White Out: A Father/Son Story for the Days of Awe
By Albert Stern
My relationship with my father, Henry Stern, was always fraught with one thing or another. When I was old enough to start expressing my feelings about Stern family life, my parents responded by promptly shipping me off to a psychologist to uncover why I was a child so inordinately filled with rage and anxiety. I must have been in the second grade. Over the next several years, I spent hours upon hours in the office of C.C. Corrie on Arthur Godfrey Road in Miami Beach as the good doctor probed my turbulent juvenile psyche, trying to find a way to unlock why my mind roiled so with anger and dread. Meanwhile, he never did address my abiding question, specifically ‘Why am I the only person in my family who is receiving psychiatric care?’
Certainly, my father never felt as though he might benefit from psychotherapy, and he was probably right. An unreflective man, he was guided by his Jewish identity and the certainties the Torah could provide. The bedrock morality. Tradition. The calendar of daily worship, Sabbaths, and festivals that ordered his life. The lessons about human nature derived from biblical stories and Talmudic exegesis. And, I suspect, a wistful longing for a messianic age to come in which the laws of the Torah were reinstituted and a beis din might again permit a righteous Jew to stone his disobedient child.
As painful as it is to admit, I have a more-than-vague suspicion that part of the disconnect between my father and me was that I was adopted — I was not born a Jew, I did not look like a Jew, and, maybe just maybe, I acted out as I did because I was not a Jew. Henry Stern was in many ways a simple man, and I do not think he was capable of completely shaking off an ingrained feeling of tribal uneasiness about my biological makeup. In any case, he plainly did not recognize much of himself in me — although had he showed more interest, he might of. His attitudes, or at least my perception of them, made fraught my desire to connect to Judaism, at least until I embraced my identity as a ger in middle age and started to notice the Torah’s many exhortations to love the stranger — kindness I had long been offered by my co-religionists but that I had always rebuffed, like a child.
My father and I were going through our typical ups and downs when he surprised me one day in the early 1990s by announcing that he wanted to take out a life insurance policy for me. What had I done to deserve such thoughtfulness, I wondered? I was about 29 years old, leading a completely secular life, living in sin with the non-Jewish girlfriend I seemed likely to marry, and not exactly knocking it out of the ballpark with my career, despite the fancy Ivy League education that had cost my father a pretty penny. It was about 10 years after my mother died and, alone in this world, Henry Stern had become more certain in his beliefs and more ossified in his ways. As my sister put it, he was a person who was more concerned with things than with people. Along with his Jewish practice, he had accumulated a regimen of chores to occupy the empty hours that demarcate the life of an aging single man. Without anyone at home to temper them, character traits he had always possessed became more pronounced and difficult for others to grapple with.
One such trait was, shall we say, his frugality. Thus, it was surprising that he would invest in a life insurance policy for me, his prodigal son. I considered that perhaps because Henry Stern was getting on in years, he was becoming a more thoughtful person and taking steps to look after his loved ones. Also, the time of year was early September, not long before Rosh Hashanah — perhaps his seeing to my future was an act of teshuvah, of repair, as we approached the Days of Awe. His reasons for doing anything he did were generally unfathomable to me, but as a motivation for doing something like this, a Jewishy motive seemed more likely than any other.
To purchase the policy, my father asked me to accompany him to his insurance agent’s office in West Miami. On our drive out from Miami Beach, I thanked him for what he was about to do. “It’s important for a person to have life insurance, Albert,” he said. “It’s a good investment and you can borrow against it.” I’ll always remember his offering me this life wisdom.
My father and I sat together at the office of Mrs. Fernandez, the insurance agent who took down our personal information and recorded it onto the form spooled into her IBM Selectric typewriter. After typing in our names, Social Security numbers, and such, Mrs. Fernandez asked: “Meeter A-tern, I have a questchung — what is the full name of the beneficiary of this policy?”
My father said: “Henry. Stern.”
“Dad, it’s the other way around,” I said. “I would be the beneficiary of the policy.”
“I understood what she asked,” he responded. “The beneficiary’s name is: Henry. Stern.”
“Shouldn’t it be the other way around,” I asked, “so that if you die first, I get some money?”
“No!”
“So the policy is on my life, not yours? You get money if I die.”
“Yes!”
I realized that I was there, sitting in the office of an insurance agent, watching my father as he was placing a bet. “Nu,” I imagined him thinking, “this kid might someday amount to something after all.” If things broke the right way, he might get some return on his investment, if only pennies on the dollar.
And I started to get kind of pissed off, you know what I mean? Because this was the kind of thing my father always did. Always did. I sat there seething silently, thinking that I should just get up and leave. Then — Mrs. Fernandez started asking me questions about my medical status. Was I in good health? Did I smoke? Do drugs? Drink? Any surgeries?
What I thought was the sound of my head exploding turned out to be Mrs. Fernandez’s phone ringing. “Juiced a mini,” she said and started speaking in Spanish to the person who had called. As she spoke, she took a bottle of Liquid Paper out of her desk drawer and began correcting some of the information she had mistyped on the insurance form.
My father and I sat without saying anything for many long minutes, until: “Albert, do you have some of that?”
“Some of what,” I asked through clenched teeth.
“That stuff she put on the typewriter,” said my father.
“The typewriter?”
“Albert, you’re not listening. The stuff she put on the paper in the typewriter. The paint.”
“The white out? Liquid Paper?”
“Yes!” he said. “Can you get me some Liquid Paper?”
Why, I wondered, did my father need Liquid Paper? He didn’t do any typing, didn’t deal much with documents. What possible need would my father have for Liquid Paper? I thought around and around and around the matter. And then I remembered something I recently noticed that he had stashed in one of the cabinets in his dining room.
I said: “Dad, you want to send out the Rosh Hashanah cards in your dining room that have Mom and Bubbie’s names already printed on them, and you want Liquid Paper so you can white out their names because they’re both dead. Right?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“Dad,” I said, “I’m not getting you any Liquid Paper.”
“Why not?” he demanded.
At this point in the story, some of you are probably thinking: “Ah, so this guy thought his father was doing him a favor by buying him a life insurance policy, but wasn’t. Very funny, ha-ha, too bad.” Or perhaps: “Ah, so an old man thought it was okay to white out the names of dead people on a pre-printed High Holiday greeting card. Very funny, ha-ha, nebech.” But you true fans of family dysfunction, especially those with a philosophical bent — you aficionados — will understand how my father’s unfathomable, unanswerable two-word question, ‘Why not?’, still lurks near the core of my psyche the way the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* exists at the heart of the Milky Way, a region of darkness where gravity is so strong that no light can escape from it.
“Dad,” I repeated, “I’m not getting you any Liquid Paper.”
“Ach! You never do even a small thing that I ask,” my father responded in disgust.
I didn’t open any of the Rosh Hashanah cards my father sent me for the next five years.
