There are more than 1.5 million men incarcerated in the United States today. The majority of them are fathers. It’s a role that may not have been central to their lives before they were arrested — most did not live with their children, nor with the mothers of those children. Certainly their status as fathers is barely recognized by prison administrators or advocacy groups. Of the limited number of programs that aim to sustain family bonds during incarceration, the great majority are aimed at female prisoners.

On one level, it’s a bias that makes sense. When children lose a mother to jail or prison, they often lose a caretaker and provider; when they lose a father, they are more likely to lose a visitor. But of the 10 million children whose lives have been touched by parental incarceration, the vast majority has experienced the loss of a father. In sheer numbers, these missing fathers represent an absence to be reckoned with. And as Susana’s experience indicates, just because your dad didn’t live with you before he was arrested doesn’t mean you don’t miss him or need him once he is gone.

Susana is locked up in a juvenile hall right next door to the county jail where she came to know her father during sporadic visits over the course of nearly a decade. She’s a pretty, broad-faced girl with wide-set brown eyes, a chipped front tooth and long reddish-brown hair that drapes over her county-issue sweatshirt. In a glassed-in interview room with white cinder block walls and a concrete floor, Susana talks at length about the dad who spent most of her childhood in the place she refers to as “next door.”

“My dad’s handsome,” she says with a rare smile. “I wish I had pictures of him. He’s tall, he’s muscular. He has my face, with a mustache and thicker eyebrows, and then his hair is shaved in the back, shaved on the sides, and he slicks it back with gel.”

Her father has told her stories, Susana says, about their early days together, when he was free and she was small and he would pick her up and take her places, carry her in his arms. Susana can’t recall a single image from that time. Her memories of him start when she was 5 or 6 years old, when her grandmother would come get her at the foster home where she spent most of her early years and take her downtown to see her dad.

“We had to wait in a waiting room for a really long time,” Susana remembers, “and when we finally got in he was behind glass and you had to talk on a phone.” Susana’s foster mother had discouraged her from talking about or seeing her parents, and so, with the narcissism of a small child, she assumed the conventions of the visiting room existed to obstruct her in particular: “I figured they were trying to keep us apart, and that’s why there was glass and a telephone, and we couldn’t touch each other.”

Within a few years, Susana figured out where her father was, and why he was there. He, like her mother, was addicted to drugs — cocaine and later heroin — and stole in order to sustain his habit. As a result, he spent most of Susana’s life in and out of the county jail (“mostly in”).

Susana isn’t sure whether her father ever got any treatment for his addiction, but she knows she never saw him in a rehab program — only jail. She sometimes thinks about what her life might have been like had he been able to conquer that addiction: She might not have grown up in an abusive foster home where she was “treated like a slave,” she says, or wound up behind bars herself. But she doesn’t spend too much time on could-have-beens.

“Drugs control you,” she explains, though she has no personal experience of addiction. “And that’s why I think they practically controlled his life. They practically told him what to do. ‘Cause when you’re on drugs you’re always thinking, ‘I need more. How am I gonna get it? How am I gonna get the money?’ That’s all you’re thinking about when you’re on drugs.”

But because Susana has only ever seen her father during his stints behind bars, the desperate addict is not the man she got to know. The man she describes is an affectionate, clownish dad, one who revels in teasing — and being teased by — his mischievous daughter. He is a dad who expresses his love for her openly and likes to offer stern advice that Susana values, but also mockingly dismisses.

“As the years went on, our relationship got closer and closer. He’d be trying to tell me what to do, and I’d say, ‘OK, Dad, I’ll do it,’ but I’d be thinking to myself, ‘What can you do about it?’”

When Susana was 13, her foster mother threw her out and she went to live with her grandmother, and later with an aunt. That was the year she saw her father for the only time without a wall of glass between them. His brother had died of cirrhosis of the liver, and Susana’s dad was permitted to attend the funeral. Susana and her boyfriend went out and bought him a suit for the funeral, new shoes and a shaving kit. But he arrived at the funeral home shackled at the hands, feet and waist, accompanied by guards and police. The gifts Susana had bought stayed in the bag, and her father stayed in his prison jumpsuit.

