I hated this man. I remember him as an extraordinarily bad tempered ogre who made life miserable for everyone around him.
I want to describe a typical day in my childhood. Until about 5 PM everything was relatively normal. At about that point my father came home from work. If I had any friends playing with me in our yard, they knew enough to leave. My father would arrive home and prowl around the house looking for something to yell about. One thing seemed about as good as another; he always found something. Occasionally he just started yelling whenever he found something. More often he waited until dinner. We all ostensibly ate together. At least we were all supposed to go the dining room table and eat together. It seemed like virtually every dinner for several years running he would start yelling at someone in the family, usually one of my sisters. I learned early to keep a low profile. Usually my mom would intervene and take the brunt of his wrath. Usually at least one person and more often everyone except me ran away from the table crying, seething. I seethed. I hated these dinners. But I always stayed at the table and ate until I was full. Usually alone.
As often as not my father had to go to some meeting in the evening so he wasn't around. If he was home, he would either work in his office, where he was unappoachable, or watch TV. I think my quality time with him consisted of us watching TV together, not saying a word to each other. Usually all of the kids tried to stay in another part of the house, the better to avoid him and his wrath. It didn't always work, but there was no other reasonable strategy.
There were three kids, of whom I am the oldest. Sandra and Carol are two and four years younger than me. He did not treat us equally or fairly. When I was 8 I got a nickel a week allowance. When I was 12 I got a quarter a week, the same as my youngest sister, Carol. When she was twelve she got a dollar or two. In similar fashion, she was always given far more than Sandra or I. It was always clear that Craig was willing to give her things that he wouldn't give to either Sandra or me. The situation persisted until the day of his death.
He was very concerned with images and appearances. He wanted to present a certain picture to the outside world. We had to fit into his picture. He never adjusted his picture because of our desires or needs.
In one sense I had it easy. I was a boy. He wanted me to look a certain way. He wanted me to do well in school. Otherwise he pretty much left me alone. Since I did well in school anyway, that was never a problem. The rest is such a hackneyed 1960s story you should be able to predict it. Haircuts were a serious issue. It all started innocently enough. One summer it was hot. I must have been in 6th or 7th grade. I told the barber to give me a whiffle cut. When my father saw it he exploded. When my hair regrew enough to be shaped he insisted I get a flattop cut. It was only hair, so I did. For several years. After a while I decided this was a dorky haircut and let it grow. Initiating a constant series of fireworks. He had me ready to run away from home several times. I don't mean as a momentary thing. I mean that I seriously weighed my options and my future; what price was my freedom from this idiot? In the end I hung on until I got to college. Since that college was Princeton I was A number one material for his public image and he shut up a bit. But as I let my hair grow, he threated to pull me out of school. In my senior year I finally let it grow shoulder length. He had no more leverage.
My sisters were not so lucky. They had a more extensive and superficial image they had to match. Neither ever achieved it. I doubt either could have. So he disapproved of them. I knew he never approved of me, but it seemed worse for them. Carol seemed to be able to fit into the mold. Until she got sick in about 3rd grade. Suddenly she couldn't see well enough to read. On one hand some things were tried to help her. As was usually the case, what was done was too little, too late. On the other hand, suddenly she was failing in school and she faced massive and continuing disapproval. She began to hang out with other n'er-do-wells and began a career as something of a juvenile delinquent. She must have become schizophrenic as she somehow maintained herself as his ideal child in several ways while being anything but in most everything else. As things got crazier and crazier, Sandra and I actually benefitted because he left us alone more.
Eventually things got so nuts that Carol attempted suicide while she was in high school. This might have alerted even the brain dead that there was an extremely serious problem that required a different approach. Carol was institutionalized for a year or two, then in various halfway houses. The whole family had to see Carol's therapist, who needed to get a read on what exactly was going on in her life. Craig didn't believe in psycotherapy in any form. His participation was grudging and happened only when there was no possible alternative. His behavior changed not one iota. Sandra and I had already figured out that the way to save ourselves was to create enough distance for ourselves that Craig couldn't threaten us under any circumstances. Again I was lucky. I was nearly out of college. My dependency was about to stop. While I mostly hated Princeton, I suffered thru it, actually finding a few things to like there towards the end of my stay. Sandra was equally unprepared for college. She quit Ithaca College after a semester, then bounced around for several years before enrolling and graduating from Boston University, then Indiana University and finally doing doctoral work at City College in NY. Not being in college left her exposed to all the bullshit my father could throw at her. But it also left her working and not directly dependent on him.
While all this was going on, Craig was the pillar of the local Episcopal church. For many years he was the treasurer of the church. We went every Sunday. I remember that Jesus was the reason I had to get dressed up, etc. Nothing that they could tell me in Sunday school could counteract the certainty that anybody that made me get dressed up every Sunday was bad. Of course we had to get dressed up-it was the ritual and the appearances that mattered. I can only imagine how I would have been punished if I insisted on going to church without dressing up. The upshot of it all was that I suffered along with it all. In around 9th grade all the kids had to study for a whole winter and pass some test before we could be confirmed as members of the church in our own right. I was a good student. I easily got the highest mark on the test. I was too good a student. I was thinking about what I professing to believe in. I knew I didn't. About a year later I stopped going to church. Shortly afterwards I discover Taoism and have never considered myself Christian since. Craig was so blind that he wasn't aware of that until some 20 years later, when I wrote a series of letters about my experiences living in Indonesia in which I contrasted my inability to accept Islam with my inability to accept Christianity. He never told me directly. He never said anything directly after a while. My mother functioned as his messenger. It was thru her I heard that he was infuriated by my letters. I was also 40 years old and I hadn't been slightly interested in whether he cared about anything in my life for at least 15 years.
All of the nonsense about appearances came spectacularly in focus at Carol's wedding. Somehow the whole affair was usurped by my parents, who changed it from a celebration for Carol into a pageant for the benefit of my father's business associates. This was absolutely insane since me father had retired a few years earlier and moved from Massachusetts to South Carolina. However, the wedding was staged in my hometown, Needham, Mass. at the old church. The bride and groom were united more in trying to get away from their parents than because they truly wanted to spend life together. Nobody seemed to see this or care. Instead elaborate preparations were made to have the most picture perfect, vapid ceremony that could be staged. The only thing to mar the picture was the minister, who seemed to notice the preponderance of older adults and said some condescending things about how young people liked to inject a few things into the ceremonies that they find meaningful. Then the party proceeded to the local country club for the reception, conceived with the same aesthetic. Sandra and I, along with some other young riffraff sat at a table way at the edge of things. We were obviously there only to be seen by those people who did matter. How tacky was it? There was ice cream so full of preservatives that it didn't melt. How nuts was it? At one point, my mother wanted to get into a fight with me. I don't remember the specifics but I'm sure it had to do with my not accepting the artificiality gracefully. Carol allowed all this to happen because she had always tried to go the extra mile to please my parents. And just like a soldier, she survived her miserable tour of duty high on drugs.
a brief story
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