My little boy is having a difficult time of it in school this year, in gym, in math, and in classes stressing public speaking. And just about everywhere else, it seems. (At home with me. With my wife. My daughter. My boy seems to be having a difficult time of it in school every year now when the new term starts, but each year seems to grow worse. He is, I'm afraid, starting to "let me down.")
He hates gym and public speaking. He used to like gym. (He never liked public speaking.) Now he dreads gym, with its incessant regimen of exercises that he cannot perform well: chinning, push-ups, rope climbing, and tumbling. He abhors rope climbing, chinning, and push-ups and is stricken almost speechless (you can almost see that bulbous, leaden lump jamming his throat) by this reluctance even to talk about them (as though merely to mention his hatred of these ridiculous gymnastic demonstrations would be to violate some clandestine taboo surrounding them and to be sentenced to perform them awkwardly and feebly, with everyone watching, still one more time). My boy hates Forgione, the squat, barrel-chested, simian gym teacher with forests of black, wiry hair curling out all over him everywhere, even through the weave of his white T-shirt, except on his head, who can break me in two with his bare hands if he ever decided he wanted to, and who tries to be helpful and encouraging to my frightened little boy in his blunt, domineering, primitive way and only succeeds in frightening him further.
"He doesn't have a good competitive spirit," Forgione asserts to me complainingly. "He lacks a true will to win."
"I don't have one either, Mr. Forgione," I reply to him tamely, in an effort to get on his good side. "Maybe he gets it from me."
"That can't be true, Mr. Slocum," Forgione says. "Everybody's got a competitive spirit."
"Then why doesn't he?"
"That's what I mean," says Forgione.
My boy can turn frozen and look mucous green with trepidation some mornings when he knows he will have to go to gym later that day, or deliver some kind of oral report in one of his classes, and he will disclose to us that he doesn't feel well and thinks he might want to vomit. His chest feels empty, he says, and sometimes his arms and legs feel drained of all substance as well (if I understand correctly what he is trying to say. He feels he might fall if he tries to stand, simply sag and fold inward and sink to the floor like someone deflated and without skeleton). He does not like to have to make oral reports in class.
("It is good training for him," the school says. I know from my own small experience at addressing groups that it is no training at all.)
Sometimes, he has hinted, he will not do as well as he is able to on written reports in order to escape being called upon to read what he has written aloud from the front of the classroom as an example to others of what is superior. (He lacks the true will to win.) He never likes to be called upon in class unless he is positive he has the right answer. (He almost never, his teachers tell us, raises his hand to volunteer a reply.) He is a gifted, hard-working student; he is inhibited; he is a quick, intuitive learner. He is afraid to be wrong. He always seems to know much more about everything than he is disposed to reveal. (He thinks a lot. I can't always make him out.) He fathoms privately, his clear face grave and remote. He worries. (Or seems to. Sometimes when I ask him what he looks so worried about, he glances up at me with a flicker of astonishment and replies that he isn't worrying. I don't know if he is lying to me or not. I worry a lot that he may be worrying.)
It is impossible for us to tell anymore whether he likes school or not (he used to like school. Or seemed to) although he generally manages to adapt to the different people and procedures of each new school year and then begins enjoying himself immensely. It takes a while; and he girds himself for the effort. He is distant with people he doesn't like; he grows close swiftly with schoolmates he does. (He is guileful enough by instinct, it seems, to get on friendly and respectful terms with tough guys and bullies.) He makes many friends. (He has started to keep things from me, and I don't like it. I ask questions. I try to pry details loose from him. He tries to hold on to them. I don't want him to. I want him to confide in me.)
Once he does make friends in school and sees himself adapting capably to whatever new systems of authority and social codes prevail, everything tends (or has tended till now. Knock wood. Ha, ha) sooner or later to turn out fine: he does well; he survives; and he celebrates the miracle of his survival with boisterous, optimistic horseplay and industry unless something, even one thing of some meaning to him, goes wrong for him drastically (this year so far it is gym and Forgione, with those push-ups, tumbling, and chinning, and that vertical rope climbing to the high ceiling of the gymnasium with its theoretical danger of growing scared and dizzy and falling, or freezing in panic halfway up, or down, although nobody I've ever heard of has. Some kids his age, he tells me, can already go almost halfway up without using their feet. Like monkeys. He, like me, never will be able to — he can't get more than a single hoist above the resting knot at the bottom of the thick, bristling rope — but I won't ever want to climb ropes again, and he does. And public speaking. This year, the school has decided to emphasize public speaking in the early grades. Why? They don't explain. Are they related, public speaking and physical agility?
I am reminded of those mysterious, musty dreams of danger I have — I think everybody must have them — in which I am unable to move any muscles and unable to speak or scream or even to utter that single word I want to, Help, unable to make any noises at all except the ones that force themselves upward through my throat to wake my wife and then fill me with a delicious sense of gladness when I understand that she is calling my name and shaking my shoulder to awaken me. I guess I must really hate her at times. Often I will pretend to be asleep for a few moments after I realize I am not and continue my unintelligible moaning just so that she will have to continue trying to awaken me. I like the concern in her voice. My wife feels responsible for my bad dreams; I am pleased she does, make no effort to exonerate her, and feel she really is to blame when I have one. I use them to punish her. I keep digressing to me. I keep digressing from me. I wish my wife had bigger tits. I wish my wife had smaller tits. I think I really do love my little boy, though, the way a father should. At least I feel I do), and then he is apt to come very close to falling completely to pieces, to crumpling like a frail, inanimate bundle of little boy's clothes or spilling out emotionally all over the room like a sack of broken chips of some kind — potato, poker, wooden — into a frenzy of melancholy anguish that is at once both petrifying and shattering (to us as well as to him. My wife and I go numb with terror at even the vaguest possibility of something wrong with either of our children. Thanks to Derek. My wife does not want my little boy to grow up to be a fag and worries sneakily that he will. I know she does, because I worry often about that same thing, but not as often as she does. I don't want my boy to be a fag. I have no reason yet to think he will. But I just don't want him to).
My little boy is only nine years old and not yet able to deal like an adult with certain kinds of opposition and frustrations (and we do not know yet what all those kinds are; it seems to us he often does not even want to try; warding things off becomes for him so futile and exhausting an endeavor as to be, at times, possibly just not worthwhile; he would almost sooner give up, stop struggling; it would be so much easier and more sensible, his regretful manner of tired resignation often implies, to simply stop striving, yield, and let the very worst of all those things he foresees overtake, violate, and destroy him, to succumb and once and for all be done. He used to be afraid of weird things rising from beneath his bed. Better to let them all rise up, he may feel now, than continue waiting constantly for it all to happen to him anyway no matter what precautions are taken, since sooner or later, inevitably, it must, and never feeling safe enough for long to cease listening for mortal disaster's relentless approach. It comes on footsteps that are almost audible. I think he may feel this way about himself, because I feel this same way about both of us).
(I know how it feels to have to feel this way.)
(It doesn't feel good.)
I know how it feels to have to begin speculating ominously weeks before each summer ends and the new school year begins about the innumerable ordeals massing ahead of him. (I know how it feels to be notified of an office meeting scheduled to take place and have no idea what it's going to be about. I know that I am already troubled grimly and sadly about whether or not I will be allowed to make even my three-minute speech at the company convention in Puerto Rico this year, let alone about what will become of me if I do have Kagle's job by then and have to take charge of the whole event. Will I be good? As good as I know my three-minute speech last year would have been if Green had let me give it? I think I hate that bastard Green too, but I'd rather not admit that to my wife. Why would I want to admit to anyone that I hate and fear the man I work for, yet continue to work for him? Why do I let myself agonize over what even at best would have been no more than an amusing three-minute speech? The sky is falling, tumbling down on all our heads, and I sit shedding tears over an unhealing scratch on a very tender vanity. At least my boy's problems are real. They occupy space. They dangle from the ceiling of a gymnasium and glower at him from the dark and evil face of a physical education teacher.) To his young and practical mind it seems so pointless to have to go through one school year making complicated adjustments to people, young, old, good, neutral, and bad, only to have the relationships all terminated when spring ends and summer comes (for him, and for me now too, the year begins in September and closes out in June. Summer marks time. Summer is for taking inventory, adding bank balances, and fucking around in); and then have to go through the same harrowing process in the fall of adapting to new relationships that he knows from the start will be dissolved as well the following spring (as methodically and insensibly as the changes in seasons themselves, and for no more beneficial purpose. The seasons do not change because we want them to), leaving him isolated once more outside some sheltering context (the home, obviously, has not been substantial enough) inside which he can orient himself securely with some conviction that it is going to last awhile and maintain meanings and directions that will not blur and alter suddenly without explanation. (Where is a frame of reference now for any of us that extends even the distance to the horizon, only eighteen miles away?) My boy puzzles over things like that.
("How far is the horizon?"
"Eighteen miles at sea level," I answer rapidly. "Or only fourteen. I forget which."
"Why sea level?"
"I don't know. Maybe if you're up higher you can see farther.")
He puzzles over things like that well in advance (although not in these words, which are mine. He is only nine and lacks my vocabulary. Where was I when I was nine? Isolated among friends in elementary school too, where it was mandatory that I see a dentist twice a year to have my teeth fixed and have my head examined once or twice a year by a nurse right in the classroom, along with all the other kids, whites, Blacks, Jews, Italians, for nits, without any of us ever being told what nits were, although intonations signaled they were bad. That was a test I always passed. I don't know how I would have survived if I had ever failed. Once a girl peed in her seat in the classroom during a geography test and everyone knew it. I don't know how she survived. I don't think I could have ever survived if I had ever peed in my seat in the classroom during a geography test).
When my boy puzzles over things in advance, he tends to puzzle over things that perplex or torment him. (He almost never sees anything good in store for him. He has wishes; he never sees them coming true, even though he knows I promise and give him just about everything he asks for and everything else I think he wants and should have. When he does chance to think about something pleasant that is likely to happen to him, his reveries turn negative: he begins grieving it won't. He loses it before he even has it. He is like our salesmen, and me, wired by experience to expect, and long for, the worst — just to have it over with.) They pollute his summers for him. (The early part of each summer is marred for him by the need to acclimate himself to the surroundings of whatever beach or country house we have decided to rent that year. He won't go away to camp, and neither will my daughter ever go again, although they don't enjoy being with us. We never know what to do with Derek. It is always so embarrassing to hide him; and equally embarrassing to disclose him. The latter part of the summer is ruined for him by the approaching fall. Sometimes, to my chagrin as well as his, the cares of early summer and late summer overlap, so that if one set subsides for a while, the other is present already, gnawing at his peace of mind. Sometimes he pisses me off, and I begin to worry about everything too, including the feelings of enmity toward him that start fermenting inside me. I'm afraid I am beginning to dislike him.)
I know (and am annoyed) that weeks before the end of summer he begins fretting despondently about all the trials he knows are lying in wait for him: the schoolwork, the accomplishments expected of him in gym (he welcomes running and dodging games, at which he is swift, nimble, and foxy), the new teachers, the old teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the shop teacher, and the science teacher (he has always been leery of shop teachers and science teachers. Perhaps because they are men), the music teacher (will this one also require him to stand up in turn and sing solo a few notes in order to determine into which section of the chorus to classify him for those times when they have to perform at the weekly school assemblies?), the student monitors from grades higher than his own (boys bigger and stronger than himself with license to order him about, and older, taller girls with badges and arm bands of authority and with embryonic breasts starting to swell forward toward him mysteriously and threateningly. I remember how it was when I was small), and the boys and girls familiar to him from the preceding school year who will not be in his class again. He laments the loss of children he knows, boys and girls, even those he does not like, who move away into different communities or are transferred by their parents into private schools (more and more of us seem to be transferring our children into private schools, which are expensive and not much good, and then transferring them out again into other private schools that are not much better. We don't like the heads of these private schools. More and more things seem to be slipping into a state of dissolution, and soon there will be nothing left. No more newspapers, magazines, or department stores. No more movie houses. Just discount stores and drugs. More and more of us, I think — not just me — really don't care what happens to our children, as long as it doesn't happen to them too soon) or the one or two who drowned or got hit by cars during the summer (the incidence of accidents suffered each year by children we know corresponds with portentous accuracy to the incidence of accidents suffered by adults I know in the company. Martha in our department is going crazy), and those others who, as a consequence of inexorable and unfathomable processes in operation in offices downstairs (adults toiling assiduously with records of living children that are dead already on sheets and cards in folders and cabinets) have been separated from him (like our tonsils and our baby teeth) and scattered about into different classrooms. He hates changing from teachers who have been kind to him.
("What are you worrying about?" I will ask him when I can no longer endure in silence the thought that he might be worrying alone.
"I'm not worrying," he will reply.
I wish I could be more of a help to him. I wish he would let me try.)
"What are you worrying about?" I will ask again.
"I'm not worrying," he answers, looking up at me an instant with a glimmer of surprise.
"What makes you look so glum?"
"I was thinking."
"What were you thinking about," I persist with a smile, "that makes you look so worried?"
"I don't know. I forgot already."
"You looked so glum."
"I don't know what that means."
"Sad."
"I'm not sad."
"Tired?"
"Maybe I'm sleepy."
"Do you stay up late?"
"Sometimes I don't fall asleep right away."
I sometimes wonder if he really worries as much as I think he does. I sometimes think he worries more. He is a cautious little thing (or seems to be. I know I worry for him and expect the worst to happen to him also. So does my wife. I used to worry about my daughter too when she was little, but now she is past fifteen, and the worst hasn't happened. What is the worst? I'm not sure). Maybe the worst has happened and went unrecognized, because my boy, now that I look back, has never had an easy time of things (and my daughter is having a lousy time of it now, unless she is acting too. Wouldn't it be funny if both were acting more unhappy than they are merely to spite and upset us? Ha, ha. I wouldn't find it funny at all. Even as an infant in a playpen he always seemed to be siphoning everything around him in through large, mysterious, intelligent eyes and judging everything he absorbed tentatively before making up his mind and allowing himself to react — even when he reacted spontaneously, as when grinning or giggling suddenly, there always seemed to be a premeditated delay, an infinitesimal lag, but a lag nonetheless, during which a decision had been arrived at. Even an offer of money, or an ice cream pop, would bring a moment's weighty consideration before acceptance. I lose patience with him often. I shout and shame him sometimes — then deny I shouted and try to persuade him I was only being emphatic. It's no way to build confidence. I try to be generous and companionable to make up for it.
"Say yes or no," I demand of him in explanation. "What difference would it make if you are wrong? What would you lose by making a mistake?"
He is confused.
He is afraid of making mistakes.
So he makes them with me by vacillating).
I know he must wonder now why his life has been arranged to be so unceasingly difficult (why I shout at him so frequently, or seem to, why I undoubtedly do raise my voice) or if there ever will come a time of tranquillity and bliss for him in which no new implacable demons are waiting in ambush for him, stirring in time as the moment of contact draws near, making ready for him, practically in view. (I know I wonder all of that for him. When will he be able to relax and take things easy, so I can relax and take things easy too?)
"Tell me, what do you want to do?" I ask him so many times out of disconsolate, moody concern. "What do you want to be?"
"I would like to learn how to drive a car someday."
"Everybody does that."
"If I can. Do you think I will?"
He likes the smell of gasoline and is afraid of fire, height, and speed (but not of airplanes, if he is in one).
How weary (I feel) he must be already of challenges and adversity, like a spent and weatherbeaten old man (homunculus), or a resigned, moribund, whitehaired old woman embracing her own demise with relief. Often, when something of a particularly eroding nature seems to be preying on his mind, a shadow of gaunt consternation will fall across his fragile, fine features, a stricken look of transfixing amazement, as though he is troubled deeply by the fact that he is troubled at all.
He hardly seems altogether at ease anywhere but at home, although he has always laughed a great deal when with people he knows. He makes jokes. He has wit and a talent for giddy and imaginative tricks. They are mainly verbal, always harmless, usually successful by one light or another. He seeks safety and invisibility in humor. (I do too. I find it in sex, which is always humorous too.) And he labors industriously to surround himself inside a womblike atmosphere of compassion and good spirit and survive there eternally (like the me I really think I am, I think, swaddled cunningly inside my cocoon, hiding secretly in a foxhole no one knows is there), dissembling, peeping out guardedly nearly all the time (one part of me anyway) to reassure himself (myself) that our outer shell of protection is still there and intact (and we are there and intact too), recoiling hastily (searching in horror for some unobstructed avenue of escape, I am sure, and searching in horror in vain) when we spy or think we spy any omen of any hazard of puncture, deflation, and disintegration. (He is upset by basketball, which he does not understand.) His impulse always is to be endearing; he wants no enemies, dislikes disagreements, and does not enjoy competition. He feels least in jeopardy when everyone around him is happy and sated with contentment (he feigns complete indifference to Derek when we let him and tries to pretend he is able to ignore him); he feels most in jeopardy in proximity to somebody sullen or someone manifesting anger, especially me. (He is as much afraid of me at times, I believe, as he is of any sullen stranger glaring to himself in a cafeteria, or even as he is of Forgione, or Forgione's assistant, with their demands for rope climbing, chinning, tumbling, push-ups, and basketball games that my little boy finds impossible to do well and baffling to understand.) He is the only member of my household who hesitates to come into my study to interrupt me. (He is even too diffident to come inside to say good night to me at bedtime, though I keep asking him to do so and keep assuring him that I will not mind.
"Good night," he will call out to me from the hallway, keeping himself so deeply withdrawn that I will be unable to see him when I turn my head and look up, and recede skittishly into his own room unless I call right back:
"Good night. Come in here a minute. Will you?")
Unless I make him. Once I do make him step inside my study to talk to me, we have little to say to each other. He brings a barrier with him. Or I have one of my own. But I do want to talk to him. We have nothing to talk about. I have to search for questions. He is unresponsive. He makes me interrogate him; he gives one-word replies. I think he knows I am not really interested in answers to the questions I ask him — he seems cross and stubborn with me for even trying.
He is wary of strange men with mean, sinister faces and of wild-eyed men and women in the street who talk out loud explosively to themselves. (He keeps an eye out for them always. Many of them use such filthy language.) He is unnerved by erratic behavior of any kind (even mine when I'm drunk or kidding around in certain ways in public or with his friends. He prefers me to remain dignified when other people are around). If I do lose my temper with my wife or my daughter, or if one or the other of them begins shouting at me, my boy is apt to continue fretting over our abrupt motions and cruel threats and accusations long after the argument has ended and the rest of us are back on favorable terms. My wife and I make endeavors now not to quarrel in front of the children, mainly because of the bad effect our fights have on him (and the salubrious effect they generally have on my daughter. They cheer her up. My daughter will come sniffing up avidly whenever she scents the elements of a marital quarrel brewing and will often gratuitously, and shrewdly, supply the remark needed to make it erupt, although she will sometimes blanch and shrink out of sight in dismay if the outbursts she had hurried up so enthusiastically to observe, and so hopefully to participate in, turn more vicious and hurtful than she could have envisioned. There were times, in large, noisy, crowded cafeterias or restaurants near sports arenas, circuses, or shopping centers, or in hotel lobbies or railroad stations or other cavernous, ceilinged areas in which we found ourselves surrounded by strangers, when he would feel that someone there was glaring at him with hot fury and cold dislike, planning something hurtful. He told me this; and sometimes he would describe and single out the person, always without daring to turn his own face around to look again. When I moved my own eyes swiftly to gaze at the man he was indicating, I was unable to be positive he was wrong. But I always told him he was imagining it. I did this to reassure him). He has a patient habit of mulling things over privately for long periods of time, roving through his mind in search of keys to secret riddles, and I am often unable to determine positively if he is indeed bogged down in something clutching and constraining or if he is merely relaxing and I am only imagining that he is in difficulty. (I make him enigmatic. I do not want my boy to be troubled by things he is unwilling to discuss with me, even if I am prominent among the things that are troubling him. I do not like him to keep things from me. I would like to know he confides in me. I would like to be certain he is eager to answer all my questions fully, even though his answers might be lacking in excitement and amount to little of interest to either of us. How can I know something he is thinking about is boring until I know what it is? I would like him to want to tell me everything he thinks of even before it occurs to me to ask. He is, after all, really my only son, and I think he should understand how much I need him.)
He is a good-looking son, kind and inquisitive, and everyone likes him (or seems to. You never can tell with people. Although he can. I know I do). He has fine, sandy hair, a sense of humor impish and intelligent, and pale, slight shoulders and arms. He is not strong. He is slim. His health is good. (We are pleased with him. My daughter is pleased with him now too, although she used to be envious and nasty, and we all enjoy talking about him to others.) It is like pulling teeth from him sometimes to get him to complain. (We tend to think of him as happy and to diagnose his occasional episodes of disobedience, resistance, or distress as symptoms of fatigue or sore throat and fever or as normal lapses into tolerable, childish misconduct.) He is a good little boy and always has been. He is, as my wife or I reflect aloud with pride on occasions, almost too good to be true (and he isn't! Something's wrong, and I think I have always known it, although I have never been brave enough to say so or even to face the thought without diverging from it in haste. All my wife worries about is that he not grow up to be a homosexual, although there is not a single reason to suspect he will. I worry about that only a little.
"He's being good just to spite me!" my daughter will allege impulsively in his presence during some of those playful or tempestuous disputes one or the other is always instigating, sometimes in humor, sometimes with virulence. "Nobody is that good all the time."
"Lesbo," he retorts winningly.
And we are all compelled to chuckle in affectionate appreciation, although my wife is not certain such language is appropriate in front of us or healthy or proper for either one of our children to use, or even know).
But something is wrong, I think, although I have always kept my chilling doubts to myself (as though by not taking notice of anything unpleasant that might be emerging, it will go away. There are people who believe they cure their own cancers that way. My wife. Something bad is going to happen to him. I know that now. I know it will. And something bad is going to happen to me too, because it does happen to him. Perhaps it is happening to him already. I think it is. It started far back) with the foolish, unarticulated prayer that (primarily for my benefit, rather than his) it would heal itself adequately by and by and spare me the anguish and difficulty of having to deal with it, or at least that it would remain dormant and undetected by anyone else until I have lived out my allotted three score years and ten in joy, prosperity, and fullest contentment (ha, ha. And am dead, of natural causes) and can no longer be harmed by whatever tragedy it is that pains and cripples him severely (I can't stand pain) or strikes him down fatally. I am skeptical about my chances, for I have noticed that people tend to grow up pretty much the way they began; and hidden somewhere inside every bluff or quiet man and woman I know, I think, is the fully formed, but uncompleted, little boy or girl that once was and will always remain as it always has been, suspended lonesomely inside its own past, waiting hopefully, vainly, to resume, longing insatiably for company, pining desolately for that time to come when it will be safe and sane and possible to burst outside exuberantly, stretch its arms, fill its lungs with invigorating air, without fear at last, and call:
"Hey! Here I am. Couldn't you find me? Can't we be together now?"
And hiding inside of me somewhere, I know (I feel him inside me. I feel it beyond all doubt), is a timid little boy just like my son who wants to be his best friend and wishes he could come outside and play.
On the positive side, he seems to be outgrowing his fear of bees, spiders, caterpillars, crabs, and jellyfish, he tells me, and I want very much to believe him.
"I am," he repeats, insistently. "The last time I saw a bee I didn't even want to move away."
"But were you afraid?" I question him closely. "Did the bee come near you?"
"I was with someone," he admits.
He is marvelous at math and good at science, but no longer cares to excel in either (to the chagrin of his teachers, who express disappointment with him. He is puzzled by their disapproval). Mixed in with all his confusion, I'm sure, is an unresolved Oedipal conflict of staggering dimensions and attendant horrifying castration fears (mine, of course), but he is still too young, ha, ha, to be bothered by any of that stuff now.
He thinks (I think) that he is much smaller than he actually is. I think he thinks he is funny looking and disappointing and that we want to abandon him, take him somewhere far, and leave him there. For what reason we should want to do this, he doesn't know; he doesn't say. (Maybe he believes we want to abandon him because we think he's too small. He isn't small. He is average, and only seems small in comparison to boys his age who are taller. He is a little small, and it's no use telling him he isn't.)
It used to be that when we brought him someplace he had never been before, or even to certain places he had been, to somebody's home, or to a public place that was deserted or one that was noisy and crowded (dark or bright didn't matter. He didn't like crowds; he didn't like emptiness. Or the taking him there. Or taking him anywhere. When we went, he was not convinced we were going where we told him we were going until we got there and not sure when we were there that we intended to bring him back), he would maneuver craftily to keep his shoulder or hand against my wife or me, persevere at remaining in physical touch with one or the other of us, at least until he had scrutinized his surroundings and us to his satisfaction and concluded that the time had not yet come (that it was not yet the occasion of his doom. Sentence had already been passed. Only the moment of execution remained in doubt). He wants to hold on tight to what he knows he has (even though he is far from pleased by what he knows he has). He does not want to lose us. He does not want to be alone, not even at home, and usually leaves the door to his room open. He doesn't spend much time inside it. (He is disturbed when he comes upon doors to other rooms in the house that are closed. The door to my daughter's room is always closed, almost as a flamboyant gesture of spite. Ours may be open or closed. And evenings and mornings when my wife and I make love, or one of us thinks there's a possibility we might, it is closed. We don't feel we want anybody to watch. Group sex will never be for us.) He does not want to be with people he doesn't trust; and he does not trust people he has not known long. He does not always trust us. (So who else does he have?) He would take hold of our hands and be unwilling to let go. We were often embarrassed. We made him let go.
"Let go," we would coax. "Let go of my hand. Please let go now."