“When he came in the room, he didn’t look at any of us,” Susana remembers. “He just went straight to the coffin and he was praying there. He stood there for a while talking to his brother. Finally he looked at us, but he wouldn’t look us in the eyes. One of my aunts asked, ‘Can we hug him?’ The police officer said, ‘You know that’s against procedure, but go ahead.’

“I got to hug him first, and I was hugging him for a while, and then he went on and hugged everyone else. Then he came to me and hugged me again, and that time I didn’t want to let go. A police officer literally had to pull me off him and he actually restrained me, put my hands behind my back. Then they took him. After they took my dad, the police officer finally let go of me.

“I knew it was procedure and I should have gotten off of him when they told me to. But I just wanted to hold him because I knew that would probably be the last time I’d ever hug him, kiss him, anything.”

Susana’s understanding of addiction is remarkably empathetic for a 15-year-old who has grown up in an era of scare campaigns and simplistic answers. She understands that drugs have “controlled” her father and that his addiction has driven his criminality. At the same time, she believes her father “had chances to do shit with his life but he just never took them … That’s why I’m trying to take advantage of life, be a teenager, not just be in and out of Juvenile Hall, not being able to enjoy my time out there.”

This is Susana’s second trip to Juvenile Hall. The first time, just a few months ago, she was charged with auto theft and evading police after she borrowed a friend’s car without permission, then crashed it into a pole trying to avoid being pulled over. She was released to her aunt under house arrest, with an electronic monitoring bracelet around her ankle. Not long after, she and her aunt got into an argument and her aunt locked her out of the house, causing her to violate her house arrest.

Susana is in Juvenile Hall now because there is nowhere else for her to go until her probation officer finds a group home that will take her. She’s an athletic girl — loves swimming, boxing, lifting weights — with big plans to finish high school, join the Navy, go to college and become a professional bodybuilder. Her confinement is making her crazy with impatience and worry. She hates the idea of her father finding out where she is, but hates even more that she has no way of keeping in touch with him — incarcerated minors are not allowed to write to, or receive letters from, adult prisoners, even if those prisoners are their parents.

That Father’s Day is around the corner only makes it worse: Susana usually sends her father $120 (the jail takes $20 from each money order and she likes him to have an even $100), a card and handwritten verses from the Bible; he writes her back with his interpretation of the scriptures she’s chosen.

The last time Susana saw her father was the day after he was sentenced for his third strike. Susana was there for the sentencing, but ran sobbing from the courtroom when she heard the sentence read. The next day, she went to see him in the county jail. “Mija,” he told her, “this might be the last time I’ll see you in a while, but keep strong and don’t let nothing get to you. Don’t let this get to you either.”

Susana left the visiting room in tears, and entered a hallway flanked by blocks of cells. Often, when she would visit her father, other prisoners would whistle at her as she passed through the corridor. This time she heard someone counting quietly: “One, two, three …” Then a chorus of male voices: “Don’t cry, Mija. We’ll take care of your papm for you.”

Susana knew right away her crazy father had somehow orchestrated the performance. She laughed so hard she found she was no longer crying. “I was like, oh my God, my dad is too much.” She tells the story with a visible blush of pleasure at the quintessential adolescent experience of being embarrassed by her dad.

Susana has counted the years that her father is likely to serve — 18 at a minimum — over and over in her head and can tell you without hesitation how old they will both be when he gets out (33 and 62); but she is a little unclear on what the span of years will actually entail.

“I’ll still be college when he gets out, I think … ” she speculates vaguely, counting out loud the years she’ll spend in the Navy, the years in school. She has agreed to wait until his release to get married so he can be there to give her away. “He wants to be that person, you know? So I promised him.”

