Robert Joe Stout, My Other Father

grew up with two very different fathers. The one who came home just after five was wellorganized but distant. He didn’t drink; he seldom missed work; he seldom interfered in anything I did. He was well-read and could recite Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tennyson that he’d learned from his year of college, but I only remember seeing him read newspapers or magazines like Life and Collier’s.

Often in the evenings he sat listening to the radio and playing Solitaire, but during the summer and on weekends he filled most of the daylight hours working in the garden, or digging a root cellar, or mixing and pouring concrete for a sidewalk. Often he had me help, but I don’t remember that he insisted on it or assigned me specific chores. I can’t recall him hugging or punishing me physically in any way.

He was who he was, a daily presence, mildly affectionate, determinedly opinionated, dedicated to routine. He wasn’t at all like my other father—the one I truly admired and wished to emulate.

Every boy would want a father like my other father. He had climbed I

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the Great Pyramids, hunted leopards in Ceylon, smuggled himself across the Rhine hidden beneath gunny sacks. He had been a college running back, a soldier, a ventriloquist, a used car salesman. He had supped in Marseilles and photographed Maori dancers in New Zealand and crossed the International Date Line through raging seas that made everybody on shipboard sick except him. He was a friend of the great Cap Gudmundson, who’d defied the Bolsheviks and who had thawed and eaten the flesh of Siberian mammoths, and of Drew Pearson, who wrote for all the papers and went on national lecture tours that thousands of people paid money to attend. He had traveled throughout the United States with opera

singers and former congressmen and European dignitaries while working for the Chautauquas, the great tent shows that pre-dated movies and radio and television and brought music and lectures and plays and magicians to virtually every small town in America.

This other father was very different from the father who came home every day from the sugar factory. I knew he was different because I had pictures of him posing on the railing of the steamship S. S. Tahiti between two lovely women, neither of whom was my mother. What a Beau Brummell! someone had scrawled across a snapshot of him, young and cleanshaven, his fedora tipped at a jaunty angle, a cocky smile defying anyone to contradict him.

I didn’t have to fabricate his adventures because the photos carefully pasted into albums detailed experiences in jungles and on shipboard and in cities and with friends. There were platypuses and leopards and the Sphinx, castles and mosques and elephants and racing cars, sunsets in Tahiti and double-decker buses in London and half-naked native dancers in New Zealand. There were Chautauqua posters and programs and letters and itineraries, maps and stamped documents and newspaper photographs.

I don’t remember pretending to be my other father or trying to recreate any of the things that he’d done, but I loved to page through the albums. Notes in white ink around the snapshots chronicled the adventures of a hero who, unlike baseball players or movie stars, I didn’t have to share with anyone else.

Anyone else, that is, except the factory worker—my everyday father.

I don’t remember pretending to be my other father or trying to recreate any of the things that he’d done, but I loved to page through the albums. Notes in white ink around the snapshots chronicled the adventures of a hero who, unlike baseball players or movie stars, I didn’t have to share with anyone else. Anyone else, that is, except the factory worker—my everyday father.

I found it very difficult to reconcile him with the man in the photographs. I know from personal experience that memories build on themselves and grow as though they have lives of their own, but some of mine have stayed with me, virtually unchanged as the years have passed, especially those when my everyday father became my other father. Reminded of some past event, he would re-create E. B. Fish pounding a podium as he denounced Bolsheviks, or John Philip Souza gyrating his baton in front of applauding audiences.

He would imitate a lecturer grandiloquently greeting his audience in “Grass Pants” instead of “Grants Pass,” Oregon, and describe a Louisiana state patrol car, siren screaming, zigzagging over gravel roads to deliver a Bostonian lecturer to Houma after he’d showed up in Homer, Louisiana, because, being from Boston, he pronounced the two words backwards. A warming glow filled the room as he and my mother

relived experiences as exciting and fascinating to me as Frank and Osa Johnson confronting a rampaging rhinoceros, or Richard Halliburton sailing a Chinese junk across the Pacific.

Occasionally, friends from my other father’s Chautauqua days would visit. Looking back, I can only presume that they detoured to where we lived specifically to see my parents; otherwise, no one came to that part of Wyoming unless they were running away from something or were lost. One visitor I distinctly remember was Oliver Burkhart. He had a booming voice and moved his arms and hands as though intending to do prodigious things with them. I watched him transform himself into a German train conductor, a Mexican laborer, a New England college professor, a talking poodle. He pantomimed a magician getting bitten by the rabbit that he pulled out of a top hat and animated an extravagant story about an amateur actor who finally pronounced the lines, “Oh my God! I’ve been shot!,” when someone off stage riddled his butt with a saltfilled shotgun charge.

Sometimes, as I watched my two fathers come together, the Beau Brummell from the photographs would flick across the features of the sugar factory worker, a teasing resemblance, a possibility, a series of overlapping shadows. That adventurer on shipboard, that friend of Cap Gudmundson, that climber of pyramids and hunter of leopards peeked through eyes brightened by a visitor’s admiration. The face took on a jaunty, cocky air, and the voice lost its everyday dullness. My father looked younger—happy—as he must have looked when the photographs in the albums were taken.

I think, deep in my heart of hearts, I wanted my everyday father not to be the same man as my other father. I wanted the Beau Brummell not to wind up in a sweat-stained cotton work shirt with only memories of a Chautauqua to share. And though I had witnessed occasions when the two seemed to merge, I didn’t understand how—or why—the father in the photographs had become the father whom I knew. Probably I still don’t fully understand, even though I’ve read a great deal about the Great Depression and have experienced traumatic losses in my own life. But since I first began to perceive that I had two fathers, the one I called “my other father” has existed within me, a living organism who has infiltrated choices, decisions, dreams.

Some psychologists claim that each of us feels an obligation to

I wanted my everyday father not to be the same man as my other father. I wanted the Beau Brummell not to wind up in a sweat-stained cotton work shirt with only memories of a Chautauqua to share. And though I had witnessed occasions when the two seemed to merge I didn’t understand how—or why—the father in the photographs had become the father whom I knew.

fulfill the unfulfilled portions of our parents’ lives. If that is true, perhaps it explains my own vagabondage, joining the Air Force instead of attending the state college in my home town, going to Mexico after my discharge, refusing to continue in graduate school and spending the winter in Montana rooming houses, leaving what my friends called “a great gig” at a language school, leaving a magazine editorship to go to Europe, preferring poetry to accounting, directing plays to being a copy editor, playing with my kids instead of working overtime to provide them with what late twentieth-century Americans called “security.”

I may be wrong; I might have become who I am even if my other father hadn’t given up his Beau Brummell life to work in a sugar factory, but I don’t think so. I didn’t want my children to grow up as I had, wishing their father were who he had been, not who he had become. (I also realize that many times in their lives my children may well have wished I was someone other than I am!) Each life is distinctive, unique, and as far as we know each of us only has one to live.

So as I pack a change of clothes in a bag and head for the bus that will take me to a deserted Mexican mountain school to meet the leaders of a band of supposed anti-government rebels, I wonder, briefly, what my children say about this father of theirs who was more a partner and a friend than an authority figure and who left them with gaps in their own growing up that each in his and her own way has had to struggle to fill.

Robert Joe Stout’s poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Rambler, and The Mid-America Poetry Review. He has published three novels and the nonfiction books Why Immigrants Come to America and Hidden Dangers. He lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.