This Father's Day, I will think fondly of my dad, who would have been 113 this summer. But another species of father deserves some recognition — my fathers-in-law. Having acquired over the years no fewer than four of them, I've stored away some gratifying memories. If Hallmark has all but forgotten paternal in-laws, I haven't. One by one, I've sought their counsel, enjoyed their friendship, and was both instructed and consoled by their experience.
Mothers-in-law have established a far more recognizable brand than their male counterparts, at least in American culture. Songs have been written about mothers-in-law. Yes, and jokes, too — which illustrates their influential, if sometimes conflicting role. Notwithstanding recently farcical movie fathers-in-law (like Robert DeNiro as Ben Stiller's intimidatingly off-kilter in-law in "Meet the Parents"), fathers-in-law tend to fade into the background of domestic life for reasons it would take an anthropologist to explain.
But fathers-in-law have been anything but bit players in my life. Two in particular stand out.
I married young, barely into my 20s, sliding into, and shortly thereafter out of, a starter marriage. Looking back ruefully at my callow youth, the strongest bond I formed was not with my first wife, but her parents.
Compared with my own disappointingly conventional mom and dad, Blanche and Joe — both now long since deceased — impressed me immoderately. Unlike my own solid, bourgeois parents, they weren't mere businesspeople, but theater people. Colorful. Artistic. Unconventional.
Blanche rented summer stock theaters in the wilds of small-town Pennsylvania. Unlike my father, who drove a huge, shiny Oldsmobile, or my mother, who never got her driver's license, my mother-in-law — a few inches under 5 feet tall — wheeled around in a Karmann-Ghia the size of a golf cart, gesturing dramatically with a long, black cigarette holder, and burning out one clutch after another.
If Blanche was bohemian, her husband loomed mythologically. Six-foot-3 and well over 250 pounds, he didn't sell fur coats like my own father; he tasted candy for a living, as a vice president of a confectionery manufacturer.
After a stroke that seemed inevitable for someone with his job description, Joe and I had many engaging conversations. He had done exotic things in his youth. In the 1930s, he was a batboy for the minor-league San Francisco Seals baseball team that included Joe DiMaggio. He played the ukulele, and once landed a sort of offscreen musical body-double role — playing the ukulele for Ukulele Ike, a popular entertainer in the 1920s and '30s.
I am chagrined to confess that I was more enamored of my in-laws than my wife. Which would explain the "starter" in starter marriage. Joe's passing, when I was 23, was my first direct and emotional experience of death. I imagine it prepared me for my father's death two years later.
Another of my fathers-in-law — my son's grandfather — was a legitimate member of the Greatest Generation. A graduate of Annapolis, Bill (not his real name) rose to the rank of captain, serving in the Pacific theater during World War II.
Unlike my own dad — an immigrant who never finished grammar school — Bill was a Harvard Business School graduate, a history buff and a citizen of the world. He mixed a mean martini; took me out on his sailboat, during which he attempted without success to show me how to tack; tutored me on the manual-shift Toyota Tercel he sold me; and never complained when I ran him ragged on the tennis court.
I have always been a sucker for nostalgia. But as much as I've enjoyed the companionship of my fathers-in-law, it is my own father who has my heart.
As a small boy, I would stand in the bathroom and watch the spectacle of my father shaving. He'd dip his hand into the jar of shaving cream, smear it all over his face, and perform that engaging, surgical, definitively masculine morning ritual. I memorized his routine. I peered up at his white-masked reflection in the mirror as he washed his cream face clean in cold water. Unlike the whiskery, bristly forest of his pre-shaven face, the face on which I then placed my palm had been leveled into a frictionless plain, smooth and cool to the touch.
This Father's Day, I'll remember my fathers-in-law. But on that morning, when I look into the bathroom mirror and remember my dad shaving, the face I see won't be theirs, but his.
• • •
Robert E. Brown teaches writing at Salem State College and the Harvard Extension School. He has written previously for the opinion pages.
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