In Spite of Everything Read online

  The watershed moment in my own paternal-filial dynamic was not documented in a picture, but rather played out in an event immortalized via family mythology. What actually happened seems to have been straightforwardly cute. Mom, Dad, and I had been driving back late at night from a party, and the car broke down on the highway. Dad was swearing stormily, my mother devolved into her customary talky panic, and I, just over a year old, was asleep in the back. As the situation crescendoed, with Dad thrashing around for flares in the glove compartment, I suddenly chirped from my car seat, “Daddy-Doe, Daddy-Doe! Susie and Daddy-Doe!” My dad turned to his goofy-faced daughter, chortling in the dark. It was the first time I had uttered anything like a sentence, and it was a song. “Listen to her, Dugal!” my mother cried, thrilled. “Are you listening to your daughter?” He was. “Well, hello there, Suh-woo-zo!” he chuckled. Within fifteen minutes, he had cheered up, figured out how to fix the car, and was driving us home—with me singing my song all the way.

  This incident, thereafter known as the “Susie and Daddy-Doe” song, became famous in our family and its circle of close friends. This inner coterie, it should be noted, were acquainted, to varying degrees, with Dad’s good and evil inner twins. In very basic ways, they were explicit. On the one hand, Dad was, physically, one of those men you could identify from two blocks away as being Harvard Class of ’60. He was, like all his ilk, an impeccable old-school preppy business dresser. Everything from his overcoat to suit to boxer shorts was Brooks Brothers. Tortoiseshell-framed glasses. Always. On the other hand, he was long on the loutish Libertarian bluster. You could always count on him to rail about downtown Berkeley’s “lazy commie pinkos” and his character appraisal of Nixon as a “congenital thug” (ripped off from Hunter S. Thompson). He was open about his you’re-goddamned-right-I-have-the-right-to-bear-arms membership in the National Rifle Association, though he was also actively involved in the Sierra Club and the Explorers Club; he worshipped his first-edition volumes of the naturalist writers John McPhee and Peter Matthiessen. Think Don Imus funneled into Dick Thornburgh.

  And while Dad could, Imus-like, easily burn bridges with his guns-a-blarin’ rhetoric, he was also deservedly known as a canny survivor. In his twenties, he had made the first solo ascent of the north face of the Gothics in the Adirondack Mountains, earning a place in the annals of American mountaineering; the route he pioneered is still known as “the Dugal.” Throughout my childhood, Dad was always taking off to go on climbs involving backpacks full of neatly coiled ropes and clanking pitons. Once, when I was six and Ian was four, Dad had gone on an epic climbing expedition in the Sierras with a buddy, and a freak blizzard buried the region where they had last been seen. My mother piled us into the station wagon, and we gunned it up to the base camp and found it teeming with rangers on walkie-talkies, TV news crews, and emergency rescue workers. My mother crumpled on the steering wheel. Ian wailed, clutching his favorite stuffie at the time, a Raggedy Andy that he had named, poignantly, “Doll Daddy.” But there was no question in my mind that Dad was going to make it. When he and his pal were helicoptered to safety a few days later, emerging with rolls of spectacular film and having survived on a concoction he’d whipped up called “Mongolian milk” (powdered milk, snow, whiskey), Dad was fully intact, grubby and grinning like a teenage boy.

  He was also notorious for being rib-cracklingly funny. Certainly grown-up men and women were always smiling broadly in his company—and, in short order, howling—but he was hilarious to my brother and me, too: a steady beat we could count on in the rhythm of everyday life. For example, Dad would be standing in the kitchen, his briefcase in one hand and a giant mug of coffee in the other, grumping in his Great Santini, ham-fisted way. But if he caught your eye, he might casually put the mug down on the counter, drop his briefcase on the floor, and spin into a graceful twirl and arabesque with his eyes reaching for heaven, then segue into a passionately furrowed Flamenco hand-clapping and foot-stomping piece. Then he would come to a complete stop on his tiptoes, set his heels down, and nonchalantly pick up the mug and the briefcase. When you laughed, he would bow and decorously intone, “And thus ends the recital of Julius Walrusso”—and leave for work.

