Fatherhood

by Thomas H. Cook

  He felt the flow increase in velocity, make a hard leftward turn, then descend, so that he felt himself sliding down a long metal chute. As he slid, he sensed the air grow warm around him. A cloud of steam drifted up and blurred his vision of Margaret but not his memory of her, which became all the more vivid as the steam thickened around him. It was as if his experience of her had become even more sharply defined, everything else a blur, the difference, as he conceived it, between a great horse recalled in the moment of its triumph and one recalled as merely another head nodding from the starting gate.

  He closed his eyes more tightly and tried to remain in the soothing comfort of darkness, settle back into the flow, move toward death without further delay or interruption. But the lighted string of numbers began to move again, a snake uncoiling in his head, bringing back the odds he’d obsessively figured during all the passing years, the vast eliminations they had cruelly demanded, hopes and pleasures cut from him like strips of skin, all the sensual joys of life, taste and touch, the fierce reprieve of love, odds that had directed his life not according to the rules of probability but to the probability of error within those rules, the terrible intrusion of odds-defying chance.

  Freak accident.

  The speed of the current increased again, and he felt himself racing headlong into an area of shade, the vault of heaven, or wherever he was, turning smoky. Through the smoke, he saw a figure close in upon him, slowly at first, then astonishingly fast, as if he’d traveled the distance between them at warp speed, so that he instantly stood before him, silent in the smoldering air, a kid from Holy Cross, short with pumpkin-colored hair, a rosy-cheeked boy half his size, but the same age.

  Mickey Deaver.

  Mickey the Clown.

  He felt his closed eyes clench, but to no avail, because the vision was inside him, carried toward him on a river of rushing numbers. It faded in and out, hazy at first, but with growing clarity, until at last the mist lifted and Mickey stood in his school uniform, twelve years old, holding a blood-spattered towel against the side of his head. He stared straight ahead. His eyes didn’t blink. Not one red hair stirred. The only motion came from his lips, mouthing two unmistakable words:

  Freak accident.

  Now he was in the schoolyard, watching from a distance as Mickey sauntered over to Margaret. Within seconds she was laughing. Not very much at first, then harder and harder, as Mickey clowned and made jokes. Her laughter rang through the overhanging trees and spiraled around the monkey bars and curled through the storm fence against which he leaned, watching as Margaret reached into her small lunch box and handed Mickey the Clown one of her mother’s cookies.

  A siren split the air, and on its desperate keening, he felt a hard jolt in the flow, like a train going off the track, so that he gripped for a hold, now clinging for dear life as he bumped and clattered, the flow rocketing forward at what seemed inhuman speed. The river vanished and he was on land, his body flat on the hard surface of a metal gurney, wildly jostled as if he were being dragged across rutted ground.

  “What’s the matter, Doctor?”

  “Quick, get the defibrillator!”

  The explosion came from the center of his chest, as if he’d lain face down on a land mine. It blasted shards of light in all directions, flashing images of past time through a roiling stream of memory. He saw Mickey emerge, whistling happily, from the rear door of his building, then felt the brutal shove of his hand against Mickey’s shoulder, and watched as Mickey tumbled to the side, knees buckling, so that his head struck hard against the side of the building, a geyser of blood spouting from his ear as he fell unconscious onto the cement stairs.

  “Give me the paddles!”

  A bell tolled, and in its dying echoes he saw Mickey gathered up, placed on a stretcher and wheeled into a waiting ambulance, a local boy, as the paper had described him, dead by freak accident.

  “Clear!”

  “Okay.”

  “Hit it!”

  He felt the jerk of the gurney like blows to his body, wrenchingly painful punches that sent him into aching spasms each time another jolt rocked the earthbound flow. With each blow a bell tolled and a year passed and logged within those passing years he saw the outcome of his act, Old Man Deaver dead of drink, Margaret confused and shaken, never knowing why he’d turned from her that morning, nor even approached her again, never knowing that he was still Eddie, her white knight, bent on her protection, and so protecting her from himself, because by his own ill luck, a rift in the laws of chance, a little, half-hearted shove had made him a murderer.

  “Clear!”

  “Hit it!”

  He jerked in pain, and through the screen of his pain yearned for the cushion of air, the invisible river, as his defiant brain worked feverishly to figure the odds that he might at least die beyond the reach of odds.

  “No good.”

  But figure as he did, calculate and recalculate, the odds remained the same as long ago, when he’d first begun to lay them, high against stopping yourself in time, getting another chance, high as the odds, he finally concluded, against a peaceful death.

  “Too late.”

  At least a billion to one, he figured on the dying breath of a final calculation.

  But for the first time in a long time, he had figured them too low.

  THE SUNGAZER

  I met Marilyn when I was a sophomore in college. She came from a rural area of Indiana and had one of those prairie faces, all openness and unwrinkled space. Her forehead was so pale and smooth you could almost see the pattern of the clouds overhead. She wore country clothes, little cotton dresses ornamented by spiraling vines of red rosebuds or plain, solid-color skirt and sweater combinations which blended perfectly with the old fashioned brick and mortar buildings of the state university.

