Continued......

That my mother was disinterested in opera and politics was true, but I can’t imagine she had ever led him to believe anything different. She was neither intellectual nor duplicitous.

In the late 1930s, when Jack and Mollie met (she was twenty years old), women were expected to marry and have children—sooner rather than later. While Jack was obviously not perfect husband material, Mollie has always been a woman who took the easy way out. Not that she was weak; after all, she endured my father for sixty years. But she was neither self-motivating nor self-starting. My mother’s decision to stay with my father after I was born was practical, but now I recognized it as the most significant of a long series of personal rejections. My feelings—my literal safety—were being sacrificed because I was less important than someone else, in this case my strongest and most relentless adversary.

Soon after their marriage, my father enlisted in the army to fight the Nazis. He went to boot camp in Birmingham, Alabama, and was shipped overseas. I was born while he was in Europe and was cared for, pampered, by my mother and grandmother, until he returned in 1946. I remember sitting on my mother’s lap, rocking in a chair. She was crying when she told me my father was coming home that day. I remember the afternoon he arrived in his wrinkled khakis, his pointed army hat tilted jauntily on the side of his head, a style he maintained with tousle hats, baseball caps, and alpine hats throughout his entire life. While we were all sitting and talking and getting reacquainted, I picked up a yellow porcelain bird on the coffee table. My grandmother had told me repeatedly not to touch this knickknack—it was precious to her. She said it again that afternoon. But I didn’t listen. When I fingered it a second and then a third time, my father hit me.

I’ll never forget: his first day back from the war, my first interaction with him. I was barely three years old. He slapped my hand once—looked at me sharply, his eyes glowing—and slapped it again. That moment defined the focus of my memories regarding my father. I imagine we had our bonding moments, but my newsreels of life with dad are framed in pain and humiliation beginning with this first scenario, which forever defined our interactions.

While I can’t deny the inappropriateness of my behavior, my father, a total stranger, was introducing himself and his style of fathering to me. No one had ever touched me before in an ungentle way. I was completely unprepared. I trusted everybody, my mother and grandparents, the neighbors and cousins who came to kiss and tickle me. Then this slap: two pistol shots. The spark of pain on the back of my hand combined with the crisp crack of contact was forever inside me, unrelentingly reminiscent. Each time I found myself in the same room with my father, I braced myself.

After the war, my father worked at the Poll Parrot Shoe Store for Fritz Ehrlich, a very neat, formal German refugee who clicked his heels and bowed when he greeted you. Everyone called him “The Count.” My father wasn’t crazy about working for Fritz—he wasn’t crazy about working for anybody—but if you were a shoe dog it was good to be connected to a franchise sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show” on TV. Howdy wore Poll Parrot shoes, as did Dilly Dally, Buffalo Bob, Princess Summerfall Winterspring, Chief Thunderthud, and Mr. Bluster. I, too, wore Poll Parrots with the scuff-proof toe. I also had a pair of brown and white saddle oxfords for dress-up, purchased when my father was working for The Count.

After The Count, my father went to Fink’s in Greensburg, about thirty-five miles east of Pittsburgh. Greensburg was a prosperous community, and Fink’s was one of the biggest and most successful shoe stores in the state. Fink’s had Buster Brown and Jumping Jacks for kids. They had P.F. Flyers and U.S. Keds canvas shoes. They had Bostonian and Florsheim for men. The black “spade,” pointed toes with a shiny, perforated tip, was the most popular style for men and teens, with wing tips a close second. They had Red Cross and Capezio for women. For those awful Western Pennsylvania winters, Fink’s could supply four-buckle arctic rubber boots, also known as “overshoes,” for men, women, and children in three colors.

Fink’s had an X-ray machine called a fluoroscope, a big wood-paneled, console-like device, resembling an old-fashioned Victrola. You put on your new shoes and inserted your feet into the left and right openings at the base of the unit. Suddenly you could see the green outline of your feet, as if encased in neon, and judge for yourself how they fit into the new scuff-toe oxfords, if you were a boy, or patent-leather T-straps for girls.

As manager of the store, my father worked six days a week, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and until 9 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday nights, while Mr. Fink, who usually appeared during the day only, worked sporadic casual hours. Fink, a tall, severe-looking man with a mustache and a long nose, was fond of my father and wanted to turn over to him part ownership of the store. His children, college-educated professionals, did not want to live in a tiny hick town like Greensburg or labor day and night as shoe dogs. But Mr. Fink would not give my father a share of the business until he made a symbolic but essential commitment and moved his family to Greensburg. My father wanted to move, buy a house, take the chance. My mother suspected Mr. Fink would not keep his word. “But then we could always move back,” my father tried to reason. My mother held firm.