Susana doesn’t have too many other adults who want to “be that person” in her life. Her aunt and her grandmother won’t take her calls now that she is locked up; she has no interest in maintaining a relationship with her former foster parents, and no idea where her mother is.

The last time Susana saw her mother was a couple of years ago, when she ran into her on the bus. Her mother didn’t recognize her. “I’m your daughter,” Susana called out. “Which one?” her mother asked. For now, the man she can’t write to and doesn’t know when she’ll see again, the man who will be behind bars until she is in her mid-30s, is the sustaining figure in Susana’s life.

What would it take to restore Susana’s father to her, in body as well as in spirit? Universally accessible drug treatment in and out of jails and prisons? Not just second chances, but third, fourth and fifth chances for drug offenders who can’t kick their habits on the first or second try? Support for the children of offenders, who are disproportionately likely to become the next generation of prisoners? They are questions we barely consider in shaping drug policy and sentencing laws, but ones that children like Susana can’t afford to ignore.

“His love for me helps me,” Susana says, “and his support, the way he tells me, ‘Don’t end up like this, you shouldn’t be in gangs, you should be going to school and getting an education.’ That helps me in a lot of ways, but I ask myself sometimes, ‘Why couldn’t he do it for him?’”

My father was still behind the wheel in his white lab coat when I presented him with the smashed mouse in cupped hands and calmly, under the circumstances, asked him to fix her. Knowing that our (first) honeymoon was over, my father postponed the trauma by taking the mouse into the house and holding it under running water while he figured out how to tell me that he wasn’t who I thought he was. (I figured it out for myself when I saw Linda’s small intestine swirl down the drain.)

A classic of the genre, this anecdote — at least for my generation: the dad moment where unrealistic expectations and abiding fondness, often created or exacerbated by absence, are squished, sometimes never to be reanimated. It happens once, it happens a thousand times.

We could banish these thoughts as Father’s Day nears, but that is when they consume us, along with weirdo dad, brilliant dad, cruel dad, disappearing dad and groovy dad stories. This is the best time, too, to stalk and scrutinize the New Dad, a guy who is struggling with high expectations and few role models to be a different dad than his dad.

So we begin our Father’s Day theme week with a look at the peculiar and infuriating practice of “maternal gatekeeping,” a serious obstacle to New Dads everywhere, not to mention women who seek equality away from home. From there, we pursue all angles of fatherhood with words, and add, each day, a graphic feature by artists including Craig Thompson, Renee French and Brian Biggs. On Friday, we combine the best of both — words and images — in an illustrated feature by Lynda Barry.

Read them, collect them, wrap them in the funnies — they’ll make a great gift.

No matter how the remake of “The Dinner Game” turns out (Dreamworks has it in development, and Veber may direct), the original, now in theaters, should win back the goodwill of comedy-watchers everywhere. It’s a sour, sweet, then sour again spree. The two leads are a smug, good-looking publisher and an accountant as squat and badly-used as a neighborhood dog’s favorite hydrant.

The publisher invites the accountant to a group dinner that’s actually a game — the fellow who brings the sorriest bore wins. The accountant qualifies because he’s obsessed with making matchstick recreations of engineering feats like the Eiffel Tower or the Concorde. But the pair never get to the dinner game. And in a satisfying case of existential turnaround, the accountant — with the best intentions, and without leaving the publisher’s home — ruins his host’s life.

At the end of a publicity jaunt from Los Angeles to San Francisco (he has homes in West Hollywood and Paris), Veber couldn’t have been more gracious. Making sure that I had not just a Perrier from his hotel room mini-bar but also a proper water glass, he confessed that he identified with both of his characters — well, maybe a little more with the accountant.

Does doing one of these tours make you feel the host or the idiot?

I feel like the two of them all the time.

So you sometimes think that the press is setting you up to be a jerk?

There is this question that keeps coming back, all the time, about Jerry Lewis. It’s like a guilt that we French are supposed to have forever. I mean, Jerry Lewis hasn’t been part of our landscape for 20 years. But that question keeps coming: “Do you like Jerry Lewis?”

