“My Father’s Tears”

He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realized, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I. I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller. He had loved me, it came to me as never before. It was something that had not needed to be said before, and now his tears were saying it.

John Updike, author of My Father’s Tears and Other Stories grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania inhabited with more blue-collar workers than college graduates. An only child , Updike displayed academic and artistic talents in school which earned him acceptance to Harvard – a meteoric rise for a small town boy. In My Father’s Tears – one of the 18 short stories in the collection – a son recalls seeing his father cry for the first and only time when he departs his hometown to return to Harvard after a weekend at home. A touching story that recalls the bittersweet journey of a child into adulthood.

Fatherhood does not loom large in Updike’s works except as it relates to the protagonist as a son or grandson.He writes of children…and even grandchildren dutifully,  but focuses the spotlight and depth of feelings on the father or grandfather figure as if the spawn are small independent planets within the protagonist’s universe; part of his world but also distant. In rare instances – The Guardians and Kinderszenen –  the protagonist is a child, a young boy who recounts his life growing up in a house with both parents and grandparents – “four adults as sides of a perfect square, with a diagonal from each corner to a central point. He was that point, protected on all sides, loved from every direction.”  And, in The Laughter of the Gods, a man looks back on his boyhood with an interest in his parents courtship and marriage wondering if they were ever a happy union.

Updike has always been known to write of narcissistic men with a strong libido and as he aged and experienced life (marriage, divorce, remarriage), his characters did the same. In five of the short stories – German Lessons, Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage, Delicate Wives, Outage, and Free – the protagonist is a man who recounts his decision to temporarily leave a marriage, have an affair, or contemplate remarriage. As the author writes “…I was young enough to live in the present, thinking the world owed me happiness” – justifying the behavior at the time.

The most meaningful stories in the collection though are the ones in which the perspective is from an old man who has lived most of his life with a trained eye. In The Road Home and The Walk with Elizanne, Updike writes of a man going back to his hometown and not recognizing the places he once knew so well or of attending a 50th high school reunion where memories are rekindled and for a night, the attendees are not 68-year old grey-haired men and women but the memories of who they once were:

But we don’t see ourselves that way, as lame and old. We see kindergarten children – the same round fresh faces, the same up ears and long-lashed eyes. We hear the gleeful shrieking during elementary-school recess and the seductive saxophones and muted trumpets of the locally bred swing bands that serenaded the blue-lit gymnasium during high school dances. We see in each other the enduring simplicities of a town rendered changeless by Depression and then by a world war whose bombs never reached us, through rationing and toy tanks and air-raid drills did. Old rivalries are rekindled and put aside; old romances flare for a moment and subside into the general warmth, the diffuse love.

 It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.