daron aric hagen

Sighing, my father poured each of us an amaretto and stretched out behind his desk. At that moment, I thought him ugly. I'm sure we were both in shock. I could tell that he wanted to talk man to man for the first time. The liquor smelled like death. I didn't want to.

Mother had told him in front of me the day before that, if he didn't find a way to communicate with his sons, then we would turn our backs on him. His last words to me, a few months before he died, two decades later, in 2002, were, 'I probably should have gotten psychological help when you were boys, but there always seemed to be other, more important things.'

He talked. I couldn't keep myself from feeling that on some level he still thought that the past few days — my mother's, his wife's slow motion quadrille with death —  had been about him. Father could be a captivating, charming man; he was capable of real eloquence. He loved the law and could conjur beauty when talking about it. He had the sort of mind that remembered all sorts of things; he was skilled at recalling trivia and injecting it into conversations both to delight his friends and to disarm his opponents.

I don't know whether he was a good lawyer or not, but he adored my mother; she loved him for that. He loved her and the law with a fiery, flawed purity that I can't help but admire. His friends and clients seemed to love him and to respect him. He was often and for long periods profoundly depressed. When we played chess, even when we both knew I was going to lose, he never permitted me to resign. He liked to work with his hands, and taught his sons countless practical skills. He was smart enough to know a lot, and he was proud of his intellect, yet it seemed to me that he did not understand that  it wasn't enough to know a little bit about everything, that one must know a lot about at least one thing. I often disliked him, but I always loved him; I never doubted that he loved me.

We were in his den. 'All your good qualities,' he began, the evening that she died in my arms, the evening before the morning I left, never to return during his lifetime, making a steeple of his fingers, 'you got from your mother; all the bad ones come from me.'