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the phantom father
BY BARRY GIFFORD
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK novelist and screenwriter Barry Gifford's memoir "The Phantom Father" has one heck of a subject at its center: Gifford's father, Rudy Winston, was a racketeer who ran an all-night drugstore/liquor store in Chicago in the 1950s, a man who throughout his shady career was linked with underworld figures like Ben Siegel and cohorts of Al Capone. The only problem is, Rudy was such a mystery man to Gifford (Gifford was 8 when his parents separated, in the mid-'50s, and he was 12 when his father died) that he doesn't quite know how to reveal him to us. Gifford seems to have dropped all the right poignant details into place. Not long before Rudy's death, he and the young Gifford took a trip to Florida. Gifford recalls accidentally walking in on his father, who had just undergone a colostomy, in the bathroom. Gifford writes of seeing the pain on his father's face, but his macho streak cuts across -- and mars -- his prose like a zigzag scar. "I didn't like seeing my dad so uncomfortable, but I knew there was nothing I could do for him," he writes tersely, and although his compassion is self-evident, you wish he'd cut the stiff-upper-lip crap just for a second. It must be tiring to be such a manly man all the time, and it sure is exhausting to read about it.
But Gifford does have his charms as a storyteller. Instead of being a plain meat-and-potatoes memoir, "The Phantom Father" is a series of vignettes with smudged edges, and some of them hang together nicely. Gifford doesn't try to wrap up each one with a tidy little summation -- life just doesn't work that way, and his honest recognition of that is refreshing. In one chapter, he reminisces about his maternal grandfather's fur business, which provided fine pelts for society ladies and gangsters' molls alike. He recalls seeing some of those clients at a particularly swanky Chicago restaurant in the '50s, and the chapter ends this way: "Many of the women who had bought coats, or had had coats bought for them, at my grandfather's place ate there. I was always pleased to recognize one of them, drinking a martini or picking at a shrimp salad, the fabulous dark mink draped gracefully nearby." It's an abrupt ending, and a strange one -- as if the chapter had jumped off its own little cliff -- but sometimes that's the only way to wrap up a memory. Being a manly man has some benefits: You can't be bothered with lots of frills and furbelows, and sometimes that's a very good thing.
Stephanie Zacharek lives in Boston. She is a regular contributor to Salon. |