The blood would drain from his cheeks and lips (which would turn blue. His lips would take on a bluish tinge when he was very tense). He would tremble, swallow, and gag; especially if, after forcing him to let go, we then also forced him to go off somewhere alone to play or told him to sit in one place while we moved out of sight to another. He always hung back an instant with a sickened, pleading look whenever we told him to go off someplace and play. So we stopped. (He would not want anyone to see his painful apprehension, even while baring it to us. We have stopped making him come with us to places he does not want to go. He has the choice of remaining home without us. My daughter is usually too busy now to devote much attention to him.) He is always saddened and disconcerted when one of our Black maids or white nurses leaves (even though he might not like her. He usually does not like them and wants no more to do with them than he has to). He feels we may be planning to get rid of him the same way.
"Do you want to get rid of Derek?" he has asked.
"No," I have lied.
"Do you want to get rid of me?"
"No. Why should we want to do that?"
"Do you want to get rid of anyone?"
"No."
"People who work for you?"
"No. Just one. Why should we want to get rid of you? You're too good."
"Suppose I wasn't?"
"You'd still be too good."
"Sometimes," he confesses ruefully, with a soft (perhaps tricky) smile, "I dream at night that I'm all alone someplace and I don't know where to go. And I cry. When I wake up, my eyes are wet. Sometimes," he continues humbly, now that he has decided to tell, "I'm not even asleep when I have this dream."
His look is sad when he finishes, and he waits in silence for my answer with a searching, sagacious air.
(I do not know anymore whether he tells me things like this because they are true, or because he observes how strongly they affect me. Mistrust and acrimony are starting to cloud my emotions toward him. More and more frequently, I am incited to react toward him contentiously and competitively, the way I do toward my daughter. I try not to.
"Are you angry?" he will ask.
"No," I will lie.)
Or, as he asked of us one day when we dressed him in a shirt, knitted tie, and jacket to take him to what we told him was the circus (it was to the circus, although he did not seem to believe it, and he looked so lovable, wholesome, and neat in the pink tattersall shirt I had bought for him in the Boys' Shop at Brooks Brothers and miniature blue blazer we had also bought him from Brooks Brothers, with his shiny, silken hair — which was his own and not from Brooks Brothers, ha, ha — clean, wet, parted, and combed.
"Am I clean enough?" he asked, turning from the full-length mirror after he had been scrubbed and dried and dressed.
"Clean as a whistle," I assured him. "Shiny clean," added my wife): "Are you going to put me in a taxi and leave me there?"
"No, of course not!" I retort with anger, appalled. "Now why in the world would we want to do that?"
He responds with a self-effacing shrug. "I don't know."
But he does seem to know.
"Are you playing games with me?" I demand. "Or do you really mean that? Do you really think we would leave you in a cab? What would the cabdriver say?"
"Can I ask you?" he requests meekly.
"What?"
"What I want to."
"I won't get angry."
"You're angry now."
"I won't get angrier."
"Go ahead," my wife says.
"If you do want to get rid of me, how will you do it?"
"With hugs and kisses," I answer in exasperation. "You're ruining the whole day. This is a hell of a conversation to be having with a handsome boy who's all dressed up in a tattersall shirt, tie, and blazer. And we're taking you to lunch at a fine restaurant too."
"I don't want to go."
"Yes, you do."
"You'll enjoy it."
"I don't even want to go to the circus."
"Yes, you do."
"You'll enjoy it."
I don't like the subway. (I have had scared terrifying fantasies centered around him in which he does get lost, or has been misplaced, on a subway, but never thoughts or dreams in which I leave him someplace deliberately, or even want to. The door closes between us before we can both get on or off together, separating us. Or we are walking together and I turn my head away for an instant, and when I turn it back, he is gone. Or I forget about him: he slips my mind: and I remember only afterward, when he is no longer present and has disappeared without trace from my dream, that he is supposed to be with me. I am unable to guess where he has gone. There is only void. I feel lonely then, and it is not possible to be certain which one of us has been lost. I feel lost too.)
He withdraws from bad smells (he thinks, perhaps, of rot, poison gas, or suffocation. He does not want to fly to the moon, ever, and neither do I) and is alarmed by unexpected loud noises (or creeping, mystifying, stealthy ones. So am I, and so, for that matter, are antelopes. He tends to believe that he is the only one who reacts to such things, and that he is the only one who ever feels in danger). He cannot understand why wars, muggings, bees, math, spiders, basketball, rope climbing, nausea, ferocious, menacing men (real and deduced), and public speaking all have to be there for him to contend with, lying in wait for him visibly, stinking, inevitable, unmovable, and unappeasable (and, frankly, neither do I, although there does not seem to be much that I or anyone else can do about it. It is the custom); why he is expected to work harder at math and learn much more and attach more importance to it just because he is good at it, and why his classroom teachers (most of them female), who used to be so delighted with him because of his precocious insight into numbers, are now disappointed with him because he has lost interest in math for math's sake and why they let him know they are displeased (they feel he has rejected them. He has let them down); or why he must try harder, strive to excel, determine to be better than all other boys in pushball, kickball, throwball, shoveball, dodgeball, baseball, volleyball. (It all does seem indeed like an awful lot of balls for a young little man like him to have to carry around, doesn't it?) He particularly hates basketball. He does not know what he is supposed to do (and will not let me explain to him. He will ask a specific question and accept only the answer to that question and no more. He cuts me off curtly if I try to go on. He rebuffs me). He is never sure when to shoot and when to pass, and he is too self-conscious and ashamed to confess his predicament and ask. He has never made a basket; he is afraid to try; he never shoots unless people on his team all yell at him: "Shoot! Shoot!" Then he shoots and misses. He is never able to keep straight in his mind when he is supposed to block and obstruct and when he is supposed to catch, pass, cooperate, and shoot. He relies on his instincts, and his instincts are not reliable. In the bewildering disintegration of his judgment, he tends to lose track of which of the other kids are on his team and which are on the other as the thumping action swarms and slithers around him (like the grasping, unfurling long legs of a large spider, I would imagine. He has never told me this). He passes the ball away to opponents and commits other errors just as conspicuous, and he is pushed and yelled at as a result (and often does not know why. He does not learn from these mistakes because he does not understand what they are. The danger that he may repeat them hobbles his thinking and increases the chances that he will). Forgione shakes his head in disgust. My boy takes it all in. (I imagine all of this too and melt with pity for him.) My boy would like to make baskets and be able to pass and dribble flawlessly. (He doesn't want to shoot because he knows he will miss.) He is afraid to play basketball and wishes he didn't have to.
By now, he does not want to go to school at all on days he has gym. (Or public speaking. Or knows he must make an oral report or read a written one.) He has gym three days a week; he worries about gym three of the other four days. (Saturdays he takes off. One-day school holidays afford no surcease. Unless they fall on a day he has gym. Then he is ecstatic.) By now, he is afraid of Forgione, and feels despised, and of the assistant gym teacher (whose name he doesn't know; nor does anyone, he seems to indicate, and he does not describe him, so I have no idea how old or large he is), which must be another ghastly danger for him to have to stave off. (How would you like to be a tame, somewhat shy and unaggressive little boy of nine, somewhat shorter and thinner than average, and find yourself put three times a week, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, as regularly and inexorably as the sun sets and the sky darkens and the globe turns black and dead and spooky with no warm promise that anyone anywhere ever will awaken again, into the somber, iron custody of someone named Forgione, older, broader, and much larger than yourself, a dreadful, powerful, broad-shouldered man who is hairy, hard-muscled, and barrel-chested and wears immaculate tight white or navy-blue T-shirts that seem as firm and unpitying as the figure of flesh and bone they encase like a mold, whose ferocious, dark eyes you never had courage enough to meet and whose assistant's name you did not ask or were not able to remember, and who did not seem to like you or approve of you? He could do whatever he wanted to you. He could do whatever he wanted to me.)
"He doesn't try to win," Forgione asserts to me in reproach about my boy after I can no longer, in good conscience, postpone going to the school to remonstrate with him privately on behalf of my boy.
(My wife has been nagging me to speak to Forgione or to complain about Forgione to the principal, which I hesitate to do because that would be sneaky and perhaps unnecessary and perhaps even produce disastrous repercussions.
"It's your child, isn't it?"
It is my child, and I suppose I really can't, in good conscience, have him suffering such nauseating sorrow three mornings a week, as systematically as clockwork, can I, although there may prove to be nothing I can do about alleviating the situation without making a raucous pest of myself, and I am not like that. There must be something I can do. I have a shaming feeling there is something other fathers would do.)
"I'm sure he does his best."
"He doesn't want to beat the next fellow."
"That's his nature, I guess," I murmur apologetically.
"That's not his nature, Mr. Slocum," Forgione persists sententiously. "He wasn't born that way."
"That's his nature now."
"He doesn't have that true competitive spirit. He doesn't try his best to win. He lacks a will to win."
"You aren't going to give him one by picking on him, Mr. Forgione," I venture timidly, in as harmless a tone as I can manage.
"I don't pick on him, Mr. Slocum," he protests earnestly. "I try to help."
"He's afraid of you, Mr. Forgione. He used to enjoy coming to gym and have fun playing games. When he was little, he always liked to play. Now he doesn't. Now he doesn't want to come here at all."
"He has to come here. Unless he has a medical excuse."
"I'll have to get him one."
"You're not blaming that on me?" he protests defensively.
"I'm not trying to blame it on anyone." The advantage, I feel, is now mine, and I continue with more confidence. "I'm trying to find some way of making the situation here easier for him."
"How is he at home?"
"Fine. When he doesn't have to worry about coming here."
"It's no good to make things too easy for him."
"I don't want to make things too easy."
"He has to learn to cope."
"With what? Rope climbing?"
"He has to do that here. He'll have to do it other places."
"Where?"
"In high school. In the army, maybe. He has to do lots of things he doesn't want to if he wants to get ahead."
"I don't want to argue with you."
"I don't."
"I want to try to help him try to work things out."
"I help him," Forgione maintains. "I try to encourage him, Mr. Slocum. I try to give him a will to win. He don't have one. When he's ahead in one of the relay races, do you know what he does? He starts laughing. He does that. And then slows down and waits for the other guys to catch up. Can you imagine? The other kids on his team don't like that. That's no way to run a race, Mr. Slocum. Would you say that's a way to run a race?"
"No." I shake my head and try to bury a smile. (Good for you, kid, I want to cheer out loud. But it's not so good for him.) "I guess not."
I have to chuckle softly (and Forgione grins and chuckles softly also, shaking his trim, swarthy head complacently in the mistaken belief that I am chuckling because I share his incredulity), for I can visualize my boy clearly far out in front in one of his relay races, laughing that deep, reverberating, unrestrained laugh that sometimes erupts from him, staggering with merriment as he toils to keep going and motioning liberally for the other kids in the race to catch up so they can all laugh together and run alongside each other as they continue their game (after all, it is only a game). I am gratified, I am thrilled, by this picture of my boy but I know I must not reveal this to Forgione (or display any mockery or superiority), for Forgione does have him totally at his mercy three times a week and can get back at me effectively by inflicting all sorts of threats and punishments on him (while I am safely encapsulated in my very good job in my office at the company, smothering in accumulating hours, aging and suffocating in stultifying boredom or quivering intolerably with my repressed hysteria, or otherwise ambitiously preoccupied in something idle or sensual. Who can possibly imagine all the vicious crimes and atrocious accidents that might befall my boy or my wife or my daughter or Derek while I am biting my nails at my desk or peeing in a urinal here or ducking encounters with Green or feeling Betty's, Laura's, or Mildred's tit in Red Parker's apartment or flirting with Jane in the narrow corridor outside the Art Department? I can. I can imagine them all, and then fabricate new ones without end. Disasters troop across my mind unbidden and unheralded like independent members of a ghoulish caravan from hell or from some other sick and painful place. I seek skeletons in decaying winding sheets as I study company reports, and they aren't grinning. I smell strange dust. I shudder and am disgusted. I am often contemptuous of myself for imagining the catastrophes I do. They are not worthy of me, and I will often catch myself at it with a scornful rebuke and make myself get busy on something immediately to evade the sinking feeling in my chest and the network of tremors I experience coming alive inside me like a wicker basket of escaping lizards. Or a gale of colorless moths beating their wings. Or I telephone home in order to make sure that everyone is all right, as far as whoever answers the telephone there knows. The most I can generally find out, though, is that there has been no news of anything bad. Even if I undertook daily the fantastic effort of calling each member of my family in turn at the different places they are, I would have no binding assurance that some tragedy had not struck the first one I called by the time I had finished talking to the last one. Of course, I could use three or four telephones and get them all on at the same time. At least that way I could be sure — until I hung up. At least a policeman or ambulance attendant does not pick up the telephone when I call home, and I am thankful for that. In these situations, it's a case of no news being good news, I always say. Until the bad news comes. Ha, ha. I'll bet I haven't said that once. Until just now. Ha, ha again). And I therefore dare not risk offending Forgione, or cause him to dislike me, for my little boy's sake (if not, eventually, for my own. What troubles him troubles me). So I am meek, humble, respectful.
"Does he have to race?" I inquire. I am deferential and disarming with Forgione. I control my urge to be sarcastic: I do feel superior to him, and afraid; I know I am better than he is, and that I am weaker. "Isn't there something else they can do? Or him?"
"Life is hard, Mr. Slocum," Forgione philosophizes (and I would like to tell him to take his philosophizing and shove it up his ass). "He has to learn now that he has to be better than the next fellow. That's one of the lessons we try to teach him today to prepare him for tomorrow."
"I feel sorry for the next fellow."
"Ha, ha."
"Who is the next fellow? Poor bastard."
"Ha, ha."
"Maybe he's the next fellow."
"That's why we train him now. You wouldn't want that to happen to him, would you? You wouldn't want him to be the next fellow that everyone's better than, would you?"
"No. He's this fellow to me. He's the one I care about. That's why I came to the school to speak to you."
"Maybe I am riding him a little too hard. But that's only for his own good. It's better to be too hard than too easy. Sometimes."
"Mr. Forgione, you have children, don't you?" I argue back in a reasoning, slightly more determined manner (inasmuch as he has not yet smitten me dead with the short-handled hammer of his fist and has retreated to a position of vindicating himself). "You know I can't just look the other way and allow a child of mine to come here if he's going to be so upset by things or because he thinks you pick on him. Would you do that?"
"I don't pick on him, Mr. Slocum," Forgione objects quickly, swallowing uncomfortably, his neck bobbing with emotion. "Did he tell you that?"
"No. But I think he feels that way."
"I try to help him. I don't pick on him. It's his friends. It's all his friends that pick on him. They get angry and begin to yell at him when he slows down and starts laughing and doesn't try to win. Or when he passes the basketball deliberately — he does it deliberately, Mr. Slocum, I swear he does. Like a joke. He throws it away — to some kid on the other team just to give him a chance to make some points or to surprise the kids on his own team. For a joke. That's some joke, isn't it? He throws the ball away when someone charges at him. He gets scared. It's his friends that get angry and start to yell at him — not me. I just try to get him to do things right so they won't. That's when they really get sore and turn on him, and then he starts moping and looks like he's gonna cry and says he feels sick or has a sore throat and wants to see the nurse and go home. He acts like a baby. He turns green. I don't like to say this, Mr. Slocum, but sometimes he acts like a baby."
(I could kill Forgione for that; I could kill him right there on the spot because what he says is true and I didn't want anyone to notice.) "He is only a kid, you know." I fake an indulgent laugh.
"He's nine years old."
"How old is that?"
"That's time to start learning some responsibility and discipline."
"I don't want to argue with you."
"I don't. I tell you this, Mr. Slocum. He's got to learn to start facing things."
"He's trying. He's trying very hard."
"Then they don't want him on their team. They complain to me that they don't want him on their team if he's not going to try. It's no secret. They do it right in front of him. Now they complain to me that they don't want him on their basketball team because he isn't any good. That isn't such a funny joke to kids who are playing their hearts out to win. What amI supposed to do? Whose side should I take? Can't you do something?"
"That's why I came here. To try."
"Can't you talk to him, Mr. Slocum? And try to explain to him why he should try to do things straight and right. It would be better for him, not me."
It would indeed. With no great effort I can picture my little boy looking scared and green with Forgione, for I have seen him often enough looking that same way with me when we are in some unfamiliar place and he thinks I'm going to leave him there or that I am going to try to make him dive from a diving board. How can I explain to Forgione that I like my little boy pretty much the way he is (do I? I'm not sure), that it's all right with me if he's not competitive, aggressive, or outstanding, although there are times, I must admit to myself, when I wish he were more so, when I am displeased with him because he isn't, and would probably be more proud of him if he were. And I guess he must know that too.
He does not know yet that I have come to Forgione to try to obtain special favors for him, and I do not want him to find out. I think he might be too mortified, feel too nakedly degraded, ever to be able to face Forgione again. And I know that I will be peeved with him when I leave for having made it necessary for me to come (and for spoiling my morning and most of my peace of mind the evening before after I made my decision to go to Forgione once and for all and was already regretting it), and that I would like to kick all those other snarling, snapping little kids in the ass and smash their smelly, snotty, bellicose little heads together for ganging up against him. (And making it necessary for me to do something. Oh, shit — I sometimes think I could be so happy alone, but I know I would not be.)
"Can't you leave him out for a little while, if he asks you to?"
"Is that what he wants?"
"Yes, I think so. Although I don't think he will ask you. And I will talk to him. But don't say anything."
"If that's what he wants, sure. I don't pick on him, Mr. Slocum."
"Maybe he'll get a little of his confidence back. Just for a few days."
"I try to help."
"Tell him he looks a little tired or something."
"Have him come to me with an excuse. Let him limp a little or bring a note from you saying he feels sick. So the other kids don't find out and make fun of him."
"It wouldn't be a lie. On days when he has gym, he does feel sick and feels like throwing up. He doesn't eat breakfast. He comes to school without eating anything."
"I didn't know that. Does he say anything about me?"
"Only a little. Nothing bad. That he's scared and can't do things. He didn't ask me to come here."
"I'm only trying to help him when I get on him to try to make him do better and try harder. I'm just trying to get him to realize his maximum potential so he'll do the best he can and be much better off. You ought to tell him I said that."
"I don't even want him to know I came here. Let him do push-ups or something for a few days and see what happens when we take the pressure off. Okay?"
"He's no good at push-ups, either. Or at chinning, sit-ups, rope climbing, or tumbling. In fact, I don't think I could give your boy a good rating at anything, Mr. Slocum. But running. He's pretty fast. But he doesn't always try. He kids around."
(I have to suppress another smile.) "Maybe that's hereditary," I say. "I was never much good at anything either."
"Oh, no, Mr. Slocum," Mr. Forgione corrects me with, a laugh. "Anybody can be good at anything physical if he works steadily to develop himself."
"I hope so," I concede diplomatically. "I know I used to spend a lot of time in gyms," I lie. "But I never seemed to improve very much."
"You've got a good build. I can see that from here. Your boy could be a fine athlete, Mr. Slocum, if he'd only apply himself harder. He can run like a weasel and has quick reflexes. You should see the way he flinches when he thinks I'm gonna yell at him. Or one of the kids."
"He may be afraid to ask you. Even if I give him the note."
"I know what to do."
"He might be too embarrassed. And you won't tell him I spoke to you. I wouldn't want him to know."
"Sure. No."
"And you're not going to get even, are you? Take it out on him because I came here to ask?"
"No, of course not," Forgione exclaimed indignantly. "Why would I want to do that?" (Because you're human, I think.) "What kind of a man do you think I am?"
"Cro-Magnon," I reply crisply.
(But that, of course, I say to myself. Outside myself, I laugh softly in a pretense of congeniality. I wonder if the time will ever come when I will begin, without recognizing I am doing it and without detecting the change, saying out loud the things I now say privately to myself or verbalize in contemplation and if I will therefore become psychotic or one of those men — more often than not they are women — who talk out loud to themselves on sidewalks and buses. If that happens, I will blend my inner world with my outer world and be disoriented in both. I will be pathetic. I have trouble enough deciding which is which now and which one is the true one. I worry gravely about all lapses of self-control. I think it may already be happening, that I do talk to myself out loud — my children tease me and say I did talk to myself out loud while rehearsing the speech I wasn't allowed to give at last year's convention — sometimes when I'm drunk or very deeply immersed in work or introspection. Sometimes I catch myself almost mouthing words that I intend to write down when I get to my desk at the office or in my study at home, or that I plan to say to whoever it is I am on my way to meet. At least, I think I always catch myself in time. I can't be sure. There may be times already when I don't. I know I occasionally do gesticulate with hands and head when preparing myself for conversations, but that is almost in the nature of a rehearsal of which I am aware. I am so afraid that I will start talking to myself someday that I feel I already do. People will make fun of me. Or look the other way and pretend I'm not. I suffer chest pains frequently because I'm so afraid of suffering chest pains someday and dying of a heart attack. My brother died of a heart attack while waiting for something in the waiting room of his office, and my father died of something else while I was still just a little boy, and my mother, as I can't forget, was struck down in her old age by a number, some of them too subtle and minute in individual effect to be counted, of cerebral vascular accidents, as they are euphemistically called — they did not seem like «accidents» — that set her tongue clattering inside her mouth when she tried to talk and turned the rest of her, eventually, to bloodless pulp. God, how I grew to detest the sight of her! And wanted to cry, in love, sympathy, and self-pity, and would not let myself do anything like that. I kept control. I was strong. I can be strong and unemotional when it comes to someone else. I think I may worry as much about talking out loud to myself as I worry about stuttering. I think some of my dreams may be homosexual. I think I'm afraid I might start stuttering incurably when I even think that thought of being homosexual. I don't know why I feel that way about those dreams. And I also feel that some of my other dreams may be heterosexual, and I do know why. I am chasing and pumping away with girls in those dreams and almost get there, almost get all the way in, but never do. I never even come. They always break off unfinished. Is it my mother? Nude and cooperative? And know also that much of my waking life is composed of defenses against behavior I am not aware of and would find difficult to justify. Why do I feel like crying so often and why do I refuse to let myself do so. ever? There are times, afterward, when I wish I did and regret I didn't. I often used to feel like crying after quarreling with my daughter. I am no longer proud that I can remain unmoved. I hope desperately that my little boy never finds out I'm a fag if that is what I really am, although I think I might derive some nasty gratification if my wife began to harass herself about that possibility. I hope I never lose control of myself in anything. I never have, not even with a girl. I wish I wanted to. I'm glad I don't. I hope I never have a stroke that makes me stutter or renders me paralyzed or speechless. I hope I never have a heart attack. I hope I'm never senile and pee in my pants and want to molest children. I wonder what kind of person would come out if I ever did erase all my inhibitions at once, what kind of being is bottled up inside me now. Would I like him? I think not. There's more than one of me, probably. There's more than just an id; I know that; I could live with my id if I ever looked upon it whole, sort of snuggle up and get cozy with it, exchange smutty stories. Deep down inside, I might really be great. Deep down inside, I think not. I hope I never live to see the real me come out. He might say and do things that would embarrass me and plunge him into serious trouble, and I hope I am dead and buried by the time he does. Ha, ha.)
"Ha, ha, Forgione," is what I do say, to indicate to Forgione that my question was not intended to be taken seriously. "I do. I really do, Mr. Forgione."
"What?"
"Appreciate it. I'm glad you understand."
"That's okay, Mr. Slocum. I'd do that to help any kid."
"Thank you, Mr. Forgione. I feel much better now."
I put my hand out eagerly in order to shake his, and find that I feel much worse when I depart from him.
I went there braced for battle, prepared to take on all comers, if necessary. I have won my point too easily, and go away feeling I have lost. I am depressed. Good God! I catch myself wondering as I commute into the city by train to my office again. What in the world have I done to my poor little boy now? I find myself furious with my wife for having prodded me to go there. Suppose Forgione is intent upon revenge? I don't want to have to go looking around for a private school to transfer my little boy to, not now; yet Forgione can make me. I am in his power, and he is not in mine. Last year it was a saturnine battle-ax of an arts and crafts teacher (his Mrs. Yerger, and mine too again, for that time. For every season there is a Mrs. Yerger, it seems — there always has been — and a Forgione too) that came very close to making me move him out of his public school (he pleaded with me to let him stay) into an expensive private one that might have turned out to be just as evil. This year it is sturdy, umber Forgione, with his damned gym and muscular physique. (We moved to Connecticut to get away from Negroes. Now I've got this stocky Italian weight-lifter to worry about.) Does Forgione, as I now feel absolutely certain, resent my having come to the school to complain to him (did I make a very bad impression on Forgione?) and criticize and interfere with his work in relation to my child? Will he strike back at me, with immense personal satisfaction, by browbeating and disgracing my boy even more than he already has? Tune in the next day to find out. And I do tune in shakily all the next day to find out, with a telephone call home at lunchtime (to ask, ostensibly, if there is any important mail, but really to make certain he is still alive, that no word of his death has come from school) and with another telephone call home late in the afternoon.
"Guess what?" my boy exclaims cheerfully, answering the phone (to my vast relief and amazement).
