“What are you doing with yourself these days?” I’d always ask politely, even after I had long discerned that the question was not a kindness but a small cruelty. Oh, this and that, would be the answer, and although the replies were always long ones, they were in the end old men who could not conceal what their lives had become: days abuzz with little flecks of industry, trips with the wife to the grocery store, hours spent reading scientific journals that they had once allowed to accumulate in the corner of the lab in a large sliding heap, back when they were scientists themselves and too busy with their own studies to worry about reading someone else’s.79
So I could not leave. But I did begin spending more time at home. Not because I wanted to be at home, necessarily, but because it was either being there or being in the lab, and I was finding that I could no longer be at the lab indefinitely. Sundays, for example, I used to spend all day there; by the time I got home it would be dark and the children long to bed. But I began to come home earlier and earlier, until I was there more of the afternoon than not.
One Sunday found me at home particularly early. Victor had been given an assignment for history class in which he had to re-create a seed cake that the early American settlers ate and that involved large quantities of millet and cornmeal and rye. The assignment was due the next day and he had to make enough for everyone in the class to try a slice, and naturally, he did not think to share this information with me until lunchtime.
I suppose he was expecting me to do the assignment myself (and why would I have? I wanted to ask him, for I did not think I had a reputation among the children as someone who would take responsibility for their failings), but I commanded him to the kitchen and ordered him to start mixing the ingredients, none of which we had, of course, which necessitated a hurried trip to the store before it closed for the day.
We worked in silence, mostly. He was restless, quite literally jumpy, hopping from foot to foot in a manner that I found very distracting but that I would later realize was a sort of warmup, a prelude to a fight to which I had not known I was invited. “Now you have to roll out the dough,” I told him, and when he didn’t respond — he was staring, mouth slightly open, at apparently nothing more interesting than a fat squirrel crouched on an apple tree branch outside — I snapped at him. “Victor! The dough! Victor!” And he turned back to me, scraped the dough out of its bowl, and slammed it onto the counter with a wet thwack.
“You’re getting it everywhere, Victor,” I said to him, and then, when he once again didn’t respond, “Victor! I am talking to you!”
Again silence. And then, “Why was I named Victor?”
“I told you,” I said. “I named you for the pilot who took us away from U’ivu when I was adopting you.”
“But why him?”
They always wanted to know, my children, why they had been given this name or that. They were fond of self-mythologizing, and I think they all hoped that there might be some heroic story behind their naming, that they alone might be imbued with a special significance, that I might have secreted some message to them in my choice that they would one day understand and appreciate. The truth, however, was that I had usually simply named them after people I had encountered on my journeys to and from retrieving them: they were named after check-in counter clerks at airports and managers at hotels, customs agents and bellhops, pilots and stewardesses, seatmates and waitresses, unknown State Department functionaries who had cleared their entries and familiar immigration officials who had waved at me as I advanced toward them, holding the hand of a new charge. What could I do? I had long ago exhausted the names of friends and colleagues, and by the late 1970s the children were arriving so quickly that contriving imaginative names for them hardly seemed an essential concern.
“Why not?” I asked him. “It’s a good name.”
“Victor is a stupid name,” said Victor.
“Don’t act like a child,” I told him. “Victor is a fine name. And anyway, it’s the name you have, so you must learn to live with it.”
“I am a child,” said Victor. “And I hate the name Victor.”
“You weren’t listening to me,” I replied. “I told you not to act like a child. Being a child in and of itself doesn’t obligate you to behave like one. And I never said you had to like the name Victor — go ahead and hate it all you wish. I only said you had to learn to live with it.”
He had no response to this but a sulky silence, and I found myself weary of him.
And then I asked the question no parent should. “What would you like to be called instead?”
Of course he had an answer prepared.
“Vi,” he said triumphantly.
Sometimes I really don’t understand what came over me. Why had I provided him such an opportunity? But occasionally, after years upon years of these conversations, one forgets oneself and makes regrettable errors.
“Vie?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. It reminded me of the time Sonia80 came home with her beautiful woolly hair chopped off at the ears and dyed with white streaks. As a parent, I was always ready to let my children “express themselves,” or whatever the excuse for bad behavior is nowadays, but I do have limits. What child psychiatrists and liberal-minded teachers refuse to acknowledge is that most children have no taste and indeed tend toward the tacky. Just as it is a parent’s responsibility to instruct his children in the matter of manners, ethics, and morality, so it is to give them some sort of aesthetic and cultural education, so they don’t grow into vulgar adults, the sort who contrive new and needlessly complicated ways to spell their names and consider the plotlines of recently viewed television comedies appropriate dinnertime conversation. “As in to vie for a new position? Or to vie among your siblings for a new way to irritate me?”
But he wasn’t provoked even by that. “V–I,” he explained, as if to a slow child. I had heard him use the same tone with Giselle, one of the toddlers.
“Vi,” I repeated. It still didn’t make any sense, and I told him so. “Really, Victor,” I said, “if you feel that strongly about changing your name, I suppose we can discuss it, but couldn’t you pick something less ridiculous? Why not go by your middle name?” Victor’s middle name is Owen.81
“No,” said Victor briskly. “That’s a stupid name too. I won’t have some white man’s name.”
And at this I was surprised, and turned around just in time to see him smile. He was triumphant that he had gotten me to react, and I cursed myself silently. “What are you talking about?”
“Have you ever noticed,” asked Victor, “that all of us have white men’s names? All of us. It’s so false. You’re trying to whitewash us, make us forget who we are and where we come from.”
And once again I found myself turning and looking at him. I gave you a name because you were nameless when I found you, I thought. A dog. Less than a dog. It took some effort not to say this, and had I been more perturbed, I might not have been able to stop myself.