Sidewalks Literary Journal, 3/99

Seven years ago, my father sat silently across from me, his mouth set in a straight line, sunglasses shielding his eyes. Around us, people talked and laughed and clinked their glasses, waiters rushed past carrying trays above their heads, busboys cleared tables with blurred hands, and the wooden floor beneath my feet vibrated with their comings and goings, quick-paced and steady. Amidst this commotion, I was also silent. Awkward in my silk blouse and smart slacks, I confronted my father as an adult for what felt like the first time: at 22, I was conscious of the silence that stood between us. 

We did not meet often. He and my mother divorced when I was 11, and since then, I’d seen him only a couple of times a year. My father never spoke of my mother after the divorce — refused to even mention her name — and he never spoke of any incident that took place during their 12 years of marriage. An edge came to our conversation, a wall of before and after, forged by his silence. As a young girl, I unknowingly peered over this wall, mentioning our dog at home, or the magnolia tree in our backyard. My father’s face would harden, he’d avert his eyes, and the silence in the room became tangible, hard and cold as stone. My mother and the past obviously bothered him, and I soon stopped talking altogether. He wanted silence; I gave it to him. 

As we faced each other in the restaurant, my mind swam with reassurances: You’re an adult. You can make conversation. You should be able to talk to your own father. But I wrung my hands under the table like a school girl about to take a spelling test. Returning to familiar ground, I finally blurted out: Have you read any good books lately? My father said he had — a novel, which he began to describe.

While he talked, I looked closely at him. His skin hung from his face, gray and shriveled like an old dishrag. Was he ill? Maybe on medication? He had one bout with cancer already, and that was six or seven years ago. And why the sunglasses? Eyeless, his skin gray-white, he reminded me of a bust on a piano: faced forward, but unable to see. His black lenses didn’t reflect him; they reflected me: a young woman with dark hair, almond-eyed and sitting very still, her eyes moving left to right, right to left, from one lens to the other, searching. A terrible feeling of dread worked its way up my throat. In my father’s cold, hard expression, I saw unhappiness, deep-seated and complete; I saw frustration and old age; I saw a man without a future.

Our food came. I ordered salmon that was not very good, but dug in anyway, so I could keep my eyes on my plate and would not have to make conversation. My father told me that he parked on such-and-such street near his office. I hardly listened to him. He took a shortcut through a lobby of another building, and in this lobby, on the wall, there was a painting, a painting “of a woman who looks like your mother.” I jumped as if he screamed the words. Did he really just say “your mother?” Slowly, his face came into focus. I searched it once more, but his grim demeanor repelled me: the bruise-colored splotches on his skin, his pursed lips almost white, his jaw set hard. He’d broken a ten year silence, but looked as if he’d said nothing at all. I wanted to say something, anything — at last, he spoke of my mother! — but could not find the words. I looked down at my plate, also as if he said nothing.

Neither of us spoke for several minutes, the noise of the restaurant protective. My father commented on his meal and the subject of the painting was dropped. Within 40 minutes, lunch was over, and I never spoke of the incident to anyone. No doubt neither did he.

A year later, my father died of cancer. I remember him slumped in his shabby-brown armchair, his face pasty yellow with jaundice, his eyes crinkled and downcast. 

It was sudden, the doctor said. 

He worked until a week before he died, my stepmother said. 

He had no idea he was ill, my sister said. 

The voices reassure, but do not convince, a poultice that doesn’t stick, doesn’t heal. I’m pulled back to that restaurant, to my father’s haggard, eyeless face, to his words, “…painting of a woman who looks like your mother.”

You’re wrong, I want to tell them. He knew he was dying. He broke his silence. And I couldn’t find the words.

Six years after my father’s death, and my mind still buzzes with questions about the painting. Is the woman young? Is she smiling? Would I see my mother in her? My father took the secret of the painting’s whereabouts with him; since I only half-listened to his story, I can never find it and see it for myself. And I had an entire year to ask him about it, and never did. I had the chance, and lost it. The buzzing in my brain nags and tears; the painting was a legacy, my father left it to me — I’m sure it could tell me something important, something I need to know, but I’ll never see it.

Having lost the chance seven years ago, I try to find the words now. I sit at my computer, begin to write, and a picture flashes before my eyes — an old photograph, one I’ve seen before. I jump from my desk, rush down the hallway. Crammed between other photos on a bookshelf, I find the small photograph of my mother and father, standing on a beach in Fire Island. Together, intact, their arms around each other, my father’s thin and muscular, his hair crew cut style, and my mother smiles widely, her black hair pulled back. There I am, too — in my mother: the almond-shaped eyes, our black hair, the way we smile… At that bustling restaurant, I was a reflection that my father spoke to, just as the painting spoke to him. He wasn’t physically ill; he was heartsick. 

The following day, I place the photograph next to my computer. I like to think of it as a surrogate for the painting my father mentioned. There is my mother, and probably how he remembered her: during a happier time, when they shared lives, shared secrets. A time when the soft feel of Dad’s New York Giants sweatshirt was familiar to my mother’s fingers, and when my father, so acquainted with my mother’s face, could not have seen it reflected anywhere else.