For Forgione, bless his noble heart, turns out fine. (I am more tense about gym than my boy at breakfast that morning. My coffee is flavored with the bitter taste of bile. Forgione is an executioner, masked in dire, enigmatic intentions, and I ponder all day long in my office over what kinds of criminal atrocities are being committed against my boy behind the brick walls, closed doors, and blind windows of that penitential institution of a school. I am more tense than my boy because I can objectify anxieties he does not even know he suffers from yet. I have an imagination that is infinitely more sophisticated and convoluted. He does not know yet about Leopold and Loeb, and I do. He does not know about cunning, older, polymorphous perverts, driven and deranged, who brutalize and murder children for no good reason. I have the same scorching foresights he has of strange, fierce, scowling men abducting, harming, dismembering him, and there are days — or used to be when we lived in the city, and still are, even now that we have retreated into the suburbs — when I will glare accusingly and belligerently, bluffing, of course, at every strange man I see in his vicinity — handymen, delivery men, construction men, insurance men, even clergymen — as potential kidnappers, sadists, ruffians, degenerates, or mad murderers who torture and mutilate their disbelieving victims before and after killing them, even though I know that's impossible. I picture it anyway. And now Forgione's face is swimming among them, heartless, symbolic, carnal, alien. I am crazy: no wonder my boy tends to be fearful. For a long time in the city I was too fearful to allow him to walk to school alone, even though the school building was only a few blocks away and other kids his own age were already doing it; at the same time, I kept urging him to get up the courage to try it, pointing out to him that he was big enough and intelligent enough and would have to do it someday, and assuring him that nothing would happen to him if he waited always for the light to turn green and looked in all directions before stepping from the curb and crossing each street. I was afraid he'd get lost. I am afraid of traffic accidents. I also feared drunkards, junkies, unhappy laborers, explosions, bigger, bullying schoolboys, and truants from high school come to prey on the smaller children in elementary school, most of them Black, Puerto Rican, or Italian, who would take his ice cream money, tear his clothes, bloody his face, or pull his ears off; I was even afraid of falling cornices, and so, I think, was he. I would telephone the house two or three times a day from my office to ask if any important mail had come or my dry cleaning, but really to make sure that everyone there was still alive, as far as anyone who was there could tell — if no one answered the phone when somebody should have, I would think of calling the police, the apartment building superintendent, or one of the neighbors — to verify that he had made it back home safely from school for lunch — which meant, by deduction, that he had made it to school safely after breakfast — and that he had found his way back home successfully again after schoo — which meant, once more, that he had made it back safely to school after lunch, that day.
"Do you want to talk to him?" my wife would ask.
"Only if he has anything he wants to say to me."
"He doesn't. Do you have anything you want to say to Daddy?"
"No."
"Do you want to ask him anything?"
"No."
"He doesn't. You sound disappointed." I would be disappointed. I'd feel he should want to talk to me, even though he had nothing specific to ask or tell. Hadn't I worried about him?
I would brood about that too: his ingratitude. After all, I was investing so much of my feelings in him, wasn't I?
Every trip from home for him then was, for me, another venture into unknown perils that were inching close. I would feel about him the way I believe I used to feel about my wife and daughter, the way some passive part of me still feels every time I walk up the ramp into an airplane on an ordinary business trip: I'm not sure I will ever come down. Wouldn't it be ridiculous for me to die on an ordinary business trip? Every day that he and I and the rest of us remain alive is another miracle. Isn't it wonderful that we can still be here and have not yet been knocked off by some accident or crime? I think that. I don't trust cars. God knows who may be driving the ones close enough to collide with us. I don't trust my wife when she is driving, especially now that I know she drinks during the day, and I don't like my daughter at night in a car driven by some kid who might be drunk also or loony with drugs. I don't really worry as much as I used to about my wife and daughter, possibly because they have both survived early childhood and seem old enough now to take care of themselves, or possibly because I no longer care for them as much as I used to, as much as I know I do care about my boy and myself. I do have morbid outlooks about myself; I don't like closed doors, sick friends, bad news. And my boy is still young and vulnerable enough, we feel, and he does too, to be very much in need of our love and our protection. And I know I do care for him, and I worry nervously about what jeopardy I have placed him in with Forgione, who — God bless him again — turns out to be just fine indeed.) Forgione, in fact, proves a surprisingly good-hearted man, and he is more generous and discreet with my boy than I would have thought him capable.
"I don't have to do anything in gym anymore," my boy continues with elation. "I don't even have to play. Until I want to."
And from that day on, my boy is a swaggering princeling. (But it does not, of course, last.) He treasures his respite in the beginning (he thinks he's smart); he basks in leisure, luxuriates in school and at home. Along with boys with plaster casts on hands and arms and legs and those with heart damage or other seriously crippling deformities, he is allowed to remain out of the games and races and to pass the time in the gymnasium watching and strutting, although he is required to report there and remain for the entire period. (There is one boy in the school his own age who is totally blind, and he is excused from gym. The school keeps him as an experiment.)
My boy spends his time in gym strolling around the outskirts of activities, he tells me, feeling superior. (He is pulling a fast one, he feels, and wants others to observe that.) He feels he ought to be envied. (He isn't. He is only a temporary novelty.) In a short while, though, and all at once, a transformation occurs, a draining of confidence, and he flickers in sallow indecision. He perceives that he does not want to be different (perhaps he is startled by the threat that what he thinks he is faking will prove to be real and that he is facing the risk of being excluded permanently, like those other boys his own age who do have heart murmurs of pathological origin and are not allowed to play, and all those others we always see wheeling and hobbling about who are disabled and deformed).
He wants to be the same as healthy ones, part of a normal group (before he is left behind and finds he can no longer catch up), even though he does not esteem the group and does not enjoy what the group is doing. He does not enjoy being classified with those who are weak and crippled (and cannot even band together into a group of their own, because they are handicapped in separate ways) and exiled and ostracized. So he stops faking fatigue, a limp, and a sore throat and goes to Forgione to report he thinks he feels okay again.
And back he plunges voluntarily into games and races (and into chinning, rope climbing, and tumbling, as well, which he still hates but consents to endure, for he cannot declare himself fit for games and races but not for gymnastics). And now he roars like a lion and fights like a tiger; he runs like a weasel and says "hubba, hubba, hubba" dutifully like an eager beaver.
("Mr. Forgione says nice things about me now," he discloses to us smugly one day.
"I scored four points today," he tells us another. "I was the second best on my team.")
And he learns it is easy enough for him to be good enough in sports if he has that true will to win (and even, perhaps, in gymnastics, if he applies himself), just as it is very easy for him to be good enough in math (even without applying himself). He is not the best at anything, but he is good enough (and lots of fun), and the ones who are the best enjoy him and want him on their teams now. (They are tougher, bigger kids, and he is one of them now.) He keeps cumulative (clandestine) records (in his mind) of his own and all other kids' triumphs and failures in pushball, punchball, kickball, throwball, shoveball, upball, assball, and baseball (he is back now with all his balls, ha, ha) and is aware always of how he stands in comparison with others. (He is like our sales staff at the company.) In relay races and in basketball, he will connive to place himself opposite some fat boy on the other team whom he knows he can beat. (He feels guilty about that fat boy, and sorry for him. But someone is going to beat the fat boy anyway, so it might as well be him.) It is not so much that he wishes to look good but that he wants to avoid looking bad. It doesn't really bother me anymore that my boy does not want to be best.
"Maybe I do," he hints enigmatically.
"Then why don't you try?"
"Maybe I know I can't," he replies, with a trace of a mysterious smile (and it is impossible for me to know, as I study him, whether he means what he implies or is merely practicing slyly some cryptic and discerning and unpleasant game he has devised to confound me. Is he clever enough for that?).
At least we do know he is smug: on days when he does do as well as he hopes to in gym, when no one makes fun of him or criticizes, or when nothing at all happens to him there (or in public speaking), he comes home confident, jubilant, and composed, swaggering almost conceitedly with an exalted view of himself, so it all isn't all bad. On days, though, when something bad happens, he turns cranky and anguished and declares he hates things and people, so it isn't all good either. He sits motionless, then rises abruptly to move about in rage and shame that he only expresses in dribs, yearning (we see) to cry, but restraining himself unhappily. It is pitiful to watch him (my wife and I want to cry too), and infuriating (I want to yell at him in displeasure, perhaps beat him, for reacting so disconsolately). He doesn't want to talk about unpleasant events beyond a certain point. And he continues to try as hard as he can at chinning, push-ups, and rope climbing. He improves, but slowly (and he probably is already gazing ahead in discouragement to high school and more chinning, pushups, and rope climbing and to swimming nude with others in the chlorinated pool. He probably will not want to swim nude. I know I didn't. If he is like so many of the rest of us, he will think that his cock is small and in danger of vanishing. I will have to tell him, if he lets me, to stare at it in the mirror if he wants to see it look as large as it appears to other people. I will not go into the phenomenon of foreshortening, unless he asks me. He does not like having his hair cut, even when we leave it long, and is afraid of having his teeth pulled or his gums injected with Novocain. If he had to have his tonsils taken out now, he would probably refuse to cooperate and would have to be lugged to the hospital by force. We clipped them from him at the right time. He doesn't like injections of any kind, except those in the side of his ass when he really does have a red throat and is too disoriented by fever to remember he's afraid). And Forgione is pleased with his "hubba, hubba, hubba," for my boy, under Forgione's tutelage, tries hard now, competes vigorously, and has developed (or at least displays for Forgione, Forgione's assistant, and others in the gymnasium) that good competitive spirit.
"You didn't tell me," my boy murmurs to me accusingly, "that you went to see him."
"How did you find out?"
"I did."
"Who told you?"
"I did. You told me. Just now. By answering me. I guessed. You did. Didn't you?"
"You ought to be a lawyer too."
"I figured it out."
"You wanted me to do something, didn't you? I know you did."
"You didn't tell me," he answers peevishly. "So I'd know."
"What else did you think I could do?"
He shrugs.
"You aren't being fair to me now. If you don't tell me what else you think I could do."
"I don't know."
"You're glad I did. Aren't you now?"
And soon, almost imperceptibly, because things have worked out so well for him, he moves back to worrying again about going to school on days when he has gym (and public speaking), worrying that he might perform poorly and his team might not win because of him. Because he has shown a good competitive spirit and a true will to win, he is now afraid of losing. He does not want the blame. He is afraid of making errors in baseball, mistakes in basketball, stumbling or dropping the beanbag in relay races, and getting part way up the rope and being unable to come down, ever, without falling. And soon, at breakfast on days he has gym, he is depressed and pasty again and complaining of nausea and red throats. He has bellyaches and doesn't want to eat, and I am right back where I started from. (I get nauseated when I see him this way, and I don't eat either.)
"Do you want me to speak to Forgione again?"
"No, I'll manage."
"I will if you want me to."
"I don't."
"Or to someone else. I can go to the principal."
"No, don't. I'll manage."
"Big shot," I respond with a laugh, trying to buoy him up. "You don't even know what manage means."
"No. But I will, anyway."
"Okay."
And he does. So far.
(While I watch.)
(And wait.)
He is waiting too.
(For what? He doesn't know. I don't have to ask.) The pity of it is that (instead of waiting) he could probably be having a good time if he would only stop waiting and were allowed to develop and do things his own way. But he has never been allowed to (I wasn't allowed to either, and nobody else I can think of was); he is not being allowed to; and he will never be allowed to, not by me, by my wife, by himself, or by others. (I wonder what we would all grow up to be if we were never ordered about by anybody else. Apes, probably. Instead of babies.) The «others» are all virtually superfluous by now, even Forgione: there is enough right here at the family hearth to shackle, twist, and subdue him (and render him and all the rest of us all the more susceptible to haphazard, unfriendly «others» like Forgione and Horace White, with whom I really have little contact, and whom I know I would be afraid of even if I did not have to be. He's got the whammy on me. We were put into that relationship from the beginning, before we even met. And he is a simpleton. Horace White is a simpleton; yet, I was prepared to kneel before him even before I knew he existed. What has happened to my boy and me to make us so subservient?). Only my daughter has never attempted to improve, damage, educate, or train him (just to dominate and manipulate him) once she succeeded in tearing her way through that draining, turbulent period of stunned and bitter wrath that raged through her like a flame at his having been brought into her home and family at all (even though she had been taught and promised for months that a brand-new baby brother or sister for her, and a baby for us also, would be coming into the house soon and wasn't she happy and lucky? The irony is that she would have felt equally deprived if we had permitted her to remain an only child. She did not want Derek either and blames herself for his affliction — at times — because she cursed him silently before he was delivered and wished him harm). She used to try to injure my boy when he was an infant in his crib or lying prone or supine, unable yet to walk or squirm away to safety, on our bed or on our blanket on the floor or sitting in his stroller or his high chair or his playpen. (She tried to push him over and he did not know what was happening.) When he was learning to walk she would knock him down if we were not alert enough to stop her. She would try to put her fingers in his eyes. Now she's stopped. They get along well now, affectionately (unless she is with friends and does not want him around), and almost never have any serious disagreements. (He gives in readily.) My daughter does not like me to shout at him: she cannot bear it when I lose my temper with him and begin shouting, and she will often scurry away in flight with her head down or whirl upon me hysterically and harangue me (and then scurry away before I can reply and defend myself. That's another tactic of hers, and I am often caught unawares and find myself shouting abuse or explanations into empty space after she has sped away. That makes me angrier). Sometimes when I do lose my temper with him (usually without realizing I have done so until afterward) and begin to bark demeaning, threatening remarks (I have called him «sissy» more than once merely by warning him contemptuously not to act like one, although I never intend to do just that while I am doing it and will detest myself afterward for having done so and seek some face-saving way of apologizing to him. Usually by letting him see I am no longer angry with him and offering to buy him something expensive I think he wants), shouting, probably (without knowing I am doing so and denying that I am if charged), with my lips deranged, probably, and my teeth bared and my whole red or bloodless face glaring at him, probably, my daughter will fling herself between us heedlessly to shield him from me, holding her ground there to defend him against me and actually start to cry.
"What are you doing to him?" she will demand, with tears forming and spilling from the corners of her eyes. "Why can't you leave him alone?"
She does not yield so readily to emotion when my fight is with her. When my fight is with her, she tries (with fortitude, perversity, with face-saving spite) not to let me make her cry (not to give me the satisfaction of seeing I can affect her even remotely. I am a matter of "supreme indifference" to her), as though that is what I want to do. (It often is.) I always desist as soon as I see I can, curbing my own spiteful intentions and drawing back from her mercifully.
(Nothing is suppressed in our family.) (In our family, everything is suppressed.) On the other hand, my daughter can be cruel to my boy when she is with her friends and feels no need to show him off, shutting him out rudely, discouraging especially those slouching, mumbling teen-age boys from kidding with him or tossing a ball or paying any attention to him at all. She does not want him around when she is with her friends. (She does not like to share.) She will separate them and chase him away, snapping:
"Don't bother with him. Don't let him bother you. Go back to your room."
He does not know what is happening to him when this does. He does not know what is happening to him now. He wants to be like other boys he thinks, mistakenly, we want him to be like. He thinks he is not now the person anyone wants him to be. We don't want him to be like everybody else. We want him to be like we want him to be (but we haven't spelled that out yet even to ourselves. So how could he know?). We want him to be different, and superior. (But we also want him to be not much different. Frankly, I don't know what I want him to be — except no trouble. He does not know yet what he's supposed to want to be when he grows up, except that he now knows he is not supposed to want to work in a filling station. And I can't guide him. A doctor? He has no idols. A lawyer? I wouldn't want that. I have no models to give him. James Pierpont Morgan II? August Belmont, Jr. III? Clara Bow? At least I had people like Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Joe Louis, and Cordell Hull I could want to be when I grew up, although I'm glad now that I didn't grow up to be any of them. But I still don't know yet what I want to be when I do grow up. Or even what I should want to be. I'd like to be rich. I know this much: I don't want to be President of the United States. They have bad reputations, and ruin neighborhoods.)
So he struggles manfully (childishly), doggedly, dazedly to change himself into everybody else his age. He wishes to be able to conform successfully without effort or thought. He wants to wear, at nine years old, what other boys of nine or ten are wearing (even though he might not like what they are wearing) and experience the same enthusiasms and frustrations. (He really doesn't care about baseball anymore, I feel, and also feel he doesn't know that yet. One time when I was very young and had doubts, probably, that I would ever grow larger or older — there must have been a time, I think I recall, when I was unable to believe I would ever be any different from the lonely, isolated little boy I was then — I wanted to be a jockey in a cerise and white cap and ride race horses, even though I had never been on a horse and was too frightened even to step near the ponderous, spiritless ones that delivered ice or milk or laundry or dropped dead in the street, like people — I never could feel friendly with my brother's wife after he died and never see her now, am not clear in my mind anymore just where in New Jersey or Long Island she and her two children, my niece and my nephew, live — and soon attracted dense, buzzing clouds of green and blue pot-bellied flies. As a jockey in a red and white cap astride a huge, speeding, lunging thoroughbred, I think I felt I could trick everyone into believing I was a tiny man instead of a little boy. I'm glad I never became a jockey. I would be too heavy now and would not win many races.) And this is unfortunate in many ways (not for me, but for him) because there is so much about him entirely his own that is profoundly endearing (there is also much about him that he would be better off without, and maybe he will be able to shed that all someday, although I doubt by now that he will be able to shed any of it. By now I feel we remain pretty much the same. We grow scar tissue instead, or corns and callouses in our soul that cover, and we forget, when we can, what's there. Until occasions remind us); and what there is about him that is good, I'm afraid, we all (not my daughter, but me, my wife, Forgione, the world, and even those dusty, ghostly rocks and craters familiar to us on the moon now, connoting dark times and transparent specters) collaborate to destroy. (Even Derek exerts a haunting effect upon him, and tall buildings. If we were stones instead of people we would have an effect upon him, perhaps that same one. Everything does. Perhaps we are stones to him. I do not know how he thinks of us. I know I do not always think of my children as children. I know I remember my father now and other dim adult males from my early childhood, and even my big brother then when he was alive and I was small, as figures of voiceless stone capable of swift, unobservable journeys from one locale to another and communicating always obscure intimations of awful, indefinable things about to occur.) He has a lively, imaginative taste for the comic, some courage, and a warm heart; and even the colored maid we have now, who pads about on tiptoe in my presence and is rarely valiant enough to talk in anything louder than a faltering mumble, will grin at something unpredictably funny he has said or done and blurt out impulsively:
"That boy. Oh, that boy of yours. He is really something."
We think so too (we are somewhat vain and braggarty about those precocious intuitions and idiosyncracies of his in which we can take proprietary delight) and (like rigid, high-powered machines not really in charge of ourselves) operate automatically to change him — to harden him, soften him, smarten him, desensitize him — lying to him and to ourselves (as I lied, and knew I was lying, when I filed my mother away into that repulsive nursing home that I described to her and others with false energy as being beautiful, new, and comfortable as a modern hotel) that it is for his own good. (And not for ours.)
"Be good," we fire at him. "Don't be afraid. You can do it. Try. Try harder. You can be anything you want to be. Don't do that. You're getting me angry."
(Maybe it is for his own good.)
(And maybe it isn't.)
And even the nurse we have for Derek now, who is considerate to none of us (and especially dislikes my daughter, who is defiant and impolite to her and never truckles at all), not even to Derek anymore, I suspect, singles my boy out periodically for loud flattery that embarrasses him and clumsy, possessive hugs that make him miserable as he sees her scowling reproachfully at the rest of us in taunting contrast, even though she does not approve of the way he acts toward Derek either.
"It's no wonder he doesn't want to play with him," she has censured the rest of us in his presence, "when he sees how the rest of you treat him. None of you want to play with him."
My boy does not like Derek's nurse or the harsh spotlight of her praise. (I think he senses he is being used by her to get at us.) He is actually afraid of her, as he is afraid of most of his teachers and the school nurse, and wishes, without evincing any of his dislike (he is always afraid to show antagonism to anyone), to avoid all possibilities for conversation with her and to escape her pinches, touches, and embraces. (He finds her obnoxious.)
"Get rid of her," I decide on cranky impulse and snap at my wife.
She sighs. "I don't want to have to start again."
"She isn't even good to him. She doesn't keep him clean."
"Where should I go?"
"Get someone young this time, can't you?"
"Where?"
"I wish we could get someone who would really like him. You can't. I know. They don't want to have to take care of him either."
"Maybe I should do it. Maybe I should devote my whole life to taking care of him."
"Holy you."
"What do you mean?"
"Become a nun."
"Maybe I should."
"Not if you think about it that way. You don't mean it. You'd probably be worse to him than any of them."
"Fuck you."
"I like the way you swear now," I joke. "You say 'Fuck you' much better than you used to."
"Practice. You taught me."
"I'm proud."
"Only with you. You make it very easy to say 'Fuck you' to you."
"You do it better too."
"Any complaints?"
"Not at this moment."
"Well fuck you again."
She rolls away from me. We are nearly naked. I continue laughing.
"I'm trying to," I tell her, coaxing her back. "I'm trying to get you to."
"Maybe we should start thinking about sending him away someplace."
"Maybe we should stop talking about nun now."
"I want to."
"No."
"Where he'll be much better off."
"No, I said."
"We'll have to, sooner or later. Think about it, I mean. You never want to think about it."
"I don't want to talk about it."
"We'll have the money now. Won't we?"
"You don't understand, do you?"
"I'm asking."
"If I decide to take the job. I've got money enough for that anyway. It isn't money."
"Maybe you should decide to take it."
"I don't want to talk about it now."
"I'm talking about the job."
"I don't want to talk about that, either. No, you're not. You're not talking about the job. You lie a lot about yourself."
"We have to talk about it sometime. We're going to have to decide. Stop a minute, will you? You can't keep ducking away forever."
"I can till I die."
"Don't joke about it."
"And leave you with him?"
"Don't joke about that, either."
"And her. And him too. Won't you be busy."
"None of that's funny."
"Don't you want me to die?"
"You know I can't stand talking about things like that."
"He's still too small. I don't want to talk about him now. When the kids might hear."
"Should I lock the door?"
"You're just as bad," I remind her. "If I say yes, you say no. When I say send him away, you say we can't."
"It's for his own good."
"No, it's not."
"Maybe we should send them all away," she observes hopelessly.
"What do you mean by that?"
"I don't know what I mean," she retracts. "The kids are embarrassed by him. Ashamed. Maybe we should send them both away and keep him."
"How would it help to send them away?"
"I didn't mean it. You know that. I'm just feeling bad. They don't like to have their friends come to the house and have to see him. Neither do we."
"Talk about yourself. I'm more comfortable about him than you are."
"No, you're not. You just pretend. You put on an act. He makes everyone uncomfortable. He makes everyone who comes here put on an act."
"Fire the old cunt."
"How would that help?"
"It would help us. She's rude to everyone."
"Don't use that word. You know I don't like it."
"That's why I use it. You ought to get used to it by now. I am. In fact, I'm starting to get very used to it right now."
"It's easy for you."
"Sure."
"I know you. You'll probably be out of town the day I tell this one she has to go and the day the new one comes."
"You bet."
"You can laugh about it. You don't even want to interview them."
"I don't know what to ask."
"And then you're disappointed. You're never satisfied with the one I get."
"I'm just glad you can get anybody at all."
"Until you get used to them. Until you can't stand them and then want me to fire them."
"Get a young one, can't you? Can't you get a psychology major or something?"
"We need someone full tune. She has to do everything for him. He can't do anything. You never like to face anything unpleasant."
"Do you?"
"Don't you ever feel guilty doing this while we're talking about the children, or even Derek?"
"No. Why?"
"Even the day my grandmother died you wanted to make me do it."
"I wanted to make you do it the day your father died too."
"Don't say that. You know how I felt."
"What does one thing have to do with another?"
"I do. I don't feel right about it."
"Why should I?"
"It doesn't seem right."
"Do you want me to stop? I will if you want me to."
"It seems all wrong now. It seems dirty again. I don't know. I don't feel right."
"Don't you like feeling dirty?"
"No. You do."
"You feel fine."
"Am I coarse? Am I ever common?"
"Now I do. Yeah, I guess I do feel guilty. You did that. You do that a lot. We don't do it that often when we're talking about the kids or something serious."
"I feel dirty."
"Then I will stop. It's no fun for me. Do you want me to?"
"Lying here talking about sending him away."
"You were doing that. I wasn't. Is that what's making you feel dirty? Or me?"
"Do you love me?"
"I'm trying to. My hardest. Feel how hard I'm trying to love you."
"Don't do that."
"This?"
"You know what I mean."
"This?"
"Fuck you again."
"Lock the door."
"You lock the door, since you're feeling so peppy."
"Fire the old cunt."
"Christ, you're vulgar," she says, and means it.
"You're profane," I answer. "Suppose your new minister could hear you now. I bet he'd like to see you now. Aren't you glad I'm vulgar?"
"No feelings."
"Feelings," I maintain. "Plenty of feelings. Feel my feelings."
"No, I'm not glad."
"What do you want?"
"I don't know. I'm ready."
"I'll lock the door."
"I'll start looking around."
"I think he's getting much better, isn't he?"
"No."
"Don't you?"
"He isn't. You always say that."
"If I don't, you do."
"I know," she admits.
"I think he listens more. He understands now. He keeps himself cleaner."
She shakes her head firmly. "I don't think she's doing him any good at all."
"Don't you see it?"
"No. He's not supposed to get better. He's never going to. That's what they say."
"Then let's fire that fucking old cunt. None of us like her. She doesn't like us. She reminds me of old Mrs. Yerger, falling into decay."
"Who's Mrs. Yerger?"
"A woman I used to work for. When I was a kid."
"Did you ever do it to her?"
"Christ, no. She was worse than my mother."
"I'm ready, I said. Why do you keep doing that?"
"I like it. You're supposed to like it too. All bosom and no breasts."
"Like me?"
"Unlike you."
"I've got small breasts. You keep telling me."
"They're big enough. I like them small."
"You've tried any other kind?"
"Never."
"Did you lock the door?"
"Yeah. How come you're so worried?"
"Locked it?"
"Open up."
I close my eyes sometimes when I'm making love to my wife and try to think of somebody better than Mrs. Yerger or Derek's old hag of a nurse to spice things up. I try to think of pink and fecund Virginia and can't: she is all silk and exotic fragrance when we begin, but my imagination lets me down and she withers rapidly in my mind into what she would be today if she hadn't gassed herself in her prime (although I doubt she thought of it as her prime, ha, ha), a short, dumpy pain-in-the-ass (like just about all the rest. I wish these women's-lib people would hurry up and liberate themselves and make themselves better companions for sexists like me. And for each other) of an offensively chattering woman ten years older than my wife, nearly (Oh, God dammit, why can't some things other than stone remain always as they used to be?), and much less attractive physically, with large pores, a shrill, grating, demanding voice, low-cut dresses with tops of wrinkling boobs, and too much giggling and red makeup. I am much better off with my wife, I know; so I open my eyes and look at her (and that delays my coming until I am ready. I wish I did have some sensational young sexpot in the city I could use in my erotic reveries at home. But I don't: just about all the girls I do succeed in getting and keeping are sad in one way or another and faintly insipid. So I tend to utilize my own wife in my sex fantasies, even while I'm right there fucking her. That's the kind of faithful husband I am. Sometimes when I'm in bed with another girl in the city or out of town and find I'm already sorry I started, I close my eyes and pretend I'm fucking my wife. Such fidelity. My wife should be honored to learn she rises in my thoughts on such occasions when we are apart, but I don't think I'll tell her. She might not like it as much as I do).
