Character Analysis
Mr. Lisbon is the fortyish father of five teenage girls. Surrounded by women, sent out to the drugstore for mass quantities of Tampax, dealing with five girls all having their periods at the same time—that's gotta be a challenge.
Those five days each month were the worst for Mr. Lisbon, who had to dispense aspirin as though feeding the ducks and comfort crying jags that arose because a dog was killed on TV. He loved his daughters, they were precious to him, but he longed for the presence of a few boys. (1.38)
He's a conventional, if somewhat passive and non-macho, suburban father who drives a station wagon and takes care of his house. Here's a quick rundown:
Mr. Lisbon taught high-school math. He was thin, boyish, stunned by his own gray hair. He had a high voice, and when Joe Larson told us how Mr. Lisbon had cried when Lux was later rushed to the hospital during her own suicide scare, we could easily imagine the sound of his girlish weeping. (1.9)
Mr. Lisbon is a Catholic, but isn't as devout or as strict as his wife. When he finds the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary after Cecilia's attempt, he says,
[…] in a defeated voice, "We baptized her, we confirmed her, and now she believes in this crap." (1.19)
He's the more liberal of the girls' parents. He has to persuade his wife to let the girls have the party after Cecilia's suicide attempt; imagine how he felt after the outcome of that party. Amazingly, he also persuades her to allow the girls go out on the group date with Trip and friends. That doesn't turn out so well, either.
Down Dad
After Cecilia's death, Mr. Lisbon tries to keep on keepin' on, but he gradually withdraws:
Mrs. Lisbon once more took charge of the house while Mr. Lisbon receded into a mist. When we saw him after that, he had the look of a poor relation. By late August, in the weeks of preparation before school, he began leaving by the back door as though sneaking out. (3.20)
Once school starts in September, he manages to teach with his "usual enthusiasm" (3.30) but eats lunch alone at his desk and isn't as energetic as he once was. He seems preoccupied, and talks to plants in the hall. At home, the leaves go unraked that autumn. He backs out of the Day of Grieving organized by the school, and years later, hardly remembers it. Day of Grieving?
"Try decade," he told us. (3.84)
As the lockdown continued and the girls weren't seen anymore,
Mr. Lisbon alone left the house. […] Mr. Lisbon became the medium through which we glimpsed the girls' spirits. We saw them through the toll they exacted on him: his puffy red eyes that hardly opened any more to see his daughters wasting away; his shoes scuffed from climbing stairs forever threatening to lead to another inert body; his sallow complexion dying in sympathy with them; and his lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had. (4.56)
It's a heartbreaking sight for the boys at school:
[…] he walked the halls with a fake smile and welling eyes, or in shows of boyish spirits shouted, "Hip check!" and pinned students against a wall. […] He began to look skeletal beneath his green suit, as though Cecilia, in dying, had tugged him briefly to the other side. (4.56)
Six weeks after the girls were taken out of school, Mr. Lisbon is fired. The boys aren't sure why, but they speculate that his withdrawn behavior was upsetting people, and anyway, who could trust a father who couldn't control his own daughters? After that, "the house truly died" (4.63). Mr. Lisbon does manage to string up some Christmas lights in January. Other than that, he's missing in action.
After the horrible night of the triple suicides, "Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon gave up the attempt to lead a normal life" (5.9). They moved to a hotel while the house was emptied out waiting to be sold. On their last few days at that house, the boys are amazed that they could do anything at all. They sleep in the empty house in sleeping bags, including Mary, who survived that night. After Mary succeeds in killing herself, he's seen at the funeral, then he and his wife leave town in the middle of the night.
When the boys interview Mr. Lisbon years later, he's reluctant to discuss those tragic years. By that time, he's divorced and living alone in a small studio apartment. Obviously, he's lived through the unthinkable: desperately trying to pull his dead daughter off the fence she impaled herself on; watching the rest of his daughters waste away and kill themselves and not understanding why.
He does share a little, though. He tells the boys he thought Cecilia was happy about her party on the day she killed herself. Afterwards, he realized that his girls were strangers to him and he never knew how to connect.
He listened to the sounds [coming from the girls' room] as though they could tell him what the girls were feeling and how to comfort them. […] "I couldn't go in, " Mr. Lisbon confessed to us years later. "I didn't know what to say." (3.18)
Neither do we.