I know exactly what this book is going to be: a man very much like my father will behave selfishly, just like my father.
He will betray his wife, and later he will betray his daughter. In his own mind, this man is, somehow, the one harmed.
My father carried this certainty. How my father explained his life is a mystery to me. The book will have as its intent an inquiry into his choices. I do not like or respect this man, and I will write him sharply so my readers may dislike and disrespect him, too. I am not certain yet of the story, the events that will structure the book. But whatever is going to happen, this man’s failures to atone for the harms he caused will be at its heart.
I roam for two years looking for the plot. I know it has to be a morally complex story, allowing my primary character to behave badly and to simultaneously imagine himself a heroic and misunderstood man. But what does he actually do? I do not want to write my own life. This is not memoir. It is a fiction, giving me cover to question a primary grief in my life: my father, newly remarried, exiled me from his life forever when I was nineteen years old. How could a father—my father, the father I loved and who loved me—do such a thing? I will give him his own book, let him speak to us, and I will finally discover the answer I have needed all my life.
One snowy day at my house in Maine, the story arrives with the man who plows my long driveway. We stand by his pick-up with the snow falling silently around us, and he wanders into a tale about his older brother who played one day after school with a friend on his dairy farm. In a terrible accident, the boy died. The mother “went into herself,” Mark tells me, country talk for sliding into deep depression. The father—well, Mark explained, he found his own comfort, with another woman in a neighboring town. He continued to work his farm each day but lived with this second wife. Here it is, my story. The second I hear it, I recognize this man. I have been looking for him for two years.
His name is Tup Senter. His wife is Doris. His three children are Sonny, Dodie, and Beston. I have never heard these names. I do not name these people. They simply are. It feels as if they have always been waiting for me. They live on a beautiful dairy farm in Maine. I have never lived on a farm. The father-character I have planned never lived on a farm. I feel shaken when they appear, an early presentiment that the book I have intended to write about my father, cloaked in fiction, is already slipping from me.
The next morning, I sit at my desk and type the title, The Senters. I have planned that Tup will tell this story. It is him, after all, I want to hear. The entire intention has been to use this man as a surrogate to speak my father’s understandings and explanations of how he lived his life. But as I start to write the first page, Doris shows up instead. It is as if the stage curtain has risen and there she stands, this stranger, making the bed she shares with her husband. “It is very nice to stand first thing every morning looking out over the land,” she says. “The sun makes sharp shadows of the fence wire, like long, neat stitches binding us to this place. Tup and I have enough sense to know that we are blessed people.” Doris loves this man.
Within one paragraph, I understand this is not the book I have carefully planned. I know nothing. I do not know these people. I do not yet know their lives. Someone else is writing this, and I need to listen very closely.
Doris and Dodie and Tup each have their turn to speak to us, in rounds. Sonny does die, in a terrible accident. Doris “goes into herself,” abandoning, in her grief, her two remaining children and her husband. Tup gives himself over, grimly, to the hard daily work of the farm.
Each speaker is a storyteller, sharing with us countless memories from the bountiful and loving life they knew before the accident. I do not recognize these stories, and I cannot name their source. They are not mine. Each morning, I sit at my desk and greet the speaker: What story are you waiting to tell me? And they start. I do not direct them. I no longer have a plan. What they each speak about is their place in this family, the comfort and safety and pleasure they have known. They speak about love, and the fidelity they trust. This is an unknown universe for me.
They also speak to me about the shattering of their life together, their acute failures of each other. Awake through the nights in a separate room, Tup struggles against a god who could allow such sorrow to find him, the loss of his son. We understand that he is a tender man. He longs for the comfort of his wife. He longs to comfort his suffering wife. Doris lives in a world entirely apart from her husband and children. And now, the heart of the story comes: Tup grabs respite from his grief and loneliness with a woman in a town nearby. He returns at dawn each day and silently fulfills his duties to the work of the farm. The terrible complexity.
Here, finally, is what I had wanted! The story I planned with such certainty has finally emerged: A man betrays his wife and children. He does great harm. So why do I love him so much?
Dodie is our truth teller. I know this girl: I was the truth teller in my family, calling out my father for his failures. My father rose up against me in fury. Instead, Dodie’s father appeals to her, and to himself, “But I am a good man!” I believe him. He is a good man struggling to carry his grieving family, his lost wife. He also does great harm. Tup knows that. He recognizes that.
Tup and Dodie and Doris did not tell the story of my father, the story I knew so well. They came on their own, from a world I had never imagined. In the end, Dodie says, “A wild and powerful river swept us far from shore, and then the current stilled and allowed us to make our way home. We found ourselves again. This happiness requires courage. It requires a willingness to love. A willingness to forgive. A willingness to believe in goodness.”
I have answers now to my questions. These people I never knew existed offered them to me. I loved my father. But he was not a courageous man. He was not a loving man, and he did not believe in goodness. His story would not have been interesting. Unlike my father, Tup understands love and its obligations. He recognizes the harms he has caused and holds himself accountable. He believes in the reciprocal act of forgiveness.
Tup tells us in the end, “We are not perfect. We dwell in a complex and uncertain grace.”
Meredith Hall ’93’s memoir, Without a Map, was a New York Times bestseller. A new edition was published in 2024. Her novel, Beneficence, was published by David R. Godine in 2021. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, Five Points, and many other journals. Hall divides her time between Maine and California.
This story first appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ Magazine website.