I know my boy doesn't like it when our bedroom door is locked (and used to say so before he began to intuit secret sex inside. I think my daughter said to him once:
"They fuck in there.").
Or when Derek's nurse reaches out to snare him in gnarled fingers on bloated hands and crush him against her musty, collapsing bodice (neither would I. Like Mrs. Yerger's, there is massive, slovenly, thrusting front with no suggestion of anything else in back but stale and folding space), and more than once, in debased supplication, he has wretchedly admonished my wife:
"It's your fault. Why do you let her do it to me? I wish she'd stop touching and pushing and squeezing me like that. I don't even like her. Can't you make her leave me alone?"
"Please try to leave him alone," my wife has said to the nurse countless times politely and awkwardly. It has done no good. "It upsets him. He doesn't like anyone to pay too much attention to him. Don't do things for him. He'd rather do them himself. And try not to touch and hug him so much if you can. He's funny. He doesn't like to be touched and kissed. He really doesn't like it from anyone."
"He doesn't mind it from me," the warted witch cackles back. "I have a way with children. He likes me. I can tell. He likes the way I cuddle him and he likes the way I smell. I always keep myself very clean because I know how children feel about smells."
He doesn't like to be hugged or kissed or touched by anyone, in or out of our family, although he has the mannerism of bumping slightly against me with his shoulder when he is feeling close to me or leaning a moment against my wife (except my daughter, with whom he likes to roughhouse and wrestle, and who enjoys tussling with him when she has time. When he was younger, two, three, four, or five, he used to get hard-ons regularly with my wife when she was bathing, powdering, or dressing him, point to them and comment and inquire about them to both of us with pleased and open curiosity. They even tickled and felt good, he let us know. And we would reply to him intelligently and frankly because we did not want to inhibit him. It was okay with us if he had hard-ons; if anything, we were proud to see them. Today he no longer waves them gloriously in front of my wife or me and doesn't talk about them to us. I can't remember if I had hard-ons at nine. I think I can remember having sneaky, scary, tinglings in my tiny cock much earlier as I sat or hovered near my mother in her bedroom and watched her dressing or removing her street clothes to drape herself into one of her housecoats that always hung shapeless and looked faded. I remember her pink or colorless corsets with those dangling garter snaps and bone or celluloid stays that were always going in or out, although I don't remember knowing what a corset was for. I know I remember sitting mute and devious in her bedroom just to watch. Why else would I want to, if not out of sexual longing? I also remember having dreams later about exactly the same thing: my mother is in her corset and slip and I am prowling about her bedroom pretending to be occupied with something else. My boy gives money away to other kids. I know I shouldn't care), but he has a special aversion to Derek's nurse (to all Derek's nurses, and so do I. And to all of our maids. When he comes into the kitchen for something to eat, he would like to be able to get it himself, and so would I. None of the nurses are young; and all seem to have a peculiar and individual ugliness about them, a lantern jaw, missing tooth, scarred eyebrow, or infected lip. Even when they don't, they do), for he senses some potential destiny for him, some crippling danger, in the fact that she is called a nurse and that she has come to dwell with us only because Derek has a damaged brain, that she came to us from somebody else who had a damaged brain, and that, when she asks for a day off and never returns or when my wife fires her, she will move from here to somebody else with a damaged brain. (He never imagined, I bet, and neither did I, that there are so many people with damaged brains.) She is a veiled harbinger, a jinx, a spinning pointer, a bearer of fatal tidings (he confuses cause and effect, I think, blaming her presence in our home for Derek's condition, instead of Derek's condition for her presence in our home), and he does not want to be singled out by her as next. Yet, he does not want to be forgotten.
"When you were in Puerto Rico," he says, "three years ago, were you very sad?"
His question was unexpected. "That was two years ago," I correct.
"Three."
"I think you're right."
"Two years ago your convention was in Florida."
"You are right. No, I wasn't sad. Were you?"
"I thought you weren't coming back."
"Is that why? I did come back, didn't I? You didn't say anything about it."
"I was too sad. I was angry at you also."
"How come?"
"I don't know."
"At what?"
Shrugging, he says he doesn't know.
"Are you angry at me still?"
"I get angry every time you have to go away."
"Are you angry at me now?"
"Do you have to go away again?"
"Will you have to be angry?"
"Will you have to go?"
"Yes."
"I guess I won't. Maybe I won't."
"I miss you when I'm there."
"Do you have a good time?" he asks.
I pause a moment to reflect. "I do," I answer frankly. "All in all. I work very hard. At the beginning. And worry a lot. But then I relax and have a good time."
"You don't telephone from conventions."
"It's hard."
"That's why I'm not sure you're coming back. You get very mean to everyone here before you go to a convention."
"No, I don't."
"Yes, you do. You don't listen when we talk to you and you yell a lot."
"No, I don't."
"You do."
"Is that true?"
"Yes. And you lock yourself in your room or the basement and talk to yourself."
"I don't talk to myself," I answer with annoyance, and then smile. "I rehearse. I practice a speech and a slide show I know I have to give at the convention."
"That's talking to yourself. Isn't it?"
"I want to make sure I can do it right and that I won't forget any of it when I have to give it."
"I get scared when I have to speak in front of the class."
"So do I. I know you do."
"Does rope climbing scare you?"
"Yes. And I'm never going to climb another one, now that I don't have to."
"Do you like it?"
"Rope climbing?"
"Making speeches?"
"I think so. I like to be asked, anyway. I get nervous too. But I enjoy it. Especially afterward."
"I'm always afraid that I'll forget what I'm supposed to say. Or that I'll get sick and have to vomit while I'm doing it. Do you know why I'm afraid to swim? I think if I ever started to drown, I'd be ashamed to call the lifeguard."
"You'd call him."
"Or that somebody in the class or the teacher won't like me. It. What I say."
"That's why I work so hard and practice so much. And why I get a little angry if one of you interrupts me. To make sure I remember it."
"Do you always remember?"
"Not at the convention. I've never been able to give one. My boss always stops me."
"Green," he guesses with certainty.
"Yes."
"I don't like Green, either," he confides, lowering his eyes. "Because you're afraid of him."
"I'm not afraid of him."
"You don't like him."
"I like him okay."
"You have to work for him."
"That's part of the trouble. When people have to work for other people, they don't always get along well with the people they have to take orders from. But it doesn't mean I don't like him. Or that I'm afraid of him."
"Do you?"
"No. But I like him more than a lot of the others."
"Why do you have to work in a place where you don't like so many people?"
"Because I like it. I have to."
"Do you know what I'm afraid of?" he asks, looking up at me with interest.
"Lots of things."
"Do you know what else I'm afraid of?"
"Lots more things."
"I'm serious."
"What?"
"That you won't come back."
"I'm surprised. I never thought you thought about that."
"I do."
"All the time? Or only at conventions?"
"All the time. But mostly at conventions. Because you're away so long."
"Sometimes I call. When I get there."
"And other times when you're away long. I don't mind so much if it's just for a day. I start to feel you won't come back."
"I always have. I'm here now, ain't I? I'm going to have to die sometime."
"I don't want you to."
"I'll try not to."
"Sometimes I do."
"Do what?" I am more shocked than offended.
"Want you to."
"To die?"
"I'm not sure. When I'm angry. Or have dreams."
"You're never angry."
"I get angry a lot when you go away," he pushes on intently. "No. I don't want you to die. Ever. I don't want to die either. Are you angry?"
"No. Are you?"
"No. I don't think I would be afraid so much if I were with you and Mommy instead of here. I don't want to be left alone."
"You wouldn't be alone. You'd be with Mommy. A person can't be afraid all the time of all the bad things that might happen to him."
"I can," he snickers mournfully.
I smile back at him in response. "No, you can't. Not even you. I'll bet I can name a lot of things you're afraid of that you don't even have time to be afraid of all the time."
"Don't," he exclaims, with mock alarm.
"I won't," I promise sympathetically. "Something comes along that takes our mind away. Should we talk about things that make you laugh instead? Have some fun? Kid around?"
"All right," he answers, with a momentary smile.
"You begin."
"Can a person's blood turn to water?"
"Huh?"
"That's what somebody told me."
"That's what makes you laugh?"
"No. I keep worrying about it."
"When did he tell you?"
"A few months ago."
"Why didn't you ask me sooner?"
"I wanted to think about it. He said he read it in the paper."
"I don't think so."
"That's what one of the kids at school told me. That a person's blood can turn to water and he dies."
"He was probably talking about leukemia."
"What's that?" he inquires sharply.
"I knew it was a mistake to tell you," I reply, with a regretful click of the tongue. "Even as I was saying it. It's a disease of the blood. Something happens to the white corpuscles."
"Does it turn to water?"
"No. I don't think so. Not water. Something like it happens, though."
"Do people die from it?"
"Sometimes."
"Do kids like me get it?"
"I don't think so," I lie.
"It was a kid he said he read about. He said it was a kid who died from it."
"Maybe they do then. I think that once in a while —»
"Don't tell me about it," he interrupts, putting both hands up in another comical gesture of awestruck horror that is both histrionic and real.
"I already have."
"Don't tell me any more."
"You always do that," I criticize him kindly. "You ask me all the questions you can think of about something terrible and then when I finish answering them you tell me, 'don't tell me about it.»
"Are you angry?"
"Do I look it? No, of course not."
"Sometimes I can't tell."
"Sure, you can. You keep telling me I yell all the time. No, I'm not angry. I want you to talk to me about the things you're thinking about, especially the things you can't figure out."
"Do you? I will."
"I do. Ask me anything."
"Do you fuck Mommy," he asks. "You said I could," he pleads hastily, as he sees me gape at him in surprise.
"Yes, you can," I answer. "Sometimes."
"Why?"
"It feels good, that's why. It's kind of fun. Do you know what it means?"
He shakes his head unsurely. "Is it all right for me to ask you?"
"It's all right to ask if I do. I think it would be better to ask someone else what it is. It would also be a little better if you used a different word."
"I don't know a different word. Screw?"
"That's almost the same. You can use the word you want. It's a little funny, though, to use it with me. Use it. I suppose it's good enough."
"Are you angry with me?"
"No. Why do you keep asking me that? Don't you know when I'm angry or not?"
"Not all the time."
"I thought I yelled so much."
"Not all the time. Sometimes you don't talk at all. Or you talk to yourself."
"I don't talk to myself."
"You bite your nails and don't even listen to any of us."
"Do I? What makes you think I'm angry when I'm like that?"
"We're all afraid."
"That doesn't mean I am. Sometimes I'm just feeling unhappy. Or concentrating. I can be unhappy too, can't I?"
"Would Mommy be angry if I asked her?"
"What?"
"If you fuck her."
"Only because of that word. Maybe not. Don't do it in front of anyone."
"I better not."
"You already asked me. I already told you. If you ask her too, it wouldn't be to find out, would it? It would just be to see if she gets angry."
"Was it all right? To ask you?"
"You already asked me that three times. I'm not angry. Do you want me to be angry?"
"I thought you'd be. I bet other kids' fathers would be."
"Maybe I ought to be. I'm better than other kids' fathers. Is that why you keep asking me? Are you trying to make me angry?"
He shakes his head positively. "No. I don't like it when you're angry. I can tell. You're starting to get angry now, aren't you?"
"I don't like it, either. And I'm not."
"Emphasis?" he remembers.
"Emphasis," I confirm.
"I don't like Derek," he remarks without pause. He wears a troubled, injured look.
"You're not supposed to say that," I instruct him mildly. "You're not supposed to feel that way, either."
"Do you?"
"You're not supposed to ask that."
"You just told me I could ask you anything. That's another thing I always think about."
"Yes. You can. It was okay for you to say what you did and ask me. And it was also okay for me to answer you the way I did. It was all right for both of us. Can you understand that? I hope that's not too confusing for you. I'm not trying to duck out on the question."
"Am I supposed to say it or not? I don't know."
"I don't know," I admit resignedly. "I'm not sure I like Derek, either, the situation I mean, the way he is, maybe even him too. I'm not sure. But we often have to live with things we don't like. Like my job. Me too. I don't know what to do about him yet. And nobody can help me."
"He makes me uncomfortable."
"He makes me uncomfortable."
"I'm ashamed to bring friends here. I think they'll make jokes about me."
"So are we. But we try not to be. We shouldn't be. And you should try not to be too. It's not our fault, it really isn't, so we pretend we aren't. Ashamed. What else?"
"Money."
"What about it?"
"You want me to tell you what's on my mind, don't you?"
"Yours too?"
"Do we have any?"
"What do you want?"
"That's not why."
"What is?"
"You buy me everything."
"So far."
"Have we got too much?"
"For what? We're not millionaires."
"Have we got enough?"
"For what?"
"You make it hard," he charges. "You're kidding now. And I'm not."
"To give away?" I kid some more, taunting.
"You give money away," he rejoins in defense.
"To cancer and things like that. Not to other people. Not to kids. I don't shovel it out to kids I hardly even know like it's too hot for me to hold on to."
"Leukemia?" he asks.
"I knew you'd ask that. Do you want me to?"
He shrugs almost indifferently. "I would like it, I think. But don't take it away from cancer."
"I knew you'd start worrying about leukemia the second I told you. I'm sorry I told you."
"I'm not worrying about it. I don't even know what it is yet."
"Don't you ever worry about things you don't know about?"
"Like what?"
"Why should I tell you if you don't know about them?"
"Now I'll worry about them. Now I'll worry about things to worry about," he adds, with another gloomy laugh.
"That's what a lot of people do worry about."
"You don't like me to give money away," he observes. "It makes you angry, doesn't it?"
"Is that why you do it?"
"I'm not gonna tell."
"You're not gonna do it."
"Yeah?"
"I'll kick your ass," I warn him jocularly.
I am happy we are talking together so freely. (I relish those moments when he seems to enjoy being with me.)
He used to give money away (probably still does, or will start giving money away again when the warm weather comes and he finds himself outside the house a lot with other kids), pennies, nickels, and dimes (money that we gave him for himself, or that he took from us, although I don't believe he has started stealing coins from us yet or lighting matches. That will come with masturbation. That's the way it came with me. I stole coins from everyone in my family and set fire secretly to everything I could find in the medicine cabinet that I discovered would burn with a flame. I squeezed blackheads from my face and fiddled with cigarette lighters with enormous fires. And jerked off. We didn't want him to. I used to try to explicate for him with professional authority why it was improper for him to give presents that we gave to him away to somebody else, and that the money we gave to him was a present. It was talking to the wall. He would hear me out dutifully every time; but he would not grasp what I meant. His face was vacant, patient, and condescending. I did not know what I meant either, or why I even tried to make him stop. And continued to try. It was only pennies, nickels, and dimes, and yet I moved in on him with the same zealous dedication with which I used to attack the blackheads around my nose and squeeze from my skin tiny yellow filaments that could have been pus. I think I felt him ungrateful). I think he still does give money away, for I have noticed that he and his friends, like my daughter, who is not normally generous, and some of her closest friends, tend to give money and other things back and forth to each other without keeping record or demanding return. I hope he does (even though I've told him he shouldn't), for I would like him to be unselfish. So why did I harangue him? I would like him to grow up to be one of these young people I see so many of today who seem to want to be very good to each other. They even lend cars. We never lent cars. I wish I were one of them; I wish I had a second chance to be young and could be part of them. I wish I could be sure they are as happy and satisified as I think they are. (My daughter isn't happy, and neither is my son, and maybe she will be, and so will my son. Maybe they still have a chance.) Every once in a while my gaze falls on a young boy and a young girl (she doesn't even have to be pretty) walking or sitting in public with their arms around each other trustingly and intimately and I can almost fall down in pain with piercing envy and lust. No, not lust. Envy. Longing. Every once in a while I do find myself with a young girl something like that; but I think she thinks I'm "square," even though she may like me (and sleep with me) for a while. And I think she's right: I am square. I am even gauche. I even feel gauche when I'm making my pitch for some girl with my customary flip, suggestive (and predictable) (and trite) repartee, and I think less of myself for being that way even while I am that way and see myself succeeding. I don't enjoy adultery, really. I'm not even sure I enjoy getting laid. Sometimes it's okay. Other times it's only coming. Is there supposed to be more? There used to be. There used to be much more heat. My wife and I used to upbraid him fiercely each time we learned, through crafty and persistent interrogation, that he had given money away again. Sometimes it would not even be to a kid he liked much or knew particularly well, but to one he had just met that summer who simply happened to be with him on the boardwalk or street and seemed to want it more. Sometimes that was the only reason he gave us for doing it. He gives cookies away too, and candy, and lets other children play with his toys, even when new. For some reason, it still galls me (my wife reacts similarly — a mood of jealousy and rejection is what I feel) when we see him permit some other kid to play with some new present we have just given him. (We feel it is still ours, rather than his.)
I used to try to observe him closely to detect if there were patterns, to see if there were any categories of personality or experience into which the different kids he gave his pennies and nickels and dimes to — I'm not sure if he ever gave away as much as a dime — could be made to fit. I didn't find any. He knew we studied him and discussed him. I told him he was imagining it. Sometimes he was imagining it when I said so; other times he was not. I still watch him. (If my boy ever does get the feeling he was spied upon, mulled over, and talked about when he was young, he would not be entirely wrong. It will not be entirely a delusion.) I feel so foolish and so ashamed for the way I acted (and perhaps will act again). No more than a penny, nickel, or dime was ever involved. But what furors we raised, my adult wife and I; how outraged and scandalized we were that this five- or six- or seven-year-old child of ours had given away a penny, nickel, or dime he had gotten from us or somebody else and did not want for himself. We didn't yell at him. We did worse; we patronized, belittled. We were never really angry with him, never deliberately very mean. But we pretended to be (which must have baffled him even more), and we would raise our voices (not yelling, but for emphasis), and cock our eyes at him in ridicule, amusement, and disbelief. We would cackle and smirk and make jovial, wry wisecracks as we closed in and down upon him in heartless, patronizing argument (while my daughter, who was covetous of the greater consideration she felt he received, would regard us reproachfully from a corner in which she had chosen to hide, too young and still too reserved herself then to object vituperatively the way she frequently does now) that he must not, ought not, simply should not give his money away.
"Why?"
(Why not, indeed? Who knows? We didn't. Although we took it for granted we did.) We were unfailingly good-natured and convivial as we took pains to convey to him (it was our responsibility as parents to do so, we made plain), repeatedly, that we loved him as much as ever anyway and were not punishing him by criticizing him and were not really mad; but we did rebuke him diligently in cordial, tolerant tones (ganging up on him, two of us at a time) as we tried to educate him, and we did try, emphatically, tenaciously, maniacally, to elucidate patiently for him why what he was doing was not wise or correct.
And the problem was that we could not explain. (We had no explanation that made sense even to us. It is difficult to be persuasive when the only answer to his Why? is a lame and dogmatic Because. We were worse to him, I feel now, than Forgione has ever been, more cruel and demoralizing than any teacher. I am overwhelmed with remorse. And yet, I know instinctively that I will do it again if he does it again and I catch him, or at least I will feel the urge to. I hope I restrain myself. I know I feel that what he does is wrong. I don't know why it is wrong. I don't know why I feel it is.) I know we were unable to present to him a single truthful and convincing reason why he ought not to give his pennies, nickels, and dimes away to other children if he wanted to. We actually put him on notice that, not to punish him, but only to teach him a lesson, we were going to punish him by teaching him a lesson. We would withhold money for stipulated periods of time: we would not give him any the next time he wanted some; or instead of money for ice cream, soda, or candy, we would give him the ice cream, soda, candy itself, because we did not feel he could be trusted with money; or tell him, so magisterially, that he would have the money to buy his own now if he had not gone and given it away as we warned him not to. ("See? We told you.")
It crossed my mind whimsically to demand also that he always eat it all up himself right before our eyes (rather than run the risk he might give someone a bite from his Popsicle or candy bar), but I never went quite that far. (I am all heart, ha, ha.)
He was so uncomfortable through all these discussions and inquisitions (he didn't know what to do or where or how to look; no matter how much we joshed and chuckled to put him at ease, he was never at ease. His doubtful smile was always forced and wavering as he strained to joke back cordially with us and asked questions and gave answers to ours in a profound and abortive effort to understand just what in the world it was we had grown so determined to teach him, and why) I suppose he really wanted to give up and cry: when I look back now and recall his delicate, furrowed expression, his lowered, obliging voice, it seems evident (now) that he had come awfully close to tears, but he would not (because we did not want him to) let them flow: he masked it well (but I know him better now): he flashed his doubtful smile often at us instead, from one to the other of us, as we harangued and excoriated him affably and he groped undecidedly, with knitted brow, to catch on to and hold what we felt we had explained so fluently.
"Suppose you want the penny later, or tomorrow?" I would point out by way of benevolent illustration.
"Then I'll get another one," he would answer.
"Where?"
"Here."
"From who?"
"From you."
"I won't give you one."
He squinted. "How come?" he asked in puzzlement.
"Because I won't," I said, with a conclusive gloat
"How come?"
I shrugged.
"Then I'll get it from Mommy."
"Will you?"
"I won't give you one either."
"How come?" He draws back a bit and gazes at my wife.
"You just gave one away before, didn't you? That's how little you thought of it."
He sees us watching him in silence, waiting for his next attempt.
"From the boy I gave it to," he says. "I'll get it from him."
"He won't have it."
"He won't give it to you."
"He'll spend it by then. That's why he wanted it."
"Do you think everyone's so generous?"
"Or he won't give it to you. Not everyone is as generous as you are."
"Or as rich."
"Or as well off. We're not rich."
"So you see? Do you?"
"We won't give it to you."
"You won't have one tomorrow."
My boy is befuddled and gapes at us searchingly, still straining to smile and endeavoring to make some sense of the situation, twisting in confusion (and plucking rapidly, distractedly, at his penis) as he waits for a hint, seeks hopefully to detect some beam of light that will illuminate it as some kind of well-intentioned practical joke.
("Don't pull at your penis," I am tempted to reprimand him, but I don't.)
"Do you have to go to the bathroom?" my wife does inquire peremptorily. He shakes his head with surprise, wondering why she has asked.
He cannot figure out what has just happened to him. A tremor of uncertainty shivers through him as he turns, looking frozen, from one to the other of us and finds himself deserted by both.
"How come?" he asks plaintively, and now a note of misery and total resignation perforates his voice. (He is ready to capitulate if he has to.)
"To," I summarize with lofty and deliberate relish, "teach you a lesson."
What a prick I was.
What a selfish, small, obtuse, and insensitive prick. I am glum with shame and repentance now when I remember those smug and tyrannical persecutions of my little boy (and will be sickened with shame and repentance afterward when I inflict them on him again. How can I stop myself?). For my own part (I plead guilty, your honor, but with an explanation, sir), I honestly believe I was motivated mainly by a protective and furious desire to safeguard him against being taken advantage of by other children (even by my daughter. I never could stand to see him taken advantage of. It was as though I myself were undergoing the helpless humiliation of being tricked, turned into a sucker. My own pride and ego would drip with wounded recognition. That's when I have been most enraged by him, when I wanted to smash and annihilate him, at those times when I felt, in a flaring outbreak of nearly unbridled bitterness, that he was allowing himself to be victimized and bullied by other children. So I bullied and victimized him, instead). I have loved and grieved for him almost from the day he was born, from the time I first noticed his lonesome, ingrained predilection for staring pensively out from his crib or playpen (my daughter was not that way, and neither was Derek, who seemed placid and normal at the beginning). And I loved him also for his naпve candor and absence of hostility, pitied him (and gave him black marks sullenly) for his tender impulses and for his many nameless and immobilizing forebodings; he seemed lost and distant and passive to me in a way it seemed I had once been myself and still feel I am at times when my guard lets down and all my strength ebbs away; I have always wanted him immune to abuse and defeat. So I abused and defeated him instead with my unctuous homilies, my meddlesome intrusions on his behalf, with my nagging, endless admonitions and discourses. I never could bear to see him unhappy (and would find it difficult to pardon him whenever he was); so I made him unhappier still (purging myself of some of my own distress in the act of doing so), but always feeling smirched immediately afterwards. (I can never sustain satisfaction from humbling him, as I usually can do when I humble my daughter, and always do when I win fights with my wife. With my wife by now, I think it no longer matters very much either way to either one of us whether I make her happy or unhappy; the difference is not so great nor the effect lasting; by now, I think we have learned how to get through the rest of our lives with each other and are both already more than halfway there. Who would ever have believed long, long ago that I would live as long as I have? But my boy is still only just beginning.) What a blind, petty, domineering, and sanctimonious prick I truly was. He simply could not see, and we simply could not show him. And even while all of these disputes were going on (it was usually during the summer in the country or at the beach, where I rent a house and all of us go almost every year and none of us ever have a good time. None of us but Derek. Who is able to take what simple pleasures he enjoys anywhere, even at home. Like Martha going crazy slowly in our office, hearing voices that bring a glow of pleasure to her face and playing games on country outings somewhere else as she gazes over the carriage of her typewriter at the blank green wall just a foot or two in front of her. I wonder how she will finally go under, how she will elect to do it, and whose responsibility this Martha our typist really is, Green, who hired her, or Personnel's, who screened and recommended her. She is not mine. At least in the summer, I can stay alone in the city more when the family is away and am free to have as much fun as I can find), my wife and I were charmed extremely by his peculiar generosity (if that's what it was) and beguiling good nature (we would smile at each other in fond and complacent self-approval and comment about him in fascination:
"He's really something, isn't he?"
