Our People     

My parents met before the US entered the First World War, as teachers at the Latter Day Saints’ Business College, where my father was teaching accounting and math. Mother, a teacher of nutrition, was by then in her 30s and perhaps thought that this was her last chance to get married, the necessary requirement for womanhood among the Mormons. Not long after the wedding, mother convinced father to quit “unmanly” teaching and “get out into the world.” Thus began his long career as a traveling salesman.

My father’s chief artistic love was music. I have probably derived my lifelong devotion to this art from him. But I have exchanged his fondness for popular and religious music for the classical and secular. When I was young, father sang solos and conducted the choir and congregation in the Capitol Hill Ward, our local chapel, but even then his pushy showmanship had begun to sabotage his efforts. I could feel my mother's embarrassment when she was present. And no one in the Church ever encouraged his overly-generous encores. Whenever he led the Saints in singing, I felt that they resented being treated as though they were wayward pupils. Over the years, mother gradually but effectively silenced his quixotic public performances. But I think that this was a terrible loss for him.

V.O.D. & P. —Father (Self-Styled)

Only on his long business trips to the small towns of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado was my father able to express himself fully and find appreciative audiences. He was frequently acknowledged and admired as a self-appointed missionary from Zion, and he would give talks filled with inspirational examples and homely observations. When traveling, father would write us long and overly-affectionate letters in a pleasant, conversational tone that we rarely heard at home. He would always sign himself, XOXOXO, Your very own Daddy and Papa. His oversized letterhead seemed very grand indeed: RAYMOND E. DORIUS AND SONS, followed by the name of whatever business he was representing at the time. But for most of his life, the only child who actually assisted him in his work was my sister Julia. At the end of every letter, he would add a long and florid, almost royal, signature which he had long perfected. When he once saw me scribbling my name on some homework, he told me that people looked down on those with sloppy signatures. Appearances meant everything to him, and whenever he was in public, he dressed like a dandy, complete with starched collar and cuffs, a puffed tie and ruby tiepin. By contrast, when he was at home he dressed like a beggar, wearing the same tired jacket year after year.

My father never lost the frugality he had developed as a child in an immigrant farm family in Ephraim, Utah. His later ascetic life away from home set a pattern for my own curiously persistent habits of spare living. His Scandinavian family—gentle, loving, and very sentimental—had lived in stone-and-clay houses that his father and relatives had built, on produce the family planted, and in clothes the womenfolk made. The seasons were extreme, and everything was grown from scratch, frequently on poor soil.

As a young man, my great grandfather had converted to Mormonism in his native Denmark, and his children followed his example. In 1857, his son, my grandfather, Carl Christian Nikolai, immigrated to America with 536 other Danish converts. In Utah, Carl Christian had five wives and over 25 children. When the Church had to disavow polygamy in 1890, when my father was six, Carl Christian was committed to the state penitentiary for refusing to surrender his multiple wives and their children. The memory of this public humiliation shadowed my father’s life. My father was always troubled that he lacked Carl Christian’s authority and status. After 1890, polygamous fathers had to visit their wives in secret and only at night. Afraid of arrests by federal marshals, my father and his sibling lived with their mother in the “underground” in Salt Lake City. Carl Christian, the “bishop” or leader of his chapel, died before my father was ten. The family would forever after consider him a martyr to his faith. I think that father often found the heroic examples set by his parents and grandparents daunting.

The pervasive religious insecurity surrounding their difficult lives during this period haunted my father all of his life. Many Mormons broke away from the Church at this time, but father could not leave his mother and siblings. His thinking and feeling were forever frozen in childhood. Although (from my reading of his diary) he seemed indifferent to religion as a boy, Ray Dorius in his teens experienced a dramatic conversion—or, as he called it, a “faith-promoting” experience when he was hiking with a friend in the Uintah Mountains. At one point on the hike, my father and his friend were separated for some time. In trying to take a shortcut, father found himself on a steep and treacherous hill of sliding shale, above a cliff with a sheer drop of several hundred feet. With every move he made, he slid further down toward disaster. He called in vain for his friend, now some distance away, and then, slipping closer toward the edge, he prayed desperately for God’s help. As if in reply, his friend “miraculously” looked over the top of the hill and saw my father struggling like a helpless ant in a sand pile. His friend “providentially” happened to have a long length of rope with him, and he pulled father to safety. I heard this story many times, and I became convinced of its central importance in his life. As an adult, father became as immovable in matters of faith and daily conduct as a granite block. There was no dynamite strong enough to force him to change his views. We all wore ourselves out trying. The father I knew still lived inside a Mormon vision of courageous and embattled Saints, rarely in the everyday world. Imitating our cooler mother, we children regarded father’s ready tears and rages as mortifying.

