(~13 minute reading time)
My father’s tastes were slightly snobby, slightly empty, always an attempt at self-definition bound to fail in the end. But he was hardly the only person who finds solace in the doing and having of Stuff.
He liked sushi, Thai food, Northern Italian. His home after my parents’ divorce was overfilled with objects—books, souvenirs, tchotchkes, pieces of kitschy artwork. He was a shopaholic, a man of impulse. There was always something new and without specific cultural context mounted on his walls or crowding his tabletops: an “authentic” stain-marred Amish quilt purchased for $700; a full-sized reproduction of the Frederick Remington statue with four cowboys riding off on their horses, guns aloft and shooting into the air; a coffee-table book of Toulouse-Lautrec images.
He was the guy who bought the Nordic Trak after the pretty saleswoman told him, You’re a natural at this!
His shallow consumerism rankled me. I once questioned why he was always getting new items for his already crowded house. He balked as if the answer was obvious. Sandhya, these are your heirlooms!
For a million reasons I did not really respect or trust my father but still I’d go visit him from time to time. I was half-estranged but couldn’t commit. It was almost a compulsion to see him if only to be ornery in his presence. But at least he liked good restaurants, and he let me have some beer or wine with dinner while he ordered a scotch on the rocks. Afterward, he would say, Fun, right? That was fun. Wasn’t that fun?
My father briefly dated a pretty bleached-blonde nurse who was, he made a point of telling us, a very strict Catholic, her recent divorce notwithstanding. He mentioned this strict Catholicism more than once, apropos of nothing. He was trying to say they weren’t having sex. The one time I met her, she sat across from my sister and me smiling primly. She had thin lips, high cheeks, a pert nose. You could not really see the color of her eyes but you could see her thick, dark mascara’d lashes like tarantula limbs. She barely spoke.
A few months later, after she had dumped my father, he told my sister the whole story. This woman was not quite as devout as advertised. For years she had been having an affair with a married man, with whom she could not be seen in public. Dad had been her unwitting beard.
I was so blind! She was just so damn beautiful!
I laughed and cringed behind his back. I was not mature enough to shed a moment’s sympathy for my beleaguered father. His romantic foibles only reinforced my low opinion of him.
At the same time, was there not some hidden inkling of an opposite and paradoxical belief? There was something strangely cool about the fact that my father could be involved in such a silly, sordid soap opera with a beautiful woman, just like any other grown American man. It added to his veneer of worldliness. The Broadway tickets. The on-trend sports jackets. The custom-built house, the luxury car. The insistence on private schools for his daughters. Without my father’s influence, my life might have been more like my Harrisburg cousins’ lives: churchy, hickish, second-rate.
He was the dreamer. I got this from him. I inherited a lot of unnecessary emotional heirlooms but also his aspiration.
One of his favorite songs was “The Impossible Dream” from The Man of La Mancha. When I was very young he would play it on his reel-to-reel stereo in his den. He’d sing along. His deep voice was a comfort.
I too loved that song for its boldness. It told of lunatic heroic quests mounted against foolish odds. I knew it from the original Broadway cast version. Listening to it on YouTube again now, I think Jack Jones’ crooning rendition is too sweet and smooth. Jones was handsome, charming, classy, the son of Hollywood actors, following the family business. I have trouble believing him. He wears the lyrics too lightly. He does not convey the desperation behind the bravado.
But I also have keen memories of the episode of GOMER PYLE: USMC when Jim Nabors came out on stage, lost all his twangy Southern goofiness, and opened his mouth broadly to let the soaring baritone angel swoop upward. Spotlit, dress-blues soldier of unbridled optimism. Gomer Pyle—Jim Nabors, that is—is a good enough comic actor. He’s got his character down pat, the stiff walk, the raised eyebrows, the goggling eyeballs. He is a tentative, insecure hick, a rube, a country bumpkin. He shuffles onto the stage, looks out at the assembled crowd, seems like he might faint.
But then he starts to sing and it’s just impossible for him, Jim Nabors, to stay entirely in character. His voice is his voice. It is a roaring river of gorgeous baritone momentum. Gomer Pyle evaporates. He escapes himself, as if in a dream. You might say he comes out. The slight curl in Jim Nabor’s upper lip is all that remains of the goofball character. He sings the poetry, the challenge after challenge. The orchestra behind him plays with martial bearing. The bolero rhythm pushes ever forward and Jim Nabors’ gargantuan range fills the air. No insecurity or hesitation is left. He navigates a first key-change upward, then a second, then absurdly a third. His long-held notes, one after another, phrase upon phrase, are pitch-perfect and beautifully rounded. It’s bombastic, ridiculous, and moving as hell.