"And how. So lovable.").
We were enchanted by his novel unselfishness; we talked about him with gusto to other people, feeling fortunate and superior because he was ours and we were able to do so. We fished for envious praise from other parents, soliciting, collecting, devouring, and waxing fat and glib on good comments about him in corpulent self-esteem. (What a vain and vainglorious, hypocritical, and egotistical prick.) And even then (indisputably now), if we had been asked to pick between a child who liberally gave away his pennies, nickels, and dimes that he did not want or need for himself and one who would always hoard them only for his own use, we would have chosen exactly what we had. We liked what we had.
(So why did I try to change him?)
Why did we proscribe and threaten and interrogate? (Why did we feel so affronted?) Why did we not chortle and prattle complacently to him also (as we did in conceit to our friends) because he gave those pennies, nickels, and dimes away, instead of only criticizing and reprimanding him and extracting reluctant confessions and recalcitrant vows? (If I were him — he, I know — I think I would hate me now. Why can't I leave him alone? Why can't I leave it alone, even now?)
And, of course, most contemptible of all, we did give him his penny, his nickel, or his dime the very next time he asked for it (he was invariably right about that, too, and we were invariably wrong), and his dollar or his dollar and a half for the movies, although we generally could not refrain from giving him something of a sermon with it. (Waste Not, Want Not. He could anticipate our catechism with unsettling accuracy and frequently would recite the words right along with us, especially if our daughter was present, for she could join in with him. I begin to perceive what a stereotype I am only when I realize how often my daughter and my boy can predict and mimic my remarks with such verbatim precision. Have I really become so calculable a bore to them without my knowing it? I smart secretly when they succeed in aping me and do not forgive them easily. I forget, rather than forgive. I do not like them to ridicule me.) And we knew we would give him the money he wanted the next time he asked, even as we were declaring to him that we would not. So why did we confound and torture him (put him through the wringer) and make him stand there and take it? Why did we make him feel, perhaps (and perhaps intentionally), like something bizarre, different, like some kind of freak?
(For a penny and a nickel or a dime.)
To teach him, we told ourselves, a lesson.
(What was that lesson?)
(We never found it. We didn't even look.)
"Have you learned your lesson?" I would catechize him further the next time he came to me for money.
"Yes."
"What is your lesson?" I would make him recite.
"I shouldn't give money away."
"Will you give it away?"
"No."
"Promise?"
"I want gum, Daddy."
"Do you promise?"
"I promise."
"What do you promise?"
"I won't give it away."
"What will you do with it?"
"Spend it."
"On who?"
"On gum."
"On what?"
"On me. I want gum, Daddy. Don't you understand? I just want some gum now."
"If I give you more than one penny, what will you do?"
"Buy more gum."
"And if I give you no pennies, what will you do?"
"Buy no gum."
"But you had pennies yesterday, didn't you? If you didn't give them away you wouldn't have to ask me for any today, would you?"
"Suppose I spent them yesterday? I'd have to ask you for some today anyway, wouldn't I?"
"I suppose you would. But do you understand now why you shouldn't give money away?"
"Yes."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Why? Why is it wrong for you to give money away?"
"Because," he begins — and his eyes gleam suddenly in anticipation and he finds it is impossible to resist giving the impish reply that comes to his mind — "because," he repeats, with a reckless, mischievous laugh and decides to plunge ahead with his joke, "it makes you and Mommy angry."
What a nice kid.
I am so pleased. And I have to laugh along with him to let him know the risk was a good one and that I am not going to make him pay for it.
We have brisk, Socratic dialogues, he and I, on just about everything (the lines fly crisply in rhythmic questions and answers), and we both enjoy them. (With my daughter, I have arguments and demoralizing discussions that tend to become overladen with personal imputations and denials, even when she starts out discussing, objectively and dispassionately, life and its meaning or her friends or mine. She has many comments to make about the people my wife and I know, as though they were any of her business.) I am Socrates, he is the pupil. (Or so it seems, until I review some of our conversations when I am alone, and then it often seems that he is Socrates. I know I love him. He loves me. He is nice. I am not.
"You're nice, Daddy," he exclaims to me frequently. He hugs me a lot.
"You know, Daddy, you're really nice sometimes," even my daughter remarks to me every now and then.
So maybe I'm not really always as bad as I think I am. I enjoy being praised, by anyone, even by members of my family. It makes me feel important; I grow expansive. Nobody is good always. Everybody is good sometime.) And there is no predicting in what directions our words will fly, for there is no telling in advance what closely guarded observations of his might suddenly spring to his tongue and flash out almost involuntarily, or what preoccupations, deliberately, after tense, inner centuries of concentrated brooding and speculation, he might choose without preliminaries to bring out into the open. (And once he does decide, there will be no deterring him.
"Did you have to fuck Mommy to get me?" he has asked.
"That's not why," I told him.
"Why what?"
"Why we did it or why we got you."
"It's how, though, isn't it?" He doesn't seem to like the idea.)
He won't take chances he doesn't have to. (Neither will I. Except with girls, and even then I tend to play it very safe.) He has never, to my knowledge, been in a fist fight. (I wouldn't get in one now either unless it was clearly a matter of life or death. The apple has not fallen far from the tree.) He has no taste for bullying or beating children smaller or weaker. He tries as best he can to avoid associating with anyone he's afraid of, even at the cost of giving up activities he enjoys or forfeiting the companionship of other children he likes. He does not know what to do when an older or tougher or even smaller kid shoves him or shouts at him or when a roving band takes away his bicycle or his baseball bat (as did happen to him in the park in the city on successive days that first time I was away at the company convention in Puerto Rico; maybe that's why he still does not like me to go away anywhere in an airplane, although I would not have been there with him in the afternoon anyway to protect him and his bicycle and his baseball bat from that gang of Puerto Rican kids one day and Negro kids the next, so maybe it is not. Other parents, mothers, were there, and they couldn't. Everything is so much more confusing than it ought to be). On the other hand, he is capable of acts of great courage and emotional strength that leave my wife and me flabbergasted. (We compliment ourselves on these, too.) He will sit still and docile if a doctor or dentist tells him he is about to hurt him and submit without flinching (though white as a sheet, or sallow, and with the tips of his fingers trembling) to whatever he has been told has to be done to him. I will flinch for him. I feel dizzy and am compelled to look away in terror and nausea when his slim arm is bared by a doctor working speedily to inoculate him or take blood. I see on his face in a doctor's or dentist's office that same sickly pallor I recognize now from mornings when he has to face Forgione later in the gymnasium or give an oral report in one of his classes (the whole impression I have of his person when he looks this way is one of phlegm. His total substance is phlegm. But he is certainly not phlegmatic. Ha, ha). He says nothing in objection as he submits, but I know that he is nauseated too: his gut is constricted, his limbs are tubes, and he fears he may yell for help and embarrass us all (and I am so shaken to see him this way thatI can scream in agony for him. I could not bear it when he had his tonsils out and I saw the tiny, crescent crust of dried blood looped out the bottom of his right or left nostril. I'm not certain which. My mind is no longer clear on such details, but that doesn't matter. There was a ringing in my head when they wheeled him back into the room, and my wife had to spring to me quickly to grip me by the arm and lead me to a chair, or I think I might have fallen). I hope he does not have to have a tooth pulled until he is old enough and hardy enough to bear it without my support, bear it much more courageously than I would be able to bear having one of his teeth pulled out now. I am so glad he no longer seems as frightened of me as he used to be, not even of my yelling or my acidulous sarcasm when I am feeling unhappy or suffering from a headache. (I remember some of the things I used to taunt and bully him about, like giving money away or being afraid to try to dive or sail or ski or ice skate, and I am saddened by shame, for a minute or two; I find it remarkable that he has been able to forgive me and forget, if indeed he has forgiven me, for maybe he remembers too. I think he remembers everything. He may even remember which nostril of his it was that bore that staining crust of blood when he was transported back to us inside the hospital room, but I don't want to ask him because I don't want to remind him of that deep and shattering trauma I suffered when he had his tonsils and adenoids pulled and clipped out and from which I am not sure either one of us will ever recover fully. He suffered too and did not want to stay in his own room when we brought him home from the hospital with his throat that hurt so much he could not speak or smile without pain. When he forgot and cracked a joke in a slow, croaking voice and began to smile he was stunned by the sharp reminder of pain. We made him return to his own room. It was a pretty room with decals on the wall and a hi-diddle-diddle mobile hanging from the ceiling in the center. In the hospital, he was thirsty when he woke up, but we could not give him water until all the ether fumes had evaporated. He would vomit, they told us. So we didn't. His eyelids were blue.)
I thank God that he no longer seems to include me among the clouded swarms of demonic, treacherous, sneaky, heartless, creeping, climbing, crawling, brutal, blood-spilling, overtowering crooks, kidnappers, ghosts, and murderers that infiltrate his dreams (and mine) and of whom, just about all his small life, I understand now, he has been in such profound and enervating dread. (He sensed these malign phantoms and villains rather than saw them, he said when we brought him home from the hospital with his cut throat, but he could hear them also at the same time. Lying awake listening for noises, he would hear the same creaks and footfalls we all do; but he would imagine human beings coming to get him, scaling stone by stone the outside wall of our apartment building, boring downward from the roof toward his bedroom, descending from an opening in the sky to the sill of his fragile glass window. Their faces were hooded or shaped in shadows they carried with them like shawls.
"Why didn't you call us?" I asked. "Why didn't you tell us, instead of trying to come into our room? We thought you were just lonely. Why didn't you call me instead of just lying there and being scared? I would have sat with you. Or Mommy."
"You would have told me I was imagining it."
"You were imagining it."
"I hear animals too. That's why I didn't call you.")
There was that one unreal period when he began to believe that I was not really me!
(Who else I could be he was not able to say.)
He began to suspect that I was no longer really me but someone vicious masquerading as me who had penetrated his household disguised as me in order to trick him and take him away from me. (Was he goading me? He was too small.) It was not possible to disprove him; every denial, every reference to reason and fact was part of the deception. Of course I would say everything I did say if he was right. I only proved him right. I could not prove I was me.
"Why should I want to?" I asked. "Why should anybody want to?"
"I don't know."
"Why should I tell you I'm me if I'm not?"
"To trick me."
"Why would I want to do that?"
"To take me away."
"To where?"
"Mommy too. To get me."
"Why would we do that when we've already got you here with us now anyway, haven't we?"
"I don't know."
"Do you think we already did get you and took you away and brought you here?"
"I don't know."
"I guess we did do all that anyway, didn't we?"
"I don't know."
Now, at least, he does know I am me and feels a bit more secure about that. (Or else understands that it makes no difference, for, if I am not me, he has to adjust nonetheless to whoever else I am. He is in my clutches now, in either event, and must remain — no one will rescue him — until he grows old enough, if he survives, to go away. When my own tonsils were taken out I awoke in pain at night in a darkened hospital ward with no parents there and no nurses. Everything was dark. There was only darkness in that very strange place. I could make out forms. Nothing moved. And thirst. God — what thirst. I was racked with thirst. I felt I would die if nobody gave me water, and nobody did. Nothing was there, except the eerie outlines of other beds that might have been empty. Nobody came until morning. The night was endless. I knew it would never end.
"Give him water," a doctor with a brown and gray mustache barked crossly at the nurses in the morning. "Give him water."
That's the last I remember. They had forgotten.)
I think he believes me now, more readily than he used to, I think he feels a little bit more at home with us, I think he trusts me more. (At least he knows now that I am me, although neither one of us is all that positive who that me we know I am is.) I think he does trust me more now, for he is not as submissive and dependent as he always used to be and has confidence enough sometimes (in me? Or in himself?) to say no to me, to refuse to do or say something he is asked to, although he is still extremely cautious about tempting anyone's wrath. He will not always give me answers about himself to questions I ask. He has never shown anger to me or my wife and hardly ever to my daughter. Is it possible he has never felt it? No. What does he do with the anger he feels? Ventilates it in dreams. And I'll bet he has been saving a lot of it up too, the way other kids accumulate comic books or bubble-gum cards. I'll bet he must hate me at times. (I think I would hate him.) I know he baits me on occasion, but usually as a lark, when we are feeling good toward each other.
"I am going to give you something," he says to a kid in my presence, with a sidelong glance in my direction, "and you don't have to give me anything back. Okay?"
(I suppress an outraged and admiring snort. I cannot believe that this impertinent little rogue of mine will really do what I sense he's going to.)
"What?" The other little boy is not sure he has understood.
"I am going to give you something," my boy repeats slowly, making certain I am attentive, "and you don't have to give me anything back. Okay? Something you want."
"What is it?"
"All right?"
Dubiously, the other boy nods.
"It's something you want."
And, to the other boy's astonishment, my boy pushes upon him the nickel he has just wheedled from me to buy more gum.
I am incredulous.
"Now, Daddy," he starts right in the instant we are alone, with his clenched hands on his hips and his head cocked to one side indignantly, in perfect imitation of me, then shakes a finger at me, again in extravagant mimicry, and launches into talk too rapid for me to interrupt. "I want you to behave and listen to me so you don't do or say anything to embarrass me here because you don't understand and I am the boss and I don't want you to and I will punish you if you do and punish you if you don't do what I want you to so you better not or I will smack you too and no television for a week because I say so do you hear and is that clear? You're laughing!" he explodes with a grin. "I can see you're laughing, Daddy, and I don't want you to pretend you're not and make believe you're angry at what I did and then forget you're making believe and really get angry. You do that sometimes you know, Daddy. Don't you?"
"Are you finished?" I ask, with my hands still on my hips. "That's a mighty long speech for a little piss-ass like you who sometimes hardly talks at all."
"Are you mad?" he inquires uneasily.
"No, I'm glad. But do you think just because you made me laugh I'm going to let you get away with what you did?"
"It was mine."
"It was mine before I gave it to you."
"It was mine after you gave it to me. Don't embarrass me in public."
"Are you imitating me again? Don't think you can get away with that forever."
"We're in public, aren't we? I don't want you to do anything that will make people stop and listen."
"I'm not doing anything at all but listening to you."
"You're standing."
"So are you."
"With your hands on your hips, just like an actor on television. Let's walk. Let's walk, I said."
"Now you're like an actor on television, shaking your finger at me."
"You're embarrassing me," he charges.
"No, I'm not."
"But you're going to," he predicts, "aren't you?"
"Why should I embarrass you?"
"Are you going to yell at me?"
"Am I yelling at you?"
"Are you going to be mad?"
"Am I mad?"
"You are embarrassing me," he accuses triumphantly. "You're being sarcastic."
"Big shot!" I tell him sarcastically. "You don't even know what embarrass means."
"Yes, I do. And I know what sarcastic means. It means when you're doing something I don't want you to do."
"I'm not doing anything you don't want me to do. I'm not doing anything at all but standing here, so how can I be embarrassing you?"
"You're asking me questions, aren't you? Why do you keep asking me questions?"
"Why don't you answer them?"
"I'm going to tell Mommy," he threatens. "I'm going to tell Mommy you drank whiskey."
"She won't believe you. She'll know it's a lie."
"How come?"
"Your nose will grow."
"How come?"
"A person's nose grows when he tells a lie."
"Then your nose is growing," he counters. "Because that's a lie."
"Then why would my nose be growing if it's a lie?"
"I'm going to sock you one, Daddy," he squeals in frustration, as he feels himself outsmarted.
"Why are you twisting around so much? Stand still."
"I think I'm nervous," he guesses.
"Do you have to pee? Then why are you picking at your pecker?"
"I don't like that."
(He stops picking at his pecker. I'm sorry I said it.)
"She'll smell my breath," I resume, to change that subject. "She won't smell whiskey, and that's how she'll know you're lying."
"I'm going to kick you," he says. "I think I'm going to kick you in the shins."
"Why?" I ask in surprise.
"Because," he says. "Because whenever I kick you in the shins or sock you one you begin wrestling with me and we laugh a lot, so I think I'll do it to make you laugh a lot."
"I'll kick your ass."
"I'm going to tell Mommy you said a dirty word to me."
"So what? I say dirty words to her."
"She doesn't like it. She'll fight with you."
"We don't fight."
"You fight a lot. She'll smack you."
"She doesn't smack me."
"She cries."
"No, she doesn't."
"Sometimes she does."
"You talk too much. And notice too much. Sometimes you get them all mixed up."
"I wish I knew somebody who could beat you up," he tells me, kidding.
"Why?"
"I'm going to call a cop."
"Why?"
"To smack you."
"He's not allowed to."
"You smack me."
"I'm allowed to. And I don't smack you."
"You used to."
"I did not. In your whole life I bet I never smacked you once."
"Once you did. When I was little. I remember."
"If I did, I'm sorry. But I don't think I did. I don't smack you now. Do I?"
"You're going to. Aren't you?"
"For what?"
"You know."
"I'm not."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
"You promise you won't smack me?"
"I promise."
"You really promise you won't smack me?"
"I promise. I won't smack you. Don't you believe me?"
"I believe you," he says.
And wham — he kicks me in the shin!
I leap a mile into the air, howling with surprise, and I know I must look funny as hell to him as I go hopping around in outrage, stroking and fanning my stinging leg. He does not laugh immediately: he frowns instead, wondering, I guess, if he has perhaps gone too far and is now in trouble, until he sees and hears me guffaw and understands that I am neither hurt nor displeased. Then his own face opens radiantly in a sunburst of relief and he begins laughing in exultation. I exaggerate all my own comic motions in order to keep him laughing and then to trap him with a sneak attack. He is doubled over in quaking merriment, clutching his belly and gulping and sighing helplessly, and all at once I am upon him: I hurl myself at him while he is bent over laughing, and we fall to the ground wrestling. It is not much of a match. At the beginning, I tickle his ribs to keep him giggling and gasping for air and render him defenseless. We grapple awhile until I grow winded, and then I turn limp to allow him to pin me. I am out of breath, and the match is his if he wants it. But he isn't satisfied. He grows cocky and careless: he wishes to savor his victory; and instead of pinning me, he elects to experiment in torturing me with some useless armlocks and toeholds. My breath is back, I decide to teach him a lesson (another lesson. The subject of this lesson, I suppose, is that one should strike while the iron is hot. The truly disgusting thing about all these platitudinous lessons for getting ahead is that sooner or later they all turn out to be true). So, while my boy is fiddling tranquilly with my fingers, my toes, and my foot, not certain really what to do with any of them, I bunch my muscles treacherously, fill my lungs for the effort, and, in one brief and explosive heave, flip him up and over and around down into the sand. He whoops in fearful, thrilled excitement at my new determination, and he kicks and twists and elbows wildly with joy, a lithe, laughing, healthy little animal trying energetically to fight and wiggle free as I swarm down upon him. (Now I cannot let him win; if I do, he'll know it's only because I did let him, and then he'll know that he has lost.) It is no contest at all now that I have my wind back and am going about it in earnest. I employ my greater bulk (much of it solid flab, ha, ha) to force him down into place. It is relatively easy for me to grasp both his wrists in one of my hands, to immobilize his legs beneath the pressing weight of my own and end his kicking. In just a few more seconds it is over; and he gives up. I have him nailed to the ground in a regulation pin. We stare at each other smiling, our faces inches apart.
"I win," he jokes.
"Then let me up," I joke back.
"Only if you surrender," he says.
"I surrender," I reply.
"Then I'll let you up," he says.
I let him go and we rise slowly, breathing hard and feeling close to each other.
"You know, Daddy," he starts right in with pious gravity, trying to divert me, assuming an owlish and censorious expression as austerely as a judge, "I really did win, because you threw sand in my eyes and tickled me and that's not allowed."
"I did not," I retort fliply.
"Did you tickle me? You liar."
"That's allowed. You can tickle."
"You don't laugh."
"You don't know how to tickle."
"That's why it's not fair."
"It is fair. And furthermore," I continue, "I didn't throw sand."
"I can say you did."
"And did you know, by the way, that it's a lovely day today because the sun is shining and the bay is calm and blue, and there are nine or seven planets —»
"Nine."
"— of which Mercury is the closest to the sun and.»
"Pluto."
". Pluto is the farthest?"
"Did you hear about the homosexual astronauts?" he asks.
"Yes. They went to Uranus. And if, as they say, there are seven days in each week and fifty-two weeks in each year, how come there are three hundred and sixty-five days in the year instead of three hundred and sixty-four?"
He pauses to calculate. "How come?" he queries. "I never thought about that."
"I don't know. I never thought about it either."
"Is that what you want to talk about now?" he asks disconsolately.
"No. But if you want to stall, I'll stall along with you. You're not fooling me."
"I'm going to tell Mommy," he threatens again. "I'm going to tell Mommy you threw sand in my eyes."
"I'm going to tell her," I rejoin.
"Are you?" His manner turns solemn.
"What?"
"Going to tell her?"
"What?"
"You know."
"What?"
"What I did."
"Did you do something?" I inquire with airy candor.
"You know."
"I can't remember."
"What I gave away."
"Did you give something away?"
"Daddy, you know I gave a nickel away."
"When? You give a lot of nickels away."
"Just before. When you were right here."
"Why?"
"You won't know."
"Tell me why. How do you know?"
"You'll get angry and start yelling or begin to tease me or make fun of me."
"I won't. I promise."
"I wanted to," he states simply.
"That's no answer."
"I knew you'd say that."
"I knew you'd say that."
"I said you wouldn't understand."
"He didn't ask you for it," I argue. "He couldn't believe his eyes when you gave it to him. I don't think you even knew him that long. I'll bet you don't even like him that much. Do you?"
"You're getting angry," he sulks. "I knew you would."
"I'm not."
"You're starting to yell, aren't you?"
"I'm just raising my voice."
"You see?"
"You're faking," I charge, and give him a tickling poke in the ribs. "And I know you're faking, so stop faking and trying to pretend you can fool me. Answer."
He grins sheepishly, exposed and pleased. "I don't know. I don't know if I like him or not. I only met him yesterday."
"See? I'm smart. Then why? You know what I mean. Why did you give your money to him?"
"You'll think I'm crazy."
"Maybe you are."
"Then I won't tell you."
"I know you aren't."
"Do I have to?"
"Yes. No. You want to. I can see you do. So you have to. Come on."
"I wanted to give him something," he explains very softly. "And that was all I had."
"Why did you want to give him something?"
"I don't know."
He tells me this so plainly, truthfully, innocently as to make it seem the most plausible and obvious reason imaginable. And I do understand. His frankness is touching, and I feel like reaching out to embrace him right there on the spot and rewarding him with dollar bills. I want to kiss him (but I think he will be embarrassed if I do, because we are out in public). I want to tousle his hair lightly. (I do.) Tenderly, I say to him:
"That's still no answer."
"How come?" he inquires with interest.
"It doesn't tell why."
"It's why."
"It doesn't tell why you wanted to give him something. Why did you want to give him something?"
"I think I know. You sure keep after me, don't you?"
"Why did you want to give him something?"
"Do I have to tell?"
"No. Not if you don't want to."
"I was happy," he states with a shrug, squinting uncomfortably in the sunlight, looking a little pained and self-conscious.
"Yeah?"
"And whenever I feel happy," he continues, "I like to give something away. Is that all right?"
"Sure." (I feel again that I want to kiss him.)
"It's okay?" He can hardly trust his good fortune.
"And I'm glad you were happy. Why were you happy?"
"Now it gets a little crazy."
"Go ahead. You're not crazy."
"Because I knew I was going to give it away." He pauses a moment to giggle nervously. "To tease you," he admits. "Then when I knew I was happy about that, I wanted to give the nickel away because I was happy about wanting to give the nickel away. Is it okay?"
"You're making me laugh."
"You're not mad?"
"Can't you see that you're making me laugh? How can I be mad?"
"Then I'll tell you something else," he squeals with ebullient gaiety. "Sometimes I feel like laughing for no reason at all. Then I feel like laughing just because I know I feel like laughing. You're smiling!" he cries suddenly, pointing a finger at my face, and begins shrieking with laughter. "Why are you smiling?"
"Because you're funny!" I shout back at him. "It's funny, that's why. You're funny, that's why."
"Are you gonna tell Mommy I gave money away?"
"Are you? You can't tell her either if I don't. Otherwise I'll get in trouble."
"You can tell her," he decides.
"Then you can tell her too."
"Was it all right?"
"Sure," I comfort him. "It was all right. In fact, it was better than all right. It was very nice. And I'm glad you talked to me. You don't always talk to me." I rest the palm of my hand lightly on the back of his head as we start walking again and head toward the boardwalk. My hand feels unnatural there, as though I am stretching a small elbow and arm muscle into an unaccustomed position. I move my hand to his shoulder; I feel a strain there too. (I am not used to holding my boy, I realize. I am not used to holding my daughter either.) "But suppose — " I want to prepare him and shield him against everything injurious in the world, and I cannot stop myself.
He pulls away from me with an impatient lurch of his shoulders, frowning. "Daddy, I knew you were going to say that!"
"And I knew you were going to say that," I laugh in reply, but my heartiness is false. "What else am I going to say?"
"I want it for myself later or tomorrow? Then I'll get it back from him. But suppose —»
"Yeah?"
"— he doesn't have it or won't give it to you?"
"He won't."
"Then I'll get another nickel. From who?"
"I won't give it to you."
"From you. I won't give it to you."
"I won't. I warn you."
"You will," he replies to me directly, ending his imitation of us. "You always say that. You always say you won't. And then you always do. So why do you say that? Won't you?"
"Yes," I concede in a long syllable of total surrender, succumbing pleasurably to his childlike charm and intelligence. "I'll give it to you. I'll even give it to you now before you want it."
