I was on the couch thumbing through the Times. “Ella singing a classic by Duke.” Every once in a while I’d put down the paper and pick up the guitar. What a guitar that was—a cherry red Gibson 335. I got it used, flipped the bridge and nut around, restrung it. Usually, when you flip a guitar, the intonation gets thrown off and it won’t stay in tune. It just sounds odd. Not this one. I kept it on a stand next to the couch, and both boys were good about not touching it—keeping the markers and the greasy, sticky paws away.
I was playing unplugged, and C was drawing a hallucination, some kind of dragon ritual, on a giant piece of vellum. X was lying on the floor. Strange child—naked, stretched out on his side, playing with his plastic dinosaurs. When he isn’t stalking, smashing, or reciting facts about the ancient animal world, he’s in a torpor—the only signs alerting us to his being awake, alive, the slight growls animating his toys.
Claire came through the door with bagels and coffee. Maybe I sensed the hidden doughnuts. I was viscerally reminded of why I married her. She was pregnant and wore the new season on her. The October breeze had buffed her cheeks, long hair in a wind tangle, auburn, foreshadowing the leaves’ turn. Green eyes like pale leaves. The boys hadn’t looked up. I remember that made me happy. Selfish, yes, but it was a statement that said they were comfortable without their mother. She was being released. They were finally off her tit. The three of them had entangled in the sweet sorrow of psychological weaning. It could get hideous at times, her longing for them to grow up but then regressing; them longing for her to realize that they were both confident and scared. But sometimes, like that day, it was right, and we were all at peace.
“Michael, do you want some juice?”
He didn’t look up. He just kept on growling softly—not ignoring his mother, just seemingly unaware of her presence.
“Michael?”
She lay down on the floor next to him and got in his face.
“Michael.”
He snapped up, wide-eyed, smiling, as though some mystery hand had flicked his power on.
“Michael,” she said, relieved. Then he yelled, not yet two years old, his most coherent statement to date.
“I’m not Michael. I’m Duke!”
Duke became X because Cecil became C and X was the only letter Duke could write—fist clenched around a Crayola. C rolling his eyes. Claire and I thrilled and worried—our boy, three years old, well over three feet tall, doing pull-ups, a vertical leap half his height—the crayon, a potential weapon. Blue eyes, just this side of scary.
Michael. I’d picked Moses first, then Miles, and Claire had winced at both. Troubled by their implications.
“They’re so loaded. That’s too much to put on a kid.”
“And Michael isn’t?”
She didn’t respond. But what is in a name? In between the two boys we lost a child. C had come too early. We were too young, too broke. X and the girl were “accidents.” But the one we lost had been planned. We were ready. It was May and it was windy and raining hard. A tree had fallen against the building and Claire called me. I was in the adjunct office grading papers. She said that she was scared. C was scared, too. I hadn’t been very sympathetic because I was in the center office—windowless—and hadn’t any sense of the weather. I teased her about lightning bolts and phone lines and she hung up, grumpy that I hadn’t indulged her. Then she went to bed. I remember wondering if the student whose paper I was reading realized that I was the one who’d supplied him with the quote that he had plagiarized. The phone rang again. I sighed, shook my head, and answered.
“I’m bleeding.
I took too long to respond. She wailed.
“I’m bleeding!”
When I got home, Claire was in an almost unreachable panic bunker. There it was, on the bedsheets, small stains on the bathroom floor whose pattern made me think that something had dropped and shattered there. I had to lie to her. I told her everything was going to be all right. She had to believe it. What else could we do—accept that our baby was dead?
But it was dead. They vacuumed it from her the next day while I held C on my lap in the waiting room and lied to him. And looking out the taxi window on the way home we knew that New York City was too brutal for us. Edith was away, so I got a car, sped us north through rain, got to her house at night and broke in. C was asleep, but Claire wouldn’t let me carry him in. He was almost too long for her to carry, but she wrapped his legs around her, pressed him to her chest, and buried her face in his crazy wave of hair.
She didn’t say anything, just got in bed and closed her eyes. The room was dark, cold, and haunted. In the darkness her sorrow, which was darker still, hovered around her like a deep, vague shadow cut loose from its tether. Inside it she seemed safe. Outside it, in the other rooms, ghosts of all different attitudes spoke. So I went out. I turned on every light in the house to dispel them, send them out to the woods, to the beach, the ocean, or the lonely country road. It didn’t work. I went back into the dark room, sat on the edge of the bed—C and his mother in a weepy, sleep embrace. And in the mess of sound, all the ghost voices, the clicking of forceps, the whoosh of the vacuum hose, and the footsteps of rain on the roof—I listened for my dead child’s voice.
“Did you want this baby?” Edith had asked me in a private moment when she returned from her trip and found us there. I knew she was trying to be kind. But it was then that I gave myself full permission to hate her: because she was white; because she always had money; because she seemed incapable of mourning—becoming damaged or recognizing that there are some people who truly are and will always be “out in the wind.”
