Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

The last chapter insinuated that though the father-and-son pair might not be open and emotional with each other, they certainly spent regular time together and shared family rituals centered on outings and activities. The author opens the second chapter in this section by announcing that in seventh grade, the two began their “era of strained relations” (78). The author wants to call the various objects of his young adolescent affection to flirt and chat. His father wants an open line so patients can reach him if they need his attention. The battle for phone time grows into a wedge that reveals competing generational ideas about parental authority and blooming sexuality.

The author also admits, “The more aloof, distant, and disapproving my father became, the more I thought of him as Armenian” (79). Though his father speaks perfect English, identifies closely with New York City, and exacts the image of a wealthy American suburban doctor, he was born in Constantinople and immigrated to the United States after stays in several European countries. The rest of the chapter ruminates on that initial place, so important to world and Armenian history: Constantinople, the coveted city and trading center of the ancient and early modern world, a fun word to put in a popular song, a place that no longer exists on the map because the new Republic of Turkey claimed that territory and renamed it.

Gerard left the city with his family as a young boy, before he could have comprehended the politics and society around him. The author says that on the eve of his father’s death, he dreamed about leaving Constantinople on a dark train, a metaphor the author understood to mean death. Something about the trauma of leaving his hometown apparently never fully left his father.

Crowded extended family gatherings in Manhattan’s Upper West Side brought the Aroosians and the Balakians together for large buffet dinners. Peter explains these branches of the family as the “two sides of the George Washington Bridge” (88), which connects Manhattan to Bergen County, New Jersey. Women continue to bicker about the virtues of the high culture in the city versus life in the suburbs. The author also describes the confrontation as “Literary Romanticism versus middle-class Protestantism” (90), for the suburban wing of the family stresses Christian piety over the institutional intellectualism of the urban Balakians.

Gerard, being a man of the suburbs but a product of his own family, occupies an uncomfortable middle ground in these arguments. He has advanced degrees and a formal “Edwardian” demeanor at home, but he values the community and “human tone” of the suburbs and his patients think him kind and interesting (92). Gerard is, like Arax and Nafina, both Armenian and American in distinct and intersecting ways. He is also European, “the youngest of a family that fled to Europe in 1922 as refugees of the Armenian genocide” (92).

The author feels entirely disconnected from both wings of the family when they gather and debate the virtues of the New York metropolitan area, wanting to retreat and hang out with a girlfriend on the beach (91), but he does take note of and reflect on Gerard’s personality and habits. The father-son pair become estranged under the same roof. Peter wants to connect with his father through personal stories of his gory life as a physician, but his father keeps his work all but secret and his personality largely to himself; The author, so heavily outnumbered by women in the two large families, feels his father’s “remoteness” acutely (95). 

Gerard laments the public-school teenage culture that Peter embraces in his adolescence. Particularly worrisome is Peter’s friendship with Frank Haskell, a rich child of a single father who has a big and empty house perfect for teenage canoodling and underage drinking.

Gerard grows obsessed with the desire to send Peter to private school and interrogates him nightly about his studies. Prompted by his father’s emphasis on an opportunity to learn about Armenia, Peter undertakes a particular research project about the Near East, but finds that among stacks of books on Turkey and Ottoman history, volumes scarcely mention Armenia. He writes about Turkey (and gets an A), but this infuriates his father, who explodes at the dinner table asking, “Don’t you know what the Turks did to us?” (100). The author lies and says yes, but notes that he has never learned about Armenia’s hidden history and feels resentment towards his father’s reaction precisely because he helped keep this history secret.

The father-son relationship takes its biggest hit when Gerard announces that he’s sending Peter to the private Englewood School for Boys for high school. To the author, this is “a humiliation, and worse than that, an emasculation” (103), for the boys of Tenafly High School wear Varsity jackets, play sports, and have girlfriends; They don’t “wear blue blazers with insignia on the breast pocket” and “[walk] to chapel with thin-lipped teachers still smelling of last night’s sherry” (102), the markings of a snobby, humorless, and altogether uncool wealthy intelligentsia. Peter’s discontent and fear of losing his social world descends into both violent physical confrontation and silent hatred towards his father, so pronounced that Arax intervenes and pleads with her husband to let him stay in public school, but his father “wouldn’t be dissuaded by [Arax’s] sentimentality or by [Peter’s] adolescent will” (105).

Peter concedes when he asks his father for a physical so he can at least play football at the school. He tries to appeal to the headmaster of the Boys School to send him away, but to no avail. The author admits that ultimately, “[his] father was right,” but it would be a long time before he came to appreciate this mandate (105). 

The chapter opens with an attempt at teenage fun gone wrong. At 15 years old, still in cahoots with his Tenafly friends, Peter gets into a car crash while driving to a midnight pool party with some friends. The crash breaks several bones in his face. It also forges a new wedge between him and his father, one that had started to erode over the course of Peter’s first year of high school. The crash means another summer of silence between father and son, which Peter describes as a product of his own shame and Gerard’s “Old World disgust for the eldest son who had disgraced himself” (109). The crash also represents the continual moral corruption assaulting suburban sons in wealthy suburbs.

Football is what ultimately mends their relationship. Gerard is always at the games, both as team physician and as a quiet but proud parent who is merely “happy for the occasion, for the game, for the effort, and happy to have been there” (112). He also invents the famous Sportade electrolyte drink in his kitchen to aid Peter’s training, and then sells it to professional and college teams. The pair discuss Peter’s Varsity games in detail and it is through that language of “particular plays […] the opposing team […] game strategy” that the two “expressed [their] love for each other” (112). More overt and outward affection, we learn, never becomes part of their relationship, but the author ends the section about his father with a tone of appreciation and respect despite their emotional distance.