In My Father's Shadow by Chris Welles Feder

marriage, which Orson never forgave him for.”
    I had learned from Ada that my father was four years old when his parents separated. He and his mother moved to Chicago, where they were quickly followed by Maurice Bernstein. Dick Welles, who stayed behind in Kenosha, was now financially independent, having been handsomely rewarded when his manufacturing firm was sold to a larger concern. He promptly retired from his job as the company’s treasurer and began a life of drinking, gambling, and womanizing. Increasingly, Maurice Bernstein took over the role of Orson’s father, to the point that the boy started calling him “Dadda.”
    “Orson never talked about it,” Granny mused, “but he had to feel as every child does when his parents separate and his mom takes up with someone new.”
    In one camp stood Orson’s tall, dark-eyed mother, a strong woman ahead of her time, more handsome than beautiful. “She had a voice like an oboe,” my father once told me, “and she could mesmerize you with her charm.” In the other camp was Orson’s father, a diffident man who drank too much.
    “What was my grandfather like?” I asked Skipper, who had met him many times.
    “Kind of dull, to tell the truth. Also kind of pathetic once the drinking got heavy. And he was dead set against Orson having anything to do with the theater. He’d come to Todd to see Orson in a play, and then he’d stand in theback of the auditorium and sneak away before the final curtain. That really hurt your dad, that his father wouldn’t come backstage. Damn it, Dick should have gone backstage and said hello to his kid!”
    “Maybe he was too drunk,” I offered, but Skipper would accept no excuses.
    “No, he was a lousy father, but I have to say this for him. He was a class act, a real gentleman. Orson loved him a lot more than he deserved and never stopped trying to turn him into something he wasn’t.”
    True. Whenever I asked my father to tell me about
his
father, I was treated to another tale about Dick Welles, the brilliant inventor, or Dick Welles, the business tycoon. Warming to the subject, he went on to describe his father as the urbane world traveler relaxing in first-class limbo on ocean liners; or the international playboy who broke the bank at Monte Carlo; or the witty raconteur who kept bars and pubs throughout the British Empire open until dawn.
    On the other hand, Ada had told me the
real
Dick Welles would have preferred that his wife give up her musical aspirations after their marriage and devote her mornings to the dressmaker and her afternoons to bridge games and ladies’ teas. He was dismayed by reports from Chicago that Beatrice was holding weekly musical soirees and exposing young Orson to a bunch of “long-haired arty types.”
    “It was my mother who wanted me to learn the piano,” my father once told me when he was reminiscing about his childhood. “She made me practice for hours on end every day—scales, scales, and more scales. She hired a wretched spinster lady who stood over me and made sure I did it. You have no idea how I
hated
the piano—not like you, Christopher. You owe your musical gifts to your grandmother Welles, you know.” One day, my father went on, he was so fed up with practicing that he climbed out the window and stood on the narrow ledge, threatening to jump if he was made to play another scale. “The spinster lady screamed hysterically for my mother who was in the next room.” He paused dramatically.
    “And … what happened?”
    “I heard my mother say, as cool as you please, ‘Well, if he wants to jump, let him jump.’ “ He began to laugh uproariously.
    “She said that?”
    “If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here to tell about it.” When I still looked disbelieving, he explained that his mother, who knew him “inside out,” understoodhow the melodramatic gesture of “stepping off into space” would have appealed to him. “So, she had to kill my act, you see. When I realized she