It was six months before Claire would undress in front of me and six more until I could look at her naked, and then, immediately, she was pregnant. And it happened again. She bled at night. She called me. We stayed up, this time, mourning. We went to the doctor, but everything was fine. X was the miracle baby, the fetus who had bled from her but somehow reconstituted himself in her. Instantaneous resurrection. So when he came out, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and oversized—two pounds heavier and two inches longer than any educated guess—we were both awed and terrified. Claire went into emergency surgery to repair her torn uterus, and they wanted to take him—put him under the lamps because they thought he looked a bit “jaundiced.” No one got the joke. I said no and kept my little ether baby with me.
As much as I fear for C, I believe that X will be all right. I don’t drill him like C, don’t obsess about his safety, his toughness, his manners. I haven’t tried to teach him five different sports, read him dense poems or scrutinized the quality of his draftsmanship. Some say that it’s because C is the firstborn, my parental training began with him. Claire thinks it’s because X is almost unreachable—the boy does what he wants, hears what he wants, seems nearly immune to any threat of discipline or punishment, and none of it seems willful; he seems built that way. I think it’s because he’s white. There are the other factors, but I know that when I look at the boy who looks exactly like me, I don’t know who or what it is I’m seeing. There’s no history or experience within me to project onto him. He’s a complete mystery to me. I can neither demand anything of him nor predict anything for him. This doesn’t mean I don’t love my boy. He’s my boy—I know that. But just as he moves so strangely in my mind, he moves, will move in the world outside me—freely. I can extrapolate, I can theorize, cite examples—my best friend is white; I know what has happened to him, I know his story, and although in parks and train yards he has told me true—his story, bruises, tears, laughter—I still do not know his mind. All I have are reports, euphonic and cacophonic, from the interior. My boy is only three. I can’t see him as a man. His doctor swears he’ll be at least six-foot-six. I can’t see it. What does that mean? Somehow I helped produce an Aryan-looking giant—a testosterone-filled encyclopedia I will never understand. So what do you do?—Say he’ll be just fine.
The school is being renovated—the main building, at least. They’ve had
a scaffolding up for the last several years—since before we had kids, though no work seems to be getting done. I go inside and at once see one of C’s old teachers. She smiles and waves by bending her fingers in unison. She scurries off. It’ll supposedly be a new building for him—a big building. First grade—serious stuff. I wait for a while in the foyer and remember dropping him off and picking him up in the midst of the other parents and brown and black nannies. More eyeballing. If you’re brown and in a place you’re not expected to be, you’d better have public documented credentials regarding why you can be there.
“May I help you?”
“I’m here to see Jean Ray.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
She picks up her phone and dials the extension.
“What’s this about?”
“Tuition.”
As soon as I say it, I become conscious of my filth. It does matter, if not to her, then to me. She looks me over, trying and failing to be covert. Perhaps the rumpled, addled look is the one to sport here. Me in a suit, me in something clean and casual might not be believable. I’d look like a con or, worse still, a fool. Better to be a bum who’s trying. I speak again.
“Tuition for my sons.”
“Your sons are enrolled for September?”
“Yes.”
“What grades?”
“First and preschool—threes.” She keeps holding the receiver, looking me over as though she needs more information. “Am I in the right place?”
“Yes.” She answers as though it’s a stupid question. I decide that I have enough evidence to dislike her. She’s mean, and, worse, she’s a bureaucrat, drunk with wee power. She dials. I straighten, almost regally.
“You can have a seat.”
“No, thanks.” I rise to my full height, rigid, as though prepared to address a mob or take a bullet. She speaks into the receiver. It’s amazing that I can’t discern what she’s saying. Her lips barely move. Unable to eavesdrop, I look out the window behind her as though I’m surveying my empire.
“She’ll see you now.”
“Thank you.”
I walk into her office—still regal. She doesn’t stand, but she gestures for me to sit. I ignore it and choose a far-off point beyond the walls to stare at.
“How can I help you?”
Her voice is high and raspy, daemonic, as though the sweet-faced person has been possessed. Nevertheless, I stand my ground, staying fixed on that distant point.
“My boys”—I find myself calling on the Brahmin tone, but it’s ridiculous, me aping Gavin, aping his old man, aping someone like Edith. She snaps her head up, startled by my voice.
“My boys, well, my eldest, has enjoyed his time here.”
I let it hang there. And then I have nothing to say, so my statement hangs some more and I listen to it bounce off the plaster, the windows, ricochet around the room until it sits on its own, disconnected from me. It would be easier for her to digest, I assume, not coming from raggedy black me. But after her initial start she seems unmoved, perhaps because she’s waiting to hear from, needs to hear from, raggedy black me. I scroll through my voice bank, hoping to find the one that will, for her, match the man. Down in the quagmire of assumption and stereotype—to find a model of her mind. Nothing. It’s been too long. I stick with my triple-adulterated Edith.
“My younger son will be starting at the preschool.”
“Michael. Michael and Cecil? They are your boys.” She’s tightened her speech to match my cadence. “Well, we’re very happy to have them. Cecil is”—she checks her folder—“a wonderful student. I’m sure Michael will flourish, too.”
She’s too calm, too distant, and although I can understand why she doesn’t share my urgency, I won’t accept it. I exhale, audibly. And it seems to reach her. She folds her hands and leans forward. She exhales, too.
