Bogart by Stephen Humphrey Bogart Page A

about a bicycle accident that I’d had about a year after my father died. I had cut open my jaw and been taken to the hospital for stitches. There was no lasting injury from that accident, but all my life I had been unaccountably angry about the fact that my mother was at work when it occurred.
    Barbara said, “Well, perhaps you were angry because you felt there was no one to protect you.” And it struck home. Yes, that was it, exactly. That’s how I felt, that nobody was there to protect me. My mother was gone, and my father was gone, too.
    In a strange way, this idea that I was unprotected was a comforting thought. Because for so many years I had felt that I didn’t think enough about my father, that I didn’t feel enough about him. I had always believed that, while Humphrey Bogart’s fame has tainted every single minute of my life, he, personally, never really had much impact on my life. But now I realize that if his absence made me feel so damn vulnerable and unprotected, then his presence, his be ing alive, must have made me feel safe. When he died my world was shattered. And it took me many years to put it all back together.
    It was a few days after the funeral that I climbed that tree in the backyard and started screaming at God. When May, the cook, came out and heard me, she must have sensed that I was about to become a major headache for my mother. For several days in a row I sat in that tree and screamed for my father and cried for hours on end.
    The hours I spent in that tree, feeling the pain and frus tration of losing my father, mark the end of my belief in a personal God. My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father a lapsed Episcopalian. Neither of my parents had any strong be lief in God, but, like many parents, they sent their children to Sunday school, out of a vague sense that religion was a good thing for a kid. We were being raised Episcopalian rather than Jewish because my mother felt that would make life easier for Leslie and me during those post–World War II years.
    In any case, when I was eight years old I still believed in the God that adults told me about. But I have always been a very logical person, even then, and during the days when I sat in that tree bawling my eyes out, the equation became very simple for me: My father is dead. God wouldn’t let that happen. Therefore, there is no God. In that tree I gave up a belief in God, and nothing I have seen in the last thirty-seven years has changed my mind on that point.
    Though my mother didn’t know at the time about the tree screaming, she had plenty of evidence that things were not right with me.
    One night just before Valentine’s Day, Mother, Leslie, and I were eating supper in the dining room.
    “I know how we can surprise Daddy,” I said.
    “How is that?” my mother asked.
    “We can all shoot ourselves, and then we can be with him for Valentine’s Day.”
    This comment, understandably, made my mother worry. She began talking to doctors about me. They assured her that my behavior was normal. They said it was natural for me to be full of resentment because my father had died. They said I was probably feeling that I had done something wrong to make him leave.
    Apparently, it was common for me to make announce ments about my father at the dinner table. Adolph Green says, “I remember one night having dinner on Mapleton Drive, shortly after your father died, and you looked up and said, ‘There’s Daddy flying over the dining room table.’ You were not hysterical, you just said it very calmly.”
    At the Warner Avenue School, where all of my friends went, I was not so calm. I had been getting good grades. But now, with the onset of the Bogie thing, I began working on a one-way ticket out the door.
    Looking back I realize that the main thing was that it in furiated me that all my friends knew that my father was dead. I hated the fact that they all had fathers and I didn’t, and they all knew that I didn’t. They knew I was