"The Best Goddamned Daughter in the World" by Patricia O’Hara
This story from our archives is featured in Epiphany’s My Last White Boyfriend anthology, available now for sale from Ristretto Books, which collects the last 20 years of Epiphany’s greatest prose hits.
My father and I are finishing breakfast at the Blue Colony Diner in Danbury, Connecticut. It’s August 2000. The air conditioner is set to arctic, a nearby table-top jukebox mumbles oldies, and a pile of hash browns sits heavy in my stomach. I’m ready for the waitress (whose first name my father has solicited three times) to bring our check so I can get in my car and drive back to Pennsylvania. I’ve just spent five days with my father, a seventy-eight-year-old widower who suffered a mini-stroke two weeks ago. The stroke wasn’t serious. The contributing factor was.
I’ve spent several days meeting with a lawyer, viewing retirement communities, and trying to figure out how to pay off the sixty-thousand-dollar gambling debt my father—a man living on modest savings and social security—has racked up since his previous gambling binge two years ago. Back then he lost twenty-thousand dollars. That time, too, I came to the rescue, setting him up with contacts in Gamblers Anonymous and a shrink who put him on Prozac. My father had since been giving me regular testimonials to the efficacy of therapy (it gives me such peace of mind, talking to that doctor; did I tell you he’s a little Indian man?) and my intervention (I was mad as a hornet when you went snooping through my stuff but it was a good thing you caught me when you did). When he quit his lifetime habit of biting his fingernails down to disfigurement, I bought him a manicure kit.
Now it has become clear we are going to have to sell the house I grew up in to square the debts. More than once, my mother made my father promise he’d never sell the house if she died first, which seemed likely as emphysema and osteoporosis and a host of other ailments left her homebound and anxious the last few years of her life. I know that sort of post-mortem promissory note is hardly binding; what could it possibly matter who dwells in our houses once we’re dead? Nevertheless, his gambling and our selling the house feel like betrayal. My mother numbered two successes in life: me and the modest, two-bedroom Cape Cod house set on a tree lined-street in Bethel, the small town next to Danbury. Purchased new in 1955 with a VA mortgage, the house was finally paid off near the end of my mother’s life, and my mother regarded the house as her compensatory gift to me. “We didn’t pay for college and we never gave you much,” she’d say and then add, with palpable satisfaction, “but you’ll have this house when we die. You’ll be able to get good money for it.” It’s crass, but I’d been banking on inheriting the house. I surely didn’t expect to see it go to support my father’s Mohegan Sun habit.
We will transfer what’s left of the proceeds of the sale to me, who now holds power-of-attorney over my father. Henceforth, I’m going to keep him on a leash, like my mother did. It’s not a role I want to play.
I’d learned of this financial disaster only a week earlier, on the last day of a three-week trip to England with my husband and son. The trip had begun with news of my father’s stroke: quite minor, I was reassured, and not an event that required me—his only child—to return to the States. The day before we were to leave London, my father rang the apartment we were renting in Westminster to ask that I call his friend, Joe D. “He needs to talk to you about something,” my father said.
“Can’t the call wait one more day? I’ll be back in Pennsylvania tomorrow afternoon. And we’re having a friend over to the apartment for dinner in a little while.” But my father was agitated and insistent. Then I started to worry that maybe Joe D. needed to tell me something genuinely urgent, something he didn’t want my father to know. Could it be something about the stroke? Was my father going to require more care? Would my father have to move in with us? I had a history of anxiety with phone calls: repeated phone calls, in-the-dead-of-night phone calls, parent phone calls, relatives’ phone calls, telling-me-to-call-home phone calls. Nevertheless, I immediately placed the call.
The story Joe D. told me traveled across the Atlantic Ocean in phrases, as truncated catastrophes: “mortgaged the house,” “Mohegan Sun Casino,” “household finance,” “behind in the payments,” “afraid to tell you.” My father had been gambling again, and with escalating frequency.
