FATHERS

I lit the fuse, and we watched the spark race down the long red string: Dad, me, and the Culbertson Rocketeers. Summer was ending. Ahead of us was middle school, and adolescence, and all the forces that would, inevitably, tear us apart. But for now we were gathered together, one last time.

A breeze passed through. The rocket I’d named the Tall Boy—all seven feet of it—swayed precariously on its launch pad, first one way, then the other.

I’d designed the Tall Boy in my father’s workshop, gluing together the tubes from a half dozen paper towel rolls, affixing the fins at the bottom, the nose cone up top. I’d decorated it with a can of red spray paint that contained a metal ball. You could hear that ball clacking inside as you shook the little can back and forth.

That rocket was taller than my father. It was the most terribly dangerous thing anyone had ever seen. It was a trip to the hospital in its most basic, unrefined stage. It was fantastic.

And this may be the first piece of transgender apostasy I have to offer you: namely, that while I had known I was meant to be female from my earliest memory, an insight that succeeded in twisting my heart around like an Amish soft pretzel, it would nevertheless be false to describe all my days as a boy as nothing but unending sorrow. Oh, I did spend many hours walking alone in the woods, wondering how in the world I was going to make my way. But there were also plenty of occasions like this one—a rocket launch among a group of twelve-year-old Visigoths. There were many other joyful days ahead of me, too, including my latter ones as a boyfriend, and a husband, and a father.

True, I was not quite myself. But even then I knew full well that being myself would come with pretty significant risks of its own. All things considered, I was doing my best, as Mrs. Dilber says in A Christmas Carol, “in keepin’ with the situation.”

My father held his butane lighter to the tip of his L&M King, then shut the top with a metallic snap. It was monogrammed with his initials—JRB. Those were my initials, too, at least they were back then. Sometimes when he wasn’t looking I’d toy with his lighter. The butane had a sharp smell—like whiskey, and cumin.

He was a handsome man, Dick Boylan, hair slicked back, and a pair of glasses that made him look not unlike the medieval history professor he’d once wanted to be. There was a little bit of Don Draper about him, a kind of poise. But he also had a quiet, wicked sense of humor. He loved getting everyone around him to debate one another, back in the days when people could pleasantly disagree. Sometimes, at the dinner table, he’d bang his fork against his water glass, and then quietly say, “Okay. Now everybody argue the opposite.”

It is worth pausing at this moment to acknowledge the incredible: my parents were named Dick and Hildegarde. I still remember lying on my bed during my days as a Rocketeer, staring at the ceiling, thinking, My parents are named—Dick! And Hildegarde! I’m not going to make it, man! I’m not going to make it!

The spark sped down the fuse toward the rocket. The breeze blew again, and once more the Tall Boy swung wildly on the launch pad.

It was clear to everyone that the rocket was going to topple onto the blacktop just before its engines ignited. It was even clear to me. But the fuse was lit.

Tub, a blond boy who lived up the road from me near the Du Pont estate, looked fearfully at my father. “Mr. Boylan!” he said. “It’s gonna tip!”

My father took a deep drag of his cigarette. He thought this over as he held that smoke in his lungs. Then he blew it all out. “Better be careful,” he said.

I still don’t know why my father was so sanguine about the catastrophe-in-progress. Maybe, just like the rest of us, he had never seen anything as dangerous as this up close, and now found it impossible to turn away.

Ted Goodrich shook his head. He was deeply into Star Trek, and was given to imitating Mr. Spock, given half a chance. “It is not logical,” he observed.

“Shut up,” said Howie Finley, who hated everyone. “Mister Spaz.”

Ted Goodrich looked at Howie Finley as if he were a grotesque specimen of alien life, which, to be fair, he kind of was, considering that Howie’s mouth was replete not only with a set of shining metal braces but a series of complex rubber bands frequently coated with the melancholy residue of peanut butter and marshmallow fluff.

“Fascinating,” said Ted Goodrich.