So what, his sage and ironic expression seems to say to me, am I making such a bogus fuss about? "I knew you would," he summarizes in triumph. He walks beside me with a lighter, more contented step.
"I always will, I want you to know. Do you?" I watch him nod; I see his brow tightening a bit with recollection and perplexity. "We're pretty good pals now, ain't we?" I ask. "You and me?"
"I used to be afraid of you."
"I hope you're not, now."
"Not as much."
"You don't have to be. I won't ever hurt you. And I'll always give you everything you need. Don't you know that? I just yell a lot."
After a moment more of deep reflection, he allows himself to bump against me softly with his shoulder as I often see him do with other boys I know he likes. (It is the friendliest answer he could have given me.) I bump him back the same way in response. He smiles to himself.
"Daddy, I love you!" he exclaims with excitement, and throws his face against my hip to kiss me and hug me. "I hope you never die."
(I hope so too.) I crook my arm around his shoulders and hug him in return. Very swiftly, before he can be embarrassed by it and stop me, I kiss the top of his head, brush my lips against his silken, light-brown hair. (I steal a kiss.) I love him too and hope that he never dies.
I have the recurring fear that he will die before I do. I cannot let that happen. He is too dear to me. I know him now, and I know he is a much more valuable person to me than the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Defense, the Majority Leader and the Minority Whip. He is more important to me than the President of the United States of America. (I think more of my boy's life than I do of his.) I Pledge my Allegiance to him. (I never mention this heresy to anyone, of course.) I will never permit them to harm him.
But what would I do to protect him? I think I know what I would do. Nothing.
"Don't worry," I have promised him in earnest. "I will never let anything bad happen to you."
He is afraid of the government, the army, the Pentagon, the police. (And so am I.)
"I won't ever let them hurt you or take you away."
And what is there, really, that I can do? Except nothing.
So I do nothing.
I can connive (that gives me time), as I connive now in my job at the company (connive to survive, keep alive till five), but that's about all. And time may soon run out.
Who am I? I think I'm beginning to find out. I am a stick: I am a broken waterlogged branch floating with my own crowd in this one nation of ours, indivisible (unfortunately), under God, with liberty and justice for all who are speedy enough to seize them first and hog them away from the rest. Some melting pot. If all of us in this vast, fabulous land of ours could come together and take time to exchange a few words with our neighbors and fellow countrymen, those words would be Bastard! Wop! Nigger! Whitey! Kike! Spic! I don't like people who run things. I don't like Horace White, who is hard to take seriously (and yet I must).
"If you ever write a book," he has said to me, and meant it, because such things are important to him, "I would like you to put my name in it."
Horace White is a pale, insipid man of many small distinctions. He likes to see his name in the newspapers. He is an honorary deputy something or other of the City of New York (even though his legal residence is in Connecticut) and has an undistinguished bronze shield proclaiming that distinction affixed to the bumper of his automobile. The letters on the license plate of his automobile form his complete monogram (HOW); the numerals advance each year to give his age. (We think he lies about his age.) No one has ever been able to describe specifically what he does here in the company, except to be who he is, to have money, own stock, and be related in two collateral ways to one or more of the founders and directors. And I must toady to him. And I do.
If I were poor, I believe I might want to overthrow the government by force. I'm very glad, however, that everyone poor isn't trying to overthrow the government, because I'm not poor. I don't know why every Negro maid doesn't steal from her white employer (but I'm glad our Negro maid doesn't, or at least has not let us find out she does). If I were Black and poor, I don't think I'd have any reason for obeying any law other than the risk of being caught. As it is, though, I'm glad colored people do obey the law (most of them, anyway), because I am afraid of Negroes and have moved away from them. I am afraid of cops. But I'm glad there are cops and wish there were more.
(I don't like cops.)
(Except when they're around to protect me.)
I do not talk about any of this even to my wife, who, as she grows more lonely, old, and disappointed, is turning, like her sister, into a sour conservative who is opposed to happiness. (She is going to vote reactionary this year. I won't talk politics with her. I don't care how she votes.) I keep my own counsel and drift speechlessly with my crowd. I float.
I float like algae in a colony of green scum, while my wife and I grow old, my daughter grows older and more dissatisfied with herself and with me (I see other girls her age who seem perfectly fine. Some are prettier. Others act more sure of themselves. At least they are doing some of the things she says she'd like to do, including getting laid, but never even tries. And get better grades. What do I care what grades she gets? I do. And I have to pretend I care very much, otherwise she will feel I am not interested in her at all), and my little boy grows up tortured and puzzled, uncertain who, beside himself, he is supposed to be (or who, if he thinks like I do, himself even is. Go find him. Go find me. Lost somewhere deep inside his small self already is the smaller boy he used to be, the original article. Or is there? If that is not so, if there is no vanished and irretrievable little me and him so starkly different from what each of us since has been forced to become, if there is no wandering, desolate lost little being I yearn for and started from so far back in my history who took a sudden, inevitable lurch into some inaccessible black recess at a moment when I must have been staring the other way, for I am unable to pinpoint the moment, and left me disoriented all by myself to continue willy-nilly on my own — then how the fuck did I ever get here? Somebody pushed me. Somebody must have set me off in this direction, and clusters of other hands must have touched themselves to the controls at various times, for I would not have picked this way for the world. He has never been found. Lost: one child, age unknown, goes by the name of me. And I can't keep looking back for sight of him to ask him hopefully where did you go and what did you mean. He would be too young still even to know what I was talking about — he was just a kid when he left me, he is younger than my own child — let alone succor me with the wise, experienced knowledge I need from him. What will I talk about to so many of those lined, ruddy faces with bloodshot, puffy eyes if Green does permit me to make my three-minute speech in Puerto Rico this year? I'll need jokes, quick jokes — ha, ha, ha — a few at the beginning and a very good one at the end, ha, ha, and all in only three minutes. We might just as well float like algae in colonies of green scum for as long as the tides will continue to carry us, and when they no longer support us, then what?) or which of the many dangers he pictures are real and which are merely hideous and fantastic daydreams. (Drowning is real. Being plucked from bed by a hook from an opening in the sky while lying helplessly asleep is not.) They are more than merely daydreams; they flood his consciousness at night in the darkness when we think he is asleep. Leaving a night light on makes no difference. It is impossible for us ever to know with certainty whether he is asleep or awake. If we peek in on him to check, he will often pretend to be asleep in order to avoid having us criticize him for being awake. I feel, without any real cause for believing so, that he always hears my wife and me make love or at least knows when we have done so. My daughter, at least, makes sure we hear her when she is up. She runs water or plays records or barges in on us without knocking to settle something once and for all. Not him. He is stealthy. I used to want to rumple my daughter's hair too, pat her head affectionately or touch or kiss her cheek or throw a hugging arm around her shoulders, but she began to shrink away from me as she grew up, kidding at first, I thought, and I would always pretend to be hurt. And then those times came when I began to comprehend that she was no longer kidding, and I no longer had to pretend I was really hurt. I really was hurt — and now I pretend I am not. Something took place, I felt, that made me awful to her, incited her disapproval and inspired her to overlook no opportunity to show it. There were times I felt she was after me in revenge. I don't know what it was I did or didn't do, and I still don't know what to do about it or even if there's anything I ought to try. Soon she'll be away at college.
I feel awkward when I have to touch her. She recoils from me, as though the tiniest physical contact with me would disgust her, or flinches, as though I were going to inflict pain. I never hit her! The most I have ever done, the most I ever do now, is shove her roughly in the shoulder when I have to. The most my wife ever does is start to slap her face when they're fighting, but makes her motion slowly enough to enable my daughter to block or avoid the blow; my daughter can inflame my wife to such anger almost at will and then reduce her to hysterical, muddled weeping. I am always stricken with bewilderment for a moment by my daughter's unexpected flashes of alarm. I am always contrite and flooded with such immense guilt and shame because my daughter thinks instinctively that I intend to hit her — or reacts as though she does. Is she waiting tensely, has she been waiting tensely all these years, for some tremendous blow from us? Does she honestly believe, when I flick my hand out to brush a loose eyelash from her cheek or a crumb of food, that I intend to hit her in the face? Or is she, as I frequently surmise now (perhaps irrationally), merely pretending, consciously and diabolically simulating such terror because she understands how keenly it shocks and saddens me? She is cunning enough for all of that, I think. It runs in the family: she gets it from me: don't I sometimes let my wife suffer through her strangling, moaning nightmares now by making no effort to rouse her from them? And glory in my advantageous position as I watch and listen? Don't I often exaggerate the agony of my own horrible dreams and feign to be more deeply entrapped in them than I am in order to make her labor longer, harder, and more compassionately to wake me from them? I do not understand my daughter any longer and I cannot cope with her successfully or make it possible for her to cope with me. So I try not to try. I wait, and hope for things to run their course. I do not understand my son, either. He is too young to be so magnanimous. He gave cookies away also. That was also the summer he tried to give cookies away to another kid and almost got a punch in the nose in return.
"Here, you can have a cookie," he said to the little boy who had dropped in to the summer house we had rented to play with him while we were all still having breakfast.
The boy gulped it down in a twinkling. Then the boy gazed hungrily at the remaining round chocolate cookie, which my boy was rolling about contemplatively on the tablecloth as he dawdled over his glass of milk. With a flicker of surprised recognition, my boy took note of the hungering stare.
"You can have this one too," he offers. "Here."
The boy stiffens as though offended and pulls back with a look of hostility. Suddenly, to my own amazement, he is enraged and befuddled and shakes his head in vigorous resentment.
"What do you mean?" he demands.
"Why? Don't you want it?" My boy pushes it part way across the table to him.
"You had it in your mouth."
"No, I didn't."
"It fell on the floor."
"No." My boy is taken aback and sounds defensive and apologetic. (He looks like he's lying.)
"It's dirty," the other boy accuses.
"It isn't. I'm not lying. You don't have to take it."
"Why don't you want it?"
"Because you want it. Don't you? I had some."
The other boy is furious, too flustered anymore to trust himself to speak, and his face turns fiery as he sits there in hatred and continues shaking his head adamantly. My boy whitens. The fists of the other boy are clenched and raised, and he is ready to fight; but I am there, sitting forbiddingly (ready to fight too, I feel. If he tries to hit my boy, I believe I will take his arm and break it). He sputters in tongue-tied, gagging wrath, shoves the second cookie roughly back across the table so it falls over the edge, and gallops out of our house, his mouth writhing and his downcast eyes almost spilling over with steaming tears of bellicose frustration. He feels, somehow, that he has been made a fool of. My little boy is blank with consternation; his face is like a crossword puzzle; he cannot understand what he has just done, simply by offering cookies, to cost him a friend and make for himself a young, new enemy who wishes to injure him. He looks about wanly in pleading confusion and tries to smile.
"You can't give things away, not so generously," I explain for him, with a weak, sympathizing smile.
"Why?" he asks.
I shrug. "I don't know. People get suspicious."
"I don't like bugs," he complains. "I don't like it here. Do we have to spend the whole summer?"
"We do. I don't like it here either."
"You go to the city."
"I have to. I'm glad we didn't send you away to camp. I'm glad you're here when I come out."
"I'm not."
That was also the summer in which my boy was having a difficult time of it (my boy has always been having a difficult tune of it, it seems, and my wife and I are finding it more and more fatiguing) in the play group in which we enrolled him to insure that he would have fun and much to do with other kids during the day. At the beginning, he was very happy there and eager to go. He was astonished and overjoyed to find himself among so many other boys his own age whom he considered his friends. Boisterously and proudly, he would point them out to us when he came upon them on the boardwalk at night or at the beach or in different parts of town.
"That's my friend," he would announce with elation. "That's my friend. I know him. I know him from play group. That's my friend also." Sometimes he would wave and they would rush to greet each other or they would bump shoulders wordlessly in recognition as they passed. "That's my friend also from play group," he would continue every time. "That's my friend too. He's older."
He took so much pleasure in having them, as though he had never before conceived it possible that he could be on sociable terms with so many people. He was radiant when any came to the house looking for him; he would entice them inside to show them off.
("This is my friend," he would say. "These are my friends."
My daughter was that way too when she was little, still is with boys, but much more subtle and blasй in the manner in which she takes pains to let us see or find out about a boy she wants us to think is interested in her. I wonder what in the world my wife and I ever did to our children to make them believe we thought they would never be able to make friends. I'm not sure anymore that we did anything, that all of it is our fault.) It was almost as though he could not contain quietly all the intense happiness he was experiencing.
It did not last. It ended early for him. Things soon began happening at that play group to disquiet him, and before long he was as reluctant to go there as he is now to go to gym and Forgione. He welcomed the foot races and the guessing games and play-skits indoors on rainy days; but there was rope climbing there too (but only for the older boys, we were able to find out) and a trampoline in view that he was leery of (so was I. And so was my wife. I don't know what my boy thought because I did not want to generate any apprehension in him by asking, but I know what I thought: I was afraid he might go bouncing up all the way to the surface of the moon, bump his head, and come bouncing back down to that trampoline on the back of his neck with his spine broken and both his legs and arms paralyzed — I just did not want him to have to try it), and far in advance he was tormented by the deep-water swimming test he was told all the boys in his age group would have to pass before the summer was over and be given lessons to pass. (He didn't even want the lessons. There were also constant rumors of jellyfish in the water, and sea lice and horseshoe crabs.) There were rumors of boxing bouts and wrestling matches; he spied a pair of boxing gloves on a hook in a shed and believed he would have to fight (although there never was any boxing or wrestling. There never was anything dangerous there for the children. It was a good day camp, I guess, as far as good day camps go, but I soon found myself detesting it because my boy began having dilliculties there). New games were introduced quickly that my boy did not understand and other children from previous years there did, and no one, not the counselors or any of his friends in the play group, took sufficient time to explain or was tolerant and considerate of his blunders when he made them. He was too shy to ask any question more than once, even when the reply he received was incomprehensible or incomplete; he was doing things wrong consistently. The counselors were busy flirting with each other. (That old stewing concupiscence was germinating hotly there too. The girls wore knitted T-shirts; many wore no bras, and even the tiny-titted ones looked good. It's so much sweeter when you're young, so much hotter, so much more fun. I wish I had that frenetic heat back now instead of this sluggish, processed lust I put myself through and frequently have to make a laborious effort to enjoy.) I hardly blamed them, although I blamed them like hell at the time when their negligence affected my own boy. (I remember my own scalding, urgent drives and fits for two summers in the woods as a camp counselor near a camp with girl counselors just across the lake. There were many activities the two camps did together. I really didn't give a fuck about the welfare or development of any of the kids, so long as they didn't drown, get scarlet fever or polio, or kill each other with ropes or rocks. All I had my entire soul concentrated on for most of those summers was reaching some bold and naughty juicy slut of an experienced girl from town or the other camp who would meet me on the ground in the woods and make me come fast. So I wouldn't have to do it myself. Oh, how I always wanted to come. I used to enjoy doing it to myself in those days as much as I enjoyed it any other way.) He felt himself sinking steadily into disgrace. He was less and less able to figure out what to do. He faked limps at play group in order to be excused from activities he was not utterly positive he understood and began complaining at home at breakfast of nausea and sore throats. (It was like it is at school now. There was no beginning, it seems, and there might be no end.)
One morning he retched and seemed to throw up the very little he had eaten because he did not want to go. We took his temperature, and he had no fever. We made him go. (It was wrong of us to make him go. I know that now, and everybody we talk to about it says it was wrong. But nobody has been able to tell me what would have been right.)
I wandered by there secretly later that day to observe him, and I was jubilant at what I saw. It was a relay race, and he was ten yards ahead, my joyous little boy (I was so proud to spy him), carrying a heavy medicine ball in his arms that he had to deliver to the next runner on his team. He was laughing; his giggles rang out clearly over everything; he was laughing so hard as he ran that he was faltering in his stride, and his knees wobbled and buckled; he was reeling with greater and greater outpourings of laughter and soon staggering and almost falling, doubled over with his deep, choking blasts of irrepressible merriment, as he leaped and stumbled and lumbered and galloped through the sand, slowing down steadily, intentionally, it appeared, for he was motioning heartily to the fat, wheezing, unhappy little boy he was racing against on the other team to hurry and catch up, so they could laugh together and run the rest of the way side by side, as though he had something funny he wished to reveal to him before they got there.
My boy was still laughing (his face and teeth and mouth were all gleaming) when he handed the medicine ball off to the next boy on his team, who, instead of running, flung it back at his feet, and a whole surly gang of enraged people, it seemed, including some of those tall, sun-tanned counselors in white T-shirts, descended upon him like ferocious animals and began screaming and swearing at him. (A few were soon screaming at each other and shoving. My heart stopped and I was frozen to the spot. I could not believe it.) It was a mob scene. My boy was aghast. He did not know how he had sinned. He did not know what to do. As he stood there dumbfounded, twisting grotesquely in bewilderment, a bigger, broad-shouldered boy with black hair and a furious face charged up to him out of the swirl of others like a bull gone berserk and rammed him viciously in the chest with the hardened heels of both hands. My boy fell back a few steps (his knees were buckling again), turned white as a sheet (Oh, God, I thought — he's going to vomit, or faint. Or cry. And make me ashamed), and waited limply. He did nothing else. He stood there. He did not speak or protest, or cast his eyes about. He did not even lift his arms to protect himself or hit back as the other boys made ready to run at him again; but he did not look as though he intended to flee or beg for help. (I shuddered and thought thatI might puke.) The other boy rushed forward again and slammed my boy in the chest with his open hands, then stood daringly with his fist poised high in an open challenge to my boy to begin fighting back. Again my boy staggered backward a few steps from the force, recovered his balance, and just waited. He would not fight back; he would not defend himself; but he would not run away, and he would not ask anyone for aid or pity. That much seemed clear; there was defiance in his stillness. For a fleeting instant, I was enthralled by the dignity and courage I sensed he was showing just by holding his ground and waiting for the next battering charge. He would not move to save himself. (I do not move to save myself.) For a second, I could actually make myself feel proud. But that wasn't enough. I wanted him to have more guts. (I wish I had more guts.) I heard myself rooting for him to strike back.
"Move, you dope!" I pleaded to myself. "Why don't you move, you dope!"
And then, with a numbing, devastating shock that made my head feel fault, I saw that his eyes were red and swollen and brimming with tears and that his lips were bloodless as ashes and quivering. And then I understood why he did not move: he could not move. He was paralyzed. He was devoid of all power and ability to act or think. He could not even panic. He did not move because he could not move. He did not speak because he could not speak. He did not hit back because he could not hit back. He did not cry out or cast his gaze about for help because he couldn't: the thought was not there. He had no voice. Here was that bad dream of mine coming to life. Here was onrushing death and degradation bearing down upon him once more in the senseless, stupid action of a little, slightly sturdier boy (looming suddenly in this situation as large as a giant) whom my boy recently tried to give two chocolate cookies to (it was the same one. Or maybe it wasn't) and he could not move (neither could I) to avert it or mouth the words necessary to call attention to it and release himself from that lifelong, terrifying nightmare of mine. (I am there, and someone can get me — I am dead already because I cannot free my feet or yell for help — I am speechless too — although I feel I want to.) He was affixed. He was frozen to his spot too (as I was frozen to mine). He was fossilized, flat, brittle, and destructible. He was already dead if anyone wanted to kill him. One of the play group counselors (in slow motion, it looked to me) intervened just then to save him (two counselors, actually, the second a chunky blond girl with big breasts. Breasts seem to be growing bigger and bouncier on young girls these days. They seem to be growing them bigger on older girls too and middle-aged women. In summer, the beaches hang with them. I like breasts, until I begin to see so much of so many of them. I used to like them more) and get things going again, and I realized I'd been holding my breath just about all the time and that all my muscles were tensed for violence (and arrested by the urge to use them). I realized that if that other little boy, whom I already hated, had charged at my little boy one more time, I might have lost control and stormed into that children's play area like someone roaring and insane and smitten him dead right then and there. (Or else, in a reaction away from that impulse, I would have murdered my boy.) If I found that I was able to move myself at all. (I will never know if I was petrified too.)
I left when they were all playing again.
I was very good to my boy the rest of that day. (I was so good to him, and sensitive, that I did not even tell him or my wife what I had seen. He had been afraid to fight.)
The next day, as I more or less foresaw, he did not want to go to play group again. He didn't say so; he merely said he didn't feel well but would probably be all right if we told him he had to go. He looked wretched and pasty, and my heart went out to him silently because I knew (I thought I knew) what he felt. He went. We told him he did have to go and took him. Leaving with us for play group that morning (our daughter was away at camp that summer, where she was having a difficult time of it too, if we could believe her), he looked as miserable and ill in spirit as he did on that bleak and drizzling, unnatural dawn we rode with him to the hospital to have his tonsils — and his adenoids — taken out (I keep forgetting those adenoids. I don't even know what adenoids are, except that they are there and dangling, somewhere up inside the nose. Maybe nobody knows what adenoids really are. I once felt pretty witty telling a young girl from Ann Arbor that adenoids were undescended testicles), and, numb with gloom ourselves that dark and heavy morning, strove to make casual conversation with him in the taxicab that I wished would speed faster and be there at the hospital already before one of the three of us passed out or passed away from the sheer strain of the approaching event, like that jolly and innocently empty conversation I always used to try to make with my mother in the nursing home during those tedious and sickening visits with her that soon served no purpose at all. I could just as easily have sent my small food parcels into the room by mail or with one of the nurses and departed immediately (and spared myself the gruesome ordeal of watching her fumble with fragments of fish and meat and candy and cake with her deformed and trembling fingers and dabbing the greasy, crumbling pieces into her lips. She did not want me to feed her). But I was her son: I was her dutiful son (ha, ha, and willing to suffer penitentially with her part of every weekend at first, then every other weekend, then every third or fourth weekend, until she began to fail rapidly, when, for some hypocritical reason, to absolve myself, it turned into every weekend again for five or ten or fifteen minutes), but not an especially grateful one. Neither one of us was grateful to the other. I was not grateful to her for having been my mother (it had become by then an unjust imposition. Why could she not have gone away unnoticed, as my father had done, inconveniencing me not at all?); and she was not grateful to me for my visits or the news and things to eat I brought her. What little conversation we had was forced. Angered silence would have been better. She missed her mother.
"Ma," she moaned deliriously again and again from her drugged and agitated stupor near the end, her glazed, reddened eyes showing unfocused fright and welling with tears, and that was almost all she had to say, except for what I think she had to say to me at the end.
I like her more now than I did when she was alive.
My mother was almost eighty when she died, and her memory had gone almost entirely, but she died crying for her mother, and I suppose that I shall die crying for mine (if the Lord, in his infinite mercy, allows me to live long enough. Ha, ha). So much of misfortune seems a matter of timing. We were late coming for him that day, and we saw him, half a block from the play area, standing alone on the sidewalk in his bare feet and bawling loudly, helplessly, because he thought we were never going to come for him at all. (I was incensed when I saw him. We were simply late. Nothing else had happened.) Other people, children and grown-ups, looked at my boy curiously as they walked past and saw him standing there crying: none of them offered to help, none of them questioned him. (Good God — even I will help a small child who seems to be in trouble, if no one else does.) He did nothing when he saw us, except shriek more piercingly, quail more frantically, in a tortured plea for us to rescue him from whatever odd spell was holding him to that spot in terror. (I was so deeply incensed with him for a moment that I was actually tempted to stop with a sneer and delay going to him.) He was convulsed with grief by the idea that we had abandoned him, just because we were a little bit late, that we had left him there purposely because we were dissatisfied and disgusted with him, and that he was never going to see us again or have anyone to take care of him.
I was infuriated. He knew the way home. It wasn't far. The walk was uncomplicated. Many mornings we would let him lead us from the house to the boardwalk to the play group just to show him he could get there alone safely and then let him lead us back afterward to demonstrate to himself and us that he also knew how to return. The village was small, there were hardly any cars, it was impossible to get lost — if he did, he could always follow the boardwalk or ask somebody for directions. He knew that too. (We were always pressing him to ask people for directions when he was unsure, but he was afraid of strangers, even children his own age, and reluctant to talk to them. When he did, he mumbled inaudibly with lowered eyes, and whoever he asked always requested him sharply to repeat what he had just said.
"Do you know how to get there?" my wife and I would ask. "You know how. Are you sure you won't get lost? Which way do you turn from here? Do you see you can't get lost? Even if you turned here instead of there or a block later you would still wind up on the boardwalk or the main avenue. You can just follow the people or ask somebody if you do get lost. Will you get lost?")
Yet he had gone only far enough to be almost out of sight of the play group area, where the few remaining counselors were languidly cleaning things up, and could go no farther. Even when he recognized us and saw us coming he did not move, as though even to budge one hair's-width from that agonizing place he occupied would be to risk fainting away over some invisible precipice and swoon out of existence. He remained stationary on the pavement in that single spot on his tiny bare feet as though every bone in his ankles had already been crushed (I noticed then, I think, for the first time, how his feet pronate, how his arches are almost flat, and how large and sharp and close to the ground his ankle bones are) and even to continue standing there was excruciating and unendurable. He couldn't move and he couldn't stay where he was. (He did not rush to us.) He howled. We were salvation, God, his only hope for life, but we had to go all the way to him in order to save him, while his gaping, glistening eyes fastened on us frantically. He would not (could not) take even one step toward us to assist in his own rescue and abbreviate his torment. (It was pitiful, pathetic, heartrending; and I fought back violent surges of anger and impatience and the feeling I might lose control and start berating him right then and there. I wanted to hit him. I felt he deserved it and felt I would have done so if he were older and bigger.) My wife quickened her pace and moved out ahead of me and I plucked at her elbow to hold her back. "Don't run!" I hissed at her. "You'll scare him." But it was me he waited for, my presence and protection he needed, and he did not begin walking again until he had felt my hand and was able to grip it solidly. (I had the impression then, as I have now, that if we had turned away from him and gone back, or if, for some unavoidable reason, we had not come for him that day at all, he would have remained stranded unalterably on that same spot at which by invisible forces he had been brought to a stop, a tiny mark on the surface of the world no greater than the dimensions of his own naked footprints, until he had perished or collapsed from exposure, hunger, thirst, fear, or fatigue, or until some unnaturally concerned and curious lady or man had gone searching for a policeman to notify him that there was a small boy standing in one place on the sidewalk who had been crying there all day and night and was in danger of dying from starvation, fright, or loneliness. I had the feeling then, and I sometimes have it now, that he would have failed to survive without my wife and me, will not be able ever to exist without the two of us to sustain him, and he may have that feeling too. What will he do when we die? What will Derek do?)
