Silas Dillon of Cary County

by Clifford Schrage

  I recalled interactions with Mommy Maureen that Friday afternoon. Motionless recollections, memory glimpses and utterances flashed back. After minutes of whining, I whimpered and sniveled until fear gradually grabbed me, and I began to cry.

  No one heard me, and no one came to rescue me. This continued until five o’clock, two hours alone there in the small world of the car. Terror, panic, and dread seemed to envelop me, smother me. I wrestled, grappled, tried to untangle my way out of the snug confinement of the car seat. Frustration. Rage. Fright—All these tormented me, giving me a puzzling desire to hurt myself.

  Mommy Sophia assumed I still slept. A fusion of the television, the telephone, assumption that I kept sleeping, thoughtlessness, and carelessness forestalled her from checking on me. My hands and feet grew cold, diaper sodden, saturated, burning my skin. For two separated stretches of fifteen minutes I stopped crying, caught my breath. But then the terror returned.

  Finally Mommy Sophia came for me, and when she opened the door she heard a howling scream, red-faced, with tears and mucus and saliva glazed over my face. This annoyed her. “All right, all right, it’s okay, it’s okay, you’re all right, be quiet, be quiet, sssshhhh, ssshhh!” She said these things quickly, brusquely, in a scolding tone. Her fleshy, whiskered, squinting face was close to mine as she carried me in. I looked at her, hunting for a trace of love, comfort, pity, anything in her expression as she merely looked about the neighbors to see if anyone noticed as I cried. She was only angry.

  It took me another two hours to get myself together after that, sitting, losing my breath, catching my breath, sniveling in distress. I felt a deep puncture of depression in my small heart. Mr. Madden and Sophia felt nothing that night. I slept in my crib exhaustedly until late the next morning, under their roof which I could never call mine, under bright and windy stars, under the long limbs of the deep rooted, growing sycamores.

  THREE

  SNOW CLOUDS

  Mommy Maureen’s efforts to reform herself satisfied a lenient judge—Judge Clement—who chaired a bench at the county’s family court. Family court cases were many and daily in urban Cary County. Silas Dillon’s was the seventh of twenty-three that crossed this judge’s bench that particular February Thursday. Like another part in the assembly line, it was just another case, just another decision in the run of decisions. His mood that day was a little detached. Part of these judgments yielded to the conventions of New York’s law, while the other depended on the umpire—his mood, his insight, his angle. Mommy Maureen was to be felt sorry for. Most people pitied my mother. She remained wretched, pathetic, and I was all she had to be proud of in life. People pitied her for that. She’d made mistakes she was sorry about. She cried, and did it publicly—before boards, at hearings, in court. “I just want my baby,” she’d said often, sobbing. Rooms full of people got quiet and patient. Like I said, she was pathetic. This judge’s heart rightfully thawed for her, but deludedly overlooked me, Silas Dillon of Cary County, in the shadows.

  I had just turned two when this change began. The agency was to serve in watching closely by having a social worker recurrently drop in on the children unannounced to see how mother and son managed. She knew this.

  Molly Fresh, a new social worker recently out of college arrived that next Monday morning to the Maddens’ to bring me to my mother. That morning uncovered itself with a cold, still, colorless chill and an expectancy of forecasted snow. Mr. Madden had left for work. He didn’t say “goodbye” to me. Mommy Sophia woke up early, dressed herself and me, and packed my things into a trunk and two boxes. Molly arrived, bundled, scarved, buttoned, knocking on the front door. Lifting me, Sophia opened the door. Thin cold air intruded like a spirit.

  Small, slender, simply pretty and childlike with shoulder length, wavy brown hair—“I smell snow in the air,” Molly said, stepping in, shivering, opening her coat collar button.

  “It’s going to snow,” Sophia said, closing the door.

  Molly looked down at my stuff on the floor by the door. She then looked at me, smiling. “How are you today Silas? You look so handsome. You’re going to your mommy, ha? Aren’t you?” She seemed to speak loudly. Her thick Brooklyn accent uttered quickly.

  I just stared, holding one hand with the other, pulling my fingers. I did this when I was nervous. Sophia tried to put me down on my feet, but I clung to her, whining; so she held me, not wanting any contest. I’d never met this person Molly before this meeting, but I did feel easeful with her, never feeling that way around Sandra.

  “I heard a lot about you,” Molly said to me, looking into my eyes, speaking with a child’s voice. “I’ve been reading his reports,” she said to Sophia now with her adult’s tone. “He seems to be pretty well adjusted here. I really hope this transition is a smooth one. His mom still seems sort of shaky to me.” Molly talked with her hands clasped together, looking at me, then at Sophia, then at me. She seemed lively, and like she wanted to hold me; I liked her. I leaned for her and she reached for me, happy, lifting, holding me. She was much lower to the ground than Sophia—with probably a five-inch difference.

  Sophia wrapped me in my coat, hat, hood, mittens, handed me back to Molly, and carried my things to the van. It seemed like my leaving was something I was eager for, but then outside in the stinging cold, before I was put in to be taken to Mommy Maureen, Sophia kissed me, holding my hand. There were tears in her eyes. One leaked down her cheek in the cold air. She smiled sadly, perhaps with regret. I watched as she walked up the steep porch into her house with her thick arms folded. She looked back once before closing the door, before the van shifted.

  This car seat was large, high, different—one that enclosed, felt safe, yet unfamiliar. I was harnessed in, seated by the window in the first seat behind the young driver from the agency, beside Molly. The radio played. The heat whispered warmly, and the view from this van was so much higher than the view from Sophia’s car. I sort of liked this.

  This neighborhood I’d grown familiar with looked somewhat altered from this height. I stared out at the utter yellowness of the house in the gray backdrop of sky. Sophia opened a curtain to look. The driver looked into his mirrors, swiveling his torso, cautious, shifting into reverse. I could hear the beeping warning as the big vehicle moved into the street. The driver kept looking into his mirrors, his long pony tail remaining around his neck on the front of his shoulder. Out in the street, he shifted into forward, turned his wheel, driving, moving down the long street toward the boulevard, passing the bulky, thick sycamores which, like the blinking of my eyes, browned out my vision with quick successions as I looked out at the colors, looked away from this nice stranger Molly, passing—continually passing—shapes and colors and movements and bare life of the humanity of this cramped island. I wondered where we were going. I was moving. I didn’t know it, but I’d never come this way again. I had no choice but to just go for this ride, to be taken, controlled, under authority, to be moved within the stiff movement of this rectangular, metallic-blue steel, through the gray air that would soon bring a storm of cold snow.

  We crossed the island, near its fringe by the ocean. It was not a nice area, but the beach at New York Bay was three blocks away, and I could smell the seaway salt even in the still cold air. Mommy Maureen lived in a fourth story tenement dwelling. This was Bay Street, and it was jammed tight with parked cars, coercing the driver to double park. Molly released me from my seat and carried me as the driver grabbed my trunk and followed.

  She opened an old, narrow door inviting us into this brown brick edifice. Once inside, this driver lit a cigarette. The smell reminded me of Mr. Madden’s cigars. The blue suddenness of its aroma sweetened the moldy, rank smell of the foyer and hallway. I had to tilt my head back to see because the hood of my coat had pushed my woolen hat down, shielding my vision.

  Inside was dirty, scrawled and scribbled with marks and graffiti—fouled white, with warped colorless tiles. The worn stairway creaked and the dilapidated banister wobbled loosely
as though it would fall.

  Molly and this man climbed. We heard murmuring. Sounds of voices and cries of children from behind doors resonated, pealing through metal doors with a thin, clear scraping.

  This was an unearthly place—spooky, cubicle, thin echoing, dark. We elevated, trudging, with happy steps. Molly kept talking to me with a nice tone. “We’re gonna go see Mommy. This is where ya gonna live, Silas. Hear the kids?” She breathed heavily. On the second landing, she stopped to rest, placing me down a minute. “I need a rest, Paul.”

  “No hurry. No hurry.” He smiled, placed the trunk down, dragging on his cigarette.

