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June 14, 2002, 9:05 a.m. The Burden of Proof The story of a father and son. By Mark Goldblatt

he worst thing I ever did I did to my father. He was 62 and I was 16 at the time, really just cohabitants, just two guys thrown together by circumstance. Our emotional range was lukewarm to tepid: We grunted our hellos, exchanged greeting cards, and signed "love" over our names. We observed courtesies, in other words. To forgo them, in truth, would have required more effort. We were two moons stuck in orbit around one planet; full of momentum, we circled the concept of Family without a hint that a separate gravity might exist between the two of us.

But it did.

He was a salesman, my father. Not the Willie Loman kind, he was more an over-the-phone guy. He was also the most predictable man I've ever known. By his footfalls on the stairs of our second floor walk-up, I knew his mood. If he paused at the first landing, it was to question his reason for living. Bad day at the office. If he hurried upstairs, that meant he'd scored big. There were other tip-offs. The speed he clicked through television channels. The position he fell asleep on the couch. These were the variables, striking only by contrast with the tar pit consistency of the rest of his life. He was not a stupid man. He had a guile and a singleness of purpose which served him in his work, and which offset the fact that he was uneducated, that he'd never graduated junior high school. But the sheer sameness of his life caught up with him eventually, as it must, and he was left with neither the will nor capacity for conversation of any depth, with only sitcoms and detective shows and westerns to occupy his mind between work and sleep.

It gnawed at him, of course. How could it not? He was sharp enough to perceive how dull he'd become, and he came, I suspect, to associate that dullness with his want of schooling. This was a vague association, probably — but then that was the problem. So he affected erudition. He'd try, with weird results, to pick up new words. Propitious. Untoward. Scrutinize. He'd lob these around like grenades for a week or so and then forget them. He came home with ambivalence one evening, and I heard it six times before bed.

He covered only minor ambivalences that evening, as I recall: whether to eat dessert, what channel to watch, etc. But as his son gradually acquired the education he himself lacked, my dad's Great Ambivalence began to emerge.

Not at first, naturally. Not when I was very young. He used to sit with me on his lap and add up columns of numbers. He would race me to the bottom and squeeze the back of my head if I came up with the wrong total; these are my earliest memories! But before I turned twelve, I could beat him, and the game ended. By then, anyway, I was bringing home math problems with words like vertex and reciprocal. He excused himself to the couch. It was from the couch that he watched, year by year, as I came home with certificate after certificate. Grammar school. Hebrew school. Even driver's ed. He tacked up each scrap of parchment to the living room wall, stared for a minute, and then returned to his TV. And when, at last, colorful college brochures started to arrive in the mail, he could not have been surprised.

Still, that was when he began to stop at the bank.

He looked up from dinner one evening and said, "You probably think you're smarter than me, don't you?" So I glanced up at him and replied, "No, not really." This was a lie: Of course I was smarter than he was! The issue had been settled so long ago in my mind that I thought he was asking a trick question. But then he reached into his pocket and drew out a thick roll of bills. He flipped it across the table; if I hadn't caught it, it would have landed in my plate. Now he spoke in a low voice: "Count it."

So I did: 800 dollars in twenties and tens. When I called out the total, he asked, "You ever make that much?"

"Nope," I said.

He held out his hands, and I tossed the roll back to him. He stood up and, with much ceremony, slipped the money back into his pants pocket. Then he pulled off the pants and hit the couch for the rest of the night.

Thus was born a ritual. Every month or so, he would ask over dinner if I thought I was smarter than he was. And I'd answer no, and he'd pull out a roll of bills, and I'd count them, and I'd announce the total, and he'd smile, and I'd toss the roll back, and he'd catch it — and then pull off his pants and head to the couch.