"If you were swimming," he asked me recently, "and thought you were going to drown, would you yell for the lifeguard and let everybody on the beach see them save you? Or would you let yourself drown?"
I don't know which I'd do. I do know, though, that I no longer go swimming in water over my head.
I would be embarrassed to yell for the lifeguard.
I would be embarrassed to call for a doctor at night if I was having a heart attack but wasn't sure.
"You don't have to be afraid," I told him.
He clung to my hand and walked beside me gingerly with his head down, making each step he took on his bare feet a delicate, probing test. His chest panted, his ribs and breastbone heaving as though they might splinter and stab through his fine translucent skin.
"I don't feel well," he said. His tears dried slowly, staining. "I felt sick."
"We'll take your temperature. Do you feel sick?"
"I was afraid you were never coming for me."
"If you really feel sick when we get back to the house we'll call a doctor and have him fix you up, so you've got nothing to worry about."
"I didn't feel well this morning either."
"I don't know what you're so scared about. You couldn't get lost coming back to the house even if you tried."
"I knew you'd think I was making it up."
He didn't go back to play group the following morning. He didn't want to and we didn't make him. (He adored us for allowing him to stay at home.) He never went back.
"Don't you want to go back there at all?" I asked at breakfast on Sunday.
"He doesn't."
We let it drop.
But after that he had little to do. He had no other kids to play with, no more friends. He spent much of each day on the beach with us, sifting sand. And saying nearly nothing. He wanted to remain indoors a great deal. He read picture books and built lots of models of cars, planes, and aircraft carriers that he took no pride in completing and no joy in preserving. He had no interest in anything. He reread comic books and stared torpidly and sporadically at the television set. He offered to help my wife with the housework. (This made her nervous.) His attention span was nil; he could not concentrate for long on any of the jigsaw puzzles we bought him. He seemed forgetful. He glued himself to us and went with us almost everywhere, holding on. He did not want to go into town but did not want to be left behind.
("Must you both go?" he would ask despondently.)
He did not want to be left alone and tried to remain with one or both of us always, except at bedtime, when he had to go off into his own room in a different part of the house (and even then he would awake very early each morning — sometimes he awoke in the middle of the night — and ease into the doorway of our bedroom just to assure himself that we were still there and breathing. He remained there persistently, making enough soft noises to disturb one or the other of us.
"What is it?" my wife or I would demand in an exasperated groan. "What do you want?"
"Breakfast," he would lie, if it was already light.
It was spooky. I sometimes had the feeling he never slept at all but merely pretended to and lay awake in his bed watching the window and counting the minutes until he could bear his solitude no longer and felt it was safer to come in to us). He exuded always an air of abject apology, even as he loitered about the kitchen and handed my wife things to help her with the cooking and dishwashing. (My wife had a fear that he would begin wearing her aprons and then other articles of her clothing. What would we do if he turned into a transvestite? And so did I. I pretended to be eager to teach him how to play chess, in order to distract him from my wife and help the time pass, and he pretended to be eager to learn. But neither one of us was really interested, and we soon stopped, even though we could not think of much else for him to do.) It was useless and cruel to urge him to go out and play. There was no one he could play with. He did not want to be with, talk to, be seen by, or even look at any of the boys and girls from the play group, not even any of those he used to hail with glee and point out proudly as his friends. Whenever he walked with us someplace and any came into view, nodding, waving, grinning, or calling hello to him by name, he stiffened and turned his gaze away in angry resolution, offering no response. And soon, no more of them did. They were no longer his friends. It was eerie. It was as though he had never met any of them. He continued to stiffen anyway, tensely and wrathfully, each time we walked and he saw any of them, as though expecting something he loathed to happen. Nothing did. I was angry too and wanted often to slam him on the arm with my fist and shove him toward them roughly with a command to begin playing with them again and have fun.
It was an agony for all of us.
It was the worst summer I ever spent. None of us knew what to do. My wife and I were all he had, and we were not so sure we liked him anymore, although, we never said exactly that. Derek was still a baby in a crib. We didn't know about him yet. And my daughter was away at camp that year for the first time, where she was having a lonely and miserable time of it too, if we could believe her, because all the other girls had been there before and fell easily into cliques, while she was left a friendless outsider. Or so she maintained to us in her letters. We didn't believe her. She wanted to come home: in every letter, she wrote that she wanted to come home; sometimes she wrote only to tell us she wanted to come home. We didn't believe her. Some children don't write home enough; ours wrote too much, three or four, five times a week, and our spirits sank every time we saw another letter from her. We did not know whether to believe her or not. We thought she was telling us such things solely to make us unhappy. Even at so early an age she was crafty enough to feign crisis and despair just to afflict us with indecision and guilt. She knew how to hurt. From what we were able to learn from other parents with children at the same camp, she seemed to be having no worse a time of it than normal. I wondered why she wrote so often if she had nothing else to say. I did not want to go see her on visiting day. I didn't miss her — I didn't have a chance to, with those damn letters. What for? It meant a long drive on a hot day, a reunion filled with accusations and dejection, another wasted weekend. When we got there, though, she seemed all right and genuinely glad we had come. She behaved as though she had missed us, which was a thing that had not occurred to me and which she had not once, I am sure, put into her letters. Under an elm tree, where no one else could hear us, I asked her point-blank if she wanted me to take her back with us. I even offered to invent some face-saving explanation: my mother was seriously ill, which was true. She said no and seemed to have many smiling friends and sang the camp songs lustily along with the rest of them. She lost the color war. Later, she was to charge that I had bullied her into saying no, and I imagined I saw tears in her eyes and felt a lump in her throat as we drove off for the rest of the summer and she stood at the roadside staring after us with a somber, unmoving face, refusing stolidly to wave good-bye. And those same urgent, whimpering, peremptory letters insisting we bring her home began again and continued in a ceaseless stream. Why, we wondered, although we never lamented it to each other in precisely these words, couldn't she leave us alone, why could she not have the decency to leave us in peace now that we had gone to so much trouble and considerable expense to get her out of our way for eight weeks? She wrote letters to our boy marked personal in which she pleaded with him — and lavishly promised him things, including to be kinder and more generous with him in the future forever — to do everything he could to get us to let her come home because she was so miserable away from us, at a time when he himself was so downtrodden with sorrow over his own suffering that he could scarcely muster the courage to speak to us about anything at all. Most of his talk with us was monosyllabic replies to questions, mumbled in undertones. One would think she enjoyed being with us, had been satisfied in our company in the past, which was not true. All our summers have been bad. And most of our Sundays. And still are. How I dread those three- and four-day weekends. I wish my wife and I played tennis or enjoyed going on boats for sailing or fishing. But I don't; I don't even enjoy people who do. I don't enjoy anything anymore. I didn't know how to explain to my boy just what the hell was going on with my daughter each time he received another letter from her declaring she was miserable and begging him to beg us to allow her to come home.
"Why won't you let her?" he would inquire with extreme reserve.
"I'm not stopping her." I didn't know what was going on. "Do you want to come?" I told her by telephone. "Pack up and come. I'll drive up for you now."
"No."
I did know that she was persecuting me. She could indeed have been homesick and unhappy; but she was also using that unhappiness with cool detachment and calculation to upset and oppress us all — as she persecutes me deliberately that same way still, I feel — and that was how we passed the time.
Somehow the time passed; it must have passed very slowly for him. (He liked playing baseball then — and enjoyed being good at it. He loved catching flies and getting hits and scooting around the bases. Now he had nobody to play with.) Somehow, the time always passes (doesn't it, with no help from us and in spite of anything that is going on, as it passes for me now at the company, as it passed ultimately for my much younger daughter then away at camp, and passes now uneventfully for my wife at home with the help of a sneaky and avenging slurp from the wine bottle every half hour or so during the morning and afternoon and an energetic bang in the box from me at night one or two times a week or so if I come home and feel up to it, and as it passed for my poor old mother when she was bedridden with arthritis and painful, cramping limbs and joints and stricken speechless by her brain spasms and just about all she had left to her, for that last, little while, was a consciousness that understood dismally how little she had left. All she had left was me. Yet, she held on, clawed fingers and all, even in those final comas, she held on stubbornly and willfully for dear life, ha, ha, but her kidneys failed her treacherously, it was a stealthy, unsuspected betrayal from underneath, and in the end, ha, ha, she died, crying for her mother, moaning "Ma! Ma! Ma!" in a drone that was clear and loud although the doctor said she felt no pain and did not know what was happening. How did he know? Then I could bury her. At last I could bury her, although she had died about sixteen months before. I had a mother once who died sixteen months before she was buried. At least as far as I was concerned. My sister lives far away with diabetes and other family problems of her own and didn't come to the funeral. I didn't want her to and told her it wasn't necessary. I would handle and pay for everything. We aren't close. I wasn't close to my mother. I was mad at her.
"Hey, look, Ma," I could have argued with her with good reason any time during those sixteen months. "You're dead already, don't you know? You died one day exactly two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve months ago right in front of my eyes, and now you're just hanging around. I didn't know it at the time but I felt it, and I turned away from you with a lump in my throat and sobbed, or wanted to, and grieved for you secretly, for over a week because something inside me knew that you were dead and gone. You were dead but not gone. I lost my mother a while ago and keep remembering and losing her again. But you're not her. You're just hanging around. Now you're just hanging around, ruining my weekends and costing me money, splotching my moods and splattering my future. You've been hanging around ever since. You're depressing everybody. What do you want me to do? What are you hanging around for?"
Oh, boy. Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. I never could say that, even to myself, while she was alive. But that was the way I think I felt. I can say it now. That was the longest I had to wait for anyone's funeral, and she waited with me almost as long. God willing, I will have to wait even longer for my own. Soon, I know, I will have to start. I know how I will begin. I'll have bladder and prostate trouble — that's if I'm lucky, and don't have a coronary occlusion or stroke first. Perhaps some hernia or hemorrhoid operation will be thrown in gratuitously also just to divert me from my bladder and prostate troubles while I'm hanging around waiting for my burial services to be allowed by law to begin. But I know I'll probably want to hang around as long as I can too, pain, pity, self-revulsion and all, clinging with weakening fingers to vaporous mirages above the bedsheets and muttering "Ma! Ma! Ma! Ma!" to the end, instead of "ha, ha, ha." Perhaps only then, when there is room left in the brain for just one memory, and throat and mouth left for just one word, will Green, White, Black, Brown, Kagle, Arthur Baron, wife's sister, three-minute speeches in Puerto Rico, and a drunken, blowsy, young whore I didn't even want in Detroit last week ridiculing me obstreperously, at a party, as she rejected advances I did not even make, perhaps only then will galling events and presences like these be expunged from my teeming inventory of trivial slights and defeats I've never been able to absorb and detoxify and will be filed away with me into oblivion and dead records once and for all. That's the way I will put an end to the world. I will not want to go. They will have to drag me down writhing and moaning, I like to think now, while I fight with mind, eyes, ears to remain, but I know I will probably be undermined also by a liver or two kidneys while I'm concentrating all my forces on top, and I will lose the battle without even knowing I have gone. I will give up the ghost without sensing I am doing so. Morphine will help befog me. I don't ever want to go. I hope I outlive everyone, even my children, my wife, and the Rocky Mountains. I don't think I will. There are valves in my heart; there are valves in my car; if General Motors is unable to produce a valve guaranteed to last longer than one more year, what chance has random nature? I cannot help feeling sorry for myself. I cannot help feeling sorry for him). I felt sorry for him then (I feel sorry for him now); he was hanging around already with the vacant, colorless look of someone old and waning, denuded of wants and enthusiasm, like an invalid mother in a nursing home who knows she has been put there to die. He hardly spoke. There was nothing he enjoyed, he seemed to lack even anything to hope for (God — he had given up so early!), except for that sweltering, muggy summer to end and school, which he feared, to begin and snatch him up again into its buzzing, fathomless drama of unknown conflicts and rewards. He had no spark or spirit. He was dull. He was always hanging around. Instead of catching fly balls and running around bases in games with friends, he tagged along with us to the boardwalk or beach and held himself apart, saying nearly nothing.
("When are we gonna go back?"
He didn't want to swim. Wherever he went with us, he was ill at ease and wanted to be somewhere else, usually back home, except in the dark at the movies.
"Do you have to go out again tonight?")
And sifted sand listlessly. (We did not want him with us.) Whenever my eyes fell upon his, he quivered and drew his neck in, as though he expected me to lunge toward him and begin browbeating him ruthlessly. He looked like someone sick. (People often inquired of us softly, to my intense discomfort, if he were not feeling well. At times I could not bear him.) I did everything I could think of to help.
"What would you like to do?" I offered.
"Where would you like to go?"
"What would you like to happen?"
"Do you want to go to the movies? Maybe we'll go with you. What do you want to see?"
"If you had one wish, what is it? Tell me. Maybe I can help make it come true. What do you wish for now more than anything else in the whole world?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"Please stop."
I could have strangled him. I could have beaten him. (I think I wanted to.) All I got from him was nothing. He made no effort at all to help us make things easier for him. I could not bear to see him always so idle and forlorn. He was always there. In the morning when we awoke. He never seemed to sleep. No matter how late my wife and I came in at night, he was always lying awake, his door open, to make certain we were back and that it was us, and not someone else, who had come in. He made no effort to talk to the baby-sitter we had got for him and Derek.
"Where are you going? What are you going to do?" he interrogated us closely each time it seemed to him that my wife and I were making ready to go out of the house together.
He trailed after us almost everywhere we let him. He began to get on my nerves. (I had to feel sorry for him too often. Why in the world did he happen to me? I began to feel about him then the way I feel about Derek now. But Derek, at least, I can disassociate myself from most of the time and escape from.) There was no escaping from him. He trailed us everywhere, a visible, public symptom of some odious family disease we would have preferred kept secret.
"I have nothing to do," he answered whenever we told him to go away from us and do something else.
We often felt grotesque. People saw him with us all the time. He had that lump in his throat. He would not speak to other lonely little boys we spotted for him and tried to introduce him to.
"Look, here is Dicky Dare. He is a nice boy and just about the same age as you. Why don't you go play with him?"
He would not want to.
"Why not?"
(He did not want to be associated with another kid who had no one else to play with. He admired the kid who had wanted to fight with him at play group and wished that other boy liked him enough in return to want to become his friend.)
When people we knew asked helpfully if he would like to meet someone to play with, we had to tell them no. We could never tell them why. We couldn't explain that he would not cooperate. (We had a lump in our throat.)
"I can't stand it," my wife would grieve, and be about to cry. "He looks like a ghost. He's so unhappy. I can't stand to see him this way. It breaks my heart."
"Me neither," I confessed.
The only good days I had that summer were the days I spent in the city at my office. It broke my heart too. He wouldn't roller skate or ride his bike. I began to lose my temper more easily. (I was ugly.)
"Go play," I ordered him curtly at the beach one day when I could control my temper no longer.
He blinked.
"Bob," my wife cautioned.
"Huh?" he asked.
"Are you deaf?"
"I didn't hear."
"Yes, you did. Go play."
"With who?"
"There's a kid sitting there near that fat lady."
"Daddy. Please."
"He looks your own age. He looks like he wants to meet somebody to play with."
"I'm playing here."
"With what?"
"Sand."
"Sand," I mimicked nastily, and pointed toward the shore. "Or I'll drag you over there by the arm and ask him for you." (Having made that threat, I had to mean it. There was an article in a women's magazine that month advising parents to be firm with balky children. There was an article in another women's magazine advising us to be sympathetic and indulgent. I didn't care about either magazine. I was mad. My wife was trying to warn me off with a look. I paid no attention. It was a matter of face now between myself and this poor, bewildered little boy.) "Would you like that?" I threatened.
His face was chalky. "I won't be able to speak."
"You're speaking now."
"I've got a lump in my throat. I want to vomit."
"You'll have a lump on your head," I could not restrain myself from wisecracking. "Get going. You can vomit later."
He rose reluctantly and went with slow, wobbling steps to do as I had forced him.
"You see?" I whispered to my wife, fearfully and penitently, craving immediate absolution. "He's going."
"I think it's horrible."
"He's doing it."
He was speaking to the other boy, a wan, yellow-haired kid who shook his head without looking up and gave a labored, long reply. His mouth moved funny. I was sickened. The fat woman glared. My boy walked back to us with knees that seemed to bend with pain and he was almost in tears as he told us in a blocked, stammering voice that the other boy stuttered badly and had said no, he did not want to play.
"Well, I did what you wanted!" my boy spat out at me bitterly, giving me a quick, stabbing glance, and sat down in the sand again a good distance away. His eyes were steaming at me with anger.
I felt frustrated and enraged.
Everything was going wrong for me, one thing after another, even my wife's snatch (God dammit).
That summer my wife had a sensitive snatch, a recurring vaginal inflammation, and I (even she, until I tried) didn't even know if I would be able to get laid properly when I came out for those dragging, intolerable weekends. (I could have done much better staying in the city. I was doing better. I was getting all I wanted.) I did not have much else to do out there at the beach that I enjoyed, except make eyes at other wives and josh suggestively with very young girls. So I kept losing my temper with him and trying to help him. (I'd lose my temper when I'd see myself fail. I was filled with such depressing feelings of rejection and impotence at my inability to cheer him up, to alleviate his wretched agony and isolation, to have him succeed at doing something new.) I kept commanding him gruffly to attempt doing things that he did not want to do and was probably physically unable to do because of the rigid tension impairing his balance and coordination and because of the lump in his throat.
Because I felt he was afraid of the ocean, I made him go wading with me, and he almost drowned when a large wave broke suddenly and knocked us both down, tore him from my grasp, and sent him rolling and tumbling helplessly toward shore in the deep, swirling, tumultuous surf. When he stumbled to his feet finally (as I struggled feebly against the backwash in an effort to reach him and save him), he was holding his breath, and his eyes were clamped shut so tightly that both knuckled halves of his flushed face looked like clenched and crimson fists. He would not open them until I had taken his hand again and led him to shore. I have visions of that episode still.
"You know, Daddy," he said to me, "I was afraid to open my eyes. I didn't know where I was and I was afraid to open my eyes and look. I was afraid that when I opened my eyes I would be all the way out there, and I didn't want to look."
I was surprised he talked to me, surprised he still trusted me enough to confide in me. (He could have drowned or been battered to death or paralysis right then and there. He might have been swept away from me out to sea by a suction of rushing water in a matter of three or four seconds. Once I helped lifeguards save a baby in an inflated tube that had been carried out thirty yards from shore in an instant. I might never have seen him alive again. I have always been afraid of death by drowning. I might never have been able to forgive myself if I had lost him then. My wife might never have allowed me to. I would have had to divorce her, leaving her with a Derek who was destined by birth, we are told, to turn out mentally defective and my daughter, who has been of small aid and comfort, which might not be such a bad thing for me to do even now. I do think about divorce a lot and I always have. Even before I was married I was thinking of getting divorced. I can picture my next wife: she would be younger, prettier, dumb, and submissive. She would be blond, short, chubby, and cheerful and would be very eager to please me in the kitchen and the bedroom. In short order I would find it impossible to be with her for more than an hour or two at a time, and I would have to divorce her too. I'm glad he lived. Getting married was my idea. I enjoy fucking my wife. She lets me do it anyway I want. No Women's Liberation for her. Lots of male chauvinist pig. I couldn't bang her freely even when there was no soreness because he was always hanging around the house in the daytime and was apt to be lying awake at night. I often tried to chase him away from us just for that. If we locked him out of our bedroom we didn't know if he was camping discouragedly just outside the door, where he could hear. I was surly much of the time and did a lot of growling at everyone.)
I did such monstrous things to him. They seemed so necessary at the time. I did not know what else to do. I couldn't get rid of him, and he knew I wanted to. He did go bike riding one day and he fell against a wooden fence and bruised a knee so badly he had to walk with a limp for a week and got a long black splinter in his forearm that I had to poke at and dislodge with a sewing needle (and felt like vice personified doing so. I debated darkly with myself whether or not to take the two-week summer vacation I had coming to me. My wife made me; she said she would be unable to endure it any longer at the beach without me and that she would come back into the city. So I took it. And there were days on my vacation that I would have paid the company twice what I was getting just to be allowed to come in and work). I couldn't even get drunk anymore. I couldn't get high on martinis at cocktail time because he was always around somewhere listening and watching. (I got weary headaches over my eyes instead.) We couldn't tell dirty jokes, I couldn't be obscene, not even when we had people in. I couldn't flirt. He was there and would see me. (At least my daughter, God bless her benevolent heart, had been considerate enough to pack up her troubles in her old duffel bag and foot-locker and go off to camp to be miserable far away from us for the summer and pester us from afar.) He was right there. He was always right there. (I couldn't say or do anything I wouldn't want him to witness. There were so many ways I might upset him.) When I turned around sometimes, he was underfoot and I would step on him, and we would both feel terrible and blurt clumsy, incoherent apologies. (I wanted to curse. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream: "Get out of here!") I couldn't decide what to say. I didn't know how to handle it. Finally, I figured it out. I said: "Get lost."
To make him realize he was capable of leaving us and finding his way around without getting lost, I made him go for a long walk alone; and, of course, he got lost.
"Get lost," I repeated more sharply, when he appeared not to understand.
"Huh?"
"I've got nothing to do," he had grumbled a moment before.
"Go someplace."
"Where?"
"Away. Take a walk."
"With who?"
"With yourself. Mommy and I want to be here on the beach alone for a while."
"I won't know how."
"Yes, you will."
"I won't get back."
"Yes, you will."
"Now?"
"When then?"
My wife stared away from him stonily. "You'd better go," she advised unsympathetically.
"Go down the beach to the amusement pier. Then turn around and come back. Just follow the water down the beach to the amusement pier. Then turn around and follow the water back."
"I want to stay here."
"I want you to go."
"I'll get lost."
"You'd have to be pretty damned smart to do that."
I was determined. He stood up, rubbing sand slowly from his palms, and walked off submissively in mute dejection without looking back. He was soon gone from sight behind the heads and torsos of other people jamming the shoreline. The amusement pier looked farther away than ever before, the beach more densely packed. I was afraid he'd get lost. (I was afraid I'd get lost if I had to do what I'd sent him to do.)
"Why did you do it?" my wife asked critically, already repenting her own passive cooperation.
"You wanted me to do it, didn't you?"
I kept craning my neck to keep slim flashes of him in view for as long as I could and grew worried and sorry also as soon as he was gone.
"I know," my wife admitted. She nodded absently. "I couldn't stand him hanging around here anymore."
"Me neither."
"He's always here. It breaks my heart."
"Mine too."
"He always looks so unhappy."
"That's one of the things I can't stand."
"Do you think he'll get lost?"
"He can't get lost. It's that damned play group, damn them. None of this would have happened if they'd kept closer watch of things. I want him to see that he can go from place to place alone without having something terrible happen to him."
"The beach is so crowded."
"He won't get lost."
He got lost.
(At least we thought he was lost.)
When twenty-five minutes passed and he did not return, we went surging after him in panic, my wife scurrying along the shore, myself trudging through deeper sand in the middle of the beach in the direction of the amusement pier. (I thought of homosexual perverts or of other kids from the play group spotting him, mocking him, ganging up on him.
"The sky is falling!" I wanted to shout in horror at groups of adults I hurried past with a thundering heart. "Have you seen a little kid? He's lost. He'll look worried.")
We found him standing by himself along the shore about two hundred yards away, floundering in one spot as though lost: he was not certain if he had overshot us already, and he did not know, therefore, in which direction to proceed. His cheeks were white, his eyes were distant, and his jaws were clamped shut. The tendons in his neck were taut, and he had a lump in his throat. The landmarks along the boardwalk — all those familiar signs and structures — meant nothing to him.
My first impulse was to kill him. "Were you lost?" I shouted to him.
"I don't know." He shrugged. I wanted to kill him. I was enraged and disgusted with him for his helplessness and incompetence (standing there like that on the sidewalk in town that day as though all the bones in his ankles were broken. I was ashamed of him and wanted to disown him. I was sorry he was mine), then I wanted to clasp him to me lovingly and protectively and shed tears of misery and deepest compassion over him (because I had wanted to kill him. Imagine having a father that wanted to kill you. That's the part they all leave out of the Oedipus story. Poor Oedipus has been much maligned. He didn't want to kill his father. His father wanted to kill him). I don't know what I felt when I found him standing there like that, immense gratitude that he was unharmed and intense, depressing disappointment over everything else, a terrible rush of ungovernable, dissonant emotions in which landmarks made no sense to me, either. (I don't always know what I feel now.) (I wish I were a chimpanzee.) The next day my wife and I had a scathing quarrel in the house over money and sex that had nothing at all to do with him (although he could not know that). We snarled and snapped and sneered at each other like barking jackals. She yelled at me and I yelled back (we called each other bastard and bitch and told each other to go fuck ourselves), and when I stormed away into the kitchen to fling some ice cubes into my glass of whiskey, nearly shattering it in my hand with my violent force, I heard my boy move into the living room timidly and say, softly, to my wife:
"Should I go for a walk again? To the amusement pier?"
I heard myself sigh. I wanted to weep.
"Is that why Daddy's unhappy?"
