ABSTRACT
The story of my life begins when I was twenty-one months old, at the time my father died. That March my father came back from Trinidad where he had gone in a vain attempt to throw off the fever that was killing him, and ten days later he died. He had been ill for the year before, and they think now that he had been infected with an obscure disease during a certain operation. He was a young surgeon with a passionate love of his work and of research, 1 and nine months before his death he had had to give up his practice in New York and come home with my mother and me to her father’s farm. I have very little idea what he was really like, but the part he played in my childhood, and still plays, was none the less great for that. It may even be that I kept some memory of him, for they tell me that all through my childhood I called one chair in the house my father’s chair, a chair no one else associated with my father. They do not know, but they think it was the chair he sat up in the one time during the last ten days of his life when they got him up out of bed. If I did keep this memory of my father’s face, it would explain many things that puzzle me, for certainly these ghmmerings have nothing to do with his pictures, which were taken in full health and with the round beard and whiskers that were the fashion of the times. My memories have to do, instead, with a worn face illuminated with the translucence of illness, and very beautiful. There is no dispute that my father was beautiful. The power that such faces had over me I never associated with my father till the day I took my mother to the Boston Museum to see my favorite of all such faces, El Greco’s Fray Felix Hortensio Paravicino. 2 Ever since I had first discovered that picture I had found ways and means of getting to Boston to see it; my feeling for it was over and above my appreciation of the superb finality of the painter’s art. My visits were acts of friendship and love for the man painted. I always called him “mine.” One day many years after I was married my mother was in Boston with me. She knows little of painting, and an El Greco I liked meant nothing to her. But when we went into the large gallery where it hangs she went at once to the portrait, not knowing it was “mine.” I could not understand. Finally she turned to me and said, “It is your father. It is your father just before he died. There are no pictures of him as he looked then, but now you know what he looked like.”
