And what is it, exactly, that my father lets us see and not see? What is it that he knows?
A literature professor, he made his living thinking and talking about books. I was a teenager in Florida when I began asking him about the titles on our shelves at home. “What about this?” I would say, holding up a collection of Theodore Roethke’s poems or an English novel. Or I’d take down a volume on linguistics — at fifteen I developed a minor fascination with the nontechnical opening chapter of Thomas Pyles’s Origins and Development of the English Language—and say, “Dad?” I remember that he might nod his head and utter a noncommittal word before turning away, as if my curiosity embarrassed him; and I wonder, now, looking back, whether to accept his reticence as part of a Virginia tradition of masculine taciturnity — I think of my father’s father and uncle and those roadside plaster birdbaths — though this likelihood leaves open the question of what my father, standing in our living room thirty years ago, might have been trying without words to tell me about books and their place in his life. Did I somehow know, did I feel, growing up in houses stocked with stories and poems and the correspondences of dead writers — and watching him go to a job that mandated enthusiasm (however guarded) for literature and its study — that books, whose contents could not easily be shared between us, might become the foundation of an intellectual inheritance that could be mine to take pride in, or ignore, or deride, or, years after I’d left home, and when that home was no more, stubbornly invent?
I bided my time. What can I accurately remember, today, about a boy who, in a long-ago time and faraway place, sat on the bottom of a swimming pool, breathing through a tank? What was in his mind?
When I was born, my father was an army lieutenant stationed at Fort Knox. Later he would transfer to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, where he would have command of a tank battalion, and where my sister would be born. My mother told me that my father was not with her in Sarasota when she had me. She was alone, she said, except for her parents. Because I was crying, she told me, her mother came into the room and, I don’t know, snatched me up and carried me away from her, from my mother. She’d not been able to hold me when I’d been a newborn baby, because her own mother had wrested us apart. “We didn’t get to bond,” my mother told me when I was an adult, and added that she thought that my father, had he been present at my birth, might have intervened and stopped her mother from stealing me from her arms. But my father was in Kentucky. Because of his absence, my mother and I were unable to forge the attachment that a mother must make with her child in order for each not to wander through life longing for the other. That was what she believed, and told me, when I was about thirty years old.
It strikes me now that my mother, in telling that story, was exercising her failing power to ordain my future. In telling me what I couldn’t possibly remember, she hoped to tell me a truth about myself. She wanted me to see matters as she saw them, and stay close to her. There’s nothing unusual in this, I suppose. Our parents’ lives before we are born take place in a kind of mythic realm, a realm of the imagination, and our mothers’ and fathers’ power to shape and interpret our lives, to tell us who we are, even in our adulthood, requires our understanding that, because they inhabited mythic time, and because their existence has brought about our own, they remain for us immortal and all-seeing, just as they were when we were too young to survive without them. In telling me a story about a rift between us at my birth, my mother tells me that I will always search for her, because to me she will never die.
My search through other women began with a girl who took off her clothes and, her hand reaching up to hold mine, lay down on the floor beside my bed. She was eleven and had curly hair. I was twelve. My family was living in Virginia, in the main house on a farm called Fiddler’s Green, thirty minutes west of Charlottesville, where my father was a professor. The girl, G., had come for a sleepover party with me and my sister and my friend Peter. Peter was my junior high school classmate, and G. was the daughter of a colleague of my father’s, a man who, the year before we moved to Fiddler’s Green, had come in the middle of the night to our house on Lewis Mountain Road, in Charlottesville, carrying a loaded gun at his side. Anyway, that night at Fiddler’s Green, sometime after my parents had shut off the lights and the house had gone quiet, G. snuck through the door that led between Terry’s bedroom and mine. Peter was asleep in my room’s other bed. Earlier, G. had been forward during our kids’ game of strip poker, deliberately losing hands. Then it had been bedtime. When she came through the door, she got right under the covers with me, and we began kissing with our mouths closed. She was naked. She held her legs together. Her breasts had just begun to develop. I remember her on top of me. We hugged and kissed and tumbled around quietly. My erection was painful. I kept it hidden inside my pajamas. I recall the bright moonlight that came through the white curtains my mother had put up in my room. There were three windows. Two looked out over Fiddler’s Green’s small formal boxwood and rose gardens. Those roses that I mentioned earlier, the ones which, in pictures looked at through the slide viewer’s lens, seemed to detach from their branches and rise up to meet the eye, grew in the garden beneath my bedroom. In bed that night with G., I could see, in the moonlight, my desk and chair, and some toy racing cars and a strip of track on the floor, and my bongo drums, and the side of the bookshelf separating the two twin beds. I could see Peter, his shape, curled beneath a blanket on the other side of the shelf. It might have been Peter’s movements in bed that caused G. to slide down from the mattress to the floor, where she would not be seen by him if he woke. I gave her one of my pillows, and she reached up to hold my hand. How long did we manage to keep ourselves awake? It seems to me that we held hands even after we’d fallen asleep. By morning, she’d snuck back through the passageway leading to my sister’s room.
The next day, after she and Peter had been picked up and taken home by their parents, I got in the car and went somewhere with my mother. I remember our drive over rolling hills, on roads bordered by white fences. We drove toward, then alongside, the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was summertime, and the car windows were rolled down. Wind stormed around the interior of the car, and, every now and then, smoke and ashes from my mother’s cigarette scattered and flew into my eyes and nose. I began to feel nauseated from cigarette smoke and summer heat and the rising and falling of the car as it passed over the pastured hills.