been so unfair to you.”

Now I understand his earlier concerns for my whereabouts in a new way, as an indicator of his own deep turmoil. While his subconscious is bubbling to the surface, it is being filtered through the screen of a demanding superego that will not let his bad behavior go unpun-ished. But once these admissions of guilt are in place, no actual apol-ogy offered, the therapeutic power of self-expression begins to take over and slowly my father recovers his equanimity. His turbulent emotions are momentarily at rest.

As I prepare to leave, my mother says sotto voce, “I have never seen your father upset like that before.” When I remind her of the Oc-tober incident when he railed against my lack of respect and his loss of control over his affairs, she cannot recall it. When I note that he does not name me among the things that make his daily life worth living, she says that I have misheard him. My mother only recognizes his admission of wrongdoing and hopes that it will erase all traces of prior conflict. She desperately wants me to feel loved and that in return I will continue to love my father despite his thankless behavior. She speaks as his advocate and out of her own self-interest, for she fears that I may abandon them if I feel abandoned by them.

And what are my own interests in these encounters? I am learning not to get on the emotional roller coaster ride that used to make me sick from the sudden heights and death-defying plunges my father engineered. Watching from the ground, I preserve my own mental health. I am a better caregiver, more energetic and clearly focused. At the same time I worry that when I sit out the rides, coolly professional m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 19

and in control, I have indeed abandoned him in some way, no longer taking his worries seriously. And despite my best efforts to separate and distance myself, can I ever be impermeable to the emotional as-saults visited upon me by my parents?

My struggles to become a responsive and caring child to my elderly parents often bring me back to the urban classrooms I visit during the day. I think about the many teachers I have observed who spend much of their time seeking to control their students through a combination of angry outbursts and displays of genuine affection. Larger-than-life maternal figures, they pride themselves on their ability to change the daily schedule on a dime in order to respond to the children’s interests. Good cop and bad cop rolled into one, these are charismatic women who appear to teach through the force of personality rather than structuring routines, designing physical space, and developing a curriculum that supports student autonomy.

I think too about the constant surveillance that children are subjected to—not dissimilar to the paternalistic supervision teachers receive from administrators and the school district itself experiences from the state—and of the round-the-clock health aides who stand guard over my parents. Unlike the children, however, my parents are able to articulate their feeling of being held prisoner in their own home. They are indignant when I question plans that will leave them alone for several hours on the day when a health aide must be late for work or that will send my mother to the eye doctor appointment on her own. Don’t I think they can manage without her? How hard is it to get a taxi?

In a frequently referenced book,
Discipline and Punish,
Michel Foucault describes the introduction of the Panopticon, a tower that enables a single guard to survey all prison inmates at once, as emblematic of the intensification of technologies of social control in the nineteenth century. I prefer to reflect on the following scene, which I witnessed at the Jefferson Avenue School, for insight about our continuing obsession with controlling the bodies of young children.

20 n jonathan g. silin

Erica, a young and enthusiastic kindergarten teacher, wants to implement a more progressive curriculum but knows that she will be judged by the year-end test scores of her five-year-olds. The first hour of the day is devoted to a review of the schedule, calendar, weather chart, and morning message that is designed to reinforce basic reading and math skills. Erica takes the children through these exercises with the exaggerated zest of a cheerleader. Unfortunately, the routine is as exhausting as it is exhaustive. At 9:50 the squirming group is lined up, the boys on one side of the door and the girls on the other.

Quieting the children with an organizing song, Erica prepares to lead them down the cavernous hallway, lined with gigantic silver radiators and musty pink walls, to the main lobby and school bathrooms. During past visits, I have stayed behind in order to catch up on my note taking. My impulse to follow the group this time does not go unno-ticed by Hector. “You coming with us, Jonathan?” he asks. I answer in the affirmative but hope that he doesn’t probe further. After all, my usual refrain, “I like to see what you are doing and how you learn in school,” just doesn’t seem appropriate to this activity.

Arriving at our destination as another group is about to leave, Erica props open the heavy wooden doors to the bathrooms and sta-tions herself between them. As the children are called two at a time to enter, she hands each one several pieces of toilet paper from the roll she has brought from the classroom. After everyone has had a turn—

no one demurs, though the waiting children are restless, fidgeting with each other’s hair and clothing—the next group can be seen entering the lobby.

As we return to the classroom, I suddenly recall a similar ritual, one that I have only read about but that resonates with my own gay history. In
A Restricted Country,
Joan Nestle describes the all-important bathroom lines in Mafia-owned lesbian bars of the 1950s.

Here the door monitor allowed only one person in at a time for fear that salacious interactions might occur if two women entered together. The line, emblematic of the policing of lesbian desire, is also a site for cruising, joking, bantering with the door monitor, and ultim y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 21

mately for resistance. The lines of children I observe are not so very different. They are about containing the bodies of those who are assumed to be potentially out of control, about supervising basic functions, and insuring that peer interaction is always open to surveillance.

My experiences as a gay man growing up and coming out before the Stonewall Riots, the woman who lived restricted and judged on the bathroom line, and the children who live regimented lives in institutions, all attest to the way that vulnerable populations in our culture are closely watched even as they engage in small moments of resistance. Little wonder, then, that I bring particular sensitivities to the complaints of my middle-class parents about the new forms of surveillance they are subject to in their declining years. Indeed, it was in the tiled bathroom designed for younger, more able-bodied people that my father had a serious fall in 2000, despite the fact that his health aide was with him. She turned her back for only a moment to reach for his eye drops and he collapsed. The broken hip was either the result or the cause of the fall. No one knows for sure, or really cares. The surveillance is always imperfect, something every good teacher acknowledges, something every good health aide fears.

The best of the educators that I observe, like the best of the health aides, teach me that care is often delivered through thoughtful reserve and a balanced respect for the emotional needs and physical safety of those who depend upon them.