I dare you to go to watch this clip and not find yourself tearing up. It is a tsunami-strength wave, what this man could do with the air he exhaled.
Jim Nabors lived to be an elderly gentleman and died in late 2017. Having publicly come out of the closet a few years earlier, he lived with his husband in Florida and had fully retired from acting and singing. But one can surmise, from his whole hidden-yet-public life, that he knew first-hand what it meant to bear with unbearable sorrow and run where the brave dare not go.
During one of my semi-reluctant visits to my father during my twenties, he had asked me, How do you write a novel? He posed this question in the casual, curious way someone might ask How do you fix a cracked bathroom tile? or How do you cook paella? He told me he was thinking about writing a book about his childhood.
I thought: Well if I had an answer to that question, I would have finished a couple of bestsellers by now.
Swallowing my surprise and resentment—at that point I was a wannabe novelist myself, struggling to separate the artistry of storytelling from the dire emotional need to Say Important Things—I gave my father some bits of advice. Start a journal, write down your memories, just to get in the habit and practice of putting words to paper.
He told me then that when he had to give speeches at the hospital, he would wait until the last minute and then write down something very quickly, and everyone would praise him and assume it was a piece he had spent hours crafting. He revealed this the way a young child, full of wonder at his own newly discovered abilities, might tell his parents.
In the end, I don’t think he ever wrote a word, just as he never took up the guitar, learned to cook for himself, enrolled in a community college class after his retirement, or pursued any of the other ambitions he’d occasionally float. I wonder sometimes if he lived his entire life in the same state of suspended ambition, that same sublimated self-hatred that I experienced while walking around the Livingston Mall on a day in 1983, 17 years old, about to enter the first co-ed class at Columbia College, yet still believing against all objective evidence that I did not qualify for a job at Spencer Gifts.
Once, in one of his favorite Italian restaurants in New Jersey, my father asked me about my life plans. I was maybe 23 or 24, working as a paralegal in a big midtown practice, taking occasional creative writing classes at the New School or the Y. I suspected I was built for something better and bigger but did not know what. I half-heartedly mentioned the possibility of a Ph.D. program, although I hadn’t settled on a subject. I giggled a little as I spoke. Maybe even shrugged. I was an overeducated, unworldly young person who felt out of place everywhere I went. What a pleasure it might be to escape back into academia. Even if I felt no great vocation for scholarship or teaching, it seemed like a sensible next step for someone in search of truth and beauty with a capital T, B. I yearned to be given a license to sit around and think big thoughts. (Eventually, my academic friends would disabuse me of all this romance, but for the moment I believed it.)
My father pointed his butter knife toward me as he spoke. It was a strangely resolute gesture from a man normally so wishy-washy.
The thing is, Sandhya, I am not sure you have the right temperament for academia. I don’t think you would do well in that environment. You’re very close-minded. Not open-minded like you need to be. You’re too opinionated and judgmental and rigid! I don’t think it would be the right place for you.
I straightened my back against the booth and stared out into the middle of the dining room. If there had been any substantive thoughts in my head, they evaporated completely. I just looked out into the room, feeling as if someone had taken a frying pan to my face. People were having their pleasant conversations over their pleasant dinners, pleasantly. Tears started sluicing out of my eyes. The wet contents of my nose went running. It was instant, an anaphylactic crisis.
Don’t cry now. I’m telling you this for your own good!
Pointing his butter knife at me emphatically.
Sandhya, stop that now. You have to stop being so sensitive. I am just trying to help you.
Now I was openly weeping. I’m sure other diners had turned around to look at me but the room shut down around my eyes. I got up and somehow made my way into the bathroom. I don’t remember how long I stayed, or what my father said when I returned, or whether we ever talked about it again. I think the answer is, we did not. I think he paid the check and we left in silence.
I called Ruth to talk about this—looking as always for comfort, for an ally, for someone who could understand—and her theory seemed reasonable: that when Dad called me opinionated and judgmental, he was actually saying Stop judging me.
From that one day at home years earlier when he’d first confessed his infidelities to me, through those unpleasant years pretending to care about the women who came after my mothers, I had never really let my father off the hook for his betrayal and dishonesty. I stuck around, I spent time with him when I felt I ought to, but I thought very little of him, his girlfriends, his empty consumerism, his irresponsibility as a father, and his inability to protect me from anything, first from the wrath and instability of my mother, later from the similar ways his first girlfriend treated me.
