Father and Son Read Online Free PDF

exaggerated enthusiasms, her patrician sense of life, he’ll always let her be the one to choose how things are done or undone. He’s infuriated by her disregard for material things, her essential optimism, her tendency to be a dreamer, her failure to consider that everything could take a turn for the worse, but since he has no stability to offer us, he cuts himself off. He wants us to save what he can’t give us, he wants us to be prudent, he doesn’t want to have to worry about us, he wants us to be safe so that he will be too.
    My mother and I do spend money. Without a second thought. We eat out whenever we want, we have a maid, and we take taxis everywhere, but the truth is that we lack for nothing. She makes enough. She works and makes money. She has grown up too. She may not save, she may not plan for tomorrow, but she has liberated herself from the world she shared with my father and created her own world, with new friends. Everything is going well. What does my father have to complain about? He thinks he knows her, and he’s terrified by her levity, the way she seems to make decisions without considering the consequences. Whenever he can, he seeks my complicity to criticize her. It bothers him that by nature I’m as relaxed as she is, and he tries to reform me.
    My mother’s world of dreams. My father’s paralyzing hyperrealism. I’m torn—my head and my frustrated desires with my father, my heart and my day-to-day life with my mother. Sometimes I ally myself with my father, but it’s my mother I live with, and I simply don’t understand my father’s dissatisfaction, his dutiful lack of enthusiasm when he comes to see us.
    In early 1980 my father shows at a fleetingly successful gallery, and a few months later he leaves on a Fulbright to spend a year in New York. The day of his departure he gives me conflicting reasons for why I shouldn’t come to the airport, and I suspect that either he isn’t traveling alone or he’s being seen off by someone he doesn’t want me to meet. I get a postcard of fake UFOs flying over the Twin Towers, I get a postcard of a miniature explorer shrunken by natives, I get a postcard of an Art Deco teapot, I get a postcard of graffiti. Those are the ones I kept; I don’t think there were any others. No letter. Occasionally he calls me. Hurried conversations in which he barrages me with questions.
    Since he left, it’s been agreed that I’ll visit him, but although it’s my mother’s understanding that she’s coming too, he thinks I’ll be coming alone. I don’t know whether it’s a misunderstanding or whether one of them wasn’t honest with the other in previous conversations. The fact is that when my mother and I arrive to spend Christmas, it’s clear from the start that my father doesn’t want her there. They don’t tell me this, but I sense it. I sleep with my father in the double bed, and my mother sleeps on a mattress on the floor. I remember one afternoon when they leave me in the loft to have a private conversation. Even so, my father takes us on long excursions, showing us the city as if nothing is wrong. He buys me John Lennon’s Double Fantasy , he buys me an electronic flipper game, he buys me some eye-catching yellow radio headphones, he buys me snow boots. At Bloomingdale’s, the night before we go back, my mother gets me a brown corduroy polo jacket, and she exits with a black digital watch that—tired of waiting to be helped—my father takes without paying. They try to act normal in front of me; at moments they probably even forget that it’s an act. But that trip is key to the severing of the final emotional ties between them, because years later they continue to bring it up, he still angry and she still hurt.
    The years 1981, 1982, and 1983 are confused in my memory. Either too many things happen or I begin to be too conscious of