Being ever so subtle, you drop into conversation the name of your alma mater.
He tells you to stop pressuring him about where he will go to college.
One morning the child sees you smelling a rose and looks at you questioningly. You feel like a doddering old man, straightening up from smelling the flower.
He has more information about cars than you have.
You read Car and Driver at the barbershop, instead of Time.
He wears a larger size shoe than you.
You can’t believe it.
He sings snatches of a song you’ve never heard before.
You find yourself humming a song you used to sing when you rocked him to sleep, and you look at him nervously, thinking he may think you sentimental.
He tells you that you can relax: There is nothing he wants to know about sex that he doesn’t know.
You tell the barber not to take so much off — that you are letting the sides grow.
He gets a cough he cannot seem to shake, and you fear that it is pneumonia.
Your wife tells you that it is an ordinary cough. You insist that he visit the doctor.
He looks at you the same way he did the day he saw you smelling the rose. It is just a cough, he says. Nothing to worry about.
You think, in the night, that you hear him coughing. You go down the corridor, to his bedroom, but all is silent. You must have been dreaming. Only when he is grown do you acknowledge your terror about ordinary childhood maladies: measles, mumps, sore throats, infected cuts, and bulging bruises. It would have been the greatest tragedy if anything terrible had happened just as he was starting to come home with jokes that made you laugh, the quite-inventive whispered profanities he’d learned from the older boys, if he disappeared so his eye would no longer suddenly meet yours when his mother got upset.
Imagine this: You love someone whose birth had nothing to do with you, whose features are too striking to resemble your own (although something in your bearing may account for people’s observation that the child looks just like you), whose presence is potentially threatening because of its power to leach away all of his mother’s emotional energy. You love someone whose mother has admitted, on occasion, to wishing him away so that the complexities of her life would become simple matters. She pursued fame, and left it to you to pursue baby-sitters. And the closer you and the child became, the more she withdrew, as if that was what she had wanted all along: a clear road, space, time, the people around her happily involved. You would expect a little jealousy. More guilt. But that isn’t the way it was.
Your worst fear about the child is that he will never let you in.
He sits on your shoulders and puts his hands on top of your head to steady himself when you start running. Feeling his cupped hands, you think to teach him the word “yarmulke.”
You think that his mother will not marry you.
You get married.
You become melancholy, sure that you will die before the child is grown.
You live.
You fear that the world will treat the child unfairly.
The child, rarely intimidated, proceeds on his way quite well.
Struck by lightning, then. Something cruel and sudden.
Lightning does not strike.
He wanted more G.I. Joes; you lobbied for another child. His chances of getting a toy were always higher than your chances of talking her into having another baby.
He wanted to daydream; you thought about changing careers midstream. He daydreamed whenever he felt like it, but you stayed in the same profession after all.
He trusted you; you worried that although he was right in his judgment of you, he was generally too accepting of people and things.
He wanted a dog; you wanted a dog. She said she wanted to be free to travel, and that she did not want to feel guilty all the time she was gone about some sad-eyed dog hanging its tail between its legs in a kennel.
He would make up stories about people at her openings; you would repeat all but the most scandalous gossip to him. She looked across the room and smiled at the two of you, and you thought your heart would break.
In short, you lived, with this child, the most ordinary life, suspecting in the back of your mind that virtue might be rewarded, giving thanks that you had found each other in this world, trying to avoid sentiment, dutifully planning for his future. And if, miraculously, he did not end up hating you, perhaps you could one day ask him what he thought about his life. Not fishing for compliments. Just finding out what were high points for him that might have gone unnoticed by you. Or things you were curious to know: How many times did you hear your mother and me making love? Did you envision it, when you heard the bedsprings creaking? Did you want us to get it over with faster? Did it make us seem more childish? Vulnerable? Remote? Might it as well have been a sneeze? Were there times when you coughed or got up and went to the bathroom on purpose to make us whisper and wait? Do you have any memory of when you were still quite small and came to listen at our door at night? You stepped out of your bedroom slippers, so in the morning we found them there, in front of our door, like shoes left in the corridor of an expensive hotel. Do you remember how you managed to find poison ivy in New York City? Do you think that Haveabud and your mother had a sexual relationship? Do you think I ever stepped out on her? Did you ever fear that we would divorce, like everybody else’s parents? Did you think that one or both of us might die? Who would you rather had died? Did you know that I defended your decision to say your prayers silently at night, and that I honestly didn’t think that you meant to stop saying them? How many arguments did your mother win, and how many did I win? Was my favorite color obvious, or did I tell you at one time what it was? How interesting that you learned all my sizes, as if memorizing necessary mathematical formulas, but you might not know my favorite color. In time, you certainly disliked Haveabud much more than I did. What about that scare when your mother went in for the biopsy? Did you think of her as disfigured? Did you know the worst that could happen? Was it helpful or harmful to be told your I.Q.? Did you sense, in your mother, a bit of misogyny, and in me a bit of homophobia? Am I making up questions to provoke you? Did I do that raising you? Did I condescend? Did I convince you of things, even when you argued? How often does chance intervene, and how often is “chance” a term used loosely about an incident that is self-generated? Did you think that your mother had a rather bleak view of life, considering her photographs? Was it wrong of her to discuss her family in print? Did she tell the truth about us? Did she know the truth? Do we know the truth about each other today? Does it seem calculating, her getting a puppy at this point in time? I suspect she will spoil it when she’s around. That in getting it, she’s also thrown me a bone.
I came into your room one night and found that your mother, seated at the foot of the bed, was reading you Blake’s sunflower poem. A poem that I could only think would be obscure to a small child. Perhaps you liked the rhyme. Her presence. You seemed not to criticize what she read, but you complained if I varied my intonation from one night to the next.