We were on the playground of what had been, up until that summer, our elementary school, William Culbertson, a school named after an Episcopalian minister whose last words were said to be, God God, Yes! Our hometown, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, was still mostly farm country in those days. There were a lot of cows, Angus mostly, black herds on green hills. Some of the farms were for real; others were ornamental. The playground of our grade school was less than a mile from Foxcatcher, the estate belonging to the Du Ponts, although Mrs. Du Pont didn’t have cows; she had horses. Many years later, her demented son John murdered a wrestling coach on that estate; a movie was made about that murder, in fact: Foxcatcher, with Steve Carell, a film in which he donned a fake nose.

All around the town were mansions, homes to the very last generation of blue bloods, places that in just a few years would be subdivided, or torn down, or shuttered. Just down the street from my house on Sawmill Road was the jewel of the Main Line—the “Big House” of Ardrossan Farms, where Hope Montgomery Scott lived on an estate whose green fields were dotted with Ayrshire dairy cattle. Mrs. Scott had been the model for the Katharine Hepburn figure in The Philadelphia Story. Just like in that movie, there really were Quakers in my hometown who would call you “thee” and “thou.” It was weird when they did that, but it was also kind of cool. Once, a Friend had looked at me and said, Thou art a real nut.

Between these two estates—Foxcatcher and Ardrossan—was a deep green forest owned by the descendants of the former governor, George Earle. His mansion had burned down in the ’50s, although the charred wreck of it still stood in the heart of the forest. It was, of course, the coolest and scariest place in the world. Ted Goodrich and I liked to ride our bikes on the old paths in the forest and creep around the mansion sometimes. Once, we got stung by bees there.

The spark was about three feet from the rocket engine now. Smoke from the fuse hung in the air and was then dispersed by the breeze.

“Mr. Scott,” said Ted Goodrich. “Beam us up.”

This would be the last time we gathered, we Rocketeers. In just a few weeks we’d start junior high school. There was a little bit of Stand by Me to this situation, as we prepared to take our leave of Culbertson Elementary, where we’d gone for seven long years, and upon whose deserted playground we were staging this final launch. I wasn’t going to Marple Newtown with the others; I was off to Haverford that fall.

I’d begged my father not to send me there, wept and wept as I sat with my parents watching TV in their bedroom—Hawaii Five-O, The Smothers Brothers, Ed Sullivan. I told my father that I’d miss my friends, but this wasn’t the truth, of course. The only friends I had were these Rocketeers, and most of these friendships were marginal, really based on not much more than parachute wadding and nose cones. We’d been close when we were really little, of course, but by the end of sixth grade, it was clear that I was not turning out like the others. One day, Sammy Walsh asked if I was a homosexual. I had no idea what that meant. I told him, I didn’t think so?

Dad had tried, in his gentle, diffident manner, to steer me into manhood. He’d attempted to teach me how to throw a football, and to get me interested in some of his own hobbies—restoring furniture, building walls from stone. For my birthday one year he gave me H. A. Rey’s book, The Stars, an introduction to the constellations. On cold winter nights, Dad took me out in the yard with a flashlight, and we gazed up at the night sky. I remember our breath coming out in clouds, the Milky Way shimmering above us. From the little stream that passed along the edge of our property I could hear water trickling beneath the ice. This is Orion, said Dad, the Hunter.

A lot of boys learn how to be men by taking a good look at their own fathers, and basically deciding to do the opposite. Many of the best memoirs and novels written by men tell the stories of boys who want desperately to grow up, and fathers who refuse to. Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool is like that. So, in its own way, is This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff. But perhaps all stories of boys trying to grow up in the shadow of a feckless father are descended from Huck Finn, whose Pap is just about the worst person in the world. Don’t you give me none o’ your lip. You’ve put on considerable many frills since I been away. I’ll take you down a peg before I get done with you.

I didn’t want to be the opposite of my father. Why would I? He was wise and funny. But in every way it was already clear I was going to become something else. As noted earlier, I’d known I was a girl as early as age four or five, at least on the inside, which—at least back then—struck me as the most important way you could be a girl. But this was something I understood, even then, that could only bring me shame.

