Follow Me

by Joanna Scott

  Okay. So your grandmother, she’d gone out of her way to collect the facts. She’d spoken to a sister of Daniel’s, her cousin, that’s who first gave her information about her son. She’d asked her cousin if the child had been adopted by a couple from Pittsburgh named Boyle. Her cousin wasn’t sure about the name, but she said it sounded familiar. Sally went to the county clerk’s office the next day and talked to a woman who worked there. She was a sister-in-law of your grandmother’s cousin. This, I think, is significant, that there was a family connection to the county clerk’s office. The woman promised to find the relevant documents for your grandmother. She said there had been a fire in 1957, some of the county’s documents had been destroyed and others moved to another storage area. You know, I’ve since found out that there was no fire in Peterkin in 1957. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The woman, the sister-in-law of your grandmother’s cousin, said she’d search for the documents relating to the adoption of Sally’s son, and she’d contact Sally as soon as she found them. There was no point in Sally hanging around. She returned home and waited to hear from the woman. She waited several weeks. Though she suspected that I was her son, she had to confirm it. She was finally able to confirm it when her cousin’s sister-in-law sent her an official letter verifying that Daniel Werner had given up custody of the child. And she sent her a copy of my adoption certificate from the diocese in Pittsburgh. I’m not sure how the woman got a hold of that. Anyway, your grandmother had no reason to doubt the authenticity of these documents. Still, she took the trouble to collect even more proof. She drove to Pittsburgh, where she spoke with an administrator in charge of the records of the Catholic Diocese, and though your grandmother wasn’t allowed to see the original papers, the woman there was willing to assure your grandmother that the adoption certificate she’d received was accurate in all regards. Well, there was no two ways about it, your grandmother was convinced that the child she’d left on the kitchen table in 1947 was me. How could she not be convinced? The evidence seemed indisput —, indisputable. She’d be convinced of it for the rest of her life. I have to say, as absurd as it sounds, I mean, me being her son and falling in love with her daughter, a coincidence like that might be acceptable in a bad movie but not in life, in modern life, in my life, in your mother’s life. A coincidence so outrageous, you can be sure I doubted it. Everything your grandmother told me, I said it couldn’t be true. But she kept adding up the facts for me. Her certainty about the matter was overwhelming. I watched her sip her coffee from one of my old chipped mugs. Or maybe she’d already finished her coffee by then, I don’t know. Maybe I hadn’t even prepared her coffee yet. What I remember most is being engulfed by despair, a sickening despair. Oh, can you even imagine what it was like for me to hear your grandmother sit there and tell me that your mother, the woman I loved, was my sister? My sister. I’d come home from a two-day haul only to discover that I’d been thrown into the midst of an incestuous epic tragedy. What could I say? Your grandmother had a story to tell. It was a convincing story. She told it to me, and then she asked me what I would do. I said I’d leave, I promised to leave the city the very next day. She agreed that there was no other option, and she advised me not to contact Penelope. I don’t think she knew at that point that her daughter was pregnant, or if she did she didn’t want to talk about it. She asked me to stay in touch, to address my letters to a PO box. And she said, can you, can you believe it, she said she loved me. She was my mother, and she loved me. She made me promise to write to her as soon as I’d settled again. And then, and then, geesh, she gave me a manila envelope. It was sealed, no, it was clipped shut but not sealed, as I recall. I opened it after she’d gone, and it turned out to be stuffed with money, with hundreds of dollars, hundreds and hundreds of dollars. There was a fortune, more than two thousand dollars in that envelope, and your grandmother left it with me as a parting gift. She told me that long ago an old man she’d known, a good man, she said, had given her the money, and she’d been saving it for something special. Well, I was something special. She wanted to make up for… for not taking care of me during my life. It all made too much sense. Even in the downpour I could hear the engine of her car as she drove away. I just stood there, dumbstruck. I was impressed by her conviction. What do I remember about that moment? I remember that satyrs and nymphs filled the room, dancing around me, taunting — taunting me with laughter. Sure. And flames, red-hot flames flickered around my feet. I went running into the storm and tore out my eyes and howled at the gods. No, I didn’t. I spent the night emptying a whole bottle of Smirnoff, I drank and drank and with each bitter gulp I became more comfortable with my despair. It suited me, I thought. I was a loser, of course I was a loser, I lost everything that mattered, I’d always been a loser, and I didn’t deserve to live. So early the next morning, in a drunken stupor, I followed what seemed the inevitable course. I headed over to the pedestrian bridge, the one, you know it, I’m sure, the one that spans the Tuskee gorge. It was just a few years old in 1974, that bridge. I went there, and, and I jumped into the river. Well, I kind of jumped and kind of fell. It was as much of an accident as it was