The Good Father

Kate Stone Lombardi

The author’s father at the lake

Word Count 1510

I think my father has left the lake. He was in there for the first few years after his death. I could see him whenever the angled sun threw sparkles across the water’s surface. And I could hear him, always the same message, telling me that I was loved and that everything was okay.

But this summer Dad is barely present – just an occasional glimmer. I believe he has moved on, no longer feeling the need to hang around.

How he loved this cold, murky upstate lake. It was the one constant in his life.

By the time my father was six years old, his mother was gone. Not dead, but she may as well have been. Isabel, my father’s mother, was locked in a psychiatric ward, and she would never come home.

At the time, my father was told that his mother was tired and had to go rest. He never saw her again. Dad developed a preternatural fear of fatigue. “Are you getting enough sleep?” he would ask me and my brothers and sister constantly. “You’ll get things all out of whack if you don’t sleep.”

After placements in several private sanitariums, my grandmother was transferred to a state hospital. She would spend the rest of her life in that place, mostly tethered to a bed in restraints.

It was shortly after this final hospitalization that my grandfather bought a tract of land in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. In a heavily forested area, he had a wooden dam constructed, which created a lake, and built a fishing cabin.

Every summer my grandfather took his three young sons up to the cabin. He taught them to fly fish. The boys stayed in tents; the adults (my grandfather would bring along friends and eventually a second wife) would stay in the cabin.

For the first part of my father’s life, this place, with the cabin, tents, and lake, was the only place he could count on as home.

By the time he was eight, my father was sent to boarding school. From boarding school, he went straight to college; from college to fight in World War II, where he was in ground forces in France and then Germany. After the war, he returned to college, and – after living briefly with his father in New York City - to married life with my mother. She had to wean him off institutional cooking – the only food he knew.

In my mother, my father married someone familiar. She was unstable, and her moods were mercurial. Charming and loving one minute; angry and cruel the next. Sometimes during family dinners, she’d throw her napkin on her plate, send her chair screeching across the dining room floor, and – always with fanfare – walk out the front door. They must have kept the keys in the car because Mom would just drive off.

My Dad adored her. He would always follow her after these dramatic departures; usually finding her parked at the train station, fuming in the family station wagon. “Don’t upset your mother” was a mantra in our household. But as hard as he worked to keep our mother happy, not to mention to keep her home, he also knew we needed comfort. And he understood that he would need to be the one who gave it.

It was my father who tucked us in, told us stories, played games with us, took us sledding and listened to our fears and dreams. He seemed to genuinely delight in us. And, of course, he shared with us his beloved cabin in the Adirondack Mountains.

He taught all of us kids to fly fish. It wasn’t easy. As a little girl, when I’d practice casting from the shore, I’d get my fly caught in the trees behind me. Or I’d throw my arm down too fast. “Gently, Katy,” my dad would coach. “Don’t slap the fly on the water. Lay it down.”

Sometimes, Dad would hook a fish himself and then hand me the rod to reel it in. “You caught one!” he’d say, as he scooped the trout into the net. I knew my father was smoothing things over, trying to make it right with a slight of hand. That’s what he did.

It was always my father who spent the most time on the lake. “One more cast,” he’d say, as daylight faded. He’d be back on the water at dawn, the only sound being the quiet, whirring release of his fishing line.

Casting his fly rod was a form of meditation for my father. It was also the antidote to his work life. My dad spent his career on the floor of The New York Stock Exchange, during a time before computers, when trades were printed on tickertape, and orders shouted from posts. I would visit him at work and watch from a gallery that looked down onto the trading floor. It was like gazing into a pit of mastodons, or at least how I imagined them, herds of men (for it was all men then) yelling, pushing into each other, and vying for prominence.

As a child, it was hard for me to reconcile the gentleman I knew with this loud, crazy den of testosterone. How proud I was when he came off the floor and took my hand. I wore my best dress for these visits, with white anklets and black patent leather Mary Janes. My father, in his charcoal suit and striped tie, would take me to lunch and introduce me to every friend and waiter we came upon. “This is my youngest daughter, Katy,” he’d say. I would shake hands, make eye contact, and curtsy, as I’d been taught to do when meeting adults. Early on, he showed me that people had many versions of themselves.

Up in the mountains, Dad was his truest self, the self he’d been all along. He lost his city pallor, along with his constricting business clothes. He sported a floppy, forest green felt hat pierced with fishing flies, so he could grab a new one if a trout broke the line. A canvas vest with multiple pockets held all sorts of gizmos – fishing line, clippers, hooks, something called “a priest” (for bonking the fish on the head once he was caught, so it wouldn’t die gasping for breath), cigars (which my dad claimed kept the bugs away but which he loved smoking all year), matches and Lord knows what else.

That vest still hangs in the closet at the cabin today, now with rust spots staining the cloth. But rummaging through the pockets would feel not so much like a violation, then as an activity that would disturb and disperse whatever remaining bits of my father the vest holds.

I have photos of my dad as a little boy up here in the summer, flanked by his brothers, all wearing baggy pants and button-down shirts. My father is the middle child, in age and height, flanked between his older and younger brothers. They are all gone now.

Back in the 1930s, they sometimes came to the cabin in the wintertime too. I only know this because I’ve also unearthed old black-and-white pictures of all four of them – the boys and their father – playing ice hockey on the lake.

The last time I saw my (corporal) father down at the lake was seven summers ago, when he was 92. His dementia was fairly progressed by then. Certainly, his short-term memory was shot. I’d be with him and duck out of the room to go to the bathroom. When I returned after a minute or two, he’d smile with delight and say, “Look who’s here! It’s Katy!” It was a new day every time he saw me.

That last summer, my dad only fished off the dock. It was too dangerous for him to get in and out of the rowboat, as he was no longer steady on his feet. Yet Dad could still cast beautifully. It must have been muscle memory, because at that point, he couldn’t have told you how he got to the lake, or even what year it was. Still, he tipped back his fly rod and then smoothly brought down his arm, expertly releasing the line at the exact right moment. The line arced far across the water, landing gently and without a splash - at exactly the dark, deep spot he was aiming for.

It’s no mystery to me why my father decided to come live in the lake for the past few years. It’s the place where he sheltered from sorrow. At the lake, he knew peace. I just don’t know why he left. Maybe my father is so ethereal that he’s just in the mist over the dam, or the rings of water that spread out when a dragonfly skims the lake’s surface.

Or maybe this is just my own grief. It’s not my father who has left the lake, but me who has let him go. But I’m not ready. I never was.

Kate is a journalist, author and essayist. For 20 years, she was a regular contributor to The New York Times. Kate’s work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Time.com, Good Housekeeping, Readers Digest, AARP’s “The Ethel” and other national publications. She is the author of “THE MAMA’S BOY MYTH” (Avery/Penguin, 2012), a nonfiction book on raising boys.