I knew it would hurt my father’s feelings, too, if I ever said the truth out loud. In a way it would be like telling that sweet, wise man, I’m not going to be like you. Who would ever want to say such a thing to a father whom she loved?

And so I lived my truth in silence, hoping against hope that some cosmic legerdemain would undo the fundamentals of my soul, so that one day I could wake up and be a boy like other boys, a creature en route to being, someday, a man like other men.

Whenever I write about my parents I am hindered, a little bit, by my profound love for them. They were sweet, dignified, loving people, even if they were named Dick and Hildegarde. My father was surely bewildered, at times, by his bookish, goofy, gamine son—not to mention my sister, who had a rebellious streak of her own. But he always treated me with love, and that’s the challenge I have in trying to place Dick Boylan at the heart of my life’s great conflict. Sure, I think he’d have been happier if I’d exhibited the slightest talent for sports; or if I didn’t seem like such an unfathomable, hilarious misfit. But the truth is that he always seemed gently charmed by his weirdo child. I think he thought I was interesting.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be less interesting. Would I have been happier, if I had been more like him? Would he have been happier, to have been the father of that son?

For his part, Dick Boylan had never known what it was like to have had a father much past childhood. My grandfather, James, had died when Dad was twelve. That was the same age I was now, as the spark rushed into the nozzle.

* * *

Once more the wind blew hard against the Tall Boy, and the rocket swayed, tipped, teetered, and then—like a mighty redwood falling in a forest—it crashed down upon the blacktop. Two of its four balsa-wood fins snapped off as it hit the pavement. The fuse was still burning.

You’d think that we’d all have run and scattered, trying to get as far away as possible from the disaster that was only seconds away. But it was impossible for us to move. We stood there in horror, and in wonder. The rocket engine hissed, and then fell silent. There was a little puff of smoke, followed by nothing.

“Fascinating,” said Ted Goodrich.

Howie Finley began to laugh with a cruel kind of joy. “It’s a dud!” he shouted, raising his hands. “Of course it’s a dud! What a joke!”

Tub looked over at me. We were all still standing there. The ruins of the Tall Boy were pointed directly at Howie Finley. I felt the blood rushing to my face, the tears burning in my eyes. “No wonder you’re going to the school for retards!” shouted Howie Finley. “Ha ha ha!”

A small plume of smoke rose from the nozzle of the Tall Boy’s engine.

“Wait,” said Tub. “I think it’s—I think it’s still—”

Tub never got to finish that sentence.

The Tall Boy exploded into life, flames shooting out the nozzle, heading straight for Howie Finley. He took off running, but in all honesty, it can be hard to outrun a rocket. As he ran, the Tall Boy in hot pursuit, Howie Finley screamed. How did he scream? Like a little girl. Closer and closer to my running, screaming nemesis the Tall Boy drew, scudding along the blacktop, just inches away now from Howie’s hateful backside.

Years later, when I saw the video footage of Senator Josh Hawley running from the mob which he himself had encouraged, I thought, This is a thing I have seen before.

At last the Tall Boy came to a stop, as the propellent was consumed and the spark burned through the delay charge—material intended to allow an ascending rocket to coast. The delay charge emitted a great deal of so-called tracking smoke, although there was no question as to the location of the Tall Boy: it had run out of propellant not far from the swings, where the Rocketeers and my father and I followed it, as if to the site of a terrible massacre. Howie was trying not to cry, and crying. The Tall Boy lay there, puffing smoke in the late-summer air.

I went over to Howie. I said, “You okay?” and he nodded. He didn’t seem okay.

We turned our attention to the Tall Boy. The tracking smoke had stopped.

Then, with a sudden pop, the nose cone hurtled off the top of the rocket, and the parachute, still attached to the fuselage by a piece of elastic cord, burst out like a champagne cork. For a moment the parachute was filled by the wind. Then, like a plastic shroud, the chute settled gently over the corpse of the Tall Boy. The rocket had traveled. Now it had come to rest.