Early photographs portray my father as a strikingly good-looking boy and a beautiful, if somewhat ethereal, youth the portrait of the artist as a young man. Looking at these, I thought that I might have loved my father in his adolescence; indeed, I could have been in love with him. I later wondered what happened to the artist evident in these early pictures. He had been the youngest boy in his father’s five families, and he early became and remained the favorite of his loving Norwegian mother. The competition between my father’s many siblings for the attention of their elders must have been fierce. The imprisonment and death of their father broke up the family. My father early learned, as he said, to “jolly up the folks,” and “crack jokes” for attention. He slowly began to shine at Church socials, and then on local stages as a member of a popular barbershop quartet. He later joined the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And in 1916, he traveled with the Choir to New York City. He also served as a tour guide in Salt Lake City for several years, finding many innovative ways to entertain and amuse strangers. Throughout his life, he kept notebooks in which he would jot down jokes, anecdotes, and moralizing tales that he had heard or read––all useful in the talks he later gave before the Saints on his travels. He loved to be the center of group laughter, not usually aware whether people were laughing with him or at him. Any kind of response would do, as long as he was noticed.

We children found father’s larger-than-life style inappropriate and often embarrassing, perhaps because our mother did. He had little sense of the differentness or boundaries between people, a lack of sensitivity that later prompted me to become too aware of others. He would embrace other Mormons in overly-familiar ways, presuming on an intimacy that those he met didn't feel. Since he thought of his offspring as parts of himself, he would frequently in company call attention to his vigorously growing children, as though he himself had sprouted leaves or limbs. As he neared middle-age, he took to wearing loud, wide ties and ten-gallon hats. He loved to speak to strangers on the street, often handing out pamphlets about the dangers of smoking and drinking. When he would take us out for a drive in one of his vintage cars, he would call out heartily to surprised drivers who came alongside, exchanging the time of day. Every stranger was a new challenge from whom father demanded attention. We would meanwhile slide down out of sight in the back seat. While waiting at bus or railway stations, father would put a large handkerchief over his head and take one of his many short naps, leaning to one side in a way that prompted passing children to ask, “Is that man dead?”

On his travels, except for Church meetings on Sundays, father lived alone for months at a time. Whenever he was strapped for cash, he would stay at YMCAs, men’s rooming houses, or in spare and simple rooms in third-class hotels, spooning his meals out of tin cans after heating them on a hot plate. I could later never let myself dwell on how lonesome and desperate my father must have been at these times. Perhaps predictably, I too have lived in similar skimpy, self-denying ways—re-using paper towels and straws, for instance—to the general amusement of my friends. My parents managed to live together for short periods because he usually worked outside in the yard. Father couldn’t even look forward to our welcoming hugs when he came home. Indeed, when he first walked in the door, we children would often run and hide. We didn’t feel up to his overly demonstrative greetings. Each time he came home—increasingly a stranger—I had to readjust to the sudden negative force in the house. Why was this aggressive man, whom I neither knew nor understood, suddenly invading my mind and body?

I’m sure that my father loved me in my childhood, noisily and effusively, as he seemed to love all children. I remember his playing with us on the floor of our living room, as though he himself were a child. He loved all the rituals of childhood, and until we were nine or ten, we did too. He would usually speak to all children in a high, squeaky voice—the same voice I now use with my cat. Since father was far more demonstrative than mother, I think that as a boy I must have responded warmly—at least in private—to his kisses and hugs, but we withdrew whenever he was overly affectionate in public. Curiously, I can remember few details of his early paternal cherishing. By seven or eight, I was seeing my father primarily through my mother’s judgmental eyes. As we approached adolescence, father couldn’t adjust to our mental and emotional growth. To his dismay, we had begun to develop minds of our own.