  The year was 1968, that impractical time when the universities rose up in dreamy fervor for causes which seem as distant and unrealizable now as the crystal seas of Xanadu. Almost no one seemed to be pursuing a recognizable future. Everyone was in the process of abandoning the established paths. Engineers were becoming English majors and fervently arguing about the proletarian novel. Lawyers were talking about neighborhood legal clinics and reinterpretations of the Constitution which would make possible a peaceful transition to paradise.

  Marilyn seemed to walk through these dense proceedings incorporeally. She was shy in the presence of strangers and kept silent during the hottest debates. In class she rarely asked questions; and at the frenzied political rallies which seemed to spring up everywhere in those days, she maintained the stolid dignity of a statue amid a frivolous shower of confetti.

  I was an advertising major. I had a way with words and saw a great future for myself in jingles. Most of my fellow students regarded me as a grinning mastodon, worth about as much to the coming liberation as a time/motion analyst. I responded to their windy idealism with a haughtiness of my own. While they played their mystical political games, I worked at getting ahead. While they hunkered over schemes for the Coming Order, I prepared for graduation, recognizing as I did that this tumult would soon lift, leaving their breezy illusions as dead and grounded as a pile of starched bones.

  At first, I sensed Marilyn looked upon all of this with the same disdain. Her silence suggested superiority, and I began to look for her at those rallies I regularly attended for my own amusement. She was always there, always silent, her arms cradling textbooks, a rare sight in those days. Self-confident though I was, I was a little put off by Marilyn, a little daunted by her upright posture and terrible wholesomeness—a manifestation, I suspected, of impregnable virginity.

  But eventually, her allure overcame my reservations, and I shifted among the chaotic crowds, edging closer and closer to her at each noisy protest. I ended up shoulder-to-shoulder with her by early fall, and during a lull in the “Dump the Hump” chanting, I made my move. “Much ado about nothing,” I muttered.

  Marilyn stared straight ahead.

  “This
stuff won’t end the war,” I said, this time loud enough so there could be no mistake as to whom I was speaking or what was being said.

  “What will then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Excuse me,” she said, elbowing her way into the crowd away from me.

  The next time I saw Marilyn she was crying. Sitting under a large tree in a remote part of the campus, her face tucked into a white lace handkerchief, she looked like a figure out of Robert Browning; the weeping maiden bereft of love. I could reduce anything to a cliché; in those days it seemed like the only intelligent thing to do.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “It doesn’t look like it.”

  “I just start crying sometimes. Over things in general.”

  “Things in general.”

  “Yes.”

  This didn’t seem worth pursuing. “I spoke to you once at a demonstration.”

  “You did?”

  “I said all this protest stuff didn’t make any difference. You didn’t like that very much. You walked away.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I got over it.”

  She nodded and began folding her handkerchief.

  “Well, at least you’re not crying now,” I said. Even then it sounded like Ronald Colman comforting Greer Garson.

  “It never lasts long,” Marilyn said. “But it never really goes away either.”

  I had no idea what this “it” was, but I presumed it was something her mind had vastly overrated, the high-school sweetheart with the terminal disease, the brilliant pianist with his scorched, stubby fingers; I had heard it all.

  “Well, maybe something to eat would ward it off.”

  We spent the next few hours hunched over a Formica table in the campus diner. She ate just as I had expected, delicately slicing her potatoes into tiny slivers, munching cautiously at the edges of her hamburger, eating as only certain women can, without seeming to move their mouths.

  “What’s your major?” she asked.

  “Advertising. I’m good at ideas.”

  She nodded half-heartedly. It was one of those infuriating Sixties gestures, an accusation as well as an expression of disappointment, the sad, knowing priest before the intransigent heathen. “Don’t be so damned arrogant,” I said.

  “Was I arrogant?”

  “Yes, you always are. You social-activist intellectuals with your great schemes for the future.”

  “That’s not true,” Marilyn said.

  “You make ordinary people feel like garbage.”

  “I don’t mean to do that.”

  I let it pass. “Why were you crying this afternoon?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  At that moment, she seemed the most exotic creature on earth. It wasn’t chemistry which brought Marilyn and me together; it was alchemy.

  Marilyn and I were married two years later in a civil ceremony. I had done well academically and landed a job at a prestigious Chicago advertising agency. It took Marilyn longer to find work, and the job she found didn’t interest her very much. This intensified that dreamy quality in her which I had mistaken for insightful detachment in our college days. She used all the outmoded clichés to describe her situation. Jobs weren’t “meaningful.” She wanted to make a “contribution.” But it seemed to me that behind all the rhetorical language there was some larger, incomprehensible goal toward which she could move only like a great lumbering bird. “The war is over,” I said once at dinner. “That’s what’s bothering you.”

  Marilyn stared at her food.

  “Well, I thought you’d all be happy now.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Marilyn said.

  I laughed. “Jerry Rubin’s happy. He’s selling self-help insurance. What does he call it, I wonder. Radical Positive Thinking?”

  “Just be quiet, David.”