He had convinced himself that I had to know the truth about this financial disaster before flying home in the morning. He had asked Joe D. to intercede on his behalf in breaking the bad news. My response—and I don’t use this word lightly—was rage: shallow-breathing, teeth-grinding, beyond-tears rage. His loss of sixty thousand dollars to gambling was ample reason for frustration and anger, but this response was of a different order. It arose from a place deeper and older.
I told Joe D. this latest screw-up is the last straw for me. My father is on his own this time. I’ve hit my limit. I wash my hands of him. I actually said the words “wash my hands of him.” I remember because they sounded at once stagey and authentic. I am, I announced to Joe D., finished with my father.
I meant it all—and knew that none of it was true.
Because one week after the conversation with Joe D., here I am in the diner in Danbury having hurled myself into damage-control overdrive the past few days with phone calls and meetings and lists. I’ve put together a file folder to hold the supporting documents of this latest crisis. And right now, inside of my head there’s a Venn diagram of overlapping angers. At my mother, for dying and leaving me to manage my father whom she’d kept in line with a system of surveillance that required full-time maintenance. At myself, for letting her down. And for forgetting that, while you can never go home again, you can never leave either.
***
“Just give that to me, now,” my father says, taking the check from the waitress before she’s able to lay it on the table. “The old man’s springing for breakfast.”
With an audience, he’s animated. He tells the waitress—as if I’m not sitting here—how his daughter Patricia Ann is driving back to Pennsylvania where she teaches college and lives with her husband and son, who goes to Lancaster Country Day School (that’s a private school, you know) and who plays the piano and the clarinet and they’ve just returned from a month in England where she gave some kind of a talk at the big university they have over there. Shifting back and forth in her gummed-up shoes, our waitress tries to break in, and away, by saying things like “college professor, wow, isn’t that something,” and “two instruments, no kidding.” If my father were any good at registering the reactions of others, he’d notice that she’s grasping a steaming coffee pot and glancing at the other booths, and that I am fidgety and uncomfortable. The waitress and I exchange eye messages. Mine: “I’m sorry.” Hers: “That’s okay, honey.” I intervene and remind him that our waitress has other customers.
“Oh, sorry, sorry. You better get that coffee to the other tables.” Although she hasn’t offered, he adds, “None for me, thanks.” It’s not clear if this is a jab at her for not offering him more coffee. She starts to leave, but he just can’t stop himself. “I know how it is. You better believe that. I spent over thirty years in this business.” I put my hand on his forearm to signal that he really needs to shut up now. “But that was before you were born,” he says and gives her a playful poke in the arm. She rolls her eyes and moves quickly to another table. She’s easily pushing sixty.
My father would have liked our waitress—who wears the demeanor of a lifer on the breakfast-lunch shift at the diner—to ask him about his thirty years in “this business.” He likes talking about his career as a waiter, from his days in Durkin’s Diner in Danbury right after the Navy all the way up to his final and best restaurant job at the Dreamwold Inn (the actual name) in Carmel, New York. Described in a New York Times review as “lavishly appointed” and “strong in main courses,” the Dreamwold hosted its share of big shots who drove all the way up from New York City, many of them, in my father’s words, “members of the tribes of Israel.” Waiting tables was my father’s second job; he worked days as a line inspector at the Barden Corporation, a ball bearing factory in Danbury out near the fairgrounds. Waiting on tables, however, seized his imagination. It laid claims on his heart even as it was “the business” that kept him squarely in the pathway of his addictions and out of the pathway of a family life, including most holidays like Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, Halloween. Perhaps it was the theater of it all: getting dressed up in the starched, white shirts my mother sent to the dry cleaners and the black pants with the satin strips up the side (later a tux, when he was captain of the waiters at the Dreamwold Inn). He liked performing for diners, speaking with formality and moving with finesse with the heavy, oval tray carried high above his head. The floor of a candle-lit dining room constitutionally suited his vision of himself better than the floor of a ball bearing factory with its thick, hot air, redolent of machine oil and drenched with the greenish pallor of fluorescent light bulbs. I saw him in action as a waiter once, when my prom date and I went to The Arch in Brewster, New York, for a fancy French dinner that the owner comped for us. My father was proud to show me and my prom-bedecked boyfriend—the only teenagers in the elegant restaurant—off to the staff and even other diners. But I felt, too, that we’d intruded somehow into the part of his life that was probably more real, more compelling to him than his life with my mother and me back across the state line in Bethel. Waiting tables gave him an opportunity for putting on the Ritz, even if it was the Ritz by way of the service entrance.
