My father was in his eighties when I found his track medals in the back of a drawer. He had been a schoolboy middle-distance champion. A jock! Pressed for more details, he reluctantly told me that he had quit his college track team when the coach wouldn’t send him to an out-of-town meet because the Olympic hopeful, whom Dad had beaten all season, was the one the coach had decided to promote. And that had been the end of his sports career. He hadn’t spoken about it in nearly seventy years, he said. Not even to his sportswriter son.
The symbolism of those medals has turned out to be a big piece in the jigsaw puzzle of Dad’s life, and thus in my own. In some ways, maybe, my biggest sports story. Over the years, Dad had freely expressed his skepticism—even cynicism—about politics, religion, and academia. Dad had opinions about everything. But he had always seemed indifferent to sports on any level, which, given his great interest in individual and mass psychology, seemed odd. I wondered if he felt too intellectual for sports or, later on, if he was subtly putting down what I did for a living. Or was that me putting myself down? He was always telling me, jesting on the square, to take a week off and write a best seller. I’d breezily reply something like “I’m too busy to get rich,” but it felt like a needle and sometimes it hurt.
I had no idea that he was still indignant over what he considered an unfair exclusion. He thought he had won the right to go to that track meet. Sports had disillusioned him. He had believed sports was a true meritocracy. Like Cosell, he believed in America’s promise to all of fairness, constitutionality, order. Dad just didn’t believe that the country always kept its promises.
After I found out about his aborted track career, I asked for his take on the City College scandals of 1951 in which basketball players had conspired with gamblers to fix the outcome of games. (Dad graduated from City in 1927.) He told me that he thought much of life as well as sports was fixed, though not as blatantly as those basketball games had been. In most cases, he said, it’s about the wrong people getting the chance to play “for political reasons.” He said that we need to make sure everybody gets an equal chance to play on a level field. Then it’s up to them.
Now I get it. He was my jock ideal. Fairness was the dominant theme of his life. Most of his career was in underserved districts of New York City, teaching and administering in schools for what were then officially designated as “socially maladjusted” boys. He lived to salvage those boys. The world might see them as juvenile delinquents, but in his writings Dad called them “inadequately protected children” whose “disturbances” had been caused and exacerbated at home and in previous schools where they had been embarrassed and punished. He offered them “an atmosphere of masculine authority” in which their self-esteem would be boosted.
He was hardly a “leftist” or even a “bleeding heart” by any labeling standards. He was an all-American centrist: Give people a fair shake by making sure they have a pair of boots so they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, which meant health care, education, shelter, food, and psychological support. After that, they were responsible for themselves. Dad had always felt responsible for himself.
I think his worldview began to take shape in 1912, when he was eight years old and heard the SOS calls from the Titanic on his brother’s crystal radio set. A seed was planted in his mind. If the supposedly unsinkable Titanic could go down, could you ever again put faith in technology or in the officials who misspoke with such authority? When his father died in the flu epidemic a few years later, another seed was planted: even God could not be relied on to do the right thing. Yet Dad was an optimist. He believed that things could be made better and he could be part of the solution. But he took nothing for granted.
Whenever disaster struck, from illness in the family to carnage on the evening news, I’d call him. In 1963, when President Kennedy was murdered, I called Dad to make sure he was okay. After all, the old man was pushing sixty. I called him after 9/11 to make sure I was okay. After all, I was in my sixties. Being a frequent subway rider in New York, I even called him after the 2004 train bombings in Madrid. I said I was calling to tell him we were all okay. I knew he would calm me down. After all, he was 100.
Dad would tell me to relax. Don’t let your imagination loose unless you’re writing fiction, he’d say: “Nothing is ever quite as good as you imagine it will be nor as bad.” When I was younger, there seemed something bittersweet, disappointed, even defeatist about that, but now it feels more like Never Give Up. We Can Get Through This. After all, Dad was saying without saying “Look, I’m still here.”