  I watched him with his head tilted and with complaisant lips sealed. He didn’t look at me. I held my left hand with my right, continuing to nervously pull my fingers through his gloves. Molly pulled my hat up off my eyes so I could see better, and I looked at her. She looked momentarily intensely into my eyes, and she smiled. I didn’t smile back, but looked away, quiet.

  “Do you want to walk Silas?”

  I nodded.

  She took my hand, stepped up, and I followed—moving, rising, so slowly, one step at a time, with concentration.

  “That’s it. That’s it. Big boy. Good.”

  I felt good about this. I felt proud. We ascended the rest of the way like this—slowly, ascending, around, around, spiraling. And as we moved, I looked down—carefully—at the steps and my small white sneakers. Right foot first, left following… the remainder of the way up—twenty-eight steps toward the unexplored, toward something new that I knew nothing about.

  Molly looked at the top of my head, and at these steps, wondering about my future—the near future—and my life on these steps, in this hallway, with this woman, my birth mother Maureen, whom we verged upon.

  They found the door on the fourth floor—number forty-four. Molly had been here before, doing her job by getting things in order in the process of reuniting a troubled mother with her two-year-old son—inspecting, writing reports, being nice, counseling, scrutinizing, admonishing, advising, urging, caring, talking, warning.

  Molly waited until Paul caught up with the trunk. He was out of breath, with his half-consumed cigarette burning, protruding from the corner of his lips. He set the trunk down. “Here we are,” Molly said. Her tone was a blend of a childish voice an adult voice, a pre-occupied thoughtfulness toward this approaching encounter, this approaching trial of days with my unsupervised stay here.

  She knocked on the wooden door. Footsteps. The door knob turned. The door opened. I glanced up. Mommy Maureen was smiling. Her red-brown hair was wet, dampening the front of her blue denim blouse as she’d just showered. She looked lovely as she bowed down to look at me, noticing fear in my eyes. “Silas,” she said, reaching. I allowed her to lift me.

  Mommy Maureen removed my coat and Molly stayed half an hour as I clung to her for asylum, as the persistent distress I felt around Mommy Maureen wouldn’t leave me. I wanted my pacifier for solace and I kept asking for it, “Pafis! Pafis!” with tears, but neither of them knew what it meant as Sophia had. Neither knew how much it meant to me, and Sophia never told them. This frustration with the repellent, fetid smell of that apartment made me scared as I remained standing between Molly’s knees—as though behind a shield—while she sat, talking to Mommy Maureen. She tried to encourage me to approach Maureen who held a stuffed bunny, dancing it on her knee like an inferior ventriloquist—pretending that the bunny sang to me. A crazy, tiresome song she created ad lib:

  Silas is a little man. Silas is my friend.

  Silas, won’t you be my friend.

  Silas, come and see me.

  She repeated this over and over, pausing between, staring and smiling at me somewhat insanely as I simply probed the inside of my mouth with my index finger, watching her scrupulously, then the bunny, her, and the bunny again, confused, disconcerted. The song seemed so obtuse to me even then, and she seemed to go in and out of her mind. She overdid this bid for my affection as the bunny’s dull, crooked face actually made me feel like it really didn’t want me, as much as it didn’t want Mommy Maureen to bounce it around that way.

  Molly remained patient. After the fourth dreadful chorus, reaching her arm up, Maureen made the bunny jump up high and slow, mimed its scream with a high-pitched wheeeee, flipped it over in the air, suspending it as though there were no gravity, and then made it fall quickly, landing on its mushy head with a loud, abrupt, plplplplup sound hastening from her lips and tongue.

  Now I laughed, smiling, moving closer. This absurd little violence made it all seem so ridiculously funny as Mommy kept emitting that plplplplush sound from her extruding tongue, making the asinine stuffed bunny smash its head onto her thigh repeatedly—flattening its face—to keep me laughing, smiling, near her.