  But back in the evil-twin column, everyone who knew him also knew that Dad was just as likely to erupt into a molten rage as he was to crack a smile. He could be exquisitely vicious and foul-mouthed, especially if he was on a binge. (Dad’s alcoholism always colored everything he did, but when Ian and I were young, the tones were still pale; as he, and we, got older, they all but blacked out everything about him.) But sometimes, the twin currents would converge like matter and antimatter—and then you were in for a treat. There was the time, for example, when Dad went to the supermarket to get some ice cream and became so outraged by the number of flavors—as well as the amount and variety of nuts, candies, and swirls bastardizing the pure, time-honored flavors—that he charged into the manager’s office and ranted that “we” didn’t want “this obscene array of choices, this New York super fudge almond chunk nougat swirly stripe bullshit”; he, frankly, found it “ostentatious and aggressive.” He didn’t know what was “going on here,” but he simply wanted to put the manager on notice that “we” just wanted “Butter Brickle! Plain and simple!” “We” didn’t want all this “goddamned frippery.” “We” never asked for it, and “we” wanted “no part” of it. When my dad relayed this story to me after the fact, I remained silent, while he sat there fuming at the memory of it. After a few moments, I ventured, “You know, Dad, I actually really like all that stuff—especially the kind with the peanut butter cups.” My dad balked. “Really?” He considered this, then nodded. “Well, perhaps I owe that hardworking citizen an apology.” I howled. He scratched his chin.

  The trick was knowing what would tip the balance from bad to good—and, really, that’s what made the “Susie and Daddy-Doe” story so telling to people close to us. Especially to my mother. In her rendition of that night, it was pitch-black outside, there were no other cars on the road, and Dad had been so violently enraged about the car that he was a hair’s breadth away from a tantrum that she was not sure she could control. She was scared. But then, she said, I had somehow known precisely what to say and how to say it so that calm, arrowlike, would penetrate my father’s roiling soul. People would nod knowingly, sometimes reaching out to pat my mother’s hand and looking at me as though I knew a secret. “That little girl loved her daddy,” she would whisper, tearily.

  My dad, a self-declared enemy of emotional hyperbole, would never enter into such discourse. Indeed, he loathed metaphor and what he referred to as “endless discussion”; he liked chutzpah, guts, gonzoism. But his concession to the veracity of Susie and Daddy-Doe came shortly thereafter in the invention of a bedtime story he called “The Adventures of Beverly Noodle.” A charming and agile strand of pasta, Beverly Noodle was forever finding herself in tough spots—an icy crevasse, a den of criminals—and, with the help of her kind-hearted, well-adjusted friend and assistant, Sebastian the Donkey, she was always able to rally her singular combination of wit and grit to figure her way out.

  To the extent that Dad would countenance metaphor, there was no question whom he intended these characters to represent. Dad, who extended the Beverly allegory by referring to himself in our workaday lives as the “noodler-in-chief,” was always figuring things out, and I, often tapped in the “noodling” process—Sebastian the Donkey—was henceforth dubbed “the deputy noodler.” I loved being the deputy noodler. The job involved everything from figuring out how to pack a hiking backpack for maximum efficiency to determining which annuals to plant where in the garden based on color and height to more esoteric conundrums like figuring out what quarks were. Although Dad spent his career as the marketing director for various high-level investment funds, his métiers, other than ice climbing, were photography, painting, gardening, astronomy, and geology, and those passions often converged on expeditions, even everyday ones.

  “Now, think
about this, if you would,” he once posited to me on a run to the local plant nursery when I was around ten. “They’ve just discovered a new particle, and the scientists describe it as ‘the absence of nothing’—now, what in hell does that mean?” I considered this and then said that the absence of nothing seemed like it had to be everything. My Dad slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s exactly it!” he hooted. “I’ve been thinking about it all week, and you got it!” He laughed and shook his head. “Tell you what, there, little darlin’,” he said, grinning at me in the rearview mirror. “What we got us here is not just one drop-dead beautiful and one funny-as-hell cookie—we got us one smart cookie.”