Now he’s not, but I’m still talking to him, taking both sides of the conversation. He’d have been very interested—I told you so, he would remind silently with his bushy eyebrows—about the housing bust, the oil spills, the latest Wall Street greed implosion. His frugality, born in the Great Depression, had paid off with a fine nest egg for a schoolteacher. His distrust of Wall Street, where he had worked as a teenage messenger, had impelled him to keep every saved penny in Treasury bills. Thanks for that, Dad. Among other things.
When the name Lipsyte first appeared in the New York Times, it was his, on June 28, 1936, two years before I was born. The headline read:
BRONX MAN ALSO VICTOR
Sidney Lipsyte Gets $400 for Article
Dad had won first place in a Times essay contest on “the Constitution as a living document.” He told me he had written it overnight at the urging of his principal. Dad was a junior high school English teacher then. In the Times story announcing his prize, he said he was going to use the money, no small change in those days, to “travel.” Actually, he bought one-third of an acre some fifty miles from Queens in upstate New York and began to build a house, much of it himself. So he knew that writing pays!
He always encouraged my writing. Sometimes a little too vigorously. He had lots of ideas to make my junior high school science fiction stories more exciting. We struggled for creative control. At the time I thought it was parental bigfooting, and I was resentful. Years later, when he showed me short stories he had written for school magazines about the Imp of the Universe and his henchmen, Time-on-his-Hands and Mischief-on-his-Mind, I realized that he was living a dream through me, and I was proud. Knowing that, I felt more comfortable allowing myself to live my dreams through Susannah’s social consciousness (she’s a lawyer) and Sam’s fiction; when his 2010 literary comic novel, The Ask, hit the Times’ best-seller list, I fully understood the pleasure of vicarious pleasure.
When I dropped out of the premed program at Columbia and declared English as my major, Dad was supportive, although he urged me to take the junior high school English teachers exam as a fallback position. I refused until his urgings became challenges. All those Columbia courses, he’d say, bet you couldn’t pass a license exam I passed a quarter-century ago with mere City College courses. He knew me. Of course, I had to take the test. He didn’t seem surprised when I passed, and five years later, during a newspaper strike, he never said “I told you so” when I was able to support myself by substitute teaching at the Rikers Island jail school he supervised.
He was always suggesting stories for me to write for the Times. One of my first Publisher’s Prizes, an internal newsroom award, came through a tip from him in 1960. Floyd Patterson, the heavyweight champion, had been a socially maladjusted boy. When he made a last-minute decision to visit his old school (another one that Dad supervised) with his championship belt, Dad called me. It was a scoop.
I remember Dad as emotionally remote when I was a kid, but that was the style of the day. He and I shook hands. Sam and I hug. Sam and his son, Alfred, kiss. Dad was uncomfortable with expressed emotions. He and Mom often called me or my sister, Gale, together. When emotions flared, Dad would hang up the telephone extension. I thought of him as insensitive. Many years later, he told me that he had strong feelings but didn’t like to let them show. He said he felt bad that people might have thought he didn’t feel at all. As a kid and young man, I was never sure of his approval. Mom, on the other hand, was wildly emotional, freely expressive of loves and hates, of approval and disapproval, a spinning weather vane of passionate feelings.
Mom and Dad complemented each other. They hardly spent a night apart through sixty-six years of marriage. She was the fierce guardian of Dad’s career, and he was the soft wall she could bounce off. They potentiated each other’s distrust and paranoia, resentment of rich people, and posture of intellectual superiority. As children of nineteenth-century immigrants from Russia and Germany who had settled in the Bronx, they came by their suspicions naturally.
Dad was born on April 4, 1904, the fourth of four boys. He was interested in science and wanted to be an engineer like his oldest brother, but he refused to change his name (all his brothers became Lipton) and pretend to be Christian to beat the engineering school quotas against Jews. I’m not sure why. He never gave me a clear explanation. He was not at all religious. I like to think it was some kind of stubborn refusal to cave to bullies. So he became an ambitious, driven public school teacher, working extra jobs weekends and summers to create financial security, build a country house, and assure college for my sister and me. My mother was a teacher and guidance counselor, but it was a mommy-track career—she stayed at home for long stretches.
