On my father

Just now, coming up the stairs, I looked, as I always do, at my father's formal portrait. He must be younger than I am there, and everyone who sees it comments on how handsome he was. I don't see it, that beauty. I try to but can't. I see my father. This time was no different, only looking reminded me of a dream that I had last night, in which I promised myself that, the next time I was that portrait, that I would thank him

In the dream I was recounting to my father something that really happened yesterday. I asked a friend, who made a great fortune in the stock market, to help me prepare for my meeting with the bank officials and the lawyer. My father amassed a fairly substantial amount in his IRA and I had very little understanding of how to read it, so I asked him to help me decode it. He kept saying, over and over, "your father was a brilliant investor," and "you owe your father a great debt," and "he really took care of you." None of this, of course, was terribly unfamiliar to me. Indeed, the paradox of my life is that my father regularly flaunted his wealth and emphasized the debt I owed him, although he never managed, really, to make me feel as though he had "taken care of me," not in my heart or spirit, after all. He may have made a bunch of money, which I enjoyed when I was still living as part of his household, but he has not helped me, neither financially nor emotionally, since I finished graduate school.

I long ago stopped asking him for money because whatever he gave came with an enormous cost, not the least of which was his disapproval. If I couldn't make it on my own, there was something wrong with me. Of course I still believe that, and I do make it, barely.

My father was far more interested in amassing than in sharing what he made. He was both a miser and a conspicuous consumer. What his wife got from him--the diamonds, the three mercedes convertibles, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit---she obtained by demanding and withholding and throwing temper tantrums disguised as breakdowns. And you can be sure he punished her, passively, for every cent he spent. But she was impervious to this degredation, a whore at heart, and if the golden-hearted sort, then the cold, dead metal kind. .

He didn't do this to her. His heart was, finally, far more alive, more capable of loving than hers ever was or will be. Some people are entirely ruined because they have gone their entire lives without any comfort, and because they haven't got enough grace within them to remain inwardly and outwardly kind. My father, at least, had my mother for thirty-five years. The seed she planted in his heart, and in ours, kept him human.

As long as my father was alive, I imagined that somehow, against all evidence, we could have a relationship that was not principally premised on money, and that he would somehow see, finally, that I loved him not for his money, but rather in spite of it. I could not therefore imagine ever praising him, ever finding a way to tell him, openly, that I admired him for his fantastic ability to generate money.

I am therefore uncomfortable and slightly flumoxed, as he knew I would be, to find myself the executor of this enormous estate. I never learned how to understand money because I never had any. He knew that I would not squander the it, that I would protect it through probate and divide it fairly. It was a great compliment.

At any rate, last night I dreamed that I was telling my father about what my friend had said, and that I was thanking him, genuinely, for all he had given to me. I was praising him for his brilliance, for his miraculous financial acumen and fertility--I am, after all, writing about book about this very thing: about making relations between fathers and daughters, particularly between the Father-God and writing daughters, as relationships of debt that are paid off, with interest, when the daughter learns to generate as prodigiously as her father. She never reaches this goal, of course, so she remains in the positition of needing to pay, to thank, continuously to pay the debt with gratitude for having been given the potential to pay in the first place.

If you thank someone who has departed this life in your dreams, does it count?