My Dad Part 2

The faults of his qualities

Ramatuelle (Département duVar), France.

I had last seen my father on the occasion of a huge row between us. I was 23. I don’t remember the details, and they don’t matter. It happened when we were due to overlap by a few hours in the South of France and had arranged to meet. He would be arriving from London at the start of his holiday, just as I was to drive to Milan at the end of mine. By the time he turned up, I’d been waiting several hours and was worried that something had happened.

Finally he arrived and parked the car in a temporary space convenient to lug the suitcases to his place. We hadn’t seen each other for at least two years, and I had missed him. I had been looking forward to those short moments in his company. He stepped out of the car and, without even coming around to my side to hug me, immediately began telling an interminable, inane joke. His wife and child were both tired from the journey and looked miserable.

I tried to convey that this was the wrong thing at the wrong time, but he persevered. The unfunny story went on. The mood was souring, and he could sense that he had blown the occasion. Eventually he shut up, and we all got to their apartment, where he resumed telling silly stories while complaining that we were all spoilsports. By this time I was furious, shouted at him, and left in a huff. Three weeks later, he was dead.

For a long time, I felt bad that we had parted this way, and I chided myself for making such a big deal of what was, after all, only facetiousness. I have changed my mind. Children and spouses store misdemeanors until they add up to felonies. My father’s obnoxious behavior that day was just the latest in a long line of similar incidents. I now have a possible explanation for his strange behavior.

My father’s superpower was a brisk, shimmering informality. Using his relaxed manner and quick intelligence, he could change color instantly, talk to anyone, charm anyone, persuade anyone. He had a brilliant career, first as a UN official, then as a university professor, and finally as one of the Deputy Secretary Generals of the United Nations. As a consultant economist, he traveled widely, advising governments. I remember him telling me in the early ‘60s that his favorite officials were those of Israel and Cuba: young and unstuffy, in shirtsleeves, in a hurry. He was made for emergencies, times when rules and rank are suspended. His diplomatic passport was covered in stamps from strange places. Impishly, he liked to wave it and say he was attending a VIP, so he could speed through airport security and greet me on the tarmac when I visited him.

(I have inherited some of his skills. Science is a profession where rules and rank should be suspended at all times. When a shy fifteen-year-old curious about research visits my lab, I channel my father and take pleasure in making them feel that an idea of theirs could, there and then, change the course of science.)

As part of his passion for informality, my father was also the least snobbish person I have ever met. When he became a professor at University College London, he got an entry in the College Yearbook. The Registrar, a shambling, lovable man named Tattersall, explained to him that he needed to have letters after his name. Everyone in the faculty had a dozen degrees and fellowships of this and that, yet he was just D.A. Turin. He explained to Tattersall that he had no degrees and did not belong to any societies, but that cut no ice. Tattersall told him to make something up. Fine, said my father: “Dipl. Arch.” because he had briefly studied architecture in Córdoba, Argentina. Tattersall pressed him for one more. My father added, “S.C.A.” I later asked him what that was. He said he had no idea.

The tragic converse of his talent for informality was the utter lack of gravitas that had made him so insufferable the last time we met. He was incapable of understanding when a situation required solemnity. I remember him introducing me, a young man of 19, to Arnaldo Momigliano. I had no idea who the man was. My father was standing next to him on the grounds of UCL as I walked past, and he beckoned me. In a rather reluctant tone, he said, “I want you to meet this character,” and indicated Momigliano with an irritated gesture, giving the impression that here was yet another boring old fart. Only later did I figure out that Momigliano was an immensely distinguished historian whom my father, in fact, revered.

There are many more such examples. On the occasion of my father’s second wedding, which doubled as a grand reunion for the family of the bride, he managed to spoil the occasion by making constant goofy faces in the group photo that his father-in-law, Cas Oorthuys, a famous photographer, was trying to take. Oorthuys nearly punched him in the face for it, and yet the best photo of the lot still shows him acting silly. He once sent me in his stead to a reception at the Cuban embassy in London, telling me it was just an informal gathering of friends who would be glad to meet me. I ended up standing at the top of some steps, announced by the emcee as “Professor Duccio Turin” while the Ambassador stared at me in disbelief.

My father was acutely aware of his strange, Pinocchio-like curse. He always hoped that age or the Blue Fairy would turn him into a real man, one of wisdom and substance. He was trapped in the young-man thing he was so good at. He revered older, important men, which helped him in his career, but whatever they had, it never rubbed off on him as he’d hoped. His immaturity cost him his first marriage. My mother used to refer to him as the Cavaliere Inesistente (The Nonexistent Knight), a figure in an Italo Calvino novel who wears full armor at all times, cuts his food but does not eat it, and turns out to be all armor and no man. My father could see with dread that even I, his son, had grown enough of a soul to detect the flaw in his.

In the last two years before his death, he had been mysteriously declining, and that may partly explain what happened at our last meeting. I am now twenty years older than he ever was, and I wonder whether he had some degenerative illness. In the event, neither decay nor wisdom reached him.