I was an absent-minded boy, always living in my imagination, finding daily life burdensome—and when I was with my father, often frightening. Whenever I helped him with chores, such as shining his pair of old, ornate automobiles—a faded yellow La Salle and a dark blue Buick-–he would harp on the fact that I used tools, swept sidewalks, carried out garbage, and watered lawns like a blockhead. He would shout at me sharply, “Why are you holding the shovel that way?” He seemed to be asking himself: “What on earth is wrong with Joel? Is he dim-witted?” He would constantly accuse me of being butter-fingered and incapable of learning simple skills. I think he was right, but I also think my lack of eye-hand coordination was partly a learned helplessness. Father was a rotten teacher; he didn't bother to explain procedures, and his shouting threw me off balance and built up a burning resentment. His fussy corrections and short temper made it impossible for me to think. The legacy of his badgering has been that whenever I am upset or facing deadlines, I can scarcely do even simple arithmetic, let alone read complicated instructions.

Once, when I was learning to drive, he sat in front with me and criticized my every move at the wheel. As we approached an intersection, he yelled, “Keep away from the curb, you dummy!” My anger took over, and I instantly turned the car too abruptly, up and over the curb. He exploded in exasperation. “Joel, I warned you about that curb! Did you do that to upset me?” Several other times, I compulsively acted out exactly what he had warned against. Anyone who performed tasks in ways other than his was not simply different; he was plain wrong. In our family, father played the badgering nanny, as well as the Victorian pater familias. Because of him, I had great difficulty in liking or trusting older male authority figures; and for years it was impossible for me to feel close to any older man, except my piano teacher. Throughout life, many of my closest friends have been younger than I, and I have tried to give them the love I felt that my father denied me.

Throughout our younger years, father’s primary emotions were confused and confusing––ffection bordering on sentimentality, and anger bordering on rage. Mealtimes with father were disastrous. Perhaps to salve his conscience about being absent for long periods, father played the head of a pious Church family with a heavy hand. Every meal was accompanied by a lecture on moral improvement and safeguarding our health. He would nag us constantly—from “You put too much food on your fork,” to “Be sure and bundle up today and put on your rubbers.” His endless retelling of anecdotes from his early life made ordinary conversation impossible. He hated being interrupted, and could not tolerate our arguing with him. “Don’t dispute me!” he would shout, astonished that we would dare to do so. If we ignored him, he would yell, and occasionally pound on the table until dishes clattered to the floor. I was so unnerved by his temper tantrums that I have been unable to express my own anger openly for most of my life. I have ever since found wrath an ugly and ungovernable emotion; I have always feared that if I lost control, I would go to pieces.

In later life, even when an occasion called for it, I could never simply blow up and get it over with. Instead, I kept most negative feelings hidden, brooded over them, and let them make me sick. Over the years, I developed an indirect, low-key way of expressing such emotions through irony and satire—a method that, as I later discovered, could hurt others even more. In retrospect, I think father’s outbursts were primarily bluster, but as a boy, I couldn’t know that this dog would not bite. Mother would usually play the conciliator, but his volatile emotions made her also apprehensive: What further remark might ignite his short fuse?

I remember father’s working 10 to 15 hours a day in his cluttered room, sitting under an exposed light bulb, wearing an old gray sweater and green visor. Like the rest of us, he would often feel cold and wore several layers even indoors. As though he were part of a vast bureaucracy, he would enter endless columns of figures in his ledgers. This perpetual Kafkaesque record-keeping was puzzling, for he never seemed to have many customers. When he later taught adult Sunday School classes in Salt Lake City, he would prepare his lessons with great care, using maps, charts, and large reference books to trace the historic movements of the Saints from Ohio through Missouri, and Illinois to Utah. His prayers at Church meetings were so ardent and long-winded that, after ten minutes or so, our friends would grumble and tease us. In and out of Church, father was a perpetual mouthpiece for the Gospel. He was a missionary who would use his salesman’s skills to sell Mormonism and his religious ardor to sell suits. He left Mormon propaganda with every customer. His role as lay preacher gave his carping remarks about our behavior far more weight than they would otherwise have had. And for me, it gave Mormonism something of the rigidity and blood-kin quality of my father. Almost a decade after I left home at 22, I could scarcely separate father from faith in my imagination.

Three weeks before Christmas one year, when I was in my teens, my father and I were rehearsing Handel’s Messiah together under an exceptional conductor. At one point, the conductor asked for someone to demonstrate how a difficult passage in one of the choruses should be sung. My father’s arm shot up at once, and he stood up confidently and roared out a random mishmash of notes. The conductor quickly turned to someone else, and I tried as usual to disappear. I kept asking myself afterwards why he had dared to volunteer. Had he even felt rebuked when he sat down? Why couldn’t he notice other peoples’ glances? This insensitivity to others’ feelings cost him the very affection and admiration he longed for. I remained haunted by his negative examples well into my career. Every time I wanted to rise and speak during large and contentious faculty meetings, I would remain in great frustration on the edge of my seat. Eventually, I consciously tried to develop a public demeanor that made me appear confident and at ease even when I was not.

