Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the essay "The Public Father" by Daphne Merkin (©2000 by The New York Times Company).

The narrator's father was Hermann Merkin, a widely known New York City philanthropist, who died in 1999.

I rarely visited my father at his office, where he worked as an investment banker, but I knew that its ongoing affairs were more crucial to him, in many ways, than the life he led at home—just as I knew that his public face as a philanthropist was easier to read than his private face as a father or husband. My father was an Orthodox Jew who had grown up in Leipzig, Germany; he remained committed to Jewish causes until his death , and his knowledge of the dizzying intricacies of Israeli politics was impressive. Throughout his life my father supported Jewish scholarship; he also helped endow the kosher kitchen at Mount Sinai, as well as the Merkin Concert Hall on West 67th Street (which is silent from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown. in observance of the Sabbath).

I consider him to have been something of an enigma—to himself, and certainly to his children. He was constitutionally secretive, and it would have been nice to be let in on the secret, to know what was going on in his busy, obsessive mind.

He wasn't the kind of father I would have ideally wished for, an image cobbled together from the paternal figures I warmed to on television or in the movies, attentive and playful and full of wise counsel. He wasn't invested in the homely details of my existence or those of my five siblings: I don't think he ever knew the name of any of my teachers, and he couldn't tell my friends apart. He didn’t teach me to ride a bike (he couldn’t ride one himself) or drive a car (he couldn't drive one himself) . He didn't, in other words, lend him­ self to helping me master the world, the role often attributed to fathers in the developmental histories of daughters. He hadn't much use for feelings, which were what interested me the most, then as now. I couldn’t go to him with my problems or my passions, partly because he spoke the language of businesslike resolution while I specialized in the articulation of finely honed conflict. On those infrequent times when I would officially meet with him in his study—a room that bordered on the sacrosanct—to discuss some girlhood difficulty, I would invariably find myself cut off at the pass by his decisiveness. My habit of questioning everything wilted before his focus on the bottom line. Later I would find some of my relationship with him expressed in writer Franz Kafka 's famous, importuning letter to his father, with its futile wish for a communion that doesn't exist.

These days I find myself looking for my father, as though now that he is gone I might still get to know him better. There are superficial associations: I saw a movie in which the Savoy Hotel in London was briefly featured, and I was immediately reminded of my father's fondness for it when he traveled on business. And there are deeper ones, as well: When I'm around people—especially men—who seem too obvious in their thought processes, I think with affection of my father's utterly idiosyncratic, curvy mind. I keep wondering what has happened to all the bits of information he stored in his head, the phrases he wrote down-in English, or Hebrew, or German, or French—with his ubiquitous, freshly sharpened No.2 pencils on little white notepads. I found the combinations of things he scribbled in his vertical, almost mathematical handwriting—practical reminders mixed in with cerebral notations, isolated vocabulary words mixed in with stock quotes and dollar signs—invariably intriguing. Language meant a lot to him, and though I never shared his fondness for punsters or a certain kind of briskly witty columnist, I could see that he liked words to crackle on the page.

Since he wasn't given to communicating his emotions, I had to guess at them much of the time. In the end, I think he was genuinely different from other people, put together from strange and incongruous parts. I know he took pride in my being a writer, and I always enjoyed it when he came to literary gatherings, where he greeted everyone with relish, acting perfectly oblivious to anything ungenerous about him or my family that I might have written. He didn't, in fact, so much care what other people thought of him—which struck me as both annoying and admirable, but made him socially unembarrassable. I miss his impersonal yet oddly reassuring presence in the world, sitting in a chair in his study filled with his scholarly books, his around bald head covered with a flat black crocheted yarmulke. Write about me, he said, shortly before he died, squeezing my hand, which was his version of a hug. Did he mean it? And would he have recognized himself on the page?