He sustained his two-job life well into his fifties, scaling back after suffering his first heart attack and getting laid off from the factory. It was a tough life for both of them. For him, the grinding labor that he performed with little complaint. For her—high-strung, insecure but outgoing and comic, too—the terrible loneliness of a stay-at-home life in a nine-hundred square foot house that rewarded her with only two nights per week with her unreformable husband. She never got the Saturday-night dinner at a restaurant, just the occasional, slightly dried-up dessert my father would bring home: cheesecake, a chocolate mousse. I ached—and still do—for their lot. And my own, too: not having a family life that looked like any one else’s, I avoided talking with my friends about why my father was never around and implied, if pressed, that his second job was just temporary. Years later, a high-school friend told me that he’d assumed my parents were divorced because he’d never seen my father at my house. None of my friends were rich, but no one’s father was a factory worker and a waiter. “Say he’s a maitre d’,” my mother instructed me. “It sounds classier.”
Weekday mornings I would wake first to the thrumming of the coffee in the percolator, then the soft click of the front door as my father left for work. Sometimes I’d see him in the afternoon between jobs, taking a sponge bath at the bathroom sink then slapping on handfuls of Old Spice aftershave while my mother hovered in the hallway, trying to accordion a day’s worth of talk into half an hour. Most nights I’d awaken upon his late, often fractious and boozy return because rarely could I fall into a deep sleep until he arrived home. My mother never slept until he got home. She would sit in her quilted bathrobe on the couch, watching television, or, if the stations had gone off the airwaves, pacing in the dark, smoking cigarette after cigarette, anxiously lifting up the slat on the Venetian blinds whenever she imagined hearing a car come up our quiet street off the main drag of Bethel, a town that went to bed by ten p.m.
Some nights she would wheedle me into calling the restaurant where he was working. We’d rehearse the script for greeting whoever answered: the bartender, the hostess, sometimes even—and fearfully, for me—the owner. “Hello, this is Patty O’Hara, Justin O’Hara’s daughter. May I please speak to my father if he’s not too busy?” If my father were too busy to come to the phone, I was to say, “Would you ask him to call home when he’s free, please?” If he were able to talk, I was to say, “Please come home tonight, Daddy.” I’d wait, listening to restaurant sounds: the clearing of plates, the murmurings of dinner conversations against piped-in background music. He was never pleased to be phoned at work. My mother would take the phone and remind him—with pathos or petulance, depending on her state of mind or medication—to come right home after work.
“Don’t make me do that again,” I’d say over my shoulder as I went down the hall to my bedroom. Some nights my father came home right after work; some nights he didn’t. Thus in later years, his reverential references to “the business” and his attachment to his glory days as a waiter often got under my skin. Maybe they really were his salad days, or maybe it was just so much revisionist history. Either way, they sure as hell weren’t my good old days.
***
“I better get on the road. I don’t want to hit traffic on the Tappan Zee.” By long-standing tradition, I exaggerate the threat of traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge, as if I’m required to produce an excuse to depart. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever hit a traffic backup heading west across that bridge. “That was a good breakfast. Thanks,” I say as I’m sliding out of the booth.
“Should hold you till you get back,” he says, and I say it will. I’m using that arm’s-length voice, the one you use with store clerks or the woman who takes your blood pressure at the doctor’s office. I’m ready to leave, more than ready. Yet something acts as a doorstop.