I only went to Cannes once, 14 years ago, and at an official dinner I was seated next to the wife of a French publisher. I asked her if she liked Jerry Lewis. And she answered, “You know, the first time I see his movies, I don’t think they’re very funny. But the second time I see his movies, I laugh and laugh!”

That’s like the guy who goes to get a tattoo. The first time you think he’s an idiot, the second time you think he’s a very suspicious character.

So now I have to ask you: Do you like Jerry Lewis?

Actually, he’s done some good material. The films he did with Frank Tashlin, or the one they remade — I don’t know how they say it in English, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing, “The Magic Professor?”

“The Nutty Professor.” And “The Ladies’ Man” is not bad either. But tell me — I’m a bit like the medical man in “The Dinner Game.” I’ve heard about fraternity boys competing to bring the ugliest girl to a party, but I’ve never heard of grown-ups competing to bring the stupidest man. Is that your invention?

No, it’s a real game. They still play it in Paris. A mean, a cruel game, and I didn’t like it. So I decided to punish one of the guys who did. There’s an exclusive, private club in Paris — the members are people from advertising or the record business, the “media” — and those guys were playing this game, bringing the biggest jerk they could find. I heard stories about it. I had friends who say they participated — for example, an anchorman in Paris. He had to bring a jerk to one of these dinners, and his jerk was supposed to be a world-class one — and was sick the day of the dinner. Now my friend needed a new jerk. So he called this TV director who was supposed to be amazingly stupid. But this TV director had already been invited! My friend was the second guy calling him! So you see, this is a real game. And a mean game.

Have you ever been invited?

Maybe I have been! Because you know, when I start to talk about screenwriting, I can be as obnoxious as the guy [in "The Dinner Game"] talking about his matchstick things. They punish you for being passionate about something.

I meant, were you invited to be a “host!” Are you saying you based the lead character on someone you know?

A lot of guys I know, guys who had everything when they were born. Handsome, tall, blond, blue-eyed, from rich families. The other guy looks like E.T. or the Hunchback of Paris next to these beautiful people. Two extremes facing each other — I like the chemistry of that.

We never feel too sorry for “the idiot” because in his own world he’s just as snobbish — he mocks Belgians, for example. And he works for the Financial Ministry and brings a killer tax collector into the other man’s house.

You are perfectly right. It’s the ambiguity of the character, because he’s not exactly an idiot. He’s more dangerous than an idiot — dangerous on two levels, because when a jerk wants to help, he’s the most dangerous man in the world. And he’s dangerous as a deus ex machina — he knows when a guy can be audited. You see on his face, at one moment in the film, “I am holding you by the balls now.” So he’s more dangerous than he seems to be. Tax people are not the most popular people here in the U.S., but in France, they are hated.

You made a movie called “The Dinner Game.” But you never really show us the dinner game.

If you try to show a real jerk talking, it’s dangerous — there’s a potential that the audience can feel what he’s saying is true. So I just had a few seconds of a guy at the dinner saying how he’d kill a wallaby or an ostrich with his boomerang. That was enough.

When I was at school, we were taught Henri Bergson’s theory of comedy — that it derives from disrupted habits, patterns that are broken.

I didn’t think of Bergson when I made this movie, but I love his theory. I still remember a story told in his book about a preacher in church, giving his sermon. He’s so touching, and so emotional, that everyone is crying except one guy. And a man turns to him and says, “You’re not touched by what this priest is saying?” And the guy says, “I don’t belong to this church.”

Does a comedy such as this one, that plays on social stereotypes — like, say, the beautiful person with the charmed life and the haute bourgeois background — play more naturally in France?