intentional. I didn’t really want to kill myself. Truly, I don’t welcome pain in any form. But I was close to incoherent while I was hanging on to the rail. I was thinking that a man in my situation was supposed to jump. I was thinking about how I could put an end to all my troubles by jumping. And then I slipped and fell. I fell and plunged into the river. The thick, red, cold soup of the Tuskee. Does it still glow in the dark? It’s a long way from the bridge to the river, isn’t it? The Tuskee, the icy, red Tuskee. But here’s the thing. Unbelievably, the river didn’t like the taste of me and spit me out. It spit me right out, puh, over the wall into the parking lot of the utility company. One moment I was drowning, and the next moment I was sputtering on the pavement. Somehow I survived my own foolishness. Your grandmother insisted it was a miracle that saved me. I think it was the rain. It had been raining for days, the river had backed up and started to flood the gorge. Whatever. The river made it impossible not to survive. And here I am, after all these years, still alive to tell the tale. To be truthful, I remember climbing over the rail, and then I remember waking up in a dirty puddle in the parking lot. I don’t remember falling, actually. I don’t remember hitting the water. But I do remember coming to my senses and recognizing that my life was over, though I was too much of a loser to succeed in dying. So I did what I’d promised your grandmother I’d do, and I left the city. I drove to Detroit. And I… I lived in Detroit for a year, nearly a year, working as a dishwasher. Then I moved to Chicago. There’s more to tell, I want to fill you in on the rest of it, the years between then and now. This story continues. But it’s late, I’m exhausted, and I see I’m almost at the end of the tape. Well, good-bye for now.

  Without the letters from your grandmother, my dear Sally, I get no news of you. Not that I’m fishing for an invitation. Given what you’ve heard from me so far, I wouldn’t expect you to want to meet me. You must think I’m a creep. Or at best, a clown. My students think I’m a clown. I’ve just come from class, my last class of the day. I’m covered with mud. I went and slid into the gully behind the parking lot this morning, intentionally, I slid down a mud slick on an inflatable tube, a snow tube, you know the kind, and I asked my students for help getting out. This was the day’s problem: to find the easiest way to pull Mr. Boyle out of the mud. I do this annually in my study of forces. I begin with a marble, I roll a marble down an inclined plane of cardboard and we discuss why the marble rolls straight and not to the side. We talk about how force can be divided and the components can be added together to equal the original force. And then I take them outside and ask them to pull me out of the mud. They talk about pushing me from behind, that’s always the first idea, they want to get behind me and push. But then I remind them to consider how a force can produce components in useful directions. And sooner or later someone notices the rope I’ve left at the top of the slope. They always figure it out.
We talk about the amplification of force. I ask them how we might use the rope. Someone is bound to suggest tying one end of the rope to the tube and pulling me, so they try this, but it’s not enough to get me moving. What they have to do, the solution, is for them to tie one end of the rope to the trunk of a tree and a couple of them take hold of the rope in the middle and walk to the side. It works every time, the pressure on the rope moves the tube forward a few feet, then they tighten the rope again and do the same thing over, the tube moves forward, they tighten the rope, and so on. I can tell the kids really learn the concept, but I always end up covered with mud. There’s a new physics teacher in the high school, he has promised to one-up me and demonstrate the same concept in reverse by walking on a tightrope. He says he’s going to walk on a rope stretched between the school and the garage, but you know, he has yet to do it, I think it’s all bluster, he prefers to teach his students with textbooks and study packets. But you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with the story I’ve been telling. I guess I just feel like spinning wheels in the mud today. That’s what I was doing for a couple of years after I left your mother. Wherever I went, I couldn’t really move on. I was stuck, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. And then about you. I knew I had a daughter, your grandmother wrote to me about you after you were born. She went to great lengths to assure me that you, her namesake, were normal and healthy. She’d clearly been afraid that you would be born deformed as punishment for your parents’ sins. It hadn’t occurred to me to have that fear. You know, your grandmother sent photographs of you over the years, the first one was your birth announcement, another when you’re two and sitting on a pony, another one, let’s see, you must be about five, and you’re holding some flowers. I have all your school pictures from first grade to twelfth grade. I know that you had braces for two years. I know you wore your hair long for a while, then shoulder-length and parted in the middle. You got glasses at the age of ten, and then you must have gotten contacts, or else you just became self-conscious and took off the glasses for the photographer. But maybe it’s uncomfortable for you to hear that I have pictures of you. I’m a stranger, after all. You have a right to be uncomfortable. You should feel free to stop listening at any point. That’s the way to shut me up. Just stop listening.

