God only knows, right? Really knows?
For me, alone without him most of the time, truly the worst part is that I believe he should now be at an age when he cannot imagine one bad thing happening to him, ever. And yet he can. And sometimes at the Shore or standing streamside at the Red Man Club as the sun dies and leaves the water black and bottomless, I have looked into his sweet, pale, impermanent boy’s face and known that he squints out at a future he’s unsure of, from a vantage point he already knows he doesn’t like, but toward which he soldiers on because he thinks he should and because even though in his heart of hearts he knows we’re not alike, he wishes we were and for that likeness to give him assurance.
Naturally enough, I can explain almost nothing to him. Fatherhood by itself doesn’t provide wisdom worth imparting. Though in preparation for our trip, I’ve sent him copies of Self-Reliance and the Declaration, and suggested he take a browse. These are not your ordinary fatherly offerings, I admit; yet I believe his instincts are sound and he will help himself if he can, and that independence is, in fact, what he lacks — independence from whatever holds him captive: memory, history, bad events he struggles with, can’t control, but feels he should.
A parent’s view of what’s wrong or right with his kid is probably less accurate than even the next-door neighbor’s, who sees the child’s life perfectly through a gap in the curtain. I, of course, would like to tell him how to live life and do better in a hundred engaging ways, just as I tell myself: that nothing ever neatly “fits,” that mistakes must be made, bad things forgotten. But in our short exposures I seem only able to talk glancingly, skittishly before shying away, cautious not to be wrong, not to quiz or fight him, not to be his therapist but his Dad. So that in all likelihood I will never provide good cure for his disease, will never even imagine correctly what his disease is, but will only suffer it with him for a time and then depart.
The worst of being a parent is my fate, then: being an adult. Not owning the right language; not dreading the same dreads and contingencies and missed chances; the fate of knowing much yet having to stand like a lamppost with its lamp lit, hoping my child will see the glow and venture closer for the illumination and warmth it mutely offers.
Outside in the still, quiet morning, I hear a car door close, then the muffled voice (softened to the early hour) of Skip McPherson, my neighbor across the street. He is returning from his summer hockey league in East Brunswick (ice time available only before daylight). Many mornings I’ve seen him and his bachelor CPA chums lounging on his front steps drinking a quiet beer, still in their pads and jerseys, their skates and sticks piled on the sidewalk. Skip’s team has adopted the ruddy Indian-warrior insignia and hard-check skating style of the ’7 °Chicago Blackhawks (Skip hails from Aurora), and Skip himself has taken the number 21 in honor of his hero, Stan Mikita. Sometimes when I’m up early and out picking up the Trenton Times, we’ll talk sports curb to curb. He frequently has a butterfly bandage over his eye, or a gummy fat lip, or a complicated knee brace that stiffens his leg, but he’s always high-spirited and acts as if I’m the best neighbor in the world, though he has little notion of me other than that I’m a realtor — some older guy. He is typical of the young professionals who bought into the Presidents Streets in the middle Eighties and paid a big price, and who are sticking it out now, gradually fixing up their houses, sitting on their equity and waiting for the market to fire up.
In my “Buyer vs. Seller” editorial I’ve noted that even though most people won’t be happy with whoever wins the election, 54 percent of them still expect to be better off this time next year. (I’ve omitted the companion statistic, cribbed from the New York Times, that only 24 percent feel the country will be better off. Why these numbers shouldn’t be the same, is anybody’s guess.)
And then suddenly, it is seven-thirty. My phone comes alive. It is my son.
“Hi,” Paul says lamely.
“Hi, son,” I say, the model of upbeat father-at-a-remove. Music is playing somewhere, and I think for a moment it’s outside my window — the streets crew, possibly, or Skip — then I recognize the heavy, fuzzed-out thunga-thyunga-thunga-thyunga and realize Paul has his headphones on and is listening to Mammoth Deth or some such group he likes while he’s also listening to me. “What’s going on up there, son? Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” Thunga-thyunga. “Everything’s okay.”
“Are we all set? Canton, Ohio, tomorrow, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame by Sunday?” We have compiled a list of all the halls of fame there are, including the Anthracite Hall of Fame in Scranton, the Clown Hall of Fame in Delavan, Wisconsin, the Cotton Hall of Fame in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the Cowgirl in Beaton, Texas. We’ve vowed to visit them all in two days, though of course we can’t and will have to satisfy ourselves with basketball, in Springfield (it’s close to his house), and Cooperstown — which I’m counting on to be the ur-father-son meeting ground, offering the assurances of a spiritually neutral spectator sport made seemingly meaningful by its context in idealized male history. (I have never been there, but the brochures suggest I’m right.)
“Yeah. We’re all set.” Thunga-thyunga-thunga-thyunga. Paul has turned it up.
“Are you still pretty keen to be going?” Two days are paltry, we both recognize but pretend we don’t.
“Yeah,” Paul says noncommittally.
“Are you still in bed, son?”
“Yeah. I am. Still in bed.” This doesn’t seem like a great sign, though of course it’s only seven-thirty.
There is really nothing for us to talk about every morning. In any normal life, we would pass each other going this way and that, to and fro, exchange pleasantries or casual bits of wry or impertinent information, feel varyingly in touch with each other or out in harmless ways. But under the terms of our un-normal life we have to make extra efforts, even if they’re wastes of time.
“Did you have any good dreams last night?” I sit forward in my chair, stare straight into the cool mulberry leaves out my window. This way it is possible to concentrate totally. Paul sometimes has wacky dreams, though it may be he invents them to have something to tell.
“Yeah, I did.” He sounds distracted, but then the thunga-thyunga-thunga-thyunga goes very low. (Last night was apparently a good one for dreaming.)
“Want to tell me about it?”
“I was a baby, right?”
“Right.”
He is tampering with something metallic. I hear a metal snap! “But I was a really ugly baby? Really ugly. And my parents were not you or Mom, but they kept leaving me at home and going off to parties. Veddy, veddy posh parties.”
“Where was this?”
“Here. I don’t know. Somewhere.”
“In Deep Water?” Deep Water is his wisenheimer’s name for Deep River, calculated precisely to make Charley O’Dell feel as unappreciated as possible. He conceivably has less use for Charley than even I do.
“Yep. Deep Water. And that’s the way it is.” He adopts his perfect-pitch Walter Cronkite voice. A headshrinker, I’m confident, would read signs of dread and fear in Paul’s dream and be right. Fear of abandonment. Of castration. Of death — all solid fears, the same ones I entertain. He at least seems willing to make a joke out of it.
“Anything else going on?”
“Mom and Charley had a big fight last night.”