It does play more naturally in France. But there is a kind of contempt for poor people in Los Angeles, and it’s almost the same thing as the class difference in France. I have a house in the hills in West Hollywood — very quiet, I can take my bike and ride in the hills, then go back and write. What I’ve found is that for a lot of people here, a man who is richer is more intelligent than a man who is less rich. Which is very stupid, because you can be very rich and very stupid. But Rupert Murdoch is supposed to be more intelligent than one of his lieutenants — because he’s richer. So this is a clichi, too, and it exists in America.

I’ve seen the film at festivals here, with crowds made up of almost all Americans, and they were laughing as much as the audience in France. Maybe they understand this kind of humor, even if it’s not about the same social structure you have here. Maybe here class has been replaced by wealth.

Why has it been harder for you to have success with the remakes of your movies in America?

Let’s say I’m a producer, and I have my writer, and we buy a film to remake it. And we watch this film 10 times, 15 times. And the jokes start to fade, they are less fresh. And my new writer comes up with a new joke and I say, Oh, good, this one is fun. He’s bringing his world into the world of the original writer and sometimes it doesn’t fit. So you have something that is supposed to be richer than the original — but it’s like putting Chantilly crhme on goose liver. It’s rich but bad.

I met an intelligent writer called Elaine May in New York; she and Mike Nichols remade “La Cage aux Folles” as “The Birdcage.” And she told me that she tried to stay as close as possible to the French movie so two worlds were not fighting.

I didn’t think anything in “The Birdcage” was up to Michel Serrault’s performance in “La Cage aux Folles,” but at least the filmmakers didn’t fool with the structure. And the structure was so strong it clicked for the audience.

“La Cage aux Folles” was one of the best concepts I ever worked on because those people trying to be straight for one evening are just nice, their act comes from the heart. They want to help their son. That’s the reason these two poor clowns are so touching.

In general, these days, the American versions of European comedies are much, much broader.

But you have some wonderful comedies here. I saw recently “Analyze This,” with De Niro and Billy Crystal, and I would have liked to have this premise, I liked it very much, this psychiatrist and this mobster.

The problem often in America is that the producer or the director or the writer underestimate the audience. They think things have to be broad, have to be hammered, have to be heavy — and the audience is far faster than they think.

The problem here, too, is the credits, because the studios change teams of writers like Kleenex — pick two writers, then pick two others, then two others. Because all those writers fight to be the ones who have the credits, you are almost always at the point of the first draft, even at the end.

And there are characters that the executives at the studios won’t let you do here. Like the one the executives call a wimp. When a guy is a weak guy, an anti-hero, if he cries, like a Mastroianni type — “He’s a wimp.” If he doesn’t have an arc that makes him become Rambo, they don’t want to touch this guy. I love a man who is courageous enough to say he’s weak, but they say “Oh, my God.”

“The Dinner Game” is 80 minutes long. I love that.

I didn’t want to make the movie longer. You know I could have put in a subplot. It’s easy to imagine: We follow the wife as she drives through Paris, and it opens up the movie. And I say, no! I want to focus on the two guys. And I say to myself, what is the American movie I prefer for the last two or three years? And it was “Men in Black.” It’s one hour and 23 minutes long. Those guys in “Men in Black,” when they go in the special service, they have no past and no future anymore. So you avoid those horrible scenes where the guy goes back home and the wife asks him, “Why are you doing this dangerous job?” and the kids are crying. You avoid all that trash, and you get this film that goes whooof! So I didn’t put subplots in “The Dinner Game.” Eighty minutes is enough.

Even when the wife and another driver collide, you don’t make too big a deal of it.

After I showed the movie in Washington, a man raised his hand, and said, “I liked your movie very much, but I have a question for you: What happened to the other driver?” I thought he was kidding, so I said, “The other driver’s wife and seven children had to go on welfare because he died in the crash.”

Then he said, “No, no, I’m serious, what happened to the other driver?”

And I asked, “What are you doing for dinner tonight, sir?”

