Read Online The Story of My Father by Sue Miller - Free Book Online

story; it ought to have a shape.
    In any case, here is my father, in memory. Here, look at him, sitting in his study, almost in silhouette in front of the one window. He’s a small handsome man, Semitic looking, which runs on the male side of his family—a strong down-curving nose, skin that shadows to olive. He has dark hair, hair he will keep until he dies, hair that will remain untouched by gray until much later in his life. He wears glasses when he works, and often a jacket and tie.

    This was his room, the only room in the house that revealed much of anything about him. Three of the walls were nearly covered with bookshelves, the books in them an odd mixture of his professional library—these often in German or French and in any case of no interest at that time to me—and the books he and my mother read or had read for pleasure. His big desk, and even sometimes the floor around it, was always stacked with papers; one of the books he was writing while we lived on Harper Avenue, or student essays or bluebooks, or an article for the journal he edited,
Church History.
Framed pictures of figures he was interested in hung on the wall. I remember a sepia-toned photograph of the Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt staring down from
his
desk, in
his
study. The door onto the hall was always open.
    I think that open door drove my mother a bit mad. She saw her role as protecting my father’s privacy. If we came into the house with a bunch of friends, she was on guard: “Don’t you take all those children up there. Your father’s working.” If we made it past her, she’d holler, “Are you up there bothering your father?”
    The study was physically at the heart of the house; the door faced the top of the only flight of stairs to the second floor. Whenever you came up—whoever came up—if you stepped just slightly forward out of your path to your own room, you could see him there at his desk. And he could see you.
    As he watched the parade in the hallway, he always seemed mildly amused, tolerant of us all. You could actually hide in his study from others, and he would just raise his eyebrows for a moment and then go on with what he was doing. I think in fact he
chose
the open door. He seemed to enjoy the racket. Maybe this was because his protection against it was, in a sense, built in: he simply absented himself from whatever might interfere with his thoughts. It just didn’t register.
    My aunt Ellen, my father’s oldest sister, once counted eighteen children in the house when she was visiting and noted that my father was undisturbed by it. In fact, he worked through it. Clearly the contrast with her own father was an important part of the delight she took in this—she, unlike my father, remembered my grandfather’s intolerance of noise, of children, of any interruption in his sanctified routines.
    For a while a little girl from down the street—Judith Kaplan, my younger brother’s age—became infatuated with my father. Whenever she was over, she’d find her way eventually to his study. She’d stand by his desk—her head barely level with its surface—and watch him writing. Her question became famous in my family, the pesterer’s question: “Whatcha doin’, Mister Nichols?”
    And he
answered
her—that seemed even funnier to me. Politely, graciously, he told her, every time. “Well, Judith,” he’d say, “I’m trying to work.”
    “Whatcha working on, Mister Nichols?”
    Look at him again. This time I’m standing in Judith’s place, a tall ungainly girl of twelve or thirteen, come to my father’s study to complain to him of the biblical passage that says, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
    I’m outraged by this and I want my father’s confirmation of that outrage. I’m thinking of all that’s required in Christian life, all that’s insisted on—all the kinds of goodness, both of intention and behavior. The passage simply isn’t true, is it, Pop? Hah! His yoke,
easy?
His