And yet I was still there, letting him buy me dinner, trying to maintain a relationship of some sort. I did not have the vision to flee, to run away, to make myself wholly independent, to escape. I stayed and behaved churlishly. I stayed and wished for my anger and hurt to be acknowledged. I wanted my father to think clearly and specifically about how his actions had affected me. Maybe even to apologize. It was an impossible dream.
In my father’s last decade, his life was saved by the medical establishment more times than I can count. He had a stroke, he had quadruple bypass surgery. His memory failed, then failed some more. He spent his time watching cable news and being cared for by his second wife, Regina, a highly sociable Filipino woman and retired nurse about ten years his junior, who once had a different, more lively vision of her golden years but now seemed resigned. Regina was yet another nurse, a helpmeet by nature and training. She served as the logistical, emotional, and social glue for a man who’d spent his entire life being willfully incompetent in those areas. They moved to North Carolina to be near Regina’s physician daughter and surgeon son-in-law—surrogate children with whom he could shoptalk.
For years he voted Republican. He would often say, without any self-awareness or irony, that liberals had no moral values. He was really pissed at Clinton for…wait for it…infidelities. My father who had not been faithful to my mother from the first year of their marriage.
But in 2008 he suddenly flipped, became a rabid Obama fan. Shortly after the election, I happened to bring a friend with me to his house for dinner, a black woman originally from Haiti. Myriam tried telling my father that some of the elderly African-American men she knew were highly suspicious, highly skeptical. Obama was no savior to them. Their lives would become no easier because he’d been elected—in fact they might even become harder if it inspired racists to come out of the woodwork. This would, of course, turn out to be prescient.
But my father was having none of it. He wagged a scolding patriarchal finger at Maria from across the room, shutting her down. His optimism at seeing a brown-skinned man like himself earn the American Presidency was not to be contradicted.
My father died almost one year to the day after the election of Donald Trump. We never spoke about it but I would have to guess he was appalled. Dad, the snob, had a thing about boorish people. With a beast like Trump in high office, my father had probably given up on the world already.
My mother once told me that Dad had been bullied by his own father in a bizarrely Oedipal manner. My grandfather would stomp through the house in Madurai telling his almost-grown son You think you’re good-looking? You think you’re the best-looking man in the house? Ha. I’m the best-looking man here. ME. Don’t forget that. Allegedly my grandfather favored his elder child, my Evelyn Auntie, coddling her like a wonderful doll—this petite fine-boned beauty who later married another self-righteous bully, bore three children (the aforementioned Harrisburg churchy cousins), and turned herself into a three-hundred-pound lump.
It was difficult to make sense of these tidbits. They were almost the only things I knew about my father, and they’d come second-hand from an unreliable narrator. But even if my mother’s rendition was only partially true, it was baffling. Indian culture was so enamored of sons, so dismissive of daughters, often murderously so. How had things gone so topsy-turvy among the Asirvathams? What kind of contrarian script had this bully/coddler, my narcissist grandfather, been made to memorize without even knowing it? And what about his father before him, and his father’s father?
The regression is infinite. The possibility for anger and blame never ceases. At some point it becomes its inverse and you realize that if everybody in your lineage is to be faulted for passing down the pain they experienced in childhood, maybe you should just give up and forgive everyone en masse, perform some kind of Moonie-style ceremony in a stadium full of your ancestors’ ghosts.
That night in the Italian restaurant, my father was bullshitting. I did not know a single person who’d gone into graduate studies who was not a born arguer, a professional haver-of-strong-opinions. And he did not know a single academic except for a few teaching physicians. This thing about my close-mindedness was also just a lie. Yes, I could be stubborn on the outside, but inside I was thoroughly undecided and ambivalent about nearly everything.
I dream of a different father, a different me, a different dinner. A night in an Italian restaurant. My excitement and enthusiasm for some new life plan I’ve just concocted. Maybe in a month I’ll have revised it or ditched it entirely for something else, but who cares, I’m still young, I’ll figure it out. I share my hopeful vision with my father, and he rises up out of himself and stands tall, like Don Quixote atop his mount with a spear in one hand and a shield in the other. He looks me right in the eye and says:
YES!
You are my amazing, brilliant, willful daughter!
You are talented, impassioned, and full of righteous rage!
Whatever you want to do, whatever you put your mind to, you will succeed, I have no doubt!
Go get that doctoral degree! But don’t stop there. Be everything! Do everything! See everything!
I believe in you!