On a Tuesday in early February, I received a fax from my half-brother Jan asking me to deal with my father, his stepfather. Ralph survived his fifth heart attack last month, but had to move into a nursing home. Jan wrote that Ralph’s health is deteriorating quickly and that he’s easily confused, extremely restless and deeply paranoid. The Robison Jewish Health Center is one of Portland’s finest and most expensive facilities; he is there because an on-the-ball hospital social worker discerned he was a Jew in trouble, living in a transient hotel and squandering his social security checks on Night Train and library fines. She managed to fast-track free admission and ongoing care for him at Robison. Jan thought it urgent that I visit because he was refusing to sign over power of attorney and if someone didn’t assume legal guardianship soon, we’d have to go to court to have him declared incompetent. The doctors at the center said they would have no difficulty testifying that he is no longer capable of taking care of himself. I took the first flight out on Thursday.

The last communication I’d received from my father was a letter eight months ago that ended, “Don’t complain. Don’t explain.” It’s a motto he’s lived by his entire life, rarely revealing personal feelings about anything other than art, botany, small children, poetry and animals. His body has been falling apart since I was born 33 years ago, so in a sense I’ve been bracing for his death as long as I can remember. The summons to Portland was not a surprise, but that didn’t make it any easier.

It’s not that Daddy and I argue or that we’re estranged, as is the case with his other children. His eldest son, Nick, hasn’t spoken to him since before I came into the picture, and younger son Charles moved without telling anyone where he was going nearly a decade ago. His stepson Kris doesn’t have anything to do with him and, until recently, Jan didn’t either. Alternately charming and vicious, brilliant and about as stupid as you can get, my father is not an easy person to be around. He doesn’t particularly believe in conversation. He lectures and expects people to hang on his every word and then clap. If my mother or brothers dared voice opinions counter to his, they received his full vodka-fueled wrath. Being the youngest, the only girl and his favorite, I was usually spared his anger. I clapped. And daddy told me I was smart.

By all accounts, during my first few years of life he was an engaged and loving parent, which is probably why I’m not as screwed up and bitter as I could have been. After my parents’ divorce in 1975, we spent only short bursts of time together. He regularly wrote letters to me about synesthesia, cats and synchronicity, and he would phone occasionally, each call ending, “We’ll see each other soon, baby,” which we both knew wasn’t true. On the plane to see him, I calculated that since I was 9, we’ve been together at most 10 weeks total.

There’s a lot I will never know about my father. What I do know is that he once saw Marilyn Monroe cross Washington Square in Greenwich Village and he thought she was even more luminous in person than on the screen. His parents were immigrant tailors from England. First-generation American, he grew up in Washington Heights playing stickball in the street and cutting class to go to the Museum of Natural History. He ran with the abstract expressionist crowd, for whom drinking and creativity were inextricably and romantically bound. He had a brother named Leonard, long estranged. He didn’t earn a college degree, but spent years auditing Meyer Shapiro’s art history classes at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. His proudest achievement was that Meyer once said he was his favorite person to go to museums with. He worked as a chemist at a toothpaste factory and as a fine arts book rep for Abrams. He taught art to children, prisoners and mental patients. He nearly drowned practicing headstands in the shower. He thought of himself as a smooth salesman and a good dancer. He never saved or invested and he didn’t pay child support. When it came time to retire, he was adrift in Ohio and asked a gas station attendant where he would go if he could go anywhere and the guy said Portland, Ore., so that’s where he went.

When Jan picked me up at the airport, he warned me that seeing the nursing home would be a shock and that seeing my father frail with oxygen tubes up his nose would be disturbing. I silently thought: I can cope. I’ve hung out in AIDS wards. I know what sick people look like. Don’t pity me. But he was right. When we walked into the lobby, past a row of mumbling, quivering inmates in wheelchairs, I felt as if I’d been punched in the solar plexus. It suddenly hit me that my father was in this place and that this was likely the last time I’d ever see him. The social worker sprinted off to get a box of Kleenex for our briefing. He told us that after Ralph’s last heart attack, his lungs had filled, and though he wasn’t in immediate danger of dying, his medical condition was known as “failure to thrive.” The doctors thought his paranoia and restlessness had to do with alcohol withdrawal and oxygen deprivation. We didn’t bother explaining that Ralph has always been paranoid and restless.