It’s been a long five days, and I can’t wait to leave. And yet. And yet. I remind myself I’m just a couple of left-hand turns away from getting out of town but a very long way from the small house I grew up in, the one I should be happy enough to get rid of. The house with its tacky knick-knacks and Reader’s Digest Condensed books (Of Human Bondage, To Kill a Mockingbird), and the cheap, picture-book encyclopedia my mother purchased for a nominal sum, week after week, at the grocery store, a set that ended somewhere with the letter L or M. Where the closest thing to art was the framed print of the Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World” that I gave my mother for Christmas in 1973: the solitary, crippled girl, immobile on the hill, gazing at the house perched on the line where the field meets the gray sky. The print hung over the couch in our living room for nearly thirty years. Luminous and inscrutable, Christina appeared, like a watermark, in an inordinately large number of snapshots of my family.
The first night I’d arrived to launch Operation Rescue My Father Again, I’d noticed something weird about the “Christina’s World” print: the entire top portion of the glass was missing.
“What the hell happened to Christina’s World?” I asked my father.
He laughed tentatively, chagrined, and said that the print had fallen off the wall and the glass had broken. He’d put it back up, “just for the time being,” until he had a chance to replace it. He didn’t want to throw it out because it would leave a big rectangle of white where it’s been hanging. It had been a while since the living room had been painted.
“How long ago did it break?”
“About a year.”
This depressed me, but it was funny, too. It was so quintessentially O’Hara Family. There was still a table knife on the bathtub rim for the purpose of raising the tub stopper, its lever having broken when I was a toddler. One Christmas I gave my parents a new toilet to replace their malfunctioning one after my newly-minted husband innocently used it one morning and spent the next hour having to plunge the bowl and clean up after his morning constitutional. If a pipe sprang a leak, we’d put an old roasting pan under it and conscientiously empty the water at regular intervals. I got good at shaving a wooden pencil to a useable point with a carving knife because I could never find a pencil sharpener in the kitchen junk drawer. About a year after my mother died, my father painted my old bedroom, which he’d moved into years earlier, a “vibrant” shade of apple green. Inexperienced at such tasks, he’d painted all the windows shut. I’d tried to jimmy them open and suggested we get a handyman in to do it, but he said, “What do you need to open the windows for when you’ve got heat and air conditioning?” We accommodated ourselves to minor malfunctions and often devised inventive stop-gap solutions.
“Did you know that Christina had polio?” he asked.
It’s like she was part of our family.
That night, I surveyed my mother’s living room: the Norman Rockwell “Tea for Two” print hung over the swivel rocker; the wall sconces with their white candles—wicks still waxed—set there twenty years ago; the Precious Moments figurines; the wooden, combination barometer-thermometer that never worked; a doll bought from QVC that my mother, Ann Marie Dunleavy O’Hara, named “Annie.” My father had tried to persuade me to sleep in my mother’s bedroom on the double bed. “Too sad,” I said. “After all this time?” he asked, skeptical. It had been five years, and, yes, it was still too sad. I opted for the uncomfortable pull-out in the living room. As I leaned over to turn out the light, I noticed cobwebs hanging like ropes of chenille from the corners of the ceiling. I made a mental note to thoroughly clean the house over the next few days. I’d do it as an act of contrition: forgive me, mother, for I let this happen.
***
My father hands the green receipt to the hostess at the register and takes a few loose bills out of his pocket. It’s not the usual wad he likes to carry—a few bigger bills strategically positioned over a sheaf of singles—and flash in front of store clerks and waitresses.
We walk to our cars parked next to each other in the lot. He recites the directions to Route 84, which is visible from the parking lot. “You know where you’re going now, right?” My father never left home, except for a stint in Brazil in the Navy during World War II and for a few weeks in the mid-1960s when he tried, unsuccessfully, to run away and settle with the other O’Hara black sheep, his brother Jack, out in San Francisco.
In the parking lot, we stand awkwardly next to our respective cars. He says, “Thanks for everything. I don’t know what I would have done—” I wave off the completion of this expression of gratitude; it makes me uncomfortable. But he forges ahead, “You’re the best daughter in the world.”