In the end, my father decided to give Mr. Fink an ultimatum—a guaranteed partnership or a guaranteed resignation. He had saved his money, and he was ready to start his own business. Mr. Fink chose the latter and suddenly my father was on his own. He selected a tiny, Catholic bedroom community in the Pittsburgh suburbs, Brookline, and started a family shoe store specializing in children’s high quality and corrective footwear. It was called, in honor of his family, Tryson’s—for three sons. The possibility of “Tri-son’s,” with an “i”, never appealed to him. It didn’t look right on paper. Being an independent merchant, beholden to no one, turned out to be a wise move, for it isn’t clear that Mr. Fink would have kept his promise or that my father could have held his blazing temper long enough to have been the recipient of Mr. Fink’s largesse.

But the big question one might ask is: Why would my father name his beloved shoe store for his children, as if it were a point of pride? Not that he wasn’t proud of having three sons; the concept of fathering, of planting or continuing the Gutkind seed obviously struck a comfortable chord. But what to do with the children he created and how to nurture them beyond naming a shoe store in their honor, never seemed to enter his mind. Did he believe that his sons could learn to live life properly by following in their father’s footsteps, even though their father offered an unacceptable model of behavior to his children?

My father expected his sons to conduct themselves properly in every situation, whether or not he was involved and, through some sort of imagined process of osmosis, to attribute their positive accomplishments to his nonexistent counsel. Meanwhile, he was incapable of controlling our negative behavior or assuming the role of the family leader. As a father, he was a distant dictator; he turned his anger and frustration onto the people he loved most—his wife and his eldest son. He never vented any of his pent-up wrath on his sisters, Hattie and Ethel, who might have helped him more when he was growing up, but didn’t—or his father himself. Jack refused to admit any wrongdoing from his father. “My dad did everything he could,” he once said.

At the time he uttered those words, I thought he was also sending me a subtle message—that he had done everything he could for me, as a father, as I was growing up, that he had been basically a good father and had done his best. But I didn’t reply, because I knew he hadn’t done his best. Punching, strapping, and forcing your son into torturous isolation, as punishment, is not considered model behavior.

Facing a cash-flow shortage in the mid-1970s, my father allowed part of his fire insurance to lapse. An arsonist set fire to the restaurant next door. My father’s beloved shoe store, along with the restaurant, burned to the ground. That was the first time I remember feeling compassion for my father—and respect for his stoicism. He accepted his losses without whining, turned his back, and walked away.

The second time I felt a grudging compassion was fifteen years later. He was in the hospital with colon cancer. The doctors and my mother were in the corridor, discussing his poor prognosis and speculating about his death. I went into his room. My father looked up, engaging me eye-to-eye, a rare event, and nodded as if I knew exactly what he was about to say. Then he tilted his head, as if he was about to tell a story. Instead, he announced, “They think I am going to die. Can you imagine?” I didn’t want him to die—and he didn’t. But I was wondering if he was going to have some sort of epiphany about getting a second chance and becoming a better father. It was too late, though. I didn’t need or want a better father now. My father should have worked much harder at fatherhood, if for no other reason than because he had been the orphan son.

My father’s letter was his attempt to reach out and, perhaps, in a symbolic way, his reluctant apology. I understand how difficult this action might have been, but the fact is there is little he could do to make up for what happened when I was a kid. There is little he could do to make up for what happened when he was a kid, either. I suffered for the sins of his father and his stepmother. That’s what I believe he was telling me in this letter. He wanted me to understand; I did understand, although understanding alone has not made his behavior more acceptable.

Now that I have become a father, my father is doing a good job healing my wounds by bonding with my son. Sometimes I watch him play with Sam in the living room of his old house and close my eyes, pretending that Sam is me, which, in many respects, he really is.

Yet, it makes me sad to think that I have known this man all my life—more than half a century—and I know little about him except for this abbreviated history. It’s good that he wrote me a letter and supplied a chronology of his biographical points of reference. I appreciate it. But I haven’t the slightest idea what he thinks about on a day-to-day basis and how he feels about the results of the nearly ninety years of his life. And because of our history of conflict and our lifelong lack of connection, I don’t expect to ever find out. Which is not to say that I couldn’t engage him in conversation about these matters, if I tried. But after so many years of distance and alienation, it doesn’t seem worth the effort. I might find out something that would alter my entire perception of him and our relationship, and that scares me.
As bad as I feel about my history with my father, I have decided that it is too late to change my mind about anything. I continue to play the cards that have been dealt me; I don’t want another hand.

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