The Life of Ripley

Luke Ripley, the focal character of A Father’s Story by Andre Dubus, begins his narration with what he calls “my life” – the life people in northeastern Massachusetts know about. He then goes on to detail his personal “real life.” And later, we hear about his life without peace after an incident involving his daughter. After all is said and done, I wonder what you would think about this self-reliant guy who is comfortable with his contradictions and who refuses to sacrifice his daughter. And, who is he really protecting when all is said and done?

Luke’s publicly recognized “my life” is that of a stable owner. He boards and rents out thirty horses and provides riding lessons. The “my life” that people would see if they looked in his front room window at night is a solitary “big-gutted grey-haired guy, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the dark woods across the road, listening to a grieving soprano.”

Luke’s “real life” – the one nobody talks about anymore, except Father Paul LeBoeuf”- is revealed to us before the accident in the first three-quarters of the story. What do we learn?

Luke Ripley is a divorced Catholic and an empty nester with three sons and a daughter off somewhere else. His solitary existence is lived out in routine. We learn of Luke’s morning habit of prayer while making his bed and then going to feed his horses. He talks to God because there’s nobody else around.

His morning habit also includes seeing his best friend – Father Paul Leboeuf, the priest at a local Catholic church. Most mornings Luke rides one of his horses over to church where Father Paul’s officiates. There Luke hears the Mass and receives the Eucharist.  During the week the two men get together for a dinner meal.  With Father LeBeoeuf present and a can of beer in hand Luke verbally grieves his despair over losing his wife and his family.

At one point Luke tell us about the importance of ritual, having already told us that he is basically lazy person:

Do not think of me as a spiritual man whose every thought during those twenty-five minutes is at one with the words of the mass. Each morning I try, each morning I fail, and I know that always I will be a creature who, looking at Father Paul and the altar, and uttering prayers, will be distracted by scrambled eggs, horses, the weather, and memories and daydreams that have nothing to do with the sacrament I am about to receive. I can receive, though: the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can; and so, having to face and forgive my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual.  For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.

Nasrullah Mambrol offers this perspective:

The life that Luke tells the reader about is one filled with a variety of contradictions: He is a devout Catholic but divorced; he attends Mass regularly but does not always listen; he enjoys talking to his priest but casually, preferably over a few beers, and what they discuss is mostly small talk; he is a self-described lazy man who dislikes waking up early but does so each morning to pray, not because he feels obligated to do so but because he knows he has the choice not to do so. Luke Ripley is a man who lives with contradictions and accepts them.

Luke wants us to know that he lived through difficult days after the divorce and what he believed ritual could have done for his marriage:

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.  That is what Father Paul told me in those first two years, on some bad nights when I believed I could not bear what I had to:  the most painful loss was my children, then the loss of Gloria, whom I still loved despite or maybe because of our long periods of sadness that rendered us helpless, so neither of us could break out of it to give a hand to the other. Twelve years later I believe ritual would have healed us more quickly than the repetitious talks we had, perhaps even kept us healed. Marriages have lost that, and I wish I had known then what I what I know now, and we had performed certain acts together every day, no matter how we felt, and perhaps then we could have subordinated feeling to action, for surely that is the essence of love. I know this from my distractions during Mass, and during everything else I do, so that my actions and my feelings are seldom one. It does happen every day, but in proportion to everything else in the day, it is rare, like joy.

The loss of his wife Gloria and her leaving the church and the loss of his children figured large in Luke’s life. But the “third most painful loss, which became second and sometimes first as months passed, was the knowledge that I could never marry again, and so dared not even keep company with a woman.”

Luke lets Father Paul know that he is bitter about this. And, that when he was with Gloria he wasn’t happy with the “actual physical and spiritual plan of practicing rhythm: nights of striking the mattress with a fist…”

Early in the narration we learn Luke’s thoughts about his friend Father Paul, the Catholic church, and tithing – “I don’t feel right about giving money for buildings, places.”

We later hear his reflections on Jennifer, his only daughter, becoming a woman: “It is Jennifer’s womanhood that renders me awkward.”

He relates how her growing up affected the ‘ritual’ of memories he kept of her as his sheltered little girl at home. Jennifer became an on-her-own twenty-one-year-old girl with a purse full of adult symbols including a driver’s license. Luke says that he wants to know what she is up to and he doesn’t want to know what she is up to.

And then one night, Jennifer involves her father in a life-altering incident. Luke, to manage the situation, sticks with ritual as if nothing had happened. Ritual, we learned, might have saved his marriage to Gloria. So, Luke returns to default ritual to “save” the only other woman in his life. He wasn’t about to give her up, not even to Father Paul. Luke continues his rituals but does not confess to Father Paul.

The story ends with Luke telling the reader how he justifies himself to God, in Job-like fashion each morning, for what he did: the love a father has for a daughter is different than he has for a son and he loves his daughter more than truth.

Luke’s OK with a guy being hit by the car and but not a woman. Men, like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood, are supposed to take the bang ups and arrests and prison time.

In the end, however, Luke must answer to God for what he does to protect Jennifer. Self-serving ritual will not save him.

I’ve read this story twice. The first time, several years ago, I felt I knew the protagonist. He was like a former father-in-law: a divorced Catholic man in his fifties who wore Old Spice, hid Playboys, had daughters, and who thought himself manly in a Hemingwayesque sense. So, it was easy to have a sentimental attachment to Luke. I could empathize with his grief about losing a spouse and children and with his ritual-managed loneliness. And especially so as he acted instinctively to protect his daughter.

After a second reading this past week, I saw Luke differently – beneath the surface, so to speak. And, I had some questions:

When all is said and done by Luke, is he really protecting himself, his “real life”, his ritualized sources of comfort, when he protects his daughter from being taken away?

Did Luke really just act out of laziness (laziness being the opposite of love) in order to maintain ritual and continue life as he knew it?

Was Luke’s manhood tied to his comfort from women?

Wasn’t it cruel, unjust, and devastating to the other family and father involved for Jennifer and Luke to leave the scene of the crime and to let things just go on without answers?

As a parent, what would I do in this situation?

A Father’s Story was first published in the Spring 1983 issue of Black Warrior Review. 

Profile: Andre Dubus (youtube.com)

Andre Dubus: Father and Son – YouTube

Dubus (youtube.com)

It’s Time for Some Pruning – Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon (youtube.com)