I loved visiting Dad at work, particularly during the years he was principal of one of those hard schools. He strode those halls like Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise (he would have thought C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower or Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey), a beloved, as well as respected, figure. The rough boys vied for his attention. Several times I saw him wallop kids hard on the butt for some infraction; the boys would grin at him as if thrilled by the caring attention they got nowhere else, promise to behave, and swagger off. I thought about my own Halsey gym teachers booting the bullies. Maybe there was more to it than I realized.
When he loosened up enough—we were both old men by then—to tell me his stories, one of his favorites was of his first command, at forty-four. He was appointed principal of an elementary school near the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1948. That school was already old when he took it over. He spent much of the summer before classes roaming the ancient vessel. One day he discovered a sagging wall in the basement. Physically strong and fearless, he pushed the wall over to reveal a huge tiled room, the walls and ceilings festooned with rusted pipes. In old school records he discovered that a shower room had been built for a local immigrant community that had no hot running water.
Taking advantage of the brief window of accommodation that incoming principals get, he persuaded the district to hire plumbers and restore the shower room for a student body that still could not wash itself on a regular basis. To remove any stigma, he created the Swim Club and promoted its logo, a fish, as if it were a varsity letter or gang colors. Kids wanted to wear that white cotton fish patch pinned to their shirts, members of a club whose sole admission requirement was needing a hot shower.
Dad was a combination bureaucrat and buccaneer. He always wore a suit and tie (bought by my mother in discount stores), usually with a white shirt. That’s where I learned about conservative camouflage; even in a cheap suit you can slip into most places, or could before 9/11, and make most establishment subjects think you are one of them or want to be. Tie snugged to his starched collar, Dad ran schemes to help his boys, one of which nearly got him into major trouble. His schools received subway tokens to distribute to pupils, but only for use going back and forth from school. What about the weekends, he thought, visiting relatives, church, sightseeing, shopping, maybe even a museum or a ball game? He started an illegal program to reward kids for regular attendance, improvement in grades, and good conduct with subway tokens. Attendance, grades, and conduct improved. When an assistant principal who wanted Dad’s job turned him in, Dad was called to headquarters. I can imagine him making his case in a pedagogical bluster, his neck and face turning red above the starched collar. We’re here to improve and enrich their lives, he’d be shouting, give them a chance to rise above the poor example of family and community. I can imagine “the brass,” as he called them, stepping back, waving him away, okay, okay, Sidney, just don’t do it again. Or get caught.
Dad ended his career as a director of a bureau in the Board of Education hierarchy, a colonel, I guess. He never made general, one of the various superintendent slots, which I know he would have liked. As so many do, his career ended badly.
In 1968, fifty-six years after the Titanic went down, Dad felt betrayed once again. The revolutionary passions that swept through America, even through sports, smashed into the city school system and broke it apart. Teachers went on strike over the issue of community versus central control. It started in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district of Brooklyn when the local superintendent, Rhody McCoy, who was black, fired a number of white teachers and principals. McCoy believed, as many whites including my father did, that black kids needed black role models. Dad had been in the forefront of hiring, mentoring, and promoting black men and women to be teachers and principals. He had put Rhody McCoy on the fast track in the first place. Rhody was his guy! Rhody danced with Mom at teacher functions! At every one of his promotion ceremonies, Rhody publicly thanked Dad! I had met and liked Rhody.
But now Dad, as an official observer during the strike, was being spat on by black parents, kids, and even teachers. Rhody McCoy saw it and physically turned his back on Dad. The reality and the symbolism of that betrayal devastated Dad, although he tried not to show it. He talked stiffly about politics, not about personal hurt.
Rhody became a controversial and polarizing figure in the city, symbolic of an upheaval that came to be seen variously as a black power grab, a righteous revolution, and an honest attempt to transfer educational control from a hidebound bureaucracy to the people it was serving.
