MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING

For one son, remembering his father makes things worse.

BY TED RALL | when I was a kid, I always dreaded the week before the second Sunday in June.

The Hallmark store in my local shopping center was much larger than my sterile Ohio suburb deserved, but I still could never find a Father's Day card for the guy I only saw during court-ordered visits.

Nonetheless, my mom insisted that our shattered little family attempt to retain some vestige of normality, and that meant dropping a few dollars on a card for my dad.

Money had been impossibly linked to my father since before I could remember. Mom and I didn't have any. Dad had it, but wouldn't give it up.

I was 2 when my parents split. My dad moved downtown to a high-rise apartment with abstract art on the walls and a pool on the roof. My mom got a job teaching high school French. In a ritual familiar to half of Americans under age 35, the family court ordered my mom to turn me over to my dad on alternating Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 7 p.m., plus two consecutive weeks in August. He stuck to that schedule with the pinpoint precision that he'd picked up at MIT, cutting his latest new car into my driveway without fail at the top of the hour. We'd spend the ensuing six hours at the Dayton Mall, watching action-adventure films, feeding quarters to pinball machines and shopping for his stereo equipment. He never held my hand or put his arm around my shoulder. "Don't ever wear your heart on your sleeve," he used to say.

The stuff of day-to-day parenting -- open house, recognition assemblies and Boy Scouts -- fell to my mom. She taught me how to swim, counseled me about bullies and helped me unravel the mystery of fractions. During weekdays, my dad vanished from my life. He never called. I saw little difference between my dad and James Garner in "The Rockford Files." Both came every weekend, and neither one felt very real.

My dad was working on the B-5 bomber when he left us. Only four prototypes were ever built, but it turned out to be the biggest triumph of his Air Force career. He invented the supersonic plane's movable nose, a feature later incorporated into the Concorde. He was a brilliant engineer.

I hated him a little more each alternating Saturday and Sunday as his new prosperity bought him more new furniture and art.

One morning, Dad broke the routine. He appeared with the principal at the door of my elementary school classroom. "You're going with your dad," the principal said, intimating some terrible family emergency. As we left, Dad broke into a rare grin. "How about box seats to the World Series?" he said, waving two tickets. It was a magical day. The Reds beat the Boston Red Sox. Dave Concepcion signed my ball. I forgot for a day that Dad was always late with the child support ("Thank God it's so tiny that it doesn't matter," my mom liked to joke.) Afterwards, I almost felt something resembling love for him.

A few months later, Dad remarried.

He bought a sprawling new split-level to house the five stepkids he'd acquired through Mrs. Rall II. My dad exposed me every alternating Saturday and Sunday to the lavish upper-middle class lifestyle to which I might have belonged if not for my parents' divorce. He and his new wife tried to keep up appearances by merging her children's photos with mine on the wall of the new house's family room, but the gesture was telling: My picture was on the bottom right-hand corner of the arrangement.

After the remarriage my mom and I spent our weekdays in court, trying to force dad to honor the divorce decree he'd signed in 1968. First he refused to pay for my braces. He knew he couldn't win in court, so he showed up at the orthodontist's office the day before the hearing, slammed fifteen $100 bills on the receptionist's desk and stormed out.

Although we never discussed money during visitations, I couldn't forget his latest rancid court maneuvers. I'd come home incensed at nothing in particular, unable to articulate my rage, my head throbbing for hours.

After I got my first job, I asked my boss to schedule me for work on weekend afternoons. I saw my father less and less, and felt guilty about not missing him. My mom and I fought the battles of my teen years, with others and against each other. But she was always there for me, providing the moral center that my father lacked.

Dad had promised to pay my tuition at the college of my choice. But as I was packing to leave for Columbia, he called my mom's lawyer to say he would only pay for state-school tuition. Four years later, I was repaying $850 a month in student loans.

I was still seething a decade later, when I fired off a nine-page hate letter to my now-retired dad. At his suggestion we met for a weekend summit at an Embassy Suites on the I-270 loop outside Columbus, Ohio. During the course of two day-long sessions, he admitted that he had never felt any parental emotional responses, ever -- a fact for which he blamed his own distant, Methodist parents. This explained part of my personality: Mostly I'm like my very emotional, very French mom, but like Spock in "Star Trek," I can turn off my feelings whenever I need to.

His take on his cheapness was: "I can't do anything about it. That's all in the past now."

"You could pay off my student loans," I replied, knowing that he would never attempt to make good on his previous neglect. I returned to New York to find a newsy letter from Dad in the letter box. He seriously believed that I had understood him, that we could begin a light-hearted father-son relationship without revisiting the past. I haven't spoken to him, nor have I thought about sending him a Father's Day card since.

I've reconsidered the holiday lately. Just because my dad wasn't a father doesn't mean I didn't have a father. This year, I'm calling my real dad on Father's Day. I'm calling my mom.
June 13, 1997

Ted Rall, a syndicated editorial cartoonist and writer who lives in New York, is writing a book about generational issues for Workman Publishing.