Luckily, both of my parents liked music and insisted that I take classical piano lessons. At first, I was as bored as most boys would be, but when I was about 12, my father recommended me to a man who had bought custom-made suits from him, a well-known local piano teacher, Sterling Carlsberg. For several years, father paid for my lessons by selling Carlsberg suits at a discount. Unfortunately, I could never acknowledge this prolonged subsidy. After four lost years under poor teachers—during which I had played In the Lilac Gardens and other syrupy pieces by unknown ladies—I was finally assigned Mozart. Thus at 12, I fell completely in love with classical music, a love that has remained with me for the rest of my life. I used practicing the piano as an excuse to get out of most chores, and it soon became a joyful escape from my boring daily life in Zion. Later, when I was nearly failing my college pre-med classes, I would try to comfort myself by saying, “At least there’s one thing I can do. I can play the piano.” Although I was never far above average, this minor achievement was my only means of gaining self-respect. Not until my second year at Harvard did I achieve a similar confidence in my abilities in literature. When my parents moved to Los Angeles, father insisted on keeping the now dusty, old upright piano his children had played years before. It was by then covered with files and papers, occupying a disproportionately large space in his small, overcrowded room. Mother would not allow this “ugly old object” in her new house. Although he could not play a note himself, he loved the memories of our childhoods associated with this now soundless instrument.

During the Depression, mother and I started going to movies together; we had to go secretly because father disapproved of such frivolity. Father always resented our passionate hobby and the spirited discussions that would follow each viewing. “What a lot of fuss about nothing!” he would say. Father could not understand the plots of movies; he was simply unable to follow a sequence of scenes, or identify with characters. Out of sheer frustration, he often left in the middle of a picture. It had never occurred to me that film was a language that had to be learned. He was deeply embarrassed by, and therefore hated, love stories. Two large heads kissing on the screen would mortify him and he would look away. Despite his reported flirtations while on the road, he could be as puritanical as my mother. He only enjoyed what he called “animal pictures,” an interest I too have developed in recent housebound years when preparing for sleep. Only in his last decade or so did he begin to understand what love between adult men and women might be. In his 60s, while keeping his endless accounts, he gradually became devoted to a few daytime soap operas on the radio, such as Portia Faces Life. I was moved to see him finally able to enjoy even these limited human relationships. It is little wonder that his wife and children had baffled him.

I think that my father had been mocked as a boy for his under-developed body. Comparing him with her muscular farmer brothers, mother must have encouraged him to build himself up, and he began to do so with a vengeance—always alone. One of the oddest consequences was his habit of doing his daily morning exercises in front of the house, on a corner across the street from both the Capitol grounds and the new Mormon Chapel. He would walk around on tiptoe and reach for the heavens, blow the air out of one nostril while holding the other shut, bend to the ground, whirl his arms, and sometimes vocalize to make sure his lungs were in good working order. He needed a larger public than the pallid stick-in-the-muds in the house. If passing Mormons criticized his long absences, these morning demonstrations would show them what an admirable example he was setting for his family and the neighborhood. To my great cost, father’s athletic displays put me and my siblings off physical exercise forever. Like father, I had as a young man an unusually underdeveloped upper body, with thin arms and a pigeon chest. I hated taking off my shirt in public, because I was the skinniest boy in the neighborhood, and mother’s frequent comments about my back left me feeling deformed. Never having learned to express the relaxed combativeness most boys learn through physical activity and team sports, I missed important stages in my relationships with groups of boys and men.

Whenever my father attempted to put his mark on part of the house, which had been carefully decorated by his wife, I was made sharply aware of matters of taste and quality. One year, just before the Christmas holidays, a small chain of Eagle Gasoline stations closed while he was on his travels. This stroke of good luck allowed him to acquire and bring home in a rented trailer eight standing figures of eagles with wings folded—six of hollow, frosted white glass, and two of stone, each about four feet tall. He filled two of the glass eagles with brilliant red lights and put them in the office windows of the insurance company for which he was briefly working. He was promptly fired for his presumption; Sun Life’s logo, after all, was a beaming sun. At home, he lighted four of the eagles, pulled up the blinds, and set them in the front windows for the holidays. Mother made sure that the glass eagles had disappeared by New Year’s Day. Father outwitted her, however. He built concrete foundations for the stone birds and set them stolidly for time and eternity at either side of our front door. A friend called them Castor and Pollux (I hear that they are still there).

