All My Fathers

Lee Reilly

The author’s father

Word Count 1196

Her Father.

My friend, Libby, leaned over and said in an ironic voice, “The Greatest Generation. I have my doubts.” She was a creative director, frequently deployed to win over haughty deans, university presidents, and in one case, the Secretary of the Treasury. A thousand miles away, her father was struggling in late age, with ivy growing inside his windows, and refusing help. He was one of the original Oak Ridge boys, she said, a maker of the earliest atomic bombs.

My Father

My father was of that generation, too, and believed wholeheartedly that it was The Greatest Generation (TGG), not because of the bombs particularly, but because it was the generation he belonged to. That’s one insight into his blustery character. There are other, sadder ones.

My Father’s Father

My father’s father was a member of the World War I generation and by all accounts didn’t brandish the ethos of TGG. This could be because his cohort had sacrificed so much that the whole generation was soon canonized as being “lost,” or it could be because he was a cruel alcoholic who once took his 12-year-old son to the insane asylum where his mother was recovering and pointed to a ward window. When Rosalie appeared, Leo said to my father, “This is what you’ve brought your mother to.”

My Father’s Father’s Father

My father’s father’s father did not come from a Great generation because he was born well after Gettysburg; he was untested by war, which is one way, alongside wealth, that we measure men—and therefore fathers. Instead, Michael was an average railroad worker, son of Irish immigrants, who married an unusually efficient woman. She eventually owned many properties, which brought in all the household income, save for Michael’s pension check from the railroad, which he got after losing his arm in an accident. On her deathbed, she made Leo promise to take care of his unemployed father. Then she died, and Leo promptly confined his father to the attic, taking the pension check as rent. As a kid, my father delivered meals to Michael and told him stories.

“You’re a Seanachie,” my father’s father’s father frequently said, according to my father.

“So your grandfather, he called you a storyteller,” I said. We were on the New Jersey Turnpike and this sudden conversation was unprecedented. Silent brooding governed car trips to New York City, the Poconos, Vermont. They were so airless that we three daughters did everything we could not to be sent on one. Don’t grasp the door when he goes too fast. Don’t ask where we’re going. Don’t ask to pee. And certainly: Don’t try to tell a joke. I don’t remember how I got stuck on this trip. The best I could say was he couldn’t throw anything at me while driving.

“He was calling me a bullshitter,” my father said. He drove the way he thought, aggressively, definitively. We switched lanes to cut off a semi.

”Seanachie were the original oral historians in Ireland.” I think I was trying to keep the conversation going.

“He was calling me a bullshitter.” Conversation over.

This made me wonder if the word Seanachie had been delivered with a slap, and what being slapped by a one-armed man imprisoned in his own house would feel like to a boy with great expectations.

My Father’s Father Again and Maybe Always

But it’s my father’s father I think about most. When my middle sister was born, Leo wrote to his son:

Congratulations on the arrival of your daughter Caron (sic). I sincerely hope that she does well. I am particalarly (sic) gratified for your sake that it was not a boy since I honestly believe that any son of yours, who would be unfortunate enough to inherit ten per-cent of your lousiness, would cause you great unhappiness.

I did meet Leo once. I was three or four. He was prostrate on a picnic table—drunk? His wife Rosalie, released from the mental hospital, sat on the ground nearby and taught me the daisy game.

“He loves me, he loves me not,” she demonstrated, cheating to make it end on He loves me.

I’ve come to think Leo is one reason my father believed himself to be a good man: He, for one, did not confine his father to an attic. And the fact of Leo probably helped my father believe he was a good patriarch: He didn’t put his daughters up there either.

A low bar, you say. But you’re not counting how greedily and needily my father took credit.

A few years ago, I found the commercial strip my great grandmother once owned in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, and the church where Leo was christened. I also found the house with the attic. It didn’t speak to me. It was highly renovated. In my pocket was a slip of paper enumerating Adverse Childhood Experiences, a clinical list of 10 formative life stressors that in combination have the capacity to wound and warp, things like humiliation, violence, parents with mental illness. My husband, a forensic psychologist, had given it to me, after having braved the NJ Turnpike and Route 3 (which may be its own clinically adverse experience) to get me there.

Standing mid-hill, gazing at the manicured park where my father once escaped into wild saltwater meadows to fish and look for things the New York Mob might have buried, I guessed at the number of adverse childhood events he experienced. Six of the 10?

And Leo?

I experienced three. I never had children.

And My Father, Again

I do not know the rules of lineage. I see my father in other descendants, primarily the self-styling that put him in the center of all things, assigned his story more import than anyone else’s, and behaved as if other human beings could hear his thoughts. He brandished himself like a consumer brand. He was proudly of TGG (even though he never fought in the war or invented a bomb, as Libby’s father did, and he must have wondered if he really qualified). He saw himself as an exception to natural laws, having overcome his father’s financial ruin (albeit with the help of the GI Bill and the economic gift of being white). Even I can see there was much to admire in his mirror: He was bright and funny and green-eyed handsome. He once played Santa Claus to a roomful of tiny Girl Scouts. He served in Civil Defense to fight off Soviet invasion, sang in the local beloved choir for 45 years. He was married to a beautiful Ivy League grad. He was a member of the Intellectuals Club and an excellent provider. Also, none of his daughters went to jail.

Yet shame still stalked him, even though he called it pride. Any son of yours who would inherit ten per-cent of your lousiness…. He couldn’t be found out—not now, in late age. He isolated in his weakened state. He fought live-in care. He hid my mother’s debilitating disease of mind. He sequestered her infidelity, which he discovered after she died.

“Burn the letters,” his only confidant told him, and he did.

When he felt his heart buckle, he didn’t let anyone call his favorite daughter. He grabbed his medication list, called the ambulance, and walked to the gurney set up in our driveway. He was, after all, from TGG, and also his father’s son.#

Lee is a care worker and author. Her writing has won recognition from Hunger Mountain, Florida Review, Barbara Deming Fund, the State of Illinois, Monson Arts, and other arts organizations. Her flash fiction has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, London Independent Story Prize, Hippocampus, and elsewhere, and she’s published two nonfiction books. She lives in Maine, where she hosts the Shannaghe residency for writers and photographers.