The Man Who Hated Himself

Denise Osso

Word Count 749

In the crinkle-edge black and white snap shot my father is holding me still.

I am eleven-months-old, wearing a red coat. My grandfather squeezes the button on the Kodak Brownie. The photo is faded now but his copperplate cursive caption is still sharp: Christmas 1954.

My father is just back from the Korea. The rest of his life hasn’t happened yet.

When he is fired the first time, I am nine. My two younger sisters and I are piled into the Dodge and deposited with our grandparents in Rochester, New York. My mother and father drive back home so he can look for a new job.

That summer our grandfather tells stories about working in the coal mines in Pennsylvania. “I says to the boss, you can’t talk to me like I was some Eye-talian or Pole,” he says and clutches the neck of the sweating bottle of Rolling Rock. “I didn’t come across in steerage.” We three girls listen. Our bare toes trace circles on the worn linoleum under our grandmother’s spotless kitchen table.

When our grandmother lets us help her bake, her yeasty, warm love rises in us. Fills us. “How much flour?” we ask. “Enough,” she answers. We don’t know she left school after fourth grade and can’t read. But we know she embarrasses our father, her educated son.

Later that summer our parents pick us up and take us to a new home in a new town where my father starts a new job. A few years later it happens again.

We go back to Rochester. The Chinese Checkers game we played the summer before still has a piece missing. We use a tiger’s eye in the jar of marbles our father played with as a boy and play anyway.

Our grandparents never move. They do not read Tristram Shandy or drink martinis like their son. His contempt seeps out of his three-piece suits. He is never whole. A piece is missing. They love him anyway.

Decades later, we bury my grandfather in Scranton, Pennsylvania. On the way back from the cemetery, I feel how the narrow streets wind around on themselves. How the ceilings are low in the small room where we eat cold cuts and Divinity with Welsh Baptists at the funeral lunch. My father stands on the porch, smoking and waiting until it is over and he can leave his birthplace.

Decades before, this is where he is raised like a princeling – swaddled and dressed in white lace, cosseted and adored. He is the baby that lived – unlike the 13 still-birthed, miscarried and crib-dead ones my grandmother buries in the churchyard of that too-small coal town. Where the men go underground and stoop to feed their families and the women cry because they can’t keep anything clean.

It is too dark in that anthracite seam for him to see a future where he can stand upright. He is the canary that leaves so he can live.

He goes to college on the GI Bill, joins the Navy and sails from San Francisco to Incheon to Capetown, devours every Penguin Paperback in his sea bag, the giant turbines thrumming: Hem-ing-way! Sal-in-ger! Mo-by Dick!

He makes officer, makes land in Norfolk, Virginia, gets a job that makes him hate himself and makes a mess of his life.

He drinks enough to feel like somebody he could read about in a novel. We move every time he loses a job. He fights with my mother to feel the fire. They douse our lives with alcohol. They divorce. He remarries, goes away, shows up when he gets divorced or fired again or both. He never answers our letters.

He cannot continue to live without the piece of himself that is always missing - and takes his life.

We have to outlive him to learn he saves all our letters. We find them in the garage of our stepmother’s condo. They are in his gray filing cabinet. They are alphabetized. They are the proof of how hard we tried to reach him. We each take the folder with our name on it and go home. I have yet to read mine. But I have my folder. And I have my photo.

“Christmas 1954”

There he is, my 22-year-old father. The rest of his life hasn’t happened yet. Just home from the sea and trying to stand on solid ground, he smiles for the camera, and holds a tiny girl in a red coat.

He is holding me still.

Denise writes lyric essays, poetry, fiction, songs and works in clay in her studio in the Hudson Valley. Her essays and short stories have been featured in pigeonpagesnyc.com, The Los Angeles Review, Persimmon Tree and The Los Angeles New Fiction Emerging Writer Series. Her songs have been featured in films and recorded internationally. Her sculpture appears in Jane Dunnewold’s award-winning book Damsel, Hero, Artist, Judge: Meditations on Archetypes and Creativity.