Father was probably at his best as an organizer of Church socials—calling out the moves in square dances, and introducing young people to one another. He thought of himself as a “good mixer.” But his lack of tact was evident even here. He pushed his shy and self-conscious daughter to meet good, clean Mormon boys who might make fine husbands. Julia finally did marry one of her father’s handpicked choices, but the man deserted her after a year–-a terrible blow to her fragile self-esteem.

Father adopted some of our childhood expressions and made them standard in the family. He also began addressing his wife as “Missy” or “Miss Doll”—never as “Claire.” “Baby Doll” could scarcely have been less appropriate, although mother never took offense. Since she was always in control, these nicknames may have been his ways of mentally defanging her. Even when we were entering adolescence and rarely met his gaze, he tried to reach us through the baby talk that he had used when we were younger, his only language for intimacy. If we didn’t respond, he would adopt a whining voice, like a dog that whimpers and lowers its tail in a gesture of appeasement. His use of this simplified speech for affection was frequently welcome to us because we couldn’t argue in childish syllables. But this banter also meant that we could say nothing serious. Father had long referred to himself and to all of us in the third person, as though we lacked clearly-defined identities. “I” and “you” came to seem rude and too direct. My father would say to my sister Julia, “Daddy loves his Grand Love.” My mother never rejected this curious impersonality, and I’ve often wondered whether it pleased her. Unconsciously, I too began to adopt his regressive language. But I was soon aware of the quirkiness of the family’s speech, and I developed mocking or outlandish variations upon it. I still didn’t dare criticize father to his face, to avoid explosions. When father’s good spirits declined markedly during and after the Depression, he gradually became a health nut, obsessed with infection and germs. He would open doors in public places with his hand inside the lapel of his coat, or wrapped in a handkerchief; and in restaurants he would wipe plates and silverware with a napkin. In his mid-60s, despite his exercises, father’s health began to decline. He grew increasingly afraid of drafts, especially at night. In his later years, he took an hour to prepare for bed. He would wrap cloths around his feet, legs, and arms, and wear a kind of cummerbund around his middle. He wore a tight nightcap and bound a cloth around his eyes and ears. When he developed diabetes in his 60s, mother wrote me that he was angry and ashamed. Although his parents and every one of his siblings had died of diabetes, he wanted his own illness hidden from his children and relatives. In his eyes, this disease was an unaccountable betrayal of his lifelong vigilance, and it simply could not strike him. It must have shaken his faith, if anything could. Despite his slow decline, my father’s smooth skin and lucky genes caused him at times to be mistaken in public for his wife’s son, much to her dismay. Through the years, he became gentle and docile, thoroughly domesticated by his wife. When I would visit on holidays, I was given his bed, while he would sleep on a cot. But father was dispossessed of more than just his room. How long had it been since this house had been his home?

In his last decade, father had no idea how to relate to Mormon women his age except to give them presents. Earlier, to mother’s distress, father would have gently patted their behinds or given them a squeeze. But in his last years in Los Angeles, he grew a large and ever-blooming rose garden, solely to be able to take roses to Church Sunday mornings and hand one to each of his favorite “sisters.” He had become very gallant around the fairer sex, and he must have remembered his bachelor days as a ladies’ man. When I think of my father’s erotic life, several contradictory episodes puzzle me. Because of my mother’s aversion to sex, I think that after the first few months the two had intercourse primarily to produce children. One afternoon in the Thirties, at a public pool about two miles from our house, Kermit, my brother, and I were shocked when we saw our father at the shallow end hugging a woman we did not know. We left at once and strangely did not speak to one another about what we had seen for nearly two decades. In later years, father received ardent tokens of steady affection from a fellow saint. A Brother Applegreen, slightly older than my father, started sending him love notes, then love letters, then finally roses. Sisters Dorius and Applegreen must have been puzzled by these signs of sexagenarian male bonding. How did father respond to the good brother’s loving gestures? I came to see that the meaning of the generic Mormon term “brother,” applied to all males, could be greatly extended. Since mother had rarely welcomed his affection, it’s scarcely surprising that father sought it elsewhere.

