My Two Dads

My mother, who's about to turn 101, got married at least twice, first to Frank Sartwell (my biological father) and then Richard Abell (my stepfather). The transition from one to the other was pretty quick, circa 1969, and that’s perhaps one reason that the men were so different. Sometimes when things go badly awry with your previously wondrous lover, you seek their very opposite; whatever’s completely different begins to look like everything you need. (I did a similar matrimonial lurch in the 1980s and 90s.)

Frank was a reporter in DC, where I grew up. His father (also Franklin Sartwell) had been a columnist at The Washington Post, but lost his job and eventually his life to alcoholism, before I was born. My dad was very opinionated, and he and his kids and even my mother were extremely impressed by his knowledge base, though he’d dropped out of DC's Catholic U. People often said of Frank that "he knows just about everything." My mother, the daughter of a novelist, admired his prose style and his sense of humor, expressed in a non-stop transgressive stand-up routine that coincided with his life as a whole.  He was hilarious when he was insulting other people, admittedly a bit harder to swallow when aiming right between the eyes of his wife or two sons.

My mother was raised by communists in Chicago and never stopped being a leftist of some sort; my father approached politics with the magnificent condescension that derived from generations of DC journalists (his own dad's best friend was Warren Harding). He thought it was pretty funny to be the only person for miles around who voted for Barry Goldwater. He also smoked three packs a day of unfiltered Pall Malls and through the 1960s was declining into alcoholism, which made him verbally abusive and radically unreliable.

Joyce took us to California to see her family and (I realized later) to give my dad time to move out of the house. She'd been a housewife to his reporter and editor; now she needed a job. (It's kind of amazing what a kid might not know about what's going on with his own parents as he grows up; this is based on lots of inferences as well as questions put to Joyce decades later.) She took classes in education at George Washington University, finishing a BA begun long before at Berkeley, and started student teaching in social studies at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, getting assigned to the master teacher Richard Abell. A year or so later, Richard moved into our house. (She was his student teacher, but they were about the same age.)

He was the very opposite sort of man. Richard was a conscientious objector in World War II. He told us that when he was 12, he got into a fistfight with his best friend, whom he left bleeding in a ditch. He pledged never again to commit an act of violence. In  CO camp in Ohio, he contracted polio. A lacrosse player at the University of New Hampshire who majored in horticulture and aspired to be a farmer, he spent a year in an iron lung and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. After that, he became a teacher, and spearheaded the racial integration of Sidwell Friends, cradle of presidential children. Richard was a draft counselor during Vietnam, and early in my parents' relationship, he took my brother Adam and me to a couple of Quaker meetings and tried to teach us about peace. Frank, on the other hand, was a vociferous and abusive atheist who delighted in refuting and ridiculing religious people, including his own devout Catholic mother.

Richard liked a glass of wine, but I never saw him drink more than two in a session. He was a serious reader and intellectual (he particularly loved poetry, and we had a family poetry reading every Wednesday evening after he moved in), but he was more the New England silent type than a non-stop verbal killer like Frank. Funny, but not that funny, you know? Too sweet and too loving to really be an insult comic, much less pretend to be a reactionary just to piss my mom off. Together, my mother and step-father were activists in the teachers' union and beloved alternative mentors and friends to a generation of hippies. We still hear from some of their students from the 1970s.

My father had grown up in downtown DC in a family of writers and as the saying goes, he couldn't screw in a lightbulb: he was the least handy man in Chevy Chase. Richard could fix or build anything, though because of his disabilities he proceeded slowly with extreme care. Frank never saw a corner he wouldn't cut. Everything that Richard did, he did right, including loving his wife and parenting his step-children. As a paraplegic in the 1950s and 60s, he somehow traveled the world, and early in Richard and Joyce's marriage, we all took a trip to India and Nepal. This seemed to me almost routine; I didn’t realize what an extraordinary person Richard Abell was.

He tried to teach us to be like that, but 12 is a little late to change personalities. I think of myself as the world's least handy person, and I still cut corners, especially if you're not watching. My brother Adam and I both plunged into alcoholism of the extreme Frank variety; addictions killed my brother before he was 30 and came close to claiming me. All this time, I've fancied myself a political provocateur, and spent much of my life trying to piss off academic leftists. And for much of my life, I've been inordinately proud of my own abilities as an insult comic. I thought of myself as the last of a line of Frank Sartwells.

One of the biggest regrets in my life is that I didn't spend more time with Richard before his death in 2003, and that I didn't, from a young age, emulate him more closely. I wish I'd learned to work carefully with my hands; he wanted to teach me. I wish I'd learned his gentleness and his thoughtfulness more thoroughly.

I wish I'd labored even more than I did with him on the Virginia farm to which my parents retired, which is where we're living now. I don't even know how to change the oil in the tractor. I wish I was more circumspect, linguistically, and didn't have a tendency to simply launch, delighted by my own alleged cleverness.

But I've been trying to get more Richard-like in my 60s. Twenty years ago I started going to Quaker meetings and I'm no longer a screeching atheist like Frank, or messing around with pro-war provocations, for I am, like Richard, a committed pacifist. I'm doing little repair and maintenance jobs around here, albeit with an incompetence that stuns everyone. We're trying to revive Richard's gardens.

The two are still, for me, the poles of masculinity and the poles of my personality. Though there are many other possibilities, those are the two that still look viable to me. I think of myself as a combination of Frank Sartwell and Richard Abell. It's kind of cool because they both had their strong points. It's incoherent, however, and it's getting late to pull myself together. I might have to reconcile myself to being both and hence neither, and aspire to a relatively intelligible run through my 70s (knock wood) involving a further mutation into Richardism. I might aspire to develop a relatively comprehensible grandpa persona so no one has to go out seeking my very opposite.

Oh yeah, that "at least twice": We've heard rumors of a brief earlier marriage contracted by my mother, perhaps in Salt Lake City in the late-1940s; she’d never talk about it, and perhaps has forgotten it. Whose opposite was he, I wonder?

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell