by Eve Morton
With a sigh he walked inside.
Chapter Nine
George Tessler’s room had been largely untouched since his death. His bed was still made with hospital corners, and a glass of water, now evaporated, remained on the bedside table. A book was also pressed into the right angle corner of the table, a blue bookmark sticking out of one end, marking it as near the beginning. Cosmin was surprised to see that it was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a semi-autobiographical psychological book about the author’s experience in the concentration camps. It was a thin volume, but immensely popular after its initial publication, and still popular in spite of accusations of Frankl’s exaggeration of his own experience.
Cosmin picked it up and saw that his father had written inside the book. This was not uncommon. His father liked to correct typos in library copies, so much that the main branch had to call his house and tell him to stop or they would suspend his card. He didn’t stop, was suspended, and then asked to borrow books under Cosmin’s name. Cosmin forgot how that initial battle ended; he supposed it didn’t matter now.
He examined a passage defining Frankl’s term logotherapy; it had been marked in several different pen inks. One was blue and underlined the paragraph. Another was red and starred it. These weren’t corrections; they were annotations. When Cosmin flipped to the end of the book, he realized that more pages had marks on them, were underlined, contained stars or question marks. George wasn’t at the beginning of his first reading; he was at the beginning of a subsequent rereading, and from the array of pen marks, it was at least his fourth or fifth time. Considering it was perched on his bedside table, like a Gideon Bible in a hotel, Cosmin could only assume his father read a paragraph or so before bed at night.
Or perhaps it was how he got out of bed in the morning.
George had always been a morning person, rising long before everyone else in the house. Cosmin’s earliest memories—other than the scattered sense ones of the orphanage—were the sounds of the creaking pipes in the house as his father took a shower. No matter the day of the week or holiday, he’d shower, dress, and remain at the kitchen table for two or three hours reading, drinking only coffee until Lily woke up and cooked him breakfast. Only then would he put the newspaper or book down and greet the rest of the world, including Cosmin and eventually Suzanne. Both children were prohibited from watching morning cartoons on the weekends, or disturbing him on Christmas morning with presents before his routine was complete. After their family dinner was done, he’d often read into the night as well, but he was more forgiving when the kids wanted to watch television or go to a movie. It was his mornings that were sacred. That was his alone time, his quiet time.
Julian had remarked on Cosmin’s morning routine in a similar manner. Cosmin would rise at least two hours before Julian, no matter Julian’s rotation schedule at the hospital, and read while taking copious notes. The only difference between George’s acts and Cosmin’s own was that he’d never wait for Julian before eating, since Julian always got something on-the-go before the hospital or didn’t eat breakfast at all. Cosmin also never read the morning newspaper. He’d more often than not need to get through a thick tome for his show or a new edition of an academic journal for his professional work. He’d close off notes just as Julian’d step out of the shower, and then they’d both greet the brave new world together.
Cosmin sat on the edge of his father’s bed, overwhelmed. His father had highlighted several passages, which he read over with a new voracious curiosity. Most of these passages were interesting, but what was George trying to figure out? He’d been coming back to these words for years—possibly decades.
His father’s existential questions, kept under lock and key, and given way to chicken scratch wonderings in the early hours of the morning. How different were they from one another? Cosmin didn’t want to consider this thought for too much longer.
He opened drawers on the bedside table. He found cotton balls, Band-Aids; pens, paper, envelopes and stamps; and an actual Bible—a small one, possibly from a door-to-door sale—and, surprisingly, condoms. Cosmin was shocked yet again. His father had condoms?
He picked them out and examined the expiration label. The neon colours of the cardboard packaging were faded with age, but the condoms themselves were still within the use-by date. Only two remained. Cosmin had no idea who his father would have used them with. He’d been close to no one since Lily—but then again, Cosmin hadn’t been close to him. Maybe he liked one of his homecare workers. Maybe he’d found a kindred spirit at the library, someone who let him correct typos in books and then talked to him about Viktor Frankl.
All the things Cosmin didn’t know about his father stared him in the face—and then spurred him forward. He knew the adoption records must be here. The closet had stacks of boxes, but they were mostly clothing and shoes, all of which had belonged to Suzanne or Lily at some point in their lives. He found his mother’s wedding dress in the cedar chest, along with the clothing he and Suzanne had worn their first days as Tesslers. He even managed to turn up the blue snowsuit he had vague memories of wearing as a child.
It was when he looked under the bed that Cosmin’s heart caught in his throat. There were several long boxes underneath, all perfectly labelled. One proclaimed LILY in all capitals, like his father often wrote when he did invoices, followed by COSSY and SUZY. Cosmin bristled at the pet name, shortened so his syllables could match Suzy’s. He removed his mother’s box first, then Suzanne’s. He didn’t want to touch his own box, but he needed to pull it aside—not open it—in order to access Suzanne’s. Once he did, he discovered another box behind it. Unlabelled. He had to get on his knees to pull it out, it was wedged so far back and so close to the wall, but once he did, he cracked it open right away.
Coil-bound notebooks lined the top. Cosmin pulled off the first layer and found more underneath. There were maybe fifty notebooks in total, all wedged and worn into a narrow box. All were labelled in his father’s cursive with dates ranging from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Years and years of writing; almost three decades. At first Cosmin thought they were just his business supplies, but he wanted to be sure. He picked up one of the books from the 1970s and opened it up to a random entry in March.
Lily came home from the hospital today. We’re not exactly sure what to do with the room. We’ve closed the door for now. Maybe someday we will open it.
Cosmin furrowed his brow. His father’s script was easy to read, but the emotions and events were harder to decipher. What happened to his mother? As far as he knew, she’d not been in an accident, never even broken a bone, until the car crash that killed her.
Cosmin flipped to an earlier entry, one where George spoke about a false blood test at the doctor followed by a positive one, then being happier than he’d been in years. Cosmin realized his mother had been pregnant; another entry soon after the blood tests confirmed it, and the happiness expounded in the prose through the loops and curls of his father’s letters. From this point, Cosmin was able to put the sad story together. Lily had been pregnant one summer, but she had given birth to a stillborn baby in early spring. Unsure what to do, they tried again the next summer, had a miscarriage, and then one last time in the winter, only to give birth to another stillborn child. All attempts at having children after that point had stopped.
The baby’s room is closed. I cannot open it. The suffering fills it and I will let it go for now. We are not meant to be parents.
Cosmin understood the sorrow in these words so clearly, and then understood his parents’ desperation, their tension at becoming new parents he experienced as a child, with the wisdom of an adult. Of course his parents had had trouble conceiving. Back then no one adopted unless they had gone through hell like this. Since Cosmin was from Romania, and parts of George’s family had also been from there, Cosmin had merely thought it was a family tradition, that they wanted to be closer to their culture
. Though he knew he’d been adopted, and it was never something they tried to hide from him, they never spoke about what preceded his arrival. If Cosmin had thought about that time period, though, the main reason for George and Lily Tessler to adopt would have been obvious. Lily often became sad on certain days of the year, but never talked about it; all matched up with the dates in the first few notebooks to when they’d lost children.
Cosmin dug through the other journals with renewed curiosity. He needed to know how the date of his own arrival in Canada had been described; he needed to know how and why his parents had changed their mind about children entirely and picked him among the many suffering children in Romania. Cosmin couldn’t find an exact passage when his parents had an “a-ha” moment, but he did find a newspaper article about Nicolae Ceaușescu that his father had taped into the journal. The final paragraph had a highlighted section speaking about the numerous orphanages and their deplorable conditions.
This. This was it. The idea had been planted, and it grew over the next few pages, mostly through the long and sprawling entries now becoming shorter and shorter. Mourning tipped into something else, a steady progression of staccato sentences focused on organization and planes. Boarded last night. Time change is brutal. And I’m unsure about where we’re going tomorrow. Interspersed between descriptions of the city, his father’s random thoughts on communism, and the few choice adjectives he had to describe the orphanage, it seemed like Cosmin would never find his own existence on the page.
More than an abstract birth date, he realized he came into being here, on the page, through his father’s looped scrawl. And he wanted to know how his father saw him. Finally, he caught the first mention of “this boy” whom he assumed to be himself:
This boy is so quiet. The nuns here say he has not spoken since he arrived. It’s not unusual for children to babble in an attempt to make words, but he does not do it. Lily...she wants a girl. The ones we lost have been girls. But this boy stared right through me. I think we will be taking him home.
A few entries later and Cosmin saw mention of his name rather than “this boy”; he wasn’t sure what he liked more.
The nuns say we can rename this boy, especially since he does not respond or say much at all, but I like the name. Cosmin. Sort of like the cosmos. I see the stars in his large black eyes.
Cosmin was struck. The cosmos? This boy? They had come for a girl, but they’d taken home a sullen child who seemed to contain stars. He read more perfunctory details about the adoption itself, all of which were familiar.
Why was it that he always heard the banal and uninteresting details about his adoption? Why did his parents think he needed to know about his passport, his lack of middle name which had held him up at the border, and the name of the orphanage—rather than the cosmos he had inside of him? Why did his father never tell him a thing about any of this?
Cosmin continued to read months and months ahead, mostly skimming. His father talked about many things in his journal, not just family or day-to-day events. He commented on politics and the weather, on movies and his future plans, and quite often on the books he read. His father wrote in the morning, it seemed to Cosmin, judging by how often he started each entry with remarks on the sun and how he slept.
Cosmin said his first word this morning. We believe it’s not his first-first word, but he’s talking. And we can’t be more thrilled.
Cosmin checked the date on the entry, making sure it wasn’t mis-transcribed from somewhere else. He was four. He’d been in their house for over a year. He hadn’t talked until then? His father never told him this, either. And his mother only said that he was a quiet child, but Cosmin always thought that meant he never cried. Not that he never spoke.
The more he read, the more he started to realize that he’d been a mute child. His father speculated reasons as to why—the deplorable state of Romania, the orphanage, right down to not liking Canadian winters—but he didn’t come to a conclusion. By the time they had him scheduled for a speech pathologist (“the talking doctor” as his father wrote), he started to speak. I suppose a conclusion is useless when the problem has been mostly solved. And we are happy for it.
As the year went on, and Cosmin didn’t seem to talk much beyond a handful of words, they did take him to the talking doctor. Cosmin remembered only a haze of navy blue and trucks from the waiting room, a woman with blond hair and a soft voice. It hadn’t been a bad experience, but it had made him want to hide under Lily’s dress. He might have done just that, since he also had a vague memory of both the speech pathologist and his mother’s laugher. George, however, did not laugh. He was very concerned about Cosmin’s lack of speech and worried it would hold him back in school. Each day he comes home, he seems sadder and sadder. Thankfully this is only half days, but we worry that it will only get worse.
It did not get worse, but getting better seemed to take years. Cosmin’s vocabulary grew in his father’s journals as he kept a running tally on the words he spoke. But the problem never fully healed, he soon realized, until Suzanne had been adopted. That was when Cosmin’s memories first came into clearer narrative focus—so of course, of course, that had been when he’d really started to speak. Cosmin quickly found that date in the journal and read the first line.
Today is the happiest day of my life. Not only do we have this beautiful girl Suzanne in our house, but Cosmin is talking. Not just one word here or there, and only when prompted, but full sentences. He talks to her. He guides her places. It’s as if he needed a reason to speak before, and now he has it. And now Lily thinks he won’t shut up! I can’t wait, though. He has a lot to say.
Cosmin shut the journal. He put a hand over his mouth to stifle a sob that wanted to come out. He wanted to hate his father. He wanted to believe that he had been an old miserable man who didn’t really love him, but only loved Suzanne because she was the golden child. The girl that they had clearly, obviously, always wanted but didn’t get to have until over a decade after they’d started trying.
But that was not true. It was never true.
How was he supposed to know, though? Cosmin had only heard or seen the periphery of all these details. He’d been told wrong information. He wasn’t a quiet child—he was a mute one—and while his father had always stated that Suzanne’s adoption had been one of his happiest days, he never bothered to add that it was because it had been the act which finally got Cosmin to speak in full sentences. Cosmin was always in the background, not fully understanding what was going on, and even as an adult, his pattern continued and he drew his own conclusions.
They had been erroneous conclusions, but when Suzanne had been around, it had been so much easier to not feel the sting of being wrong. The moment she died, any lifeline between him and his father had been severed. His wife gone, his daughter gone, and Cosmin always felt like the burden. If not for his adoption, maybe they wouldn’t have ever gotten Suzanne and then they could have been spared that pain. Maybe, maybe, maybe. He had unwritten and rewritten that part of his life so much that it had no meaning. He thought the pain was too difficult, and so he closed the door, and tried to flatten all pain to this moot point.
And so he’d let the relationship with his father atrophy, especially as his own proclivities only seemed to get in the way. But how much of his father’s homophobia was real? How much was just George’s longstanding sadness?
Cosmin was suddenly desperate to see if his father had actually disapproved of his relationships with men. The latest journal was only in the early 1990s, though. Suzanne and Lily had died about ten years after that, and Maurice had appeared two years after their death. Cosmin wondered if his father had stopped writing because his life seemed perfect then—or if he stopped because that perfection was being torn away? The line we have closed the door came through his mind. And maybe that was the case. Maybe he’d boxed up his feelings, knowing that he couldn’t experience that happiness anymore without grief
tingeing the edges.
Had his father packed away the journals as a way to remember them, or as a way to forget? Cosmin wasn’t sure. But his father’s lack of emotions now seemed to make more sense. He was drawing inward, hoarding feelings, but only because he felt them too strongly. Maybe that was enough to humanize his father. Maybe it was enough to understand, even if Cosmin was still left wanting more closure.
Cosmin opened Lily’s box next. Old photos and mementoes lined the top layer, followed by expired driver’s licences and everyday objects which clearly had meaning beyond the quotidian but were indecipherable to Cosmin. There were no journals, nothing to mark the objects as unique. He moved on to Suzanne’s box and found the same sort of collection of ephemera. Near the bottom was one notebook, which was more like a scrapbook where George had glued in her letters she sent home from college. Then there was a newspaper clipping of the crash, set in the middle of the last page as some sort of macabre ending to the whole affair. But there was nothing else, no trace of his father’s voice aside from the organizing hand who had clearly strung this all together.
Cosmin sighed as he reached his own box. He knew he had to look now, though his exhaustion was stifling. He wanted to sleep—each blink of his eyes felt like torture—but he needed to see. When he opened it and found more notebooks, journals like his father had kept, he felt hollowed out inside. Had his father removed the same type of everyday objects with no discernable meaning in order to have more storage for his own journals? Cosmin was about to leave for bed, tired of so much feeling, when he noted the copy of The Tempest by Shakespeare underneath one of the red journals. He knew the copy; he’d given it to his father one year—the year of Maurice—and his father had kept it. He pushed past the journals and saw other random items he’d given his dad over the years, including the copies of his books. Cosmin opened the academic book he’d written based on his dissertation. His father had highlighted some passages—and, of course, corrected some typos like he always did. Cosmin was about to move on when he saw his father’s writing near the end of the last chapter.