I nod. I’ve heard this before. He’s been telling me I’m the best daughter in the world all my life. Just a few nights ago, for instance, at the end of the long day spent tallying his gambling losses. My need to wound him had been strong, so I—his articulate, classy, well-traveled, professionally-successful daughter with a PhD in English—swore up a storm.
“I swear on your mother’s grave that that’s the God’s honest truth. It’s all right there,” he says.
“Fine, don’t swear on her grave, please. I believe you.” I hated that swearing on people’s graves business. We were not going to throw my mother’s grave into the mix. “But if I do fucking find out that you owe more money, I’m not going to have anything to do with you anymore. I can’t fucking keep doing this.”
“Okay, okay. You don’t have to use that language,” he said, hurt. “It’s not nice.”
Then he nodded and sat silently, torturing his fingernails, watching me run the numbers and grimace.
Around six, he asked if I was hungry.
“How about you go get us a pizza?” I was ready for, if not forgiveness, at least détente.
Encouraged, he perked up.
“Yeah! And I’ll get you a six pack. One of those fancy imported beers, like Heineken. Unless you’d rather have a nice little bottle of Château Lafite-Rothschild? I served a few of those in my time over at the Dreamwold.”
I told him some beer would be great.
“You’ve earned a couple beers, doing all this stuff. Honest to God, I’m so ashamed.” He shook his head as if incredulous at his own crimes. “You’re the best daughter in the world.”
“You’re right about that. The best goddamned daughter in the world,” I said.
But what’s the use of continuing this, I thought. I’m tired. I smiled and told him I’d like a sausage pizza.
He was grateful for the reprieve.
***
In the Blue Colony Diner parking lot, I open my car door to a furnace blast of hot air. I get in and roll down the windows. My father leans over and hands me a twenty. “I don’t have much now”—(it’s usually a fifty or a hundred dollar bill)—“but get yourself a little treat. Don’t use it to pay bills.” Like a twenty would make a difference.
So I tell him that it’s okay, that everything’s going to be fine. We’ll work it out, we’ll salvage some money that I will manage. I’ll pay the bills and give him an allowance. He can still go see his brother and sister in Florida in January and have a nice dinner once a week with his friends. Everything will be fine so long as he does not gamble, ever again. He says that no, Jesus no, he doesn’t want anything to do with the house money and as God is his judge he’ll never go near a casino again and that he wants me to have that money now. I know that he means it. My prodigal father has been compulsively wasteful with money, but he’s been very generous, too. Since my mother’s death he’s given me and my family gifts of money for a trip to Disney World, a new piano for my husband, braces for my son, the boy he calls “my best buddy in the world.”
He says that he is really happy with this arrangement, and I can tell that he is happy with this arrangement. The truth is, I’m satisfied with it, too. I’m optimistic that I’ve gotten the situation under control. This could be a new beginning. Like so many others.
I back the car out of its spot. A bag of my mother’s mementos sits in the passenger seat. My father stands next to his car, watching me pull out. He’ll wait until I’m out of sight to get into his car.
As I’m about to turn onto the main road, I look in my side-view mirror, imprinted with the reminder that things are closer than they appear. I see a little old man in baggy khaki trousers and a short-sleeved plaid shirt. He’s grinning and flapping his hand up and down, like a child.
Patricia O’Hara is a writer and Professor of English Literature at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, PA. In 2018, her play Banned from Baseball, was premiered by The Human Race Theatre Company (Dayton, OH). Banned from Baseball tells a compelling human story about baseball’s blue-collar “Hit King” blinded by his belief in his own invincibility, and the patrician Commissioner of Baseball, blinded by his self-regarding idealism. Banned from Baseball is her first play. O’Hara’s poems, personal essays, and op-eds have appeared in various journals including Newsweek, The Daily News, Southwest Review, The Southampton Review, The Rumpus, Bellevue Literary Review, and Epiphany.