  Noodler-in-chief and deputy noodler. As I approached school age, I evinced a more demonstrable sense of grit, the trait my dad most admired. In part because one of his heroes was the explorer John Wesley Powell, who famously navigated and mapped the Grand Canyon for the geographical survey of the U.S. government without an arm (it had been blown off during action in the Civil War), my dad relentlessly marketed the idea that grit is more important than talent. He would take my brother and me on camping trips in the Sierras, sometimes compelling us to hike—as seven- and five-year-olds—upward of ten miles a day. Ian would flop poutily on a rock and refuse to budge. I’d keep my head down and press on. You always felt incredibly nauseated in the mornings because of the altitude, and while my brother would, understandably, complain, I made it a point to suck it up. “Tough as nails, Suze,” he’d declare with gruff pride.

  But the ultimate honor was the Arctic Trip. As reward for my proven determination to tough it out, Dad made me a special promise when I was around eight: When I turned twelve, he and I would take a trip up to Ellesmere Island. The northernmost island in the Canadian Archipelago, Ellesmere Island appealed to my dad as an ice climber; the place is virtually all icy mountains, and practically nothing grows there. But he was also drawn to what he imagined would be the singularity of the void. “There’s just nothing up there,” he’d marvel. The plan was that it would be a “troopers only” expedition, just the two of us: hard-core camping, climbing, and canoeing. We would not bathe; we would eat nothing but Ding-Dongs and Kool-Aid. “I bet you and I will be the only two crazy honkies up there, Suze-o.”

  Did I really have a well of native grit, or did my love for my dad—and fear of losing my deputy noodler status—compel me to dig one? I don’t know. I know that I couldn’t wait for that trip. Could. Not. Wait. I could not believe that my notoriously gonzo, smart, funny, ice-climbing dad had selected me to take on the most serious expedition he had ever conceived. It meant, in my mind, that I not only had the right stuff; I must have more of the right stuff than anyone else he knew. He invited me. My father, who was so extraordinary, saw something extraordinary in me. Not only that, but he saw that we shared the same extraordinary traits. Dad and me.

  Now, in one sense, it was true: We were both pretty curious (dilettantish), determined (obdurate), and fond of a good laugh. Whether such traits are in fact extraordinary is arguable, and in any case that wasn’t the issue for me as a kid. Simply, my father saw what I was; my mom just couldn’t. Though I know that she loved me, her way of looking at the world was so fundamentally different from mine that we were rarely able to pull off a successful noncognitive transmission. Also, perhaps because I was a girl, as well the namesake of six generations of esteemed Susan Gregorys, she became increasingly distraught as she perceived that with every year, I was failing more and more to fall in line with “the women of our family.” Classic bluestocking ladies, the matriarchs in my lineage conformed not to the Hestia or Demeter archetype but to the Emily Dickinson profile, preferring to choose their own society—a society most often restricted to books and a select group of people who liked to talk about books. That I liked a lot of other things besides books confounded my mother. When I was young, this frustrated her to the extent that her normally weird but loving nicknames for me—“pickle-ator-pumpkin” and “magic muffin”—were often supplanted with “miserable failure,” among others. I now know that she didn’t mean it, but at the time, such characterizations made me feel very bad about who, in fact, I was.

  My dad, however, gave genuine thought to my ideas and observations, literally snorted milk out his nose laughing at my jokes, took actual pleasure in my company. I sensed that my dad didn’t love me just because, as my father, he kind of had to; he actually liked me. Even as a little kid, I was aware that he did not react this way to everyone. A telltale polite, resigned smile crept across his lips whenever he was faced with an encounter it became clear he would have to endure, or if someone made a joke he did not find funny. Ian, for example, was often forced to regard Dad’s portrait in blasé tolerance. It was heartbreaking: Ian adored Dad the way a puppy loves his boy. He bounded around, frantically working every angle he could think of to get Dad’s attention, to mimic Dad’s humor. But, as often happens when people get increasingly anxious to please, Ian would overdo it, and that, for Dad—master of the fun and the easy—was an instant deal-breaker. Dad would simply give Ian the smile and move on to the next activity. Once, after a particularly furious bid to get Dad to laugh, Ian exploded. “How come every time Suze says something, you think it’s so funny, but every time I say something, you don’t?” Dad calmly scooped ice cream into a bowl. “Well, Ian,” he said, “vive la différence.”

