When the sun lowers itself into the Pacific Ocean, west of California, it has a way of lingering on the horizon that makes you imagine it will stay for ever. It is perhaps less bright than at its zenith, but more beautiful. You don’t want to let it go. Then, just as you are sure it won’t disappear, it does.
The other day, my older son and I walked along the beach near my father’s house between Los Angeles and San Diego. We did not talk much, and I forgot to tell him that in that same briney wash north of us my father taught me to body-surf and to fish. My son is 30 years old, a year older than my father was when I was born. My father was always the measure. He finished school at 17, as did I. I studied philosophy at university, as he did. He refused his father’s offer to take over the family firm with its assured income and thousands of employees, much as I did not follow him into the law under an inscription that would have pleased him, ‘Glass & Son, Attorneys at Law’. We were both 21 when we ventured overseas, he sailing as a merchant marine and naval officer in 1942, me as a grad student in 1972. He came home five years later. I never returned.
He married my mother when he was 28. I married at 26. He had his first child, me, at 30. Mine came when I was 27, but it felt strange to get ahead of him. His marriage lasted five years, mine for 17. He had a second wife, for a year, and a third, whom he loved profoundly and happily, for 40. God, he was lucky. I have yet to find a second, putting him well ahead of me.
As a youngster, he made his father proud. He was a champion American football player at Loyola High School, one of the 11 players chosen in 1937 as the best in all of Los Angeles. I did not play football. At law school, he finished first in his class and came top in his examinations for the California bar. That may have softened Grandad’s disappointment that neither of his sons would assume the family business. As a son, I was proud of my father too. But I did not give him much to be proud of.
In my last year at university, when the draft board seemed poised to call me to the colours, I met Dad for breakfast in one of the coffee shops where he had ham and eggs in the company of other lawyers, horse trainers and touts, criminal clients, meat packers and businessmen. He was on his own with the Los Angeles Times when I walked in, concealing my fear of him and of his reaction to what I had to tell him. I can see the restaurant now, but cannot remember whether he was eating his eggs or drinking his mug of coffee when I came to the point. If the army called, I would not serve. If prosecuted and convicted, I would go to prison. He did not agree or disagree, and he was not angry. If the government took me to court, he said, he would be my lawyer. He had saved men from the gas chamber. He would keep me out of prison.
It was an era, denied retrospectively by many of my newly reactionary and prosperous contemporaries, when fathers and sons stopped understanding one another. I knew someone whose father reported him to the police for smoking marijuana. The boy spent a few months in jail. His father told me years later that he believed it was the right thing at the time, but he had regretted it ever after. There were other resolute fathers and rebellious sons. Many ruptures did not mend. My father and I were often hard on each other. Yet he stood by me, right and wrong. I wanted to make him proud.
When the time came, the draft board ignored me — although my number in the conscription lottery was 48 out of 365, too near the top. Richard Nixon, whose legal secretary my father had inherited when Nixon moved to Washington as a congressman in the late 1940s, was withdrawing the troops from Vietnam. America no longer needed me to prosecute its ruthless war against the peasants, so Dad and I missed our hour in court. A few months later, I left the country to study philosophy in Lebanon. I meant to come back with a masters degree, endure three years in law school and become the junior partner in ‘Glass & Son’. Instead, I fell into journalism, television, book-writing and what was probably an easier and more foolish life.
In an unexpected way, 15 years after I left California’s sunsets, Dad had occasion to take pride in his prodigal. He was in Los Angeles airport, he told me in London the next day, having a drink while waiting to board his aeroplane. Above the bar, a television news report announced that an American hostage in Beirut had escaped his captors and was on his way home. Everyone in the bar, Dad said, stood up and cheered. He did not tell them that the escapee who had somehow outfoxed the Shiite Muslim kidnappers was his son. When he told me about it, he was as proud as if I had scored a touchdown at the Rose Bowl. It compensated a little for the hell I had put him through that summer.
During our reunion after the kidnapping, he broke a lifetime’s restraint to hold me in his arms and kiss me. I was 36, he 66. The training his generation had received from their fathers suddenly deserted him: men shake hands, men remain stoic, men don’t cry. The only time I had ever heard him cry was over the telephone between Los Angeles and London, when he told me his younger brother, my gambling playboy Uncle Tommy, had died of cancer. Dad was merely passing on the news, until, as unexpectedly for him as for me, he broke down.
In my father’s house I recently found photographs of Dad and Tommy as children in prohibition-era Los Angeles. They dressed in suits like little men. Until now, no one had ever shown me these dozens of pictures — Dad as an infant on a tour of the Rocky Mountains, visiting relations in Chicago, playing on the farm in Oklahoma and posing in the wilds of barely populated southern California. There was his father, shooting ducks in the north of California. Suddenly I was seeing them all, younger than I had known them, my Aunts Rosemary and Eileen as coquettish little girls, my grandparents stolid and stable even in their twenties, the great aunts and uncles and long-dead cousins, the new Packard cars and three-piece suits, the ladies’ fox stoles and outlandish hats.
I looked at those relics, but it was too late to ask Dad about them. He lay at home in bed, where I held his hand. For the first few days of my return to see him, he promised to take me out and give me a big breakfast. I believed him. When he stopped talking, I still believed him. He was the sun on the Pacific horizon. He would be there forever. Then, he wasn’t.
I have never written anything before this that I did not send him to read. He was 87. I am 57. What is my measure now?