The questions I wished I’d asked my father

Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

Sometimes we shared a cake. I have a picture that proves this. It’s of my father and me, blowing out candles on a double-layer birthday cake festooned with confectionery flowers, which my mother made for the two of us when I was 6 and he was 30.

In the picture, I am seated before the cake doing more looking at than blowing out the candles my mother has arranged. Thirty-one for him, seven for me, the extras for good luck. My mother was always courting good luck.

My father is standing next to me, and is bent at the waist, so that it’s not his face you see but his hair, dark and curly and thick, just as it was all of my childhood. “She’s your daughter?” strangers would often ask when they saw us together. “She sure is,” my father would reply, grinning, sometimes tousling my curls, which were as pale as straw.

Ike and Mike my mother called us. For a long time, I didn’t know what this meant but I liked the sound of it. It sounded like a pair, and that’s what my father and I were.

In the picture, which my mother taped in my baby book, the tape yellow now, you can see that my father’s lips are puckered and you get the sense that he is serious about blowing out all the candles, that he is focused on this. Putting out the fire, is what I think looking at it now. That’s what he’s doing. That’s what he always did. I study his face, what I can see of it, and wonder what he was wishing back then, whether he was wishing.

I always knew my mother’s dreams. She wanted children. She wanted a house in the country. She wanted grass and flowers and the smell of the outdoors to be of blossoms and trees, not exhaust fumes. She talked about these things. She talked so much that I imagined them, too.

My father didn’t talk.

And I didn’t ask. I had a lifetime to ask him questions: “What did you want to be when you were a little kid?” “What was it like growing up without a father?” “How did the war change you?” “What were the best and worst moments of your life?” “What do you want, Dad? What makes you happy?”

The birthday picture is black and white but I see this moment in color. Pink frosting, pink and blue candles, darker pink and blue cups and plates, the tablecloth a linoleum gray. My friends at the table, my mother snapping pictures, the candle flames a flickering yellow.

It is the last birthday my father and I will celebrate in Somerville. The next year, we will live in Randolph in a house that my mother will always call her “house in the country.” We will have a lawn my father will seed and then care for, and a rock garden my mother will create and then tend and there will be no landlord downstairs telling us that we can’t have a dog. My mother will get some of her dream. But I don’t know this, yet.

I know that my father’s birthday is six days after mine. Six days after and 24 years before. Not a lot of years separated us. I didn’t know this then. But that’s what strikes me now.

He would be 98, an unthinkably old age when he died in 2005 at 82. But it’s not unthinkable today. His brother will be 96 this year and he lives alone, makes his bed, cooks his meals, does his laundry, and beats me almost all of the time at cribbage.

Before my father died, he told me that he’d had a good life. “I had your mother, and I had Louise [his second wife], and I had you,” he said.

My birthday was a few weeks ago. And then came his and all that day I thought about him and us and the years we had together and all the things we did. And all the conversations we never had.

We were Ike and Mike. My father taught me how to ride a bike and drive a car and check the oil and change a flat tire. Who taught him? Who taught him to be a good father when he never had one, when his father abandoned him and his brothers when he was 5? I know this. I know the age he was when his father left. But that’s all I know. “Do you remember those days, Dad? Tell me about them,” I should have said.

But I didn’t.

And I wish I had.