“It is logical,” noted Ted Goodrich.

And at that moment, I heard the sound of my father laughing. He laughed until he started coughing, as heavy smokers sometimes do. The rest of us started laughing, too—me, Tub, all of us, even Howie Finley. It was the most incredible thing any of us had ever witnessed. Tears poured out of our eyes. We raised our hands into the air and cheered.

We would not be little boys much longer. But on that day, we lingered.

* * *

Twenty-five years later, I drove home from the hospital through a cold, sharp night. A father.

The windshield wipers slapped back and forth. Snow was falling in heavy wet flakes. The Grateful Dead were on the radio. “And solemnly, they stated,” Jerry Garcia sang, “he has to die.”

I thought back on the mystery which I had witnessed back at the hospital. I had stood behind my wife Deedie’s head as the docs performed the cesarean. They had a sheet raised up so she couldn’t witness all the gruesome derring-do that was sustained down below. But I had seen it all, had even seen my precious love’s ovaries. They looked just like they were supposed to—the Fallopian tubes grasping onto the ovaries like the tiny hands of a child.

Later, they let me cut the umbilical cord—a mostly symbolic act, really, given that the baby had already been formally detached from Deedie. But they let me have a symbolic snip, like a mayor cutting the ribbon unveiling a new bridge.

How incredible it was to be alive at that moment! Zach, Deedie had said. We’ll name him Zach.

Jerry Garcia was still singing—the song, if I remembered properly, was called “Cryptical Envelopment.” It made me smile; in no small measure I too had been enveloped cryptically by the day’s events. I’d read somewhere that Garcia had imagined this tune as a kind of update of the Appalachian standard, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” a version of which appears in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? It’s a story-song about a mysterious man doomed to die. For in this world, I’m bound to ramble, I have no friends to help me now. According to tradition, it’s a song about Christ, and his lonely journey.

But sometimes when I thought about that tune I thought about Charlie Brown. The boy of constant sorrow.

I had always been something of a Charlie Brown my own self, in my days as a Rocketeer and beyond. As such, I knew the thing the Charlie Browns of the world knew that the Lucy van Pelts did not. Which is this: Each autumn when she holds the football for him, and she pulls it away every time, causing him to crash onto the ground? We Charlies know full well what is going to happen. This is not a story about a person with a feckless sense of hope. This is a story about a person who suffers because he knows something about this exchange is bringing Lucy joy. He pretends to allow himself to be tricked as a favor to Lucy. Because he knows how much she loves pulling off this stunt. Because he pities her. Because his heart is full of love.

* * *

I had hoped, when I got married, that I would never have to give in to what I could only assume would be a difficult, doomed life, the life of a transgender woman. It seemed impossible, given the stone foundation of paternity upon which my manhood was now built, that anything could ever erode it. When I fell in love with Deedie, I swore that the whole transgender thing would be sealed away forever, and that I would henceforward focus exclusively on the woman that I loved, and the family we might create. The transgender business, which had haunted my life for my first thirty years on earth, was a secret I was determined no soul would ever know. I would live my life in a spirit of humility and gratitude. I would, in the years to come, be unexpectedly and miraculously healed.

But now and again I’d hear songs like this, or I’d see the face of a woman who looked like me, and I’d remember the words a ghost allegedly spoke to the poet Shelley, the day before he drowned. How long, the spirit asked, do you intend to remain content?

As he had lain upon his deathbed eight years earlier, my father had seen a specter not so unlike that one. It was malignant melanoma that did him in; toward the end it had spread to his liver and his brain.

The spirit he’d seen was dressed up like an orchestra conductor, Dad told me. I’d taken a leave from grad school, down at Johns Hopkins, in order to be with him in his final days. He came to me with his baton, said Dad. And asked me to come away with him, and conduct his orchestra.

Copyright © 2025 by Jennifer Finney Boylan