I approached his room with dread. He was strapped into a wheelchair, emaciated with painfully swollen feet and gout-ravaged hands, but actually he looked better than I’d imagined. His green eyes were clear and alert, and his newly white hair rather dashing. Too weak to hold court, he was simply happy to see me. Next to his bed were books from the library: a collection of essays by Meyer and a biography of Harry Houdini. He asked about my daughter, Annalena, and husband, Dave, and wanted me to know that his not writing this year hadn’t been out of indifference. He wondered several times what day it was. He said he didn’t like being there — that the people in charge were suspicious of him because they thought he was in cahoots with a competing old folk’s home, one that had invented a special bionic cream. Then he asked where he was. He said he didn’t know what these people were pushing, poetry or food. And had I noticed that when you look at the black lines of a woodcut, after a while they disappear? I told him the staff had given me some forms and that I’d read them very closely to make sure there was no monkey business before he signed them. He didn’t acknowledge hearing me. I returned to Jan’s house and slept for 13 hours.

When I returned the following afternoon, a vivacious young orderly was telling Ralph he reminded her of someone and she’d just figured it out: Burt Lancaster. This pleased him and he launched into the (probably basically true) story of being a runner-up Marlboro Man. Everyone at the ad agency had adored him except the boss, who decided the Marlboro Man couldn’t have a cowlick. When she left the room, I asked if he wanted to go someplace and he said yes, he wanted to leave because these people don’t let him go to the bathroom. I said we couldn’t leave the building, but maybe he’d like to go to the sun room. When I brought up the forms, he replied that millions of people have died without signing these things and he didn’t want to talk about it. He asked a nurse to please bring us chocolate ice cream and peanut butter cookies.

After the sweets, I screwed up my courage to broach the subject again. “Daddy, if you don’t sign this medical power of attorney, they won’t call me if you have another heart attack. This thing says you give them permission to call me. You have to sign it or they won’t call me.” I was welling with tears. He said OK. I raced to the front desk to get the notary. The receptionist said the notary wasn’t at her desk. Fearing he’d change his mind, I glared at her and hissed, “Find the notary and get her to the sun room immediately, damn it.” I told him the notary was on her way and stalled, “Isn’t it curious how in Portland all the stores — shoe stores, record stores, book stores, stationery stores, hardware stores, backpacking supply stores — carry aromatherapy candles?”

Finally the notary showed. Deep breath. “Daddy, I have to ask you some tough questions. Do you know what life support is?” He looked far into the distance and shook his head yes. “Do you want it?” He shook his head no. “Do you want tube feeding?” Another shake no. I was worried he’d panic at the financial power-of-attorney form, even though he hardly has any money. “This other form just says Jan or I can pay your storage unit rent if you can’t.” He initialed and signed; the notary stamped and left. We didn’t say anything for a few moments, then suddenly he was animated, he wanted a heart monitor, he liked heart monitors, “The doctors shouldn’t get confused — just because they have to hook up a heart monitor doesn’t mean you’re ready to die.”

Jan and I have never been close. Thirteen years between us, we careened out of the nest with seemingly little in common, and as adults have had as little to do with each other as possible. This crisis changed that. Jan’s choosing to offer Ralph compassion in these final days when, given their mutually contemptuous history, no one would have blamed him for deciding otherwise, has settled him in some way, made him stronger and more at peace with the world. He and his girlfriend, Nancy, took thoughtful care of me. They let me be sad and accommodated my base survival instincts to power shop, eat and drink too much and limply vegetate in front of “Melrose Place.”