It seemed harmless enough. For a while, it seemed like the only time we smiled at one another. But after a year, the ritual began to grate. It began to grate, no doubt, because I was 16 and because just about everything your dad does grates when you're 16. Even worse, I'd come to suspect that the issue was not settled with him; unbelievably, he actually did think he was as smart as me. This was a misconception, I decided, that had to be dispelled.

So I set him up.

It happened on a Friday evening. He'd phoned to say he would be home a little early for dinner; I knew this meant he was stopping at the bank, which closed at five o'clock. So I was prepared when he asked, as dinner was about to end, if I thought I was smarter.

"It's not something I think," I answered. "I know for a fact that I'm smarter than you. And I can prove it." With these words, I stood up and walked away from the table. It was the walking away as much as the words that ensured he would follow me: The lone rule that we kept, the lone rule that seemed to confirm our status as a family, was that no one left the dinner table. Closing the door to my room, I could hear his footsteps heavy behind me. But as he reached the door, the footsteps stopped. He was reading the red magic-markered sign I'd left on the door: Are you going to hit me?

There was a pause. Then, slowly, I heard his footsteps trail off in the other direction. He walked past the dinner table and straight for the couch, his sanctuary — where he found another sign: Aren't you glad you didn't?

Now again I heard his footsteps, at a run, close in on the door to my room. But, again, he paused. I'd replaced the first sign with a new one: Back so soon?

Now, suddenly, he hurled open the door to my room, cracking the plaster wall behind it. He found me just inside, waiting for him, smiling. He stood before me for an instant, a long instant, and then slapped me hard across my mouth. I can remember the slouch of my shoulders, the looseness of my neck, as I received the slap. Then I pulled out the last sign from behind my back: Ouch!

I was still smiling as I faced him again, as our eyes met. I figured I'd made my point. But the look on his face was one I had never seen before, a terrible taut-lipped expression. As I watched, paralyzed by a mixture of fascination and fear, his eyes rolled back in their sockets and he drew back his right arm; at the end of his arm, his hand was balled into a fist. The sight of his fist, tight and huge, now mesmerized me. It seemed the most alien thing I'd ever seen. The thought of what he was about to do with that fist did not even occur to me. . . .

But then, within the space of a second, a second of heroic resignation, my father realized that he was about to hit me in a way that a father must not hit a son. As I stood and watched, his hand uncurled and dropped to his side.

He turned and walked from the room.

The custom, at this point, is to state that things were never the same between us. There's at least one sense in which that is true because he never hit me again. Not even a slap. It's tempting, of course, to think that he was always on the lookout for another sign. But the real reason he never hit me again, I'm certain, was because I had proven what I set out to prove. I was smarter than he was — I knew what he was going to do before he did: There is no more definitive proof. To hit me, under the circumstances, would be the act of a bully. And my father was not a bully.

But in another sense, a greater sense, things were the same between us afterwards. We still sat across the dinner table, still passed the food, still spoke in terse sentences. Of course, he never brought home a roll of bills again. But he still asked me, on occasion, to run to the deli for cigarettes. Or to massage his shoulders as he lay on the couch. These things I did, as always, without enthusiasm. When he retired to Florida in 1978, we looked into the ground, shook hands and said nothing. He lasted less than a year. And when the end came, on his new couch, in front of his new TV, six years after the incident, I mourned him. Neither of us had ever mentioned the signs again.

That's the heartache, looking back. For too late I've come to recognize the need to settle accounts. Sons are their fathers' only natural predators. If we do not surpass the lives of our fathers, we kill them with disappointment. If we do surpass them, we kill them with envy. What is left between fathers and sons, either way, is absolution. It can come with a confession, or an embrace, or even a knowing glance. But that moment of absolution is owed, father to son, and son to father. It is redemptive, significant; it provides a justification for the thousands of stupid thoughtless effects that have passed before. Without it, without absolution, a father's grave is just another place.

Absolution: My dad would have loved that word.

— Mark Goldblatt is author of a recently released novel, Africa Speaks. He teaches at Fashion Institute of Technology of the State University of New York.