I felt myself feel so utterly awful.
My wife came into the kitchen quietly.
"Did you hear him?" she murmured, her anger against me gone. (I said nothing.) "He wants to know if he should go for a walk again. He thinks that's why you're unhappy now."
"He did not," I denied finally, without spirit.
"You must have heard him. Go ask him."
"I don't believe you."
"You get crazy when you're this way," my wife lamented. "I can't talk to you. None of us can. You won't listen and you won't see. Go ask him. Go see what he looks like if you don't believe me."
I knew what I would see (and did not want to). I stepped around my wife without looking at her or touching her and walked into the living room. He was standing docile and repentant (as though he were to blame) near the door leading out to the porch, awaiting my directions. His skin was shaded blue. (He would do whatever I asked. He did not want me to be angry or unhappy because of him. His eyes were wide and serious. I have never before or since in all my life felt so totally cruel, so rotten, depraved, and inhuman. He was prepared to yield himself to any sacrifice I requested of him. I did not want him that way.) His look was expectant, grave, and resigned. I did not speak for a second. (I couldn't.) I had a lump in my throat.
"From now on," I told him gently, "at least until the end of the summer, you won't have to do anything you don't want to do. And you'll be allowed to do everything you do want to do. Will that be okay?" My tone was tender, apologetic.
His gaze was skeptical. "You mean it?"
"I promise."
"I love you, Daddy," he said, and rested his head against my belly to hug me peacefully. "You're the best daddy in the whole world."
I am the worst daddy in the whole world. Yesterday, I helped a blind man across the street and was surprised that I did not feel revolted when I took his arm. (Actually, he took my arm. I started to grip his, but he told me:
"No, let me hold on to yours.")
I think I will do things like that more often (now that I see I can).
I broke my promise to him many times. He continued to love me anyway.
I identify with him too closely, I think, and remember that once, when he was still an infant in diapers, kicking his legs away as he lay on the Bathinette, rocking it perilously and raising a violent clatter and spray of powder cans and safety pins, my wife yelled to me urgently to come into the room and showed me a fiery red blotch on the side of the head of his penis. (It must have been minuscule, had to be, but appeared a gigantic blister at the time.) And I doubled over with a keen, slicing pain in my own penis the instant I saw the rough (small), flaming-red patch and cupped my hands over all my genitals reflexively to preserve and soothe them. It hurt then. It hurts now when I remember. I don't have to look to make certain nothing's there. Once when I was small I felt a stinging itch at the tip and saw a brown ant come crawling out, but I no longer tell this to anyone because nobody believes me. I guess I really do love this little thing of mine still, although I'm not sure why. Where would I be without it? Neuter. It had led me into strange places. I have led it. Through these thrilled and limp, leaking tissues have come decades of exquisite and often intolerable pleasures and three big, fully formed children who were mammoth in camparison to it, from the day they were born, one of them defective. In a factory he would be a reject. He suffers less than normal. We make up the difference. By and large, I believe I really don't get all that much pleasure out of it anymore, although I think I'd like to hold on to it a little longer, ha, ha. I don't always like putting it in, and I don't like taking it out. I wish there was something more to do with it than there is. Once in my early teens, I paid a younger cousin of mine, a girl, a dime to pull it for me and was terrified afterward that she would tell my mother or my brother or someone in her own family. I wonder if it warped her. It might have helped. She made me happy. For only a dime. I see her still as a dubious little girl, without a gleam of mischief or curiosity or sensuality of her own to enrich the experience for her. She was bored, and a little puzzled. I touched her gingerly. I molested a child. I was molested as a child. Everyone is molested. Maybe that's why I worry about my boy so much. I used to worry that way about my daughter. Now she is old enough to molest children on her own. I have paid much more than a dime many times since.
In my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse. When I go to sleep now, it is no longer on my side with my knees tucked up securely against my abdomen, and my thumb near my mouth. I lie on my back with my hands clasped across my chest decorously like a cadaver and my face pointed straight up toward the ceiling. I hear and feel myself start to snore, on nights when I am lucky; a loose, membranous thing vibrates tantalizingly in back of my throat with a deep, delicious, tickling sensation, and I am assuaged also by the satisfying possibility that my snoring will annoy my wife and interfere with her sleep. I can't stand it when I am unable to sleep and my wife does; I sometimes want to begin beating her with the side of my fists. I like it when I am able to sleep and she can't. When I awake, though, it is usually on my side, and one of my hands is still always between my thighs, near my genitals. I guess I do want to hold on to them all for as long as I can. I knew I was getting old when I started to have dreams about peeing. I awake with a full bladder and the momentary, shame-filled horror that I have already wet the bed. And that everyone will soon find out.
I know at last what I want to be when I grow up.
When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
I'd like another chance. And then another. (And after that a couple of more. There were so many girls I could have laid when I was young and didn't because I didn't know I had the knack and could. I didn't know how easy it was. It never occurred to me then that they wanted to do it too. I didn't even have the urge. I fell in love instead. I'd like another crack. Ha, ha. I think I'd get the urge. When I grow up, I want to be someone dignified, tasteful, and important who does the things he does because he truly wants to and enjoys his work. I'd like to be William Shakespeare.) Maybe that's why I worry so much about my little boy (I identify with him too closely), why I grow somewhat frantic and exasperated whenever I see him bogged down, whenever I see him fail at something or even refuse to try. (Am I disappointed in him?) My daughter insists we are disappointed in her. I know I looked for something much different for all of us. I never became what I wanted to be, even though I got all the things I ever wanted, including two cars and two color TV sets. We are a two-car family in a Class A suburb in Connecticut. Advertising people and the U.S. Census Bureau prepare statistics that include us in categories of human beings enjoying the richest life. I wanted him carefree and confident, swashbuckling, able, successful, and dependent, so maybe I am disappointed in him, in everything but that last. Maybe that's why he's scared I want to take him someplace strange and dangerous and leave him there. Maybe I do. I have that same fear of something like that happening to him; I see him lost somewhere; and there is no hope he will ever be found. I know I fear for his safety more than I fear for my own, and this surprises me.
When he's scared, I'm scared, even though I'm not scared of what he's scared of. (I get rattled when things don't go right for him. I wish I could be guaranteed now that he will never do anything more to upset me. I can't hit back.)
When he quivers, I quake. My nose runs when he's got a cold; I sneeze too and my throat turns sore. When he has fever, my temples burn and throb and my joints and muscles turn stiff and sore. (I am all heart, ain't I?)
My boy is pretty much this same way. He identifies with other people in trouble too closely also. That's the reason he gives cookies and pennies away, I think, to people he feels want them — he knows what it is to long. (He longs along with them.) I remember the way he used to gape in disbelieving terror at deformed and mutilated people, at humpbacks, dwarfs, and people with missing or malformed arms or legs. I could read his mind: he did not know what had happened to them that could not happen to him, and it was not always easy to explain. (I could not assure him categorically that he would never be in a serious accident or fall fatally ill.) I note the way he avoids looking at them directly now. (He averts his eyes with a ripple of anger the way I avert mine. You are not supposed to look at them, you are not supposed to look away from them.) It used to be that his own arm or leg would lock momentarily in an unnatural position or knot up.
("Look!"
He would show me the rigid cramp of muscle or the fluttering spasms of fingers or feet, marveling at this telepathic phenomenon with as much curiosity as discomfort whenever he saw a cripple with arm or leg deformities and ask me why that happened.
"Mine does too.")
"I can tell you something else that's funny," he revealed to me recently. "Whenever I tickle somebody, I laugh."
"How come?" I exclaim. This strikes me funny an instant later and I begin to laugh.
"I don't know," he squeals in reply, laughing also. "Why are you laughing?"
"Because I think it's funny! Why are you laughing?"
"Because you're laughing!" he cries gleefully, and laughs even louder, bubbling all about with delight and folding his arms around his sides as though his ecstasy is too much for his ribs and spirit to contain.
My boy likes to laugh and would be laughing and kidding jauntily all the time if there were not so many of us in the atmosphere surrounding him to inhibit and subjugate him. I have this constant fear something is going to happen to him. (He's the kid who gets stabbed to death in the park or falls victim to Hodgkin's disease or blastoma of the eyeballs. Every time I know he's gone swimming. Every time he's away from the house. Every time I know my daughter is driving in a car with older kids I expect to be told by telephone or policeman of the terrible automobile accident in which she has just been killed. There are times I wish they would both hurry up and get it over with already so I could relax and stop brooding about it in such recurring suspense. There are times I wish everyone I know would die and release me from these tender tensions I experience in my generous solicitude for them. I don't suffer these same acute anxieties about my wife, even though I know she drives about a great deal during the day after drinking. I hardly ever think about her death. Just about divorce. I don't like cars. Or swimming pools or the ocean.) I think about death.
I think about it all the time. I dwell on it. I dread it. I don't really like it. Death runs in my family, it seems. People die from it, and I dream about death and weave ornate fantasies about death endlessly and ironically. (And I find — God help me — that I still do want to make that three-minute speech. I really do yearn to be promoted to Kagle's job. Last night in bed, I stopped dwelling on death for a while and began formulating plans for either of the two speeches I might be asked to make. I might be asked to make none, I found good phrases for both.) Last night in bed after fashioning my good phrases — or was it early this morning while journeying back uncrippled again from sleep? — I dreamed that our maid called me at the office while my wife was out drinking somewhere (or screwing somewhere, I have dreams about that too lately every once in a while and I don't like them at all) and told me, in her slurred southern accent, with her voice as deep as a colored man's:
"Mr., your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn't breathed for fifteen seconds." That was precisely the way the words were floated to me in my dream or beclouded waking moments:
"Mr., your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn't breathed for fifteen seconds." (No name. A gap, a portentous omission, an empty underlining — I don't know how.)
"What?" I gasped, turning freezing cold with prickling skin. (I was numb and powerless in the presence of that approaching tragedy that was at last about to occur.)
"Mr., your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn't breathed for fifteen seconds." I had no name but knew who I was. I could hear her clearly on the phone but had trouble understanding and believing her — I could see her woman's face; it was dark and full and impassive and I kept making her repeat what she was saying by asking "What?" — I could not think what else to do except stall desperately for time by hollering "What?" — and making her repeat her message — and the message from the maid was always the same:
"Mr., your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn't breathed for fifteen seconds." (Time was rushing by, and it was still fifteen seconds.)
"Mr., your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn't breathed for fifteen seconds." (I'm sure I dreamed it.) What would I do if something like that did happen, if I were sitting in my office in the city one uneventful day, like today, a day no different from any of the rest, and received a telephone message from my home that my boy had collapsed on the floor of the living room and seemed to be dying. I know just what I would do. I would telephone the police in Connecticut and let them handle it.
("My boy is lying on the floor of my living room and hasn't breathed for fifteen seconds," I might have to tell them, and it would be just like my dream.)
Then I would sigh ponderously and feel very sorry for myself. I would have to cancel appointments, change plans, and make my way home in a hurry by very slow train. A taxicab all the way would be fastest, but I probably would not think of that until I was already in the railroad terminal waiting for the train to budge out. I would be nervous, frantic. But I would also know that I was not really in that much of a hurry anymore but merely pretending, that it was already over, that I would prefer to arrive after the emergency had been handled by other people and the outcome already determined, one way or the other, since it would be too late for me to be of use anyway. I would not want to tell any of my colleagues and employees in the office why I was leaving early that day because I would not want to subject myself to their looks and exclamations of sympathy and impassioned concern. I would not want to answer their questions when I saw them again. More than anything, I think I would feel inconvenienced. (I always feel inconvenienced when plans are changed.) I was inconvenienced yesterday when a man my age was killed in a subway station nearby and caused a traffic jam that made me late for a cocktail party with salesmen at which I was expected to be early; his arm caught in the closing doors as he tried to push his way on, but the train started anyway while he was still outside, said the newspapers today, even though it was not supposed to, and dragged him along the station platform until he smashed against pillars and the stone and metal walls of the tunnel into which the subway train roared. His wife was already inside the car and watched the whole thing helplessly (I'll bet she even clutched his hand and held on, stupidly, in a vain and senseless effort to save him. It was like a dream, I bet. I'll bet she's even saying that right now:
"It was like a dream.")
Another man my age was shot to death in the park yesterday and no one knows why. (Men my age are starting to die of cancers, strokes, and heart attacks now.) Last week, another man was shot to death in the park, and no one knows why. The week before that, another man was shot to death in the park, and no one knows why. Every week a man is shot to death in the park. No one knows why. A boy was stabbed on the subway. I don't go into the park. (In Jackson, Mississippi, every year or so, three colored college students are shot to death in cold blood by state police and everyone knows why, so none of the rest of us are afraid.) I'm even still afraid of doors. I'm afraid of closed doors and afraid of what I might spy or what might come in through open ones. I know I nearly died of fear from his tonsil operation that day in the hospital when the attendants rolled him back unconscious through the doorway still and pale, reeking of ether fumes that sickened me, and a crust of nearly black blood inching disgustingly before my eyes out through one of his motionless nostrils. (Only a miracle saved me.) My stomach turned. My head reeled. The room swam.
"What's the matter?" my wife shrieked at me in panic, looking at me. "What is wrong?"
(I don't know what she thought I saw or knew about him that she didn't or what she thought was happening to me that filled her with such alarm.)
I couldn't speak. I thought I'd vomit (but didn't feel healthy enough). My ears buzzed, my brain ached, the floor undulated insanely, and I really believe I might have fainted away right then and there (like a woman) if my wife had not jumped up from the bedside of my boy to grab me by the elbow, shocking me with the stinging points of her long fingernails and with her shrill, penetrating shrieks. She held me firmly, her eyes burning upon me as large as blazing lamps. She kept me from falling and helped me, like a feeble invalid, to a chair. (My wife is stronger than I am, and better too, but I must never let her find that out.) She poured a glass of cold water for me from a pitcher that had been set on the table near the bed for my boy. The doctor entered as I was sipping from it and asked if anything was wrong. I shook my head, faking.
"There's nothing wrong, is there?" I said. "Tell her. He's all right, isn't he?"
"Good as gold," he answered with a smile. "He's going to be fine. These are his. They used to belong to him. He may want to keep them."
We threw them away before my boy regained consciousness and knew about them.
I've never forgotten that tonsillectomy. (I've never forgotten my own.) I still relapse into acute symptom recurrences in which I gag on the sweet, suffocating odor of ether rising from him and remember that pale face and dried smudge of blood desecrating one nostril and recollect with inescapable pain how, back home and recovered, he began crawling obsessively and instinctively (for a little while he was like some living prehuman thing small and obsessed) through the low and musty darkness into our bedroom over and over again after calculating each time until he hoped we were both soundly asleep because it was impossible for him to remain alone at night in his own room. (We did not realize then that it was actually impossible. We thought he was just being smart. I think it was impossible for me to remain alone at night in my own room after my tonsillectomy. I think I remember being allowed to sleep in bed with my mother and father once, and I can't imagine why they would have let me unless I was ill and scared.) We would chase him out. Each evening, he would not even want to go inside his own room when we told him it was bedtime. We made him. (He was afraid, I think, that we were plotting to nail him in for good as soon as we tricked him into entering and permitting us to close the door. He would not let us close the door. We always had to leave it open at least an inch.) We did not lock him in. We locked him out. We locked ourselves inside our room because we could not stand him crawling back to us all night long with his gaily colored quilt, which he always dragged along with him (and found him huddled up outside against the door on the floor of the narrow, drafty hallway. We had to stifle screams in the morning when we opened our door and bumped him because, at first, we forgot be might be there. Later, we were almost unable to open our bedroom door because we sensed he was. Sometimes he was not; he was missing, and that was just as appalling until we found him where he was). It was a scary, nerve-wracking time for all of us (mostly, I guess, for him, although we tended to ignore that. I slept out someplace as often as I could. He got over it in a week. It took me longer). It was torture (and he was putting us through it). It was maddening and exasperating to have to lie in bed trying to sleep each night while waiting to hear him testing our doorknob again or scratching against our thick pile carpet as he came worming his way back inside our bedroom again, rousing us, frightening us, from sleep in sluggish protest and torment again, or to awake disgruntled in the morning and discover him lying prostrate on the floor at the foot of our bed or in some corner of the room, with his quilt, near the legs of a dresser or chair, his sticky, heavy-lidded eyes glued shut finally with exhaustion, his misshapen lips lax, swollen, and blubbery, his thumb lying lifeless near his mouth as though it had just fallen out. (What a terrible time that tonsillectomy of his was for me. It was worse than my own. I may never recover from it fully.)
"Stay in your room," I would command him sternly.
"You have to go back to your room," I would try to coax him gently in the darkness of our bedroom when some unexpected new reserve of kindness and pity would flow within me (pleading with him, really, to please let us alone). "You can leave the lights on if you want to. There's nothing to be afraid of."
"I'm not afraid."
"One of us will stay with you."
"Then you'll go."
"I can't stay in your room all night."
"Then why should I?"
"It's your room."
"I want to be in your room. I want to stay with you and Mommy."
"A doctor said you shouldn't. He said it would be bad for you."
"What doctor?"
"A doctor we saw."
"I don't believe him."
"Do you want to go see him?"
He was afraid of doctors then and has been afraid of doctors, nurses, and dentists ever since. (He doesn't ever want to have to have teeth drilled or pulled.) I don't think he will ever recover from that operation of his fully either. I fear he and my daughter too may never forgive me for permitting their tonsils to become so severely infected that it was necessary for them to be taken to a hospital to have them pulled out (or cut, if that's what they do. And his adenoids too. He isn't mad at me about his adenoids because he doesn't know what they are yet, and neither does anyone else, although those were taken away from him, too. They seem to be highly specialized organs growing inside a person's pharynx whose only natural function is to be taken out), and he keeps associating men he doesn't trust (not me, although he doesn't always trust me) with the anesthetist there, whose appearance he recalls only hazily.
"He gave me an enema," he alleges with abiding resentment and embarrassment during one of our disorganized discussions about everything that might be on his mind.
"No, he didn't," I correct him again. "That was an anesthetic. We gave you an enema at home the night before."
"He looked like Forgione."
"He was a Jap. You didn't even know Forgione then."
"Forgione is an Italian," he concedes abstractedly. "Forgione doesn't like me."
"Yes he does."
"No he doesn't."
"Yes he does. He does now."
"I don't like him."
"You don't have to. Just pretend."
"Miss Owens doesn't like me."
"Yes she does. She gives you good grades."
"She always hollers at me."
"She never does."
"I'm afraid she will if I don't do my work."
"Do your work."
"He says I can't climb ropes."
"Can you?"
"I hate Forgione."
"You don't have to."
"How come?"
"He likes you."
"Did you go see him again?"
"Did you want me to?"
"I'm afraid of Forgione."
"You don't have to be."
"How do you know?"
"He says you've got a good build and can run like a weasel. You don't try to learn! You're supposed to use your feet too when you climb ropes. Not your legs, your feet."
"What's a weasel?"
"A four-legged animal that runs like you."
"Will I have wisdom teeth?"
"Sure. When you grow up."
"Will they have to be pulled?"
"Are you going to start worrying about that?"
"Do you think I can help it?"
"If they're bad."
"You don't like me."
"Yes I do."
"You go away."
"Where?"
"To Puerto Rico."
"I have to."
"To Puerto Rico?"
"When?"
"Last year. You went away to Puerto Rico."
"I had to."
"Are you going again?"
"I have to."
"Soon?"
"In June."
"To Puerto Rico?"
"I'm on the committee. I help pick the place."
"Is that your new job?"
"I don't have it yet."
"To make a speech?"
"I hope so."
"They stole my bike when you were away."
"I bought you another one."
"I thought they were going to beat me up."
"They would have stolen it anyway, even if I was here. I would have been at the office."
"Don't go."
"I have to."
"Whenever you go away I'm afraid you won't come back."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"You told me."
"Sometimes I cry."
"I'll come back."
"I don't want to be alone."
"You wouldn't be alone. You'd have Mommy."
"Mommy doesn't like me."
"Yes she does."
"She yells at me."
"I yell at you."
"You don't like me."
"You're full of bull. I'm always sorry afterward. You don't have to worry. I'll come back. I'm never going to leave you."
"When you die?"
His question catches me by surprise. "What made you think of that?"
"I don't want you to," he answers solemnly. "Maybe that's what made me think of it."
"Ever?"
"No."
"I'll try not to, then," I laugh. (My laugh sounds forced, hollow.) "For your sake. I don't want to, either."
"You have to," he speculates. "Won't you?"
"Someday, I guess. By that time, though, you might not care."
He looks up sharply. "How come?"
"You'll be all grown up by then, if you're lucky, and won't need me anymore. You'll be able to take care of yourself and won't want me around. You might even be glad. I'll finally stop yelling at you."
"Hey, slut, come here," he calls out excitedly to my daughter with a grin of incredulous wonderment. His eyes gleam. "Do you know what Daddy just said?" His eyes gleam. "He said that when he dies we might not even care because all of us will be all grown up and able to take care of ourselves. We might even be glad."
My daughter's mood is dour and unresponsive (and I feel already that she will soon be deep in deadening drugs, if she isn't using them already).
"What about Derek?" she demands with inspired malice, and her eyes grow bright and cold. I frown. (She is proud of this thrust.)
"I wasn't thinking about him."
"You forgot about Derek."
I forgot about Derek. I wish I could forget about him more often. It's hard to forget about him for long (while he's still here in the house with us, although I always try. When he's out of sight, he's usually out of my mind. We should send him away someplace and have him out of our house and minds for good. What a relief that will be. It would be upsetting. My daughter wants me to. My boy doesn't. It's no use seeing doctors anymore). Like my boy, I am afraid of doctors, nurses, and dentists (although I pretend not to be), and I guess I always have been. I'm afraid they might be right. (In the army, I would look directly at the needle when I got my immunization shots because I wanted so strongly to turn my head away. I am no longer a blood donor: I no longer give blood to my company blood bank when the Personnel and Medical Departments set up facilities annually to take blood from hardier employees than myself who volunteer and get thinned orange juice back in exchange. I do not set a good example for the people who work for me.) I am empathizing already with my boy's wisdom teeth. He has never mentioned them before (or I would have been empathizing with them sooner. I hope they're not impacted. How will I ever be able to get him to a dentist if he knows they are going to be pulled? Maybe he'll be different by then. And maybe he won't. I am not looking forward to having my own teeth pulled. I rarely get new cavities now, but old fillings fall away and teeth do have to be cleaned, and I don't like having my soft gums pricked by those hard, sharp dental instruments until they're sore from back to front and awash with blood. I don't like having my palate tickled when the backs of the uppers are polished. I am afraid to visit my dentist twice a year. I need periodontal work and have to go once a week). I am afraid of Forgione too (and would not want to have to climb ropes for him. He sneaks into my dreams occasionally too, along with niggers and other menacing strangers, steals through shadows in the background and slips away before I can find out what he is doing in them), although I do not associate him with the anesthetist at the tonsillectomy (who did not threaten me at all, although he did, quite cheerfully, give my boy a liquid anesthetic through a pink rubber tube as we watched. Is that an enema? Maybe he's right). No, I know I will never forget that tonsillectomy of his, or my own, or my daughter's, or the sequence of repetitious medical messages in hushed tones from doctors who told me to my face that my mother had probably suffered another small brain spasm or stroke and was degenerating simultaneously from progressive arthritis, so it was sometimes hard to be sure (for all of these were morbid and revolting experiences and I am unable to repress the memory of them), and I know I will also remember and dislike that last prospering young doctor with the pinstripe suit and exaggerated good posture (he was younger than I was and makes more money) as he stepped out onto the patio (I will never forget him) after examining Derek that pearly spring day (I will never forgive him), the screen door banging closed behind him, to tell us, with something of an unconscious quirk of a smile on his otherwise smug and emotionless face (I think I will always remember his smile):
"He will never speak." That bastard.
All my life, it seems, I've been sandwiched between people who will not speak. My mother couldn't speak at the end. My youngest child Derek couldn't speak from the beginning. My sister and I almost never speak. (We exchange greeting cards.) I don't speak to cousins. (I may never speak. In dreams I often have trouble speaking. My tongue feels dead and dry and swollen enough to choke my mouth. Its coat is coarse. It will not move when I want it to, and I am in danger and feel terror because I cannot speak or scream.) I wish I didn't have to leave my family and go to Puerto Rico. (I worry when I have to go away. I worry about all of us. I worry what would happen to them if I did not return.)
Derek is pleasant enough most of the time (for a kid that cannot speak) and toilet trained now. He hardly ever causes a disturbance anymore when we take him out in public and usually does not act strange. But he will achieve a mental age of not much more than five, and arrive at that slowly, and turbulent emotional changes are expected with adolescence and full physical sexual maturity. (If he lives that long. I have heard that certain kinds of retardates — that's another thing we call him now — have a life expectancy shorter than average, and that's another thing I catch myself counting on.) He has a dreamy, staring, uncomprehending gaze at times that makes him appear preoccupied and distant, but apart from that, his face is not especially distinctive. (He does not embarrass us unless he tries to speak. We tell him not to.
"Shhhh," we whisper.)
"Will he ever speak?" my boy asks.
"No."
"Will you send him away?"
"We'll do what's best."
"Would you send me away if I couldn't speak?"
"You can speak."
"If I couldn't?"
"You can."
"But if I couldn't. If something happened to me."
"We would do what was best."
"For who?" sneers my daughter.
"For all of us. We aren't sending him away just because he can't speak."
"Please don't give him away," begs my boy, who is unable even to look at him without drawing back.
"Then why don't you help us with him?" I demand. "You never want to play with him. Neither of you."
"Neither do you," sneers my daughter.
I do not reply.
My boy is silent.
In the family in which I live there are four people of whom I am afraid. Three of these four people are afraid of me, and each of these three is also afraid of the other two. Only one member of the family is not afraid of any of the others, and that one is an idiot.