Family

I am inspired by two fellow bloggers who have recently shared stories about their lives. The stories made me feel closer to them. I feel as if you are my friends, and friends are not something I have many of left in this world. There is no one left to be hurt by anything I might say - so why not? You can always move on to another blog if I become too tiresome.


I guess I've talked a lot about my family, but never much about my parents. At least, not about my father.

He was the fourth in a family of nine siblings. Frances, Arthur, Eleanor, Guilliam, Esther, John, Jim, Joe and Ted. Yes, I can still name them all. Just checking. Their mother died soon after Ted's birth, and they were more or less raised by Frances. I believe I've talked before about Frances - the aunt I never knew but have always admired. I may also have mentioned the fact that most of the family members were pretty much bigots and snobs, the exceptions being Frances and Joe. I've always contended that my father was the world champion bigot of all time. He was not a nice person. I may have mentioned that before, too. I don't remember.

I have never quite understood how two people like my mother and father ever got together. She was very young - under the age of consent for marriage. She was from a working family. Her father owned a coal and ice yard and worked hard beside his employees. He got his hands dirty. I'm sure that had to be frowned upon by my paternal grandfather. My mother never went beyond the eighth grade in school. I know that could not have made them very happy. She worked as a sales girl, a "common shop girl", as they said, in the dry goods department of a department store. But she was pretty, and willing to marry him. No one has ever told me anything about his reasons, but I have my suspicions. They married just at the start of World War I, so of course he was not drafted immediately. And they had a baby about a year later, so he was not drafted then either.

His family never did accept her.They accepted my sister and brother. She was named for their mother, and he was "the third" ( God help him). I didn't come along until eleven years later. By that time the marriage was on the rocks, and my father was asking for a divorce. I guess that's why my sister was always "Guil's daughter" and I was "Ruth's girl".

My father did very well at the bank, in the Building and Loan Department. He got along extremely well with his secretary. No matter where we went - if he took me to the zoo or the circus or just for a ride in the country, we always seemed to run into her, and she would join us for the day.

He did take me alone on little day trips, when he had to go into the inner city to talk to the bank's tenants. They were probably the biggest slum lords in the city at the time. He would turn me loose to play with the kids while he conducted business with the parents. I loved it. The kids were great, and the parents treated me very well. Little kids don't worry about the sorry conditions in the building. They just have fun. When he was finished, we had the long drive home to the suburbs. Now, in the 1930's kids did not talk back or question their parents. We sat and listened - or pretended to listen. All the way home he would preach his little sermon about how "They" lived. We wouldn't live like that. They were no better than animals, etc., etc. I guess it was supposed to be an object lesson for me. I would sit there thinking, "My father must be crazy" because he had seen the same things I had - the same people I had. I saw nothing wrong with them. And when he talked about the condition of their houses, even a little kid could figure out that was the landlord's neglect, not the residents' fault.

Anyway, when my mother refused to divorce him (He had no grounds, so it would have to be her doing.), he decided to be sure she knew she had grounds. Then he started taking me out at night. I went to more bars and night clubs and cocktail lounges before I was six than most adults at the time. I hated it. They would always end up sitting me up on a bar stool with a Shirley Temple, and asking me things like, "Are you married, Sweetheart?" or "Do you have a steady boyfriend?" To this day, I hate bars. I hate the smell of them. It doesn't matter how nice a place it is, they all have that smell of beer and whiskey and perfume - and in those days, cigarette smoke. Then he would take me home and tell me to be sure to tell Mommy where we went and who we were with. Eventually, when I was six, my mother decided I was getting "old enough to understand what was going on", and it wasn't good for me. So she divorced him.

I didn't mind them divorcing. It wasn't much different for me - except I didn't have to go to bars any more, and that was good. It isn't as if my father was ever home much that I remembered. I cannot remember a time when my parents shared a bedroom. He had his own room, as did my brother and sister, and my mother and I shared a room. When they divorced, my sister was twenty-one. She got her own apartment. My brother came with Mother and me until he went off to war, and when he came home, he married. So for the next eleven years, Mother and I lived on $100 a month child support, plus whatever she could earn. I saw my father every Sunday afternoon, when he gave me a quarter allowance. When I turned eighteen, the child support stopped, I graduated from high school, went to work and started paying the rent. (The rent for our five room apartment was $90. a month. My starting salary was $37.50 a week.)


I loved my father. It took me a lot of years before I realized that, but I did of course. If I hadn't loved him, I wouldn't have cared so much, would I? He was my father. But I didn't like him much.

There was a day - about a half hour one afternoon - when I actually felt like he was a real father. We talked, and for the first time he was not arrogant nor pompous. He was humble, and he told me he was sorry. I asked for what. He said, "For everything." He told me that all the times we had argued, I was right and he was wrong. I had never in my life heard my father say he was sorry for anything to anyone. But that afternoon in the hospital, he said it to me. He died that night.