  Dearest Sally, I was telling you about how I jumped from the bridge. Or fell. I guess the image of the gorge was in my head from talking about it the other day. Last night I dreamed that I was walking on a tightrope over the Tuskee gorge. I dreamed that it was snowing, and I was trying to walk from one side of the gorge to the other, and your mother was there, she was standing on the bridge watching me. And she was holding a baby. I was on the tightrope in the middle of the gorge, and I saw your mother waving at me, and I tried to wave back, and I slipped. I slipped and I fell, and you know how it sometimes is in dreams when you’re falling, you keep falling for a while. I was falling through the gorge, and I was thinking to myself, what an idiot I am, what a fucking idiot to think that I could try to impress your mother by walking from one side of the gorge to the other on a tightrope. I woke up, I was awake before I hit the water, but all today I’ve had a heavy feeling from the dream. I guess what I want to tell you is that it breaks my heart to think about all the lost years when I was too afraid to contact you. I’m still afraid. Time is passing. It’s ten past four and ten seconds, eleven, twelve. But, but, okay, there’s nothing to be done about it, we can’t relive our lives, that’s spilled milk. And I wouldn’t choose to give up the part of my past that produced my two younger daughters. Hey, did you know, by the way, that homogenizing milk adds, adds nothing to its nutritional value? People get confused about that. They tend to think the vitamin D comes from the process of homogenization. It’s easy to be confused. In general, I mean, it’s easier to be confused than not confused. I was confused, obviously, when I jumped off the bridge into the river. I haven’t made the extent of my confusion clear yet. What I mean is that there’s more to tell. I came to realize that I’d been wrong, I’d been misled. I don’t blame your grandmother, I mean, she was trying to help, she was trying to do what she thought was necessary to save me, to save us, your mother and me, from worse torment down the line. To her the horror would have been discovering the truth, what she thought was the truth, ten years later, after we’d been comfortably married and had established a life together. Imagine that, imagine if your grandmother had found out about me in 1984 instead of 1974. By 1984, of course, I was long gone. Let’s see, by 1984 I was married to Donna, and we had the two girls. Oh, it occurs to me I’d told you about the dog, my dog Pig. I forgot to mention that he died when I was living in Buffalo. He was old, I don’t know how old since I didn’t know his age when I found him, but he just faded, faded away, he got weak and bone-thin. He slept at the end of my bed, and one morning I woke up and he was as stiff as a board, he hadn’t made a sound during the night, he hadn’t suffered at all. That’s the way to go. Much better than drowning in a freezing river. Well, I think I’ll stop here for the time being, I have a stack of tests to grade, but I’ll be back.