Dad was angrier at the white liberal city administration that allowed it to happen than at his black teachers and principals, including Rhody. We argued. In my wisdom as a newly anointed Times columnist, I accused him of having had a colonialist mentality. Brooklyn instead of India. It was not a good time for us, and I wish I could take back what I said. Sam was born that year, and Dad’s joy cut me a lot of slack for callowness. Even if I was right, I wasn’t.
He retired a few years later and his funk continued, even after he and Mom gave up their apartment in Queens and moved upstate full-time. He was lethargic, distracted. He lost interest in his three greatest hobbies: reading, gardening, and home repairs. He told me later that he had expected to be dead by seventy-five and sometimes hoped to be.
Then something changed. Maybe a survival mechanism switched on, maybe Mom kicked him into gear. Somehow he reached into himself and restarted his engine. I saw a version of that strong, distant man reappear, although a little softer around the edges. He and Mom joined and then ran groups lobbying for the elderly, volunteered at local libraries, helped neighbors fill out health insurance forms, edited an increasingly ambitious newsletter for their temple. He started reading three books at a time—usually one on current affairs, one on ancient history, and one Patrick O’Brian naval novel. He kept scrapbooks of my writing—sports, nonsports, he cheered them all. He and Mom roamed local thrift stores for inexpensive books, old lamps he could rewire, furniture he could restore. He dug out the basement to install shelves for more books. He patched the roof, mowed the lawn, climbed on the roof to repair shingles and clean the gutters.
One winter, he refused to let Sam or me shovel the snow in his driveway. It was his job. He said, “If you’re not used to doing this, you could get a heart attack.” Sam was twenty, I was fifty, and Dad was eighty-four.
He also took increasing care of Mom. Throughout their marriage, she had often been sick, and Dad was quick to shop, cook, clean, launder. He made doing household chores seem manly.
When he himself was sick, which was rare, he would go into a corner and drink tea until he felt better. He refused to go to doctors. He said they just made you sicker. That worked until he was felled by stomach cramps at ninety. Against his will and with my phone support, Mom called an ambulance. I met them in the emergency room of their community hospital. Doctors were amazed—and annoyed—that he had no medical history, no previous doctors, no years of charts. For a week, each specialist poked him and suggested an invasive procedure that we deflected. Dad claimed it was just a piece of bad bologna. He got better without treatment, enjoying a week of jolly roommates and cooing nurses. He was cute as an old man.
It probably was bad bologna, to which he returned with gusto. A moderate eater who had never smoked or drunk alcohol, Dad allowed himself the vice of luncheon meats. The only member of the family happy to share his stash was Rudy, Lois’s big old shelter dog. Dad loved Rudy, his first dog friend.
Dad was ninety-four when Mom’s mind slipped its moorings. He insisted on taking care of her by himself. He could do it, he said. Maybe he didn’t want anyone else to see her without dignity. She was ninety, a diabetic with osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, hiatal hernia, thyroid imbalance, congestive heart failure, and carpal tunnel syndrome, for which she had been operated on twice. Macular degeneration had left her legally blind. She took seven different medications every day, including injections of insulin and an antidepressant that had been prescribed for her diabetic nerve pain some years before. She might have been suffering from depression, as well as vascular damage and Alzheimer’s, we were told. Eventually we found out she had a brain tumor.
Dad always went to Mom’s doctor’s appointments but never into the examining room. That was a job for Gale or me. He just couldn’t handle the increasingly hopeless news. He’d be in the waiting room, reading a year-old magazine, ready with some factoid he’d just picked up. I’d give him the headlines of my doctor’s notes. He’d nod without comment and write a check for the doctor’s bill.
“One hundred and five dollars and sixty-seven cents, you wonder how it is that’s one thing they can always figure out so easily.” He passed the check to the receptionist, and as the three of us left, he’d ask me, “Should we get something to eat? Need money, Bobby?”