Robert Bly attributes the deep-seated wound from which many American men suffer to the “absent father.” Despite my father’s long absences and sudden fits of temper, I’m now puzzled that for most of my life I’ve feared, even hated, this unpredictable man. He never slapped or hit me. Much as I hesitate to admit the fact, I now find many similarities between us. Like him, I’ve enjoyed playing the fool to get a laugh, and I have misjudged others’ responses. And despite my powerful bonds with friends, I have also occasionally withdrawn from the world, using my work as an excuse, as though I were living in one of my father’s lonely hotel rooms. I’ve been as mixed up sexually as I think he was, and I’ve at times assumed a hearty manner like his that disguised my true feelings. It has been difficult for me to acknowledge the positive legacy my father left me. Without the ability to offer much financial help, father encouraged me to go to school “until there isn’t any more.” And, unlike my mother, he never tried to impose a profession upon me. For too many years, father and son shared a similar pessimism; both often felt broken by the exigencies of life.

When it was available, music probably gave my father as much pleasure as it has given me. One evening before I left Salt Lake City, I played a recording of Schubert’s Quintet in C for him and the family. During the ineffable slow movement, my father wept almost uncontrollably, and he requested that this movement be played at his funeral. When my father died, my brother and I had long since hardened our hearts, and we were still too hostile to honor this simple request. I also thought that playing this heartbreaking movement in public might prompt me to break down. In my mother’s, and now my world, we rarely showed our emotions in public.

I’ve wondered at times whether my father’s uncontrolled range of emotions may have given me some of my ability to respond to the arts and to friends. I still resent the fact that he had no idea how to be a husband, father, or even a friend, and that he could never learn. A few of the most painful crises in our relationship still stir up vivid memories. I was 16 when I finally told my father when I came home one night that I couldn’t go to Church any longer. He looked as though I had just struck him.
     “Joel, you can’t say that to your father! You can’t do this to me. Tobacco and strong drink have probably put you on the road to Hell. I can smell them on you now. Your Jack Mormon friends have corrupted you.”
     I had long dreaded this confrontation, but I had to stand my ground. “No one has corrupted me,” I said. “This decision is my own. I don’t blame anyone. It’s hypocritical for me to go to Church, since I don’t believe in the gospel. I’ve been thinking about this for years.” I was scared, but also defiant.
     To my amazement, he fell to his knees and slowly advanced toward me. He started crying, telling me that he couldn’t bear to hear my words. He pled with me to pray with him and ask for God’s help.
     “Joel, please come back to the father and mother who love you. You’re damning yourself, and you won’t join the family in eternity. Please, please come back before it’s too late!”
     “I’m not leaving you or the family, Daddy, just the Church.”
I was overwhelmed by mixed emotions. The sight of my father crying on his knees was unbearable. But I couldn't think of helping him to rise, much less of touching him. When I left the room he was still crying on the floor.

For hours that night, I was torn between guilt and rage, unable to shake the image of my father’s humiliating himself before me. I had challenged his most basic hopes and beliefs. For most of the next two days, he stayed in the basement alone with his grief. I have punished myself countless times by conjuring up images of this scarring event.

Memories of father’s inability to understand his own family can still upset me. By adhering so fanatically to his literalist and childish versions of the Bible, The Book of Mormon, and his faith, father was creating intractable problems for himself. This long-feared confrontation with him reminds me of another scene, the reverse of mine. When the erring son in Balanchine’s ballet, The Prodigal Son, finally returns to his family, he advances on his knees in great remorse toward his father. His tall and stately father emerges from his tent and stands silent. The son advances further and slowly pulls himself up his father’s body. After a pause, his father thrillingly enfolds him in his arms. I have always burst into tears at this point in the ballet, made yet more powerful by Prokofiev’s magnificent score. I knew that I would or could never return to my father in this penitent way. And except on terms that I could never meet, I was sure that my father would never fold me in his arms. Even if he tried, I would back away. At this moment in the ballet, I have had an acute and overwhelming sense of loss. Years after seeing the ballet, I had an argument about it with a Catholic friend. My friend said, “The ending is biblically inaccurate. The father should have advanced toward the son and folded him in his arms at once.” I told him that I was astonished that the father hugged his son at all. Paternal forgiveness was strange to me. Denied the credible love of a mature father, I have always yearned for acceptance by an older and greater man. I finally found such a man at Harvard, admiration taking the place of love.