By Maurya Simon
My father had a neoclassical smile, but the decay-prone teeth of his paternal English forebears. Nonetheless, he flashed his provocative and alluring smile at every woman he met. I sometimes thought his teeth were a metaphor for his character: gleaming enamel on the outside and a bit of rot on the inside. But my father was far too complex for any such reductive formula. He loved women, and women loved him, and I’m sure his many extramarital affairs were prompted by that disarmingly boyish grin of his. When my father was in his late seventies and early eighties, he spent thousands of dollars on dental implants, which he’d gleefully clack together at family meals to show off their solidity and permanence—much to the delighted horror of his grandchildren.
I’m not sure why Americans popularly hold that we’ve far superior teeth than the British, but I remember my father citing his English lineage as cause for his “merry caries.” Sometimes when he clamped his jaws down and grinned, he reminded me of our first U.S. president, George Washington, whose own parents—unlike my father’s Jewish immigrant ancestors—harkened from aristocratic English families. Washington’s rare smiling portraits seem to evoke, instead of happiness, a man pursing his lips while clenching his teeth—that is, a person who’s pretending to smile. Dad and Washington not only shared the occasional grim looking grin, but they also bore the same high forehead and aquiline nose, and eyes the striking color of aquamarines.
As I’ve suggested, my father also had a genuinely warm and contagious smile, in addition to his gritty-toothed grimace, and it was easy to elicit, especially during a family meal when he told one of his oft repeated jokes from his limited but tried-and-true repertoire. Two of my favorites were his “moose pie” and “the rabbi comes to dinner” anecdotes. I won’t relate them here, but I’ll simply note that these jokes underscored his urge to either challenge or undermine the authority of people in power, and Dad relished how his jokes caused unsuspecting people to get their “just desserts.” He nurtured a deeply ingrained penchant for defying authority figures and for wanting to subvert the powers-that-be, and I suspect that these urges arose from his youthful defiance of his reserved yet tyrannical English father.
Not surprisingly, in my father’s face I see a mirror of my own defiance towards him glaringly reflected back at me. He rebelled against his father, and I rebelled against mine: what goes around comes around, I suppose. Yet, within both of us there’s also an abiding desire to be approved of and sanctioned by those whom we admire, to be acknowledged as individuals worthy of being loved.
If only we’d have perceived this desire in each other during our most tumultuous years together, when we were often tearing at each other’s throats. It would have saved us a lot of grief. If only we could have really seen each other, we might have recognized how much alike we were.
During the mid-to-late 1950s era of my childhood, my family traveled across Europe like bohemian nomads, witnessing the continent’s rich and varied cultures, and steeping ourselves in vividly imagined ancient histories that carried us back to Roman and Paleolithic times. Though we spent a quasi-bucolic year living in famed French singer Maurice Chevalier’s musty country house on the banks of the Seine, my father had earlier fallen utterly and hopelessly in love with Paris.
Dad had wanted to follow his Greenwich Village friend, novelist Jimmy Baldwin, to Paris in the late 1940s, but having a wife and two kids kept him and us in Fontaine-la-Port until he could figure out how to swing a summer stint in the City of Lights. We finally got there in June of 1956, my father filled with avid anticipation for the culinary, intellectual, and aesthetic delights that awaited him.
What savoir faire he possessed, what finesse and charm! Dad loved to croon Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf songs, to hang out for hours at Paris’s abundant sidewalk cafés, an espresso in hand, watching a kaleidoscopic swirl of humanity pass by as he casually smoked his Gauloises cigarettes. My father exuberantly embraced French culture so naturally and spontaneously, it was as if he’d been a Gaul in a former life.
Dad had long revered a bevy of French composers—Debussy, Ravel, Bizet, and Berlioz, and especially his “triumvirate,” Poulenc, Fauré, and Saint-Saëns. He’d studied French during all eight years of high school and college, earning high marks and ubiquitous praise from his classmates, as reflected by this scribbled 1941 yearbook comment: “Bravo, Robert! Vous êtes un dur à quire!” My dad thought he was a tough guy, and a “smart cookie.” With his finely tuned ear, he could converse semi-fluently in French. He was also an intrepid aficionado of French cuisine, wagging that patrician nose of his over countless gourmet dishes that tempted him.
That summer of 1956 when we lived in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in Paris, he’d sport with panache a navy-blue wool beret, tipped at a rakish angle, and he really looked like a Frenchman. The beret complemented his dark-blue-and-white striped French sailor shirt. “Don’t I look trés chic,” he’d ask while playfully fluttering his eyelashes.
Dad quickly became an avid sommelier of French wines. With his aquiline nose poised over his wine glass, he’d swirl the wine around in a gentle whirlpool to encourage the chardonnay or burgundy bouquet to rise off the crimson liquid. “Ah,” he’d sigh as he inhaled deeply, “what a mossy-dark sweetness, a veritable orchard of earthly delights. C’est merveilleux.” Years later, when he and my stepmother built a house near San Diego, Dad made sure they included a well- stocked wine cellar in it that housed fine wines from around the globe.
