Inheritance

When he was 12, my father, precocious, expressive, restless, was an artist, close to his paternal art-loving grandfather. Together they made a paper mache sculpture of Gulliver. Living with his father, a cab driver, his mother, an angry hyena, and his three sisters, Flora, Lillian and Eleanor, each one hysterical, demanding, selfish, on Coney Island, he took a painting class. One piece survived for many years, first on the wall in our Long Island kitchen, a framed drawing, a sepia wash, that ended up in my mother’s possession after they divorced and lives now in my memories of it, a cabin in the woods, dry branches blown by high winds, an  unwelcoming, desolate place, where one might unhappily live forever. Throughout my childhood, I thought I was disappointing him, regularly, not doing what I could to succeed in his eyes, and thank god I realized after 60 years, it wasn’t me who had disappointed him, abandoned him in the woods, left him alone and cold and afraid. Had he lived a bit longer, perhaps a hundred years or so, he might have found some happiness as the parent of my precocious, expressive, restless old age, as an artist.