The Spell of My Father’s Wedding Ring

INSIDE an old lockbox in my filing cabinet is my father’s wedding ring, a plain gold band that he gave to me in the late 1980s, saying he didn’t need it anymore. After 32 years of marriage, during which he had raised seven children with my mother, he left her. He had started an affair and wanted a divorce but my mother refused.

My father felt relatively free about his life during this period, and he began arranging get-togethers for the two of us. He would drive down from Albany while I would take an Amtrak train up from my decrepit East Village apartment, and we would spend the afternoon together wandering the streets of Rhinebeck, N.Y., talking.

It was during one of our meetings that he gave me the ring.

“I don’t need this anymore,” he said, dropping it into my hand, “and I want you to have it. Maybe you can use it some day.”

He looked at me meaningfully. I was 25 years old, and it was clear he hoped I would do better at marriage than he had.

I didn’t know what to do with the ring. I was so accustomed to seeing it on my father’s hand that just holding it in my own palm felt wrong. Worse, when I asked my father if he had told my mother about giving me his ring, he said no.

“This has nothing to do with her,” he said. “Besides, it was going to be yours sooner or later.”

My father often liked to bring up or allude to his death, as if the subject comforted him. When I asked him about suicide, he would say only that suicide was a sin. This answer was no help at all, and for years I expected that one day I would learn my father had killed himself.

Eventually, I decided I would start wearing my father’s ring — on the ring finger of my left hand, where a married person wears it. It took days for me to feel comfortable with its oddly weighty presence. And I tended to conceal it rather than flash it around when I went out.

Soon enough, though, people I knew began asking me in all seriousness if I had married. The question astonished and thrilled me every time, if only because it suggested that my status as a terminally single person had been replaced with an unearned reassessment of my maturity, worth and desirability.

But relations and positions would be normalized in seconds.

“Are you crazy?” I’d ask. “Me?”

Still, I would retain the buoyant sensation of having escaped being sick of my single self. Their reaction to the ring had broken the spell, erased the distance between how I regarded myself and who I really was.

In some cases, it even put me in a superior position, as if I had vaulted into adulthood in a single bound, leaving behind those people and their youthful daydreams.

Another topic that seemed to come up in almost every conversation I had about the ring was what marriage meant. What did the figure of a married man represent to me? I had always thought it was a kind of stability. And there was also the implicit suggestion that a woman wouldn’t want to marry a man unless he could display a certain capability as a lover. Therefore, if you were married, you were doing something right.

From this point, however, my friends’ ideas about the monotony of having sex with the same person for the rest of your life would infiltrate the discussion, and spill over into the possibility that a little something on the side, under such numbing conditions, would be too much to pass up.

It was through these conversations that I was made to understand that most of the people I knew saw marriage not as a declaration of commitment but as a gateway to infidelity. Ergo, to the right woman, preferably a married one, this ring was a sexy signifier, an invitation. All I had to do was lie about what it was doing on my hand.

It was no surprise that none of my friends were married at the time. But my ring still had the allure of a talisman to them, and they hungrily stood around it, warming their hands by its supernatural glow while speculating on its powers and qualities.

For weeks I kept the ring on wherever I went and gradually grew accustomed to its presence, noticing it only when it would knock against a pole in a subway car or a coffee mug.

It made a sound, something I usually tried to avoid doing with everything else. I liked it every time I heard it. It made me view myself as a grown-up, even if I knew that the ring and my new persona were nothing more than a disguise.

Yet I wanted to see if the fantasies my friends were feeding me about my ring were in any way true. So, when I was sitting alone in a bar, I would leave my left hand on the bar, the ring in full view, and wait.

Occasionally, women would talk to me. And then they would look at the ring. They would ask me if I was married, and I would say no (I couldn’t lie about it, after all). Then they would hesitate, knowing there was a story there that they didn’t really want to hear. And then they would walk away.

And I would go home alone.

I eventually took the ring off, put it in the lockbox, and forgot about it.

Jump ahead 20 years or so.

When the woman I would marry and I were choosing wedding rings, I remembered my father’s ring and dug it out of its lockbox. I put it on and we looked at it with a kind of wistful fondness, or I did, certainly.

But we knew immediately that we didn’t want to reuse it for our marriage. The taint of my father’s unhappiness was soaked into it. We wanted to start fresh.

Then I tried to remove the ring, but it was stuck, and well stuck. I joked about it, feeling like Lucille Ball in some stupid predicament in “I Love Lucy.” But the harder I tried to pull the ring off, the more my finger swelled and the more it hurt.

My brain began producing a paranoid logic.

The stuck ring was a sign, a message from my father, who by then had been dead seven years, although not from suicide.

“Are you sure this is what you want?” I heard him asking. “It’s easy to get into and hard to get out of. You don’t have to decide right now.”

I managed to push his voice aside only to have it replaced by a panicked voice telling me that my father hadn’t actually wanted to die. He had wanted to live. Drifting in limbo, he realized the error of his initial attitude toward life, and was ready to try again. He had finagled a return and was now living inside the ring. I would never get it off my finger and would have to spend the rest of my life living my father’s life for him.

“This is really bad,” I said to my girlfriend.

Pushing me toward the kitchen, she said: “Run it under cold water. The swelling will come down.”

I did and she was right. It was funny later, but I was stunned (and embarrassed) at how terrified I had become, and worse, where my mind had taken me. With the episode past, I discovered I was still left with a bilious anger toward my father.

I had never wanted to inherit his unhappiness, his disappointments about his marriage or his life. And it seemed I had them in me without even realizing it.

I put the thing back in the lockbox.

A FEW years after he had left her, my father went back to my mother. His cancer had been diagnosed, his affair had fallen apart and he was alone. He couldn’t take care of himself, and my mother, who, as she said, never stopped loving him, was ready to take him back and help him through his illness.

They stayed together until he died. And I heard my father say more than once during those last years that he had been foolish, that he didn’t deserve my mother.

After my father died, my mother very quickly got rid of his things — his clothes, shoes, shaving kit — anything, as she put it, that would remind her of him. Yet despite doing this, she missed him terribly.

She and I were talking about him one afternoon during this clearing-out, walking our way through various memories, when I brought up the get-togethers he and I used to have. I remembered his wedding ring and asked my mother if she wanted it to keep with hers.

“If he didn’t want it, I don’t want it, either,” she said, suddenly glaring at me.

And with that, our gentle reminiscence snapped shut.