L.
Woiwode
OWEN'S FATHER
Just recently, at the age of twenty-three, Owen Bierdeman
had begun to feel the influence of his father.
It
was neither a pleas–
ant influence nor a good one. His father was dead; he'd been dead
for fifteen years. Throughout childhood and adolescence Owen had
felt the need, common to those deprived of a parent when young, to
fill in the vague outline of his father, to invent traits and predilec–
tions and features for him, to fashion a man out of a shadow, and
since Owen remembered little of
his
father and his mother could not
or would not respond to any questions about her husband, Owen
had fabricated and now found himself faced with a vast and spurious
personality. His mother was alive, a tangible presence Owen could
rebel against, make amends with, manipulate, hate, love; but every
time he tried to think of his father it was as though he were beating
against blackness. And when Owen moved to Manhattan a year ago,
freeing himself from home and all that was familiar, a change came
over him. Working at the Overseas Press Club, where he edited tele–
type dispatches, or pacing in his studio apartment on Sullivan Street,
he began to feel- first with amazement, then with pride, then
dis–
taste, then fear - that many of his attitudes, gestures and even a
certain tone of voice, had about them the feeling of being familiar.
They were his father's.
It
was then that Owen realized it was es–
sential for him to separate what he had invented from the truth.
He remembered his father as an imposing man, tall and muscular,
and it wasn't until a few months ago, when he was spending Christ–
mas at home with his mother in Chicago, that Owen discovered how
mistaken he'd been. Most of his father's papers and personal effects