  It wasn’t fair, Dad’s treatment of Ian, and I didn’t get anything out of feeling favored. Then again, Ian was, without question, Mom’s darling, and I was inextricably bound to Dad, largely because I needed his protection. Around the time I turned ten, our household became tense, forbidding. My mother had started teaching at Stanford, and the commute from Berkeley was a killer. She wanted to move to Palo Alto. Dad did not. That was all my brother and I knew, factually speaking, but it was clear that Dad was grumbly. A lot more grumbly. His grit and gonzoism began to morph into fierce rigidity and unaccountable black moods. But so far as his interactions with me were concerned, Dad was still noodler-in-chief. Whenever my frenzied, stressed mother was screaming at me after dinner, Dad would simply instruct me to get into the car: “Sit tight, Suze.” I’ll never know what he said to her, but he would burst out of the house, slam the car door, and head for the Berkeley Hills. We’d get out at the summit and observe constellations. “Look at that, old pal,” he said, pointing a thick index finger upward. “That star there, at the tip of Orion, is a whole other galaxy.”

  It was only within the past several years, after a lot of researching and reporting I did for professional journalistic purposes (and therapy for my addled psyche) that I had one of those revelations that instantly illuminate all the murky primal feelings. It emerged from reading I did—with my first baby snuggled next to me on the messy bed—about studies on infant attachment. It’s old news to anyone who has read anything at all about children’s development in the past twenty years or so, but to me, it was flat-out jaw-dropping material. Babies are actually born needing to bond to someone—who knew? Renowned pediatrician Penelope Leach cites studies that show that in order to thrive, babies need to attach to a primary caregiver within the first six months of life. Without healthy attachment to such a person, a baby can develop what is called “reactive attachment disorder,” a mental health condition most often seen in cases in which babies or very young children have passed through a succession of different foster care situations, lived in orphanages, or endured prolonged hospitalization; have experienced the sudden death of a parent, or divorce; or have had multiple caregivers, parents or regular caregivers with mental illness or drug and alcohol problems, or mothers with postpartum depression. According to the Mayo Clinic, children with this disorder exhibit one of two types of behavior: “inhibited” (“shunning relationships to virtually everyone”) and “disinhibited” (attempting to “form inappropriate and shallow attachments to virtually everyone, including strangers”). According to Mayo, such children “can’t give or receive affection.”

 
The good news is that, so far as a baby is concerned, it doesn’t particularly matter if the candidate for attachment is an aunt, an older brother, a grandparent, or a nurse at an orphanage. The only thing that matters is that the person lovingly and consistently attends to the baby’s needs: reading the baby’s cues, responding to them, and, most important, perhaps, taking genuine delight in the tiny creature. In return, that person becomes, to the baby, “mother.”

  As my life has lurched forward, my appreciation of this concept has been as helpful as it has been poignant. It illuminates a previously invisible framework for so many of my decisions and neuroses. It helps to explain why I married the man I married; a big part of why I never, ever would have imagined in a billion years that I would get divorced. I think it also in some way explains why I, like a great many of my Generation X compadres, practiced—and still do—a modified form of “attachment parenting.” And it may also explain why my marriage fell apart a little more than a year after my father died. Because here’s the thing: Until I was ten, my dad was my mother.

  But when I was eleven, everything changed. After living in Stanford for a year, we moved to the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia, a blue-blooded territory comprising old estates, debutantes, elite prep schools, and country clubs that excluded minority members. My father had been offered a job with a fast-growing financial services company, and to keep the family together, my mother agreed to the move, giving up her position at Stanford. She hated it. We hated it. The weather was awful, the neighbors were austere and remote—so were the kids, none of whom seemed to ride bikes after school but who were occupied with sports like lacrosse and field hockey. Our house was so big that it took two furnaces to heat, and there was an entire floor that we never used. (After John Lennon was killed, I assumed proprietorship, dedicating the bedrooms to theme shrines devoted to each individual Beatle.) My brother’s room was in a completely separate wing from mine, and it was freezing. He was always getting sick. I felt scared for him, being alone there. Sometimes I would come to check on him on especially cold nights and find him shivering under his polyester-filled comforter, clinging to his elephant stuffie, Harold. I couldn’t understand why our parents didn’t do something.