“Talk to me, please.” She gestures to the chair again, trying to recreate our meeting. I refuse again.
“When I was a boy, I went to a school like this. It was wonderful. On Wednesday and Friday afternoons Madame St. Croix would send for me, and I’d make my way to her room, in the attic of a cottage in the corner of the campus. We’d have tea, and she’d do the best she could to keep our conversation in French.”
“That does sound wonderful.”
“I would like to have stayed. I couldn’t. The Boston public school system, however, was crumbling. So my mother faked an address in a nearby suburb that had an excellent reputation for education. Every morning, until she felt I could do it on my own, she snuck me across the border.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten.”
She opens her hands and puts her face in them.
“That’s what we did, until she found a place in the town.”
She keeps her hands on her face and I think that she doesn’t want to hear anymore—wants to pretend that I’m gone. But when she re-emerges, there’s a newness to her, a burning in her eyes, more than curiosity or sympathy. It looks like anger. She traces a small circle on the desk with a finger, as though trying to focus her rage into the smallest spot possible.
“I have never understood”—she pauses, brings her finger to the bridge of her nose—“how in a country where equality is said to be the rule, that access to something so fundamental as education is such an exclusive thing. Access—it is a thing, a tool, something you must possess.” She takes a deep breath, too big for her little body. “Where, may I ask, is your mother from?”
“Virginia.”
She nods, answering for herself all the questions she could want to ask. “And she placed a premium on education—your education.”
“Yes.”
“Quite a woman.”
“Quite.”
“Quite a boy.”
She restudies the documents, plumbing the teacher evaluations, Stanford-Benet scores. Finally, she looks back up. There’s the flash of sadness again, then nothing.
“Your sons are a valuable part of our community. I want to help.”
She brushes imaginary dust off the corner of the desk, then re-assumes her posture from when we first met. “This is what I can do.”
I take the bait and turn my body to her.
“I can waive the late fees for both boys, and”—she lets that hang for a moment to allow for my response.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She brightens, ready to reveal more. “And I can extend you more time.” She starts nodding again. “Friday.”
“This Friday?”
“Well, if you consider that you missed your final payment for last semester, as well as being quite late with this semester’s . . . We have to determine who will be with us this year. There are several candidates for the spots.”
“But you have our deposit?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Your deposit, which we could have just as easily applied to your outstanding balance, which at this time is . . .”
“Eight thousand.”
“Eight thousand four hundred.”
“I thought you said you would waive the late fee.”
“That’s true.”
“What about financial aid?”
“The application deadline was April first. The fund is spoken for. Next year, however . . .”
“You said they can’t stay.”
“They could reapply. They would be strongly considered.”
“Could we pay off the balance over time?”
“We don’t allow that.”
“What if we drafted something—if I signed a contract.”
“You already did.” She looks down. I wait for that flash, but it doesn’t come. “I can hold their places until the end of the day Friday.” She looks up again, squinting, waiting for an answer. And what can I do but scrape and nod?
10
I have never really considered the shape, size, or location of my father�
�s personal hell. I am ashamed of that. I haven’t seen him since C was a toddler. Claire used to keep a picture out; the two of them hand in hand, walking through leaves beside a playground. She kept it out for our sake—mine and the boy’s—as though we, or at least he, would honor the man. I know it made her burn with sorrow that her father—good man, father, and grandfather—unquestioningly so—was gone. C has no memory of my father. I haven’t told him much about him, either. My father has never met his other grandchildren. I’ve offered to send him tickets, even rent a car to go get him, but he’s always found a way out. Promises of meeting them stopped—no birthday cards, no holiday calls. He behaves much like a dead man: He haunts; he groans from the crypt of memory. He is a crumbled marker, a vague cautionary tale. Then word comes from up north through third and fourth parties that he’s having a rough go, that he misses me, that he loves his unknown grandchildren, and that he is thinking of us, always—always thinking of his lineage, keeping them in the best of all worlds, the platonic. He’s only held C’s hand—no hugs, no scent, diapers, blood, tears. Ideal—best thought about in an armchair over a can of Miller High Life after a greasy sandwich, cigarette in the ashtray, television on too loud, but just the same, unheard, as one program becomes another and the voices become one. Then not even voices—only sound, then not-sound. It becomes solid, a fixed part of the environment: a wood-veneered end table with weeks of magazines; stacks of newspapers on the floor; a historical novel and the crippled spider plant on the sill; the juniper outside his front window; the distant whoosh and roar from the secondary highway that is hidden behind the young evergreens; wooden fence and dumpsters behind the strip mall where he walks slowly, bum-kneed, short-breathed, to get the pepper steaks and orangeade at the Greek pizzeria, the cigarettes and beer at the mini-mart while he waits. Sometimes they let him cash his government checks there and he upgrades the beer, gets a magazine. Maybe he thinks of us. Maybe he wanders over to the small toy section, stares at the miniatures hanging on the racks and thinks about sending the kids something plastic wrapped in plastic. He doesn’t know what they like. He huffs and limps back home with a little cash and a greasy bag.
Man Gone Down Page 25