  It wasn’t obvious to me then, but she wanted me near her not because of fondness, but more so that Molly would be persuaded there was some bond between us. Maureen was always on stage, performing, proving, auditioning—even before outsiders, strangers in public. It had something to do with her mental form. So she performed with this bunny repeatedly, as I laughed afresh each time.

  Paul had been waiting in the van all this time, probably smoking. When it came time for Molly to leave, she gave Mommy Maureen some more instructions, and then dropped down to her knees, saying to me with an obliging inflection, “Goodbye now Silas. Molly has to go now to see some other boys and girls. Molly will come and see you soon Silas. I love you. You are going to live with Mommy now. Okay? Molly will come see you, okay?”

  I just gawked at her. She looked at me patiently, with her mind a little bit ahead, thinking about other responsibilities. She stroked my crimped, light brown hair and smiled, gazing into my trusting eyes. She tenderly squeezed my bronze colored cheeks. “He has the most beautiful blue eyes you know Maureen,” she said earnestly.

  “I know he does,” Mommy responded proudly.

  Amid her many job concerns and cases, I really believed Molly cared about me. She stepped out and closed the old door, and I was now left alone there with my birth mother for the first time since I was left with her in that hospital room after my birth.

  Mommy Maureen carried my trunk into the adjoining little room, which would be mine. Besides a white dresser subdued by dark blue Yankees’ baseball logo and a used crib, there was nothing about this room that would be engaging for a two-year-old. The walls and floor badly needed painting and refinishing, and the old, high wooden window needed cleaning. Looking up through its glass I could see only smudges and the sheer, stark whiteness of the sky behind. I could hear the wind pressing lightly against the rattling window. Snow began to fall as I could view from my angle an intermittent large flake finding its resting place against the pane and sash.

  My first day was exhausting. Mommy talked and talked, often with her face right up to mine. She required complete attention. I watched television and played a little with the few toys Mommy Maureen had there. I cried twice in my fear, crying “Pafis, pafis,” but my cries did not bring me my comforting pacifier.

  I fell asleep for an hour on the couch. All day I could hear noises, noises above the ceiling, footsteps, voices, some hollering, banging from the apartment next door, and loud music on the other side from the apartment there. It was such a loud, low old place. I could hear horns on the street, and of course all day Mommy talked, rambling to herself, to me. She talked to me about things as though I were an adult, rambling as I listened bewildered, quickly learning to just ignore.

  “Dipa. Dipa,” I said at about noon, pulling at my pants so she’d know to change my diaper. She never thought to check. While she kneeled and changed my diaper, and as I lay on the dirty floor beneath her leaning torso, she talked: “You’re two now. If you think you’re gonna go in your diaper much longer you got another thing comin! Sit still! Lay still I said! I got enough goin’ on here. There’s a movie comin’ on at four I’m not gonna miss so I don’t want you whinin’ about nothin’. Jasmine and Carl are
comin’ by tonight so I want you to be sleepin’.” She rambled with her speech like this often. In her eyes were waves of buried anger alternating with looks of far lostness and crazed glares.

  Snow fell for hours that day, but I couldn’t see it falling as the flakes blended with the white sky. The only visible accumulation was what huddled against the pane. I climbed onto a chair which stood against the wall under the window in the living room and stood to see out. This brought me to a complete other world. It was dusk, and the snow stopped falling, and it began to clear. Like a seagull from an unmanned crow’s nest of an old mast, I looked from this height, out, down Bay Street toward the east where, over some roofs, I could see the gray-green of the bay and the soft splatters of white caps surfacing, sinking, surfacing, sinking… The sky seemed lavender, almost touchable. Across the quarter mile distance and beside the ocean the visible lights of Brooklyn flickered, with a sparkling commotion from Coney Island and the Shore Parkway’s snake of headlights moving toward Manhattan, around Bay Ridge. I just stood there looking out, looking for life, spellbound by the color, the white, the humanity, the shattered overcast, the sights of the urban streets of Cary Island.

  By nightfall the heavy clouds had moved east and the stars polished the blackness with a cold, shiny brilliance. I had to press my face against the pane to see, to avoid the reflection of myself and of the ugliness which opened behind me.