  “And Rennie Davis has found a leader he can trust. What is he, twelve years old?”

  Marilyn got up to leave. I grabbed her hand. “Let’s have a baby.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? People do, people our age. Isn’t that a contribution?”

  Marilyn pulled her hand free. “No.”

  Lisa was born a year and a half later, and Marilyn seemed to open up to her. I thought I must have been right, that this was it—a baby—what she needed to fill that void floating in her like a large cold bubble. For a while, Marilyn’s unreachable discontent dissipated, and it looked as though she was going to be fine, was going to accept what even I knew now to be the limited nature of our life, with its passionless necessities. I hoped she would accept the rudimentary forms of contentment which were accessible to us, the little triumphs of the office, the consolation of the hearth. But there is a terrible routine to infancy, not much room for imagination, and Marilyn finally drew away from motherhood as a vocation.

  But she did not draw away from Lisa, our daughter, and during the next few years, she won her over completely, won her over inadvertently and without connivance. For there was something in Marilyn’s remote yearning which captured Lisa and held her. They spent hours and hours together, Lisa listening intently while Marilyn told her stories she had made up the night before—wild, improbable stories of soaring and undisciplined beauty, stories which leaped over the traditional boundaries of time and space and logic like a whirlwind leaps a ditch, leaving all behind it in awe and disarray.

  During our last year in Chicago, Marilyn began writing her stories down. I would come home and hear her portable typewriter clattering in the little room she had made into a study. Several times I could hear her humming along with the typewriter, as if orchestrating some particular scene. The tone was sometimes light, sometimes funereal, but it always held a certain air which was clear and unmistakable, the sense of hindered ardor breaking free. Several times I asked Marilyn what she was doing, trying to show some interest. She said she was writing letters and left it at that.

  By the time I was transferred to New York, Marilyn and I paced the house like confused duelists, looking for our marks but afraid to turn, afraid to fire. I hoped the move would help us, and the day we arrived at our new house in New Jersey seemed to offer promise. It had the taste of newness in it, fresh and sweet as the breath of nursing babies.

  We spent the next two days getting the rooms arranged, all the hundreds of little objects put in their proper places, a nook or drawer or shelf for every accretion of middle-class life. Marilyn did it with mechanical efficiency, hardly wasting a motion.

  I was exhausted by the time we finished, late at night on the second day. We put Lisa to bed and sat down together on the sofa in the living room. “I guess your parents will want to visit us soon,” I said. Both my parents had been killed in an automobile accident when I was six years old.

  “Probably,” Marilyn said.

  I casually put my arm around her shoulder. “You did a good job getting everything organized.”

  “I want Lisa to have a room of her own.”

  “All right.”

  “Not a bedroom of her own, a work room.”

  “Okay,” I said. I looked around. “Your parents will like this place.”

  “They should,” Marilyn said. “It’s just like theirs.”

  I felt a terrible wave of anger for Marilyn. I felt like hitting her, like slapping her face. Useless. Hitting Marilyn would have been like hitting a locked door, painful only to the damaged hand.

  Instead, I got up and rushed to the kitchen, leaving her alone in the living room. I stayed there for almost half an hour, drinking one cup of coffee after another, expecting, hoping she would come in and sit down beside me so we could begin some blind but determined process of reconstruction or rejuvenation. She never did, and when I went back into the living room, it was empty.

  She had gone to bed. She lay there rigidly, curled up under a stone-gray blanket. I doubted she was asleep, but it would not have mattered. Looking at the hard wall of her back in
the lamplight at her left, it seemed to me our happiness—coming as it did in brief, chaotic spurts—was at best a weak, disgruntled army against the fortress of our need.

  The next Monday I went to my job in Manhattan. I was introduced to everyone I would be working with. They were all very friendly and helpful. Several of them invited me to lunch, but I wanted to be alone, to try to think things through once again.

  At noon I walked out of the office building and headed down 41st Street to Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library. It was filled with people walking quietly along or knotted together listening to speakers and street musicians. Everything imaginable was being hawked. People were selling Atlantis and reincarnation and numerology. A group of Eastern cultists bobbed up and down in pink robes. There were miracle cures for the body and the mind. It was a festival of false redemptions and uncertain paths out of the mystery. The air was heavy with thwarted flight, and I felt my own sadness at Marilyn’s poisonous discontent gathering round me like a vapor.

  “You’re full of crap,” someone said.

  I thought he must mean me, but it was directed at a large man dressed in a long blue robe who stood quietly within a circle of people. The man in the robe smiled with professional indulgence. “Anything is possible, my friend,” he said.

  “What do you mean anything?” someone asked.

  I moved nearer to listen.

  “The soul of man can fly to any heights,” said the man in the robe. He had long black hair streaked with gray, and his beard was so massive it darkened his face like a shadow. “We are beyond limits but not beyond possibilities.”

  The crowd chuckled softly, but the man in the robe went on. “Everything we have attained was first of all a dream. I teach that we should dream and keep on dreaming.”

  “Maybe you should take time out to get a job,” someone shouted, and the crowd laughed.