A Father's Quiet Love, Revealed

The Boston Globe

"You're making a big mistake," my father said some 20 years ago when I told him I was not going to renew my teaching certificate. He was angry, and he let me know it. We argued for days about my not wanting something I would never use. I was in my 40s and a long time out of college. And yet he was furious that I would toss away something he had paid for and in which he took great pride.

I was his daughter, "the teacher," you see, never mind that I had taught school, fourth grade, for only one year way back in 1968, and never mind that I had been writing for two decades. In my father's eyes I was and always would be a teacher, first. The way I was and always would be his daughter first, not my husband's wife, not my children's mother.

After my father died, his wife gave me two binders she found tucked away in his desk drawer. One is red and labeled: "World War, 1942/1945, European Campaign, General Eisenhower," and is full of pictures of people and places he never talked about. "French girl, Jeannie." "Dog named Lucky." "Phil Hamp, GI." "North Africa." "Algeria." "Sardinia." "Tunisia." Black-and-white photos dated and pasted on thick white paper.

I've looked at this binder so many times that it's dog-eared. I've tried to picture my father, 18, 19, 20, 21, an infantryman, marching from Africa to Europe, ducking bullets, fighting a war, stopping to pose with pretty girls. I try to imagine all the things he never told me. But I can't.

The second binder is thicker and must have surprised me when I first saw it. But it mustn't have touched me, the way it does now, because if it had, it would be dog-eared, too. It's black and is labeled (because my father labeled everything) "BEVERLY BECKHAM" in all caps. And inside are dozens of columns I wrote, columns my father printed and saved.

Recently at the library, I picked up "Every Father's Daughter," a collection of essays by 24 women writers about their fathers. In the foreword, which broke my heart a little, the author writes that books were a language she and her father spoke, that they learned everything they knew about each other because of the books they read, that it was because of her father's admiration for writers that the author became a serious writer, and that even as her father lay dying, she read to him and books continued to connect them.

My father and I never had that. I never read to him. We never talked about books. We never had deep conversations based on theory.

And then I remembered.

I gave him "DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF . . . and it's all small stuff," a book by Richard Carlson, right around the time we were arguing about the teaching certificate. And he read it. Then he read it again. He read it so many times, over the years, that it fell apart.

He quoted from it for the rest of his life. "One hundred years from now, all new people." "Don't interrupt others or finish their sentences." "Let others be right most of the time."

Maybe he was letting me be right when he stopped talking about the teaching certificate. Maybe that book was our special language.

I continue to try to piece together my father's life. He took me to the movies, to Paragon Park, to the doctor for my polio shots, because he never cared that I cried. He taught me how to ride a bike, drive a car, change a tire.

He gave me gift certificates to Barnes & Noble every year on my birthday because he knew I loved books.

He did this even though he didn't like gift certificates. They reminded him of his childhood, he said. They reminded him of waiting in line for food.

He was on leave for seven days in Mannheim, Germany, in 1944. He was 21. I never knew. He never told me. But he showed me in the pictures he left behind.

And in the big black binder that bears my name, he shows me what I see so clearly now: not my father and me arguing, but his quiet, constant love.