Read Online Oogy The Dog Only a Family Could Love by Larry Levin - Free Book Online Page A

older, could deal with Susie’s death, and I guess it was also thought that, as young as I was, the event wouldn’t have an impact on my life. Each of these assumptions demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about the capability of young children to understand events that are happening around them. At my mother’s insistence, no one talked or reminisced about Susie, so why things had happened and were happening was never clarified. Nobody was ever asked how he or she felt about Susie’s death. We were never asked if we wanted to talk about it. My mother’s way of coping seemed to have been to pretend that Susie had never lived. If she had never lived, she could not have died.
    My father must have been a brash young man. At sixteen, he was the youngest-ever graduate of the most academically elite of the city’s public high schools and finished Wharton by the time he was nineteen. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, played semipro basketball, and was heavily involved in local politics at the street level (which takes a particular kind of toughness) — first as a committeeman, then as a ward leader, getting out the votes for the Democratic machine. He rose through the ranks and eventually became the lawyer for the city’s Democratic Party. This suggests a confidence and focus that no doubt enabled him also to successfully woo my mother, a noted local beauty. Ultimately, the party awarded my dad the judgeship he had coveted his entire professional life.
    My father had a keen intellect; his interests were diverse. As a lawyer in private practice, he argued and won the first case in Pennsylvania to hold that a man who had committed murder was not guilty by reason of insanity, and every year until that man passed, he sent our family a Christmas card. My dad loved history and language, was an avid golfer, gardener, and fisherman, and was an ardent Zionist. He played the piano regularly until, in old age, he couldn’t read sheet music anymore. In my favorite photograph of him, he is sitting at the piano, glasses pushed all the way up on his forehead, squinting at the notes swimming before him. As both a judge and a lawyer, he was recognized for his honesty, humanity, and candor, and he was much beloved by many, a mentor to countless up-and-coming attorneys.
    I would not describe his relationship with me in the same way. Perhaps he embraced the opportunity to nurture those who were not his children because he was unable to understand his own. After Susie died, my father’s need to be in control seemed to have, understandably, increased. He judged me, and I did not satisfy his standards. From my perspective, he was aloof and often seemed angry and unapproachable. Afraid of incurring his wrath and his disappointment, I kept secrets from him, and keeping secrets created walls. Did I remind my father of his ultimate powerlessness to control what mattered? Did I remind him every day of Susie?
    After my dad was diagnosed with cancer, he used the time he had left to take everyone who mattered to him out to lunch or to dinner. The last thing he did before he died was his taxes. The morning he died, I went into the bedroom where he lay and sat next to him. I looked at him. I had no real sense of the man who lay in front of me. I had no sense of personal loss, that I had somehow been diminished. The body in front of me might as well have been that of a stranger. There was no connection; it was like the experience I had had when I examined the picture of my sister.
    The lives of the dead set examples for us. It makes sense that having a sister die when I was only three left me afraid of a lot of things. It explains why the unexpected phone call is always bad news. It accounts for why, until I became a father, I was many times filled with an emotion I could articulate only as “the nameless dread.”
    An incident that is emblematic of my outlook at the time I became a father arose late one Wednesday morning.