  And here I am again, it’s Tuesday, and the crocuses are blooming out front. They’re mostly the variegated kind, purple and white. I’ve lived in this complex for two years. I bought a house after the divorce, a little Cape, but I sold it when my youngest daughter moved out to California. I think I prefer having neighbors on the other side of the living room wall, it makes me feel more a part of the world. It’s easy to grow isolated, I find, to go to work, come home, and turn on the TV. I know I have a tendency to get comfortable with isolation, too comfortable. But on the other hand, I know complacency’s a danger. I’m not going to sit around and yell at football players on the screen. Did I tell you about that peace rally I spoke at a few months back? Did I mention that some men, they were probably fathers of my students, shot me with a paintball gun, a red ball, as I was walking back to school? Did I tell you about that? I still wear the coat, and it’s still stained with red, red paintball paint. Isn’t that appropriate? On the other hand, there’s the danger of self-righteousness. Like I was saying earlier, it’s easy to be confused, what with all the invitations to believe. What do you believe? I’ll tell you, I’ve decided that what matters is how we believe rather than, than, than what we believe. I mean, how we believe matters more, whether we believe fanatically or flexibly, or, or absolutely or uncertainly. I’ve learned this, you know, in part because of your grandmother. She believed that I was her son, and I believed her. Why shouldn’t I have believed her? She had evidence. And if the evidence hadn’t convinced me, she demonstrated her certainty with the money she gave me to get lost. And so I went on and made a new life for myself. I was telling you, wasn’t I, about Detroit? For a little more than a year I worked in Detroit washing dishes in two businesses, I worked a double shift every day, seven a.m. to three and five to midnight, and on my pay I wouldn’t have even been able to afford the rent. But I had the cash from your grandmother. This helped cover the bills. And when my car died I bought another one, a snappy ’67 Bel Air convertible. I remember the roof was ripped and every morning in the winter there’d be an icicle hanging inside. I’d always forget to look for it, and I’d take my seat and bump my head against the icicle, and it would crumble and fall inside my collar, down my neck. Ha, that’s a memory I haven’t thought of for a while. I lived in Detroit, spinning wheels, as I said, and then I decided to go to Chicago. One of my friends from Roslyn, Deano Colletti, he lived in Chicago, he had a job managing a trade show venue, and he invited me to come visit. So I visited, and I ended up staying there. I met Donna at a party, she was a friend of a friend of Deano’s. Donna was studying nursing when I met her. Gee, I don’t think we’d dated for more than a month when we started talking about marriage. She was eager to settle down and have kids. And she got me thinking about a career for myself, a real career. I told you I took night courses, I got my teacher certification in 1977, and Donna and I were married that same year. I worked as a
substitute for a while in the Chicago schools. Marcia was born in 1978, Tracy in 1980, and in August of 1980 I was hired by the Vergonia district. And here I still am, looking at the swollen buds on the sycamore tree outside my window. My hair is gray. I have arthritis in my knees. I have to go to my doctor twice a year to have my earwax flushed out. I wonder if that’s relevant. Do you want to hear about my life with Donna? I don’t think I need to go into detail. I’ll just say that we were content with each other, but I could never shake the feeling that we’d come to each other on rebounds from failed relationships. In the year before we’d met, she’d been in love with a med school student, they’d had an affair, but he was already engaged to someone else, which Donna found out only after he went away for the week and came back married. She was still reeling from the humiliation when we met. She thought marriage would make her forget her true love. I thought the same thing, I guess. It worked for a while. But what happened, what made it all go sour for us, was the med student, now a doctor, a very successful neurologist, he divorced his wife and, and I guess it was early in 1998 when he contacted Donna, and she, well, she was still in love with him, despite how he’d treated her way back when. She’d forgotten about the humiliating part of it. She got all tangled up in another affair with him. She couldn’t keep her secret for long. I found letters she’d written to him, I found a necklace he’d given her for her birthday. Donna and I were divorced in 1999. She’s all right now, but she had a hard time, I’ll tell you, when the doctor ended their affair abruptly again, for the second time. He’d met another woman, a younger woman, and Donna was just devastated, you can imagine. Donna and I, we’re good friends now, but we’ll never get back together. That’s just not something that interests either of us anymore. Too much has changed. Rather, too much has been revealed. We know each other too well to think we could live together again. It was hard on the girls, yeah, but, but they’re doing fine, I guess. And I’ve had time to think about other things. I’ve had time to think about your mother. Even before your grandmother’s death, I realized that I had some lingering questions. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her directly. We exchanged letters, your grandmother and I, just to communicate the basic news of our lives. We rarely mentioned your mother. And I never asked your grandmother about my father. I knew only that he was her cousin. Her cousin, huh. That’s not as bad as a brother, is it? Well, I wanted to know more about him. I needed to put the facts in order so I’d be sure of my past. I started by contacting old friends from Long Island. And one thing led to another. It took me a long while, several years, to piece together the truth. I’m going to tell you what I learned. But I don’t have the time now to go into detail. I’ll pick up where I’m leaving off.