He was a clown, too, one who loved to shock and captivate his family by first touching the end of his curved nose with the tip of his tongue, then waggling his nose back and forth. He’d raise his thick eyebrows and open his eyes wide before he did this trick, grinning mischievously, and looking a bit like the young Danny Thomas. It was a stunt he performed at family dinners for his children and grandchildren, to everyone’s delight. Once he winked at me and prefaced his nose-waggling performance with this claim: “This is the nose, the noggin, the schnozzle that launched a thousand ships!”
And while my father used his prominent nose to appear self-deprecating and self-mocking, he used his striking eyes to be both funny and seductive. Because he was fair-skinned and had a thick mane of ebony hair and dark eyelashes, Dad’s azure eyes were startlingly provocative. He’d bat his eyelashes while playfully asking my sister and me: “Girls, does my turquoise shirt match my baby-blue eyes?” I think he was aware of how hypnotic his gaze might appear to women open to seduction. But this is a part of my father’s character which I’ll investigate later, and which I know leads inevitably to pain.
I inherited my father’s thin-lipped, sensitive mouth that betrays any pretense by either of us of being a tough guy. We share a mouth that easily twists upwards in pain, or frowns insolently, if fleetingly. Ours is the mouth of an introvert, often resolutely closed during introspection, with lips pressed together decisively, or parted slightly to let a sigh sneak into or out of it. We share a love of words and sounds—an exuberant relishing of crashing waves, of birdsong and tinkling wind chimes, of great oratory like Dylan Thomas reading his poems and sounding “like God,” as one of my former students once said—and a devotion to silence, too.
Any portrait of my father must necessarily reveal the alternating rôles he played: accomplished but frustrated composer, pacifist Army lieutenant during World War II, gifted Professor of Ethnomusicology, boxing enthusiast, bon vivant, tennis player, family man, lively raconteur, sports car enthusiast and driver, high school orchestra conductor, martini aficionado, Francophile, unrepentant adulterer—I’ve come to see how these prismatic aspects of my father’s character are like a fantastic multi-faceted geode, with its gleaming crystal formations of amethyst, quartz, agate, jasper, and chalcedony, all contained in one orb.
Yet the visage I knew best was my father’s Janus-faced reflection, because his persona often reflected two contrasting aspects, and not just in the sense of his being duplicitous, but also because of the powerful dualities in my dad’s character. Here was a profoundly shy man who morphed into the star at social gatherings; here was a quiet, often insecure, but self-composed person who, with grace and éclat, could easily command huge audiences—such as his perpetually-over-enrolled undergrad World Music classes in the 1980s and ‘90s at Cal Poly Pomona University. Here was a loving father and husband who relished sleeping with other women. He was a singular man who often lived a double life.
Yet my father truly was a devoted family man and a perfectionist, a man who embraced both the small and large pleasures in his life, a man who was genteel, or civilized, he’d say, and one who held that important rituals should be savored. He loved and admired sacred music from around the world, and he was as swiftly transported by Bach’s “Requiem” mass as by a Balinese monkey chant or a soulful Aretha Franklin song. As an atheist, he may not have thought that God was in the details, but surely, he believed something sacred dwelled within them.
Still, ten years after his death, so much of my father’s character remains puzzling and mysterious. After his strokes, in those later years when I saw him, I often felt like Aeneas meeting his father Anchises in the Underworld. In Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid, Aeneas is greatly moved by seeing his father again in the realm of the dead, but when he tries to embrace him, his father vanishes. This happens three times: each time, Aeneas holds out his arms to his father, and his father disappears into thin air. For this is the nature of the dead—they continually recede from us, fading away into memory like wraiths.
After my father’s strokes, he seemed to dwell in a disquieting limbo between the lands of the living and the departed. He was present physically, but his mind was apparently elsewhere. It was as if he’d entered the Tibetan Buddhist realm of bardo, wherein his usual life and persona were suspended because he’d retreated to some invisible sphere. His eyes often glanced at me in an unfocussed way, and because they’d turned a paler blue than they’d been previously, his gaze seemed otherworldly.
Old family photos might momentarily revive the dead for us, but like mirages in the desert, they evaporate as soon as we move closer to them. I study my father’s face in several photographs that I’ve laid out on my desk, and I see the intensely serious, chiseled-jawed young man slowly morph into a middle-aged man’s genial pensiveness, which next deepens into the vacantly dreamy-eyed expression of an elderly man lost in his own past or in an unknowable future. Then all these beloved images collapse into each other and fade into oblivion.
Maurya Simon’s La Sirena: A Novella in Verse (May 2024) is a National Book Award nominee. Her volume, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, received the 2019 Independent Booksellers Association’s Gold Medal in Poetry. A Fulbright Senior Research Fellow (South India), NEA Poetry Fellow, and a Poetry Society’s Lucille Medwick Memorial and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awardee, she’s served residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators (Sweden), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), and the MacDowell Colony. Simon’s poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Spanish, Rumanian, Bengali, Greek, and Farsi.