Eventually, it was obvious that Dad couldn’t keep up with ministering to Mom alone. He didn’t want nurses in the house. He was haggard, fatigued, wearing out. Gale, a Jungian analyst, lived in northern California, and I was finding it harder and harder to give up days to drive Mom to her doctor’s appointments. We found a pleasant nursing home that was part of a nearby hospital complex that Dad could easily drive to every day. She was fine there for a while, then collapsed and was moved to the intensive care unit. She was a crumpled heap, a respirator breathing for her. Dad could sit at her bedside for only about twenty minutes before he would have to go into the hall and be alone. He refused to be seen weeping. He would say only, “These tubes have a bad effect on me.”
I asked him, “Are you sad?” and he was silent so long I thought there would be no answer. Finally he said, “That’s a hard question to answer.” For another few minutes I thought the conversation was over.
Then he said, “When you’ve been with someone for sixty-six years, they are a part of you.” Now the conversation was over.
The nurses treated her like a pet, washing and combing her silky white hair. She looked peaceful, except when she twitched reflexively. Dad said he liked to believe that she was having good dreams. And maybe that’s why he refused to let her go.
He was her health care proxy. He wanted to keep her alive, despite the living will that Mom had signed a few years before: In the event she suffered from a condition from which “there is no reasonable prospect of recovery to a cognitive and sentient life” and no longer could communicate “meaningfully” with others, she wanted no medical treatments to prolong her life.
I was angry for a while after Mom’s heart stopped and was pounded back to life, after massive doses of antibiotics were injected to control the pneumonia. Why not let her rest? But Gale persuaded me that Dad wasn’t ready yet; Mom was the campfire at which he kept himself warm. Gale reminded me that Dad would always do the right thing, once he had thought it through. On his timetable.
And then the hospital called. Medicare would be ending payment. Because she was on a respirator, Mom could not go back to the pleasant nursing home attached to the hospital, and if she stayed in intensive care it would cost $2,000 a day. She needed to be moved to a custodial care facility that could handle a respirator, a facility that was a warehouse too far for Dad to visit every day. How many life-and-death decisions come down to money?
We went over all the options with Dad and wrote down questions for us to ask the doctors again. How long would she continue to live on the respirator? Weeks, perhaps months, one doctor told us. How long without it? Hours, days. Was there any hope? No. There were indications her heart was weakening. Nothing was going on in her brain. She might even be in pain.
After a few minutes, Dad suddenly signaled with his hand, a quick chopping motion, that the conversation was over. Gale went out to talk to a passing doctor. After Dad could talk again, he told me that he had just seen the 1997 movie Titanic on TV. He said he thought it was a silly movie, although he enjoyed the effects. He talked again about hearing the SOS on his brother’s radio when he was eight.
When I recounted the conversation, Gale wanted to know exactly what Dad had said about the Titanic. She thought there might be clues to his state of mind.
“C’mon,” I snapped, “don’t start distancing yourself like he does. Don’t start being a shrink in your own life.”
Later, I apologized. “You were right,” I said. “There was something Dad said that I forgot to tell you. He said that one thing they missed in the movie was a reaction from the shore. He would have liked to know what the families of those passengers were doing and thinking while the ship went down.”
We allowed the respirator to be unplugged, and Mom slowly sank. After she died, Dad sat in his house, stared at the piles of books that had always been his comfort, and cried when he thought we weren’t watching. He barely ate. He roamed the house through the night. He dismissed any suggestion of talking about his grief, much less with a professional. We thought he wouldn’t survive. We remembered the last time Dad had been in a depression. But that had been thirty years earlier and he had lost a job, not his life’s companion.
Then one day he made Gale and me French toast for breakfast and urged us to hurry eating because he needed the dining room table to start laying out a family scrapbook. There were two more monster scrapbooks in the six years after that day. He continued to talk about Mom wistfully, but then he would get on with whatever he was doing. How had he been able to reach into himself and start the engine yet again? That’s the DNA I want even more than the longevity.
