Neil S. Friedman

Neil, 77, is a retired nurse specializing in sleep disorders now living at Laurel Circle in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Though always interested in writing, he began pursuing it seriously after enrolling in Paul Rabinowitz’s creative writing workshop.

To Know Him Is to Know Her

My place in the family shaped how I saw my father and how he saw me. I was the youngest of five children, and the only boy, born sixteen years after my eldest sister. She had the advantage of knowing a saner father, at least for a time. He had no expectations of my sisters; they were girls. But I was the great male hope, the son who would become the religious scholar he never could. I didn’t. I rebelled. I just wanted to play with my friends.

My father was a man of rituals. He could be called a dandy—meticulous about his appearance, spending money we could ill afford on his wardrobe. Every Friday, he took a whisk broom to each item of clothing in his closet, including his fancy fedoras, whether he had worn any of them recently or not. Then, he polished his many shoes, always in that order—clothes first, shoes last, to avoid transferring polish. A dapper Dan who glad-handed the neighbors and backhanded his children, thankfully on rare occasions. Worse were the long silences he used as punishment.

We were children. We whistled in the apartment. We put our feet on a chair. We ate his candy.These offenses earned his silence, sometimes for a day, or a week, or so long I lost track and stopped caring. As an adult, I think of him whenever I hear The Sounds of Silence. In the end, he disowned all five of us and that became the longest silence of all.

Every morning, my father prayed, not casually, but with the full ritual of our faith. Every evening, he prayed again. No noise was permitted. In between, he worked a low-paying job, earning enough to buy the clothes he craved.

At night, my mother made his dinner. He cleaned the kitchen. Then, he cleaned the rest of the apartment with the same obsessive care he gave his clothes and shoes. Before bed, he set out his breakfast dishes: a bowl for cereal, a glass for tea, another for prune juice, a shot glass for his one daily drink (“to get the body going,” as he put it), and a plate for bread. Each was placed face down on another plate, so they would not gather dust overnight. Then, he locked himself in our one bathroom for an hour, grooming for the next day. In a seven-person household, this was no small inconvenience. Thankfully and embarrassingly, we had kind neighbors.

My sisters and I survived our father because our mother was loving, giving, and, as best she could be, our protector. She understood his mental illness, explained how it had evolved over the years, and bore the weight of it. Divorce was rare then, but not unheard of. Some thought she was weak for staying. I think she was brave. She worked tirelessly outside the home, five and a half days a week, while being the only viable parent to five children. My mother was a widow with a husband.

As I grew older, I hoped my father would pass before my mother, so she could finally live without anxiety, surrounded by the children and grandchildren he had forbidden from visiting her in her own home. But Billy Joel was right: the good die young.

The last time I saw my father alive was at my mother’s funeral. Six years later, I saw him at his.