"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 pla
yed 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 De
rek.
"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."
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