His corners got even softer. He let Gale and me further in. The humor came back, although sometimes with an edge. Reading about Dr. Martin Luther King’s philandering, he said in a deepened voice, “I’ve got a dream . . . girl.” Looking at the fetal sonogram of his first great-grandchild, Alfred Major Lipsyte, he said, “He looks just like me.” When he finally got to hold Alfred, he looked the newborn in the eye and dramatically intoned, “I am your ancestor.”
He was driving around again, looking for bargains in books and food. He paid his utility bills in person so he could have a little chitchat with the clerks, who treated him as an endearing grandpa. I’d go upstate and hang out for a day or two. It was fun. We’d talk, sometimes just sit and read. I’d usually bring Rudy so the two of them could bologna up together. We’d even watch TV together, especially women’s basketball, which he told me he’d “discovered.” He couldn’t stop talking about the players’ passing skills. He urged me to write about it. I could never persuade him that the rest of the world, including me, already knew about women’s basketball.
Those were the warmest, closest years. He told me stories I had never heard and would answer any question. He remembered an old friend from college who had introduced him to opera. He became a noted professor, opera translator, and author. He died in 1998. In one of many letters he wrote Dad, he admitted he was gay. In the fearful fifties, Dad told me, he had destroyed all the letters lest they fell into the wrong hands and destroy his friend’s career. And his? I wondered. He regretted having lost touch with him. He wished he had the letters.
I asked Dad if he had ever felt physically attracted to another man. He smiled and said, “Not yet.”
He was ninety-seven then, and I thought it was the most life-affirming line I had ever heard.
That was also the year he stopped going up on the roof. On his hundredth birthday, he stopped driving. By then he had allowed Gale to hire a former nurse to “drop by” two afternoons a week, check him out, tidy up, and cook a few meals. She and Dad seemed to enjoy each other’s company. Dad had his survival skills.
Except for one, it seemed at the time, although now I’m not so sure. He refused to wear one of those I’ve-fallen-down-and-can’t-get-up alarms, a must for old people living alone. He felt that if he fell down and couldn’t get up on his own, he wouldn’t want to, that it would be the signal that his time was over.
Three months before his 101st birthday, apparently while getting into the shower, probably on a Saturday evening, he fell. By the time he was found on Monday, his organs were failing. Three days later, January 20, 2005, he died peacefully with Gale, Lois, and me at his bedside.
It was while pawing around nooks and crannies in the house that I had found his medals a dozen years earlier and then after his death a letter from his old opera buddy. He hadn’t destroyed them all.
The four-page handwritten letter on the stationery of his piano studio was undated. The script was as ornate and whimsical as the words. Operatic. It began, “Sidney, And why the wherefore?” and went on to demand that “my literary executor and Biographer” show up at his Brooklyn home on the coming Sunday to hear “inchoate dreams and plans and Intentions—now Alas! to remain forever unrealized.”
He promised a “death-bed scene. Will you do less for me than Dumas fils did for the Lady of the Camellias (the part suits me to perfection, except that I don’t use flowers for whooping cough).”
The letter ends “I’ll call you up Saturday at 1.00 to make arrangements.”
Did he call? Did Sidney go? What year was this?
I love the mystery of this letter and of their friendship. I don’t know everything about Dad.
An antiquarian bookseller came to assess Dad’s books. Gale thought there were treasures among them, I thought the collection was basically worthless. We were both right.
The bookseller spent several hours reading, touching, even smelling the books for mold, of which there was too much. He lingered over the big art books, the thick old leather-bound histories, the two sets of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“Twenty years ago,” he said, “this would have been a real find. But in the age of the Internet, all this information is easily available. There are very few important first editions here, and most of them are not in good shape.”
He seemed reluctant to leave. “You know, this is not a collection of trophy books, it’s a collection of ideas. I know many people who collect expensive books they never open. Your father bought books he wanted to read. I would like to have met him.”
I would have liked to have met Dad earlier in the emotional place we found together in the end. By the time I came to appreciate him, to understand his impact on me, we were both old men. But there was time enough.