I went back to the Robison a third time. Daddy asked again where he was. He said, “This place is a memory parlor. Only everybody’s trying to memorize themselves.” I wept when it was time to go. He asked why I was upset. I told him because this was probably the last time we’d see each other. He pointed to his semicomatose roommate, “Oh I don’t know, baby, I think Gus over there is 89.”

One story did come to occupy center stage: the victims’ wrenching testimony and calls for retribution. In the New Yorker and on ABC, former prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin extolled the role of victims’ rights advocates in the case; in the New York Times, Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School attacked Judge Matsch for suggesting that some of the emotion might be “inflammatory.” “Closure” for Oklahoma City’s victims became the watchword of television news anchors.

Amid this wave of victim-consciousness, few seemed to notice that the whole process now playing out discriminated against survivors and relatives who might not favor the ultimate punishment for McVeigh. To put it more bluntly, any victim or relative who wanted to play a part in the sentencing phase of the trial first had to pass a death-penalty loyalty test.

Consider Bud Welch, whose daughter Jennifer died in the Alfred P. Murrah building while he stood across the street. “God only knows there’s been enough bloodshed … we don’t need any more death,” he told ABC News. Surely Welch, and other Oklahoma City victims who are opposed to execution, deserved the opportunity to seek “closure” by bearing witness in the legal record. But the jury never heard from Welch, because in Denver, as elsewhere in the federal court system, “victim impact” testimony belongs solely to the prosecution. And in Denver, the prosecution wanted an execution. They didn’t want Welch’s qualms. Since he didn’t want to participate in the prosecution’s execution plan, there was no place else in the legal process for Welch to be heard.

The McVeigh case is one of the first major sounding boards for surviving next-of-kin since 1991, when the Supreme Court allowed victim-impact testimony as a factor in sentencing. But you wouldn’t know from the news reports and analyses that such testimony remains a deeply controversial proposition in legal circles. In a recent University of Chicago Law Review article, DePaul University law professor Susan Bandes, echoing numerous scholars, defense lawyers and civil libertarians, criticized victim-impact testimony for evoking “emotions inappropriate in the context of criminal sentencing.” Judge Matsch himself had that concern when he rejected testimony from an 11-year-old boy whose mother was killed and declared he wanted no part of a victim-impact “lynching.”

That surviving next-of-kin, especially in heinous cases like the Oklahoma City bombing, should have the right to address the jury may seem obvious. Yet it’s a considerable departure for American criminal law, which has historically treated victims as little more than convenient sources of evidence. It was feminists who first challenged this notion in the 1970s, with their campaign to humanize female sexual-assault victims. In the 1980s, a broader range of victim-rights groups sought ways for “consumers” of the criminal justice system to participate more actively in the process. But it was only in 1991 that the Supreme Court permitted juries to consider such testimony when deciding murder sentences. More recently, Congress, under intense political pressure, wrote that right into federal law.

As the McVeigh trial demonstrates, not all victims are treated equally — — as SuZann Osler of Hallandale, Florida found out a few years ago. In 1986 her father was murdered by a young man named James Campbell, who also stabbed SuZann in the head and left her for dead. SuZann, who opposes capital punishment, wants her father’s killer jailed for life. Yet although she has testified as a witness through two re-trials, Campbell is on death row and has never been permitted to ask a sentencing jury to spare his life.

If “closure” was really the issue, there are other, fairer ways to achieve it. In the 1995 trial of Long Island Railroad gunman Colin Ferguson, victims and next-of-kin spoke eloquently — after Ferguson was sentenced, not before. Those who wanted Ferguson dead and those who did not, shared the same opportunity to look the killer in the eye, to bear witness to the cost of his violence. Some have argued that victims should be represented by their own lawyers during trials, since the interest of a victim and the interests of the state are not necessarily the same.

The harrowing stories of Oklahoma City’s survivors demanded to be heard, whatever their views on Timothy McVeigh’s fate. But what was on display in Denver was vengeance rights, not victim rights. It was unfair to the victims to box them into a narrow role as prosecutors’ aides — as unfair as it once was to ignore them completely.

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.