privacy in the kitchen. The air in the
darkened living room between us crack-
led like a force field.
When I was seven, Day recorded that
“Tad wrote a composition about his
mother. She was afraid of it. She forced
a smile and asked, ‘Is it full of bad things?’
He said he didn’t want anyone to read
it. Going to bed, she worried about it,
and next morning, while he was upstairs,
she peeked at the composition. It says,
‘Her voice is like a moonbeam, her liv-
ing room is a palace and I love her. She
would have been a princess. She is very
pretty and she is interested in sports (at
least she listens) and I wouldn’t want
another one.’ She leads me out to look
at it, and when I’ve read it, I look at her.
Tears start from my eyes, and tears from
hers.” My first big descriptive lie.
Y
ou are a flat stone. You begin to
skip across the lake, generating rip-
ples that spread with unpredictable ef-
fect. According to the theoretical math
that attends moving water, there’s noth-
ing to stop a skipping stone from—once
in a great while—causing the lake to
explode. My father expected an exploit
at that level.
Day and Mom wrote up life plans
every few years, so they could embark
on more projects, develop more friend-
ships, and wring more from each day.
My father envisioned his working life
as a tripartite affair, like the U.S. gov-
ernment or the Christian godhead. His-
tory, fiction, action. Whichever arena he
was laboring in seemed less promising
than the others. When he sent poems
such as “Torpor, Wrapped in a Turkish
Towel” to small reviews, they boomer-
anged back. So he turned to his history,
a comparative study of Indonesia and
the Philippines under Japanese occupa-
tion—and then began to doubt the book’s
merits. Should he junk the project and
really do something with his life? Mom
told him, “A cook doesn’t commit sui-
cide because the soufflé has fallen.”
Like many public men, Day bloomed
at the lectern. But he bloomed even
more abundantly in private, writing of
the delight he took in his fresh-cut lawn
and in the fragrant steam rising from
a cup of Lapsang souchong—and of
his shame at failing to live up to his
image as a public man. His mind poured
compulsively onto pocket-calendar
pages, hotel stationery, envelopes, Post-it
notes, and restaurant menus, covering
them with aphorisms, poems, fears, re-
grets, and prayers—a red thread of fer-
vor woven into the snowy vestments of
his rational mind. He kept detailed rec-
ords of haunting dreams: of thwartedurination, of futile effort, of erotic rev-
eries of all kinds. His nightmares mor-
tified him; he lived in dread of his un-
bridled imagination.
Family life consoled him, somewhat.
“I woke the child and put him in the
back of the station wagon with a blan-
ket and pillow; and she climbed back
there too with a comforter, and I drove
us over the bridge to the Lake’s other
side and looked at the city, the city’s
lights, with the eye of a tourist,” he
wrote, in 1965. “She was droopy as a
fern. And said the next day it had been
one of the happiest times in our mar-
riage.” In his journals, he usually called
me “the child” or “the boy”; people often
struck him as ideas incarnate, as Jesus
was. Even as his children grew up and
acquired professions (my brother, Pier,
in finance and my sister, Timmie, in
interior design), we usually appeared as
subsets of his own capacities. In 1990,
he wrote, “One son likes money; the
other, words. My daughter likes mas-
sage. I like money, words, massage, and
sacred music.” O.K., Zeus.
During the nine years my father spent
at Swarthmore, I don’t remember ever
talking to him for long before his at-
tention reverted to some faculty upris-
ing or administrative perfidy. Constantly
simmering, he often boiled over. Once,
on a call with his stepmother, Eugenia,
a world-historical harpy, he began wav-
ing the phone at his crotch. In a note
to himself, he wrote, “I knew, in my nar-
cissism, that I saw myself as Saint Se-
bastian, and loved the role. That I would
will a suffering, so long as it were sig-
nificant, and neither accidental nor de-
grading. I suppose I have found it in a
college presidency.” Meanwhile, I’d slink
off to my room to listen to songs like
“Bad Company” and “Dream On,” be-
cause they suggested a world beyond
Swarthmore, a world full of drugs and
outlawry and skintight pants—a world
that was not actually in my future, but
that gave me hope for a future some-
where else.M
om was a poet in college and took
up painting in her forties, but let-
ters were her chief expressive form. In
1980, she wrote me a prismatic note about
how she and my father had gone to New
York, “Day on college business, me for
“Can I pretend to help?” fun,” and a friend from Long Island PREVIOUS PAGE: SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE ESTATE OF ANNELIESE GARVER; TAD FRIEND