The Story of My Father by Sue Miller

and goings into and out of theirs, simply didn’t
count
as much in our childhood. It was my mother’s emotional life, after all, that set the tone for us; it was naturally her emotional connection to her family that mattered more.
    And my father’s family? Well, it was shaped by my grandfather, who was old by the standards of the time when he married: thirty-seven. He was born in 1874, a Victorian to his bones, so forbidding to his wife’s younger sisters that they called him “
Beau-frère
” rather than risk the informality of his first name. He was forty-two when my father was born, and he’d begun to teach church history at Auburn Theological Seminary.
    My father’s family might have been very different if his mother had lived, but she died young, when he was just eight, and her death marked a change for all of them; afterward there was a chilly quality to their life together.
    Two years after my natural grandmother’s death, my grandfather remarried. My father, who was incapable of disloyalty, even when it was deserved, was deeply attached to his father and very fond of his stepmother, but my aunts on that side of my family, at least two of whom were devoted to calling a spade a spade, spoke often of a difficult and gloomy growing-up. When the two youngest girls were called back from the home of the beloved aunt they’d been sent to after their mother’s death (my father and his older sister stayed home with their father and a housekeeper), they were made to call my grandmother Winifred “Mother.” They were all discouraged from ever mentioning or remembering aloud their own mother, Marjorie, again.
    My grandfather was a patriarch, remote and exacting and almost childishly quick to anger. I have on my mantel a chipped marble bust of Homer that was once his, its nose completely gone and various dings decorating the rest of its head. It’s damaged because my grandfather returned home one day to find the maid had
polished
it. He was enraged; one did not
polish
marble! He had a tantrum. He pronounced the bust utterly ruined and took it outside and threw it violently into the ash heap.
    My aunts could tell other tales of his temper, of a way he had when irritated of flapping his jowls in frustration or anger. What I remember of my grandfather was the formality of our visits to him late in his life; they were virtually audiences, where we terrified children stood silently to be viewed by an equally silent, unsmiling presence. My father was always careful and respectful to his own father on these occasions.

    There is and was a characteristic note sustained in the personalities of my father and his sisters, perhaps genetic but more likely in response to their history. Though all of them were wry, some with sharper wit than others; though all were gracious, curious, interested, and engaged with the world; though all led full and useful lives which brought each of them, I think and hope, enormous satisfaction, there was in all of them a sense, finally, of deep reserve. They were warm but not easily affectionate. Attentive, interested in others, but never demonstrative. I think my father must have been drawn, in part, to the noisiness and energy of my mother and her family. I think, too, that he may have sensed a need for someone like my mother— almost as though he were completing himself by marrying her.
    The story of how they met is part of our family’s lore. He was getting his doctoral degree at the time. His sister Jane was a classmate of my mother’s, and my father had come to Jane’s college to visit her. At some point they decided to play tennis. My father hadn’t planned for it, and he was unequipped. They found a racket for him to borrow, but he had no appropriate shoes. Where, at a women’s college, to find tennis shoes big enough to fit a man?
    Ah! Of course! Judy Beach.
    The shoes were, in fact, slightly
too
big. My mother was taller than my father, which made her an imposing woman and him an