A Father's Story by Andre Dubus
"A Father's Story" by Andre Dubus is a poignant narrative that explores the complexities of fatherhood, guilt, and morality through the experiences of Luke, a divorced father living in northeastern Massachusetts. At the age of fifty-four, Luke grapples with the aftermath of his wife's departure and the challenges of raising his four children, especially his daughter, Jennifer, who embodies both his pride and his anxiety regarding modern societal values. The story details Luke's close relationship with Father Paul LeBoeuf, the parish priest, who provides him with spiritual counsel as he navigates his faith amidst personal struggles, including the constraints imposed by the Catholic Church.
The narrative peaks during a dramatic incident when Jennifer accidentally hits a pedestrian while driving home from a night out, leading to a night filled with emotional turmoil for both father and daughter. Luke's reaction to the accident—his instinctual desire to protect Jennifer at all costs—raises profound questions about parental responsibility and moral choices. As the story unfolds, Luke’s reflections on his past, his relationship with the church, and his evolving understanding of his role as a father reveal the intricate layers of love, shame, and redemption within familial bonds. The story ultimately juxtaposes the innocence of youth with the harsh realities of adult life, making it a compelling exploration of the themes of fatherhood, loss, and the search for forgiveness.
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A Father's Story by Andre Dubus
First published: 1983
Type of plot: Domestic realism
Time of work: The early 1980's
Locale: Northeastern Massachusetts
Principal Characters:
Luke Ripley , the narrator and protagonist, a divorced, middle-aged manJennifer , his twenty-year-old daughterPaul LeBoeuf , a Roman Catholic priest in his sixties, his spiritual adviser and friend
The Story
Luke Ripley, who narrates his own experience, is fifty-four, a divorced father of four who lives in northeastern Massachusetts, near the New Hampshire line and the Atlantic Ocean. Apparently neither rich nor poor, he runs a stable, boarding and renting out thirty horses and giving riding lessons. Luke still broods over the Wednesday that his wife, Gloria, left with the kids and a trailer, some ten or so years earlier.
Largely a solitary person, Luke is a friend of Father Paul LeBoeuf, the balding, sixty-four-year-old pastor of a nearby Catholic church. Father LeBoeuf, of French-Canadian descent in a church still dominated by the Irish, has been a weekly visitor to Luke's house since before Luke's marriage failed. No longer willing to ride horseback, Father Paul still takes long walks with Luke and finds time occasionally to join him fishing and duck hunting. An earthy man of simple yet profound piety, Father LeBoeuf listens with understanding to Luke's spiritual dilemmas and to his rebellious objections to a church that he loves but does not always respect.
Luke's self-reliant life is generally happy—or at least content. He has nearly gotten over missing his wife, if not watching his three sons and a daughter grow. He accepts church regulations forbidding divorced Catholics to remarry and—more reluctantly—celibacy, confessing that he has had two brief affairs in the intervening years. He has come to grips with his lonesome life through an appreciation of nature and an orderly routine. He does his own cooking, reads an occasional detective story, and follows the baseball season. His business provides him the opportunity for rides through a countryside to which he responds more sympathetically than most contemporary males.
Like many believing Catholics of the late twentieth century, Luke has modified the strictures of his church to suit his particular needs. Some of these modifications are slightly eccentric, for example, his refusal to support his parish church despite his friendship with its pastor. Convinced in a stubborn peasant way, which Father LeBoeuf tolerantly accepts, that the contributions of the faithful are not always wisely spent, Luke prefers that the money he gives goes into people's stomachs and on their backs.
Furthermore, Luke still resents the effects he believes the Roman Catholic church's teaching on birth control had on his marriage, attributing early tensions and frustrations to the rhythm method he and his wife practiced to avoid conception. Nevertheless, he has made his peace with the church. He rises at 4:45 a.m. for a period of devotion as he prepares his breakfast, offering to God every act of the day before him. During this hour he talks to God, thanking Him for his blessings, not excluding the two women with whom he made love after Gloria left. Afterward, he saddles a horse and rides over for morning mass at Father Paul's church.
During the summer, Luke's daughter, Jennifer, pays her annual visit from Florida, a vestige of his divorce's custody terms. Luke worries more about his daughter than his older sons, who are now settled in various places about the country. He is proud of her athletic abilities, her fully developed womanhood, and her open manner with friends but is vaguely uneasy about the role she must play in a culture so different from the one in which he grew up. He does not exactly disapprove of the fact that twenty-year-old Jennifer is neither a virgin nor a believer, but he misses the certainty of older times, as stifling as they often were.
One windy summer night, Jennifer and two girlfriends take her car to go to a movie, then visit the beach. In the course of the night, each drinks four bottles of beer. On the twenty-minute ride home, after dropping off the others and singing with a cassette, Jennifer crests a dark hill only to get the briefest glance of a moving figure before experiencing a heart-stopping thud. Panicked and only half aware of what has occurred, she takes her foot off the brake she has jammed on and continues home to her father.
Awakened by his sobbing daughter, Luke questions the hysterical girl closely in the kitchen over several calming shots of whiskey before setting out to the accident scene. In the gusty darkness after a hasty search, he discovers in a ditch the body of a young man whom he desperately attempts to examine. At one point, he thinks that he hears sounds in the man's chest. Then there is a silence, and Luke returns home, still without notifying authorities.
He sends his daughter to bed, surveys the damage to the car, and removes the empty beer bottles. For the rest of a sleepless night, he listens to opera records, planning how he can rescue his daughter. Finally, in the early morning, he drives her car in the rain to church and deliberately crashes the front right side of the car into a tree in the parking lot before entering the church to hear mass and receive Holy Communion.