Read Online Fatherhood by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online

She’d picked my father’s course on Poe from the great variety of academic offerings open to her because, according to Betty and Dotty, she’d liked penny dreadfuls, read them by the score, and thus had been surprised when Professor Green disparaged them. But they had had a talk, Lenore told her roommates, and after that …
    I had always had trouble imagining the “after that” of my father and Lenore, not because it is almost impossible for children to imagine a parent in the act of sexual congress, but because my father had never seemed physical at all. He’d been all brain to me, all books and learning, all authority and judgment, a secular father of biblical proportions. Aristotle, in the inflated way he seemed to think of himself, to my Alexander.
    But he had hardly turned out to be that sort of sage, a sad fact of life my mother had often made clear. Rather, he was the phony ba’al torah who’d lacked wisdom to hold his family together, a vain and haughty man, always farputst , with his scholar’s key and gold watch, a puffed-up feinshmeker who’d fallen victim to his own exalted image of himself, taken advantage of a young girl and murdered her , to use my mother’s phrase, though she well knew he had not done that.
    Or had he?
    For murder, or at least the possibility of it, was surely what I’d taken from the newspaper accounts of Lenore’s death. I’d been a freshman at Yeshiva before I’d actually read them, warned away from the story by my mother, who had seemed to bury the details of her leaving my father in a deep grave of secrecy. But after reading the newspaper stories, the notion of foul play had lingered in my mind, so that once, after watching that sad and frightening scene from A Place in the Sun where an ambitious, social-climbing Montgomery Clift rows the distraught, pregnant working girl who loves him out onto a lake and murders her for his own advantage, I’d felt a dreadful question circle through my mind. For Lenore had died like that, drowned after somehow falling over the side of the small boat she’d taken out onto storm-tossed Lake Montego. But had she gone alone? Or had my father gone with her, done what he had to do in order to get rid of this inconvenient little strumpet, one he had himself dismissed as “just a girl”?
    It would be easy, I thought, to kill someone who could be dismissed with the very words my father had said in the car that afternoon, words that had always seemed to me the true mark of his cruelty. And if he had done nothing, why had he never gained high position at the college, never become a dean or head of his department, never soared up and up as he’d no doubt expected to soar?
    I felt the darkest suspicion of my life rise like a gush of bile in my throat.
    â€œDid you kill her?” I blurted suddenly. “Did you kill that … pregnant shiksa?”
    My father’s eyes burst open.
    â€œIs that why my mother left you?” I demanded. “Not just that you schtupped that girl, but that you killed her?”
    My father began to kick and pull at his sheets, twisting his body and jerking his head. But none of his contortions summoned the slightest pity in me. Let him kick and toss about forever, I thought. Let the dogs of his conscience, the ghosts of all he’d so recklessly thrown aside, even the ghost of Alexander, that little boy who’d loved him so, let them all have their way with him, chew his flesh and drink his blood and break his bones, and finally reduce him to the same dust his betrayal had made of my childhood adoration of him.
    Then quite suddenly he stopped, and with what seemed a mighty effort, said “Nischt mein.”
    I’d seen other people revert to words and phrases they’d not used since childhood, people long rooted in the suburbs who’d abruptly returned, as it were, to the shtetl of their parents or grandparents, the blasted