A Good and Happy Child (4 page)

The Boy in the Window

Iwoke in my bedroom, bright and full of daylight, great white bolts of sun pouring in the window catching motes. I was in white pj’s, swimming in white cotton sheets. My mother sat on the bed next to me, stroking my hair, coaxing me out of my dreams. She gazed at me, her mouth tucked into a concerned frown, and I wondered how, in all this suffusion of light and warmth, she could wear such a worried expression. And then I remembered: I fell in the shower; I had lain against the porcelain with the droplets still falling, and I watched my mother through half-lidded eyes as she fetched towel, then aspirin, then water glass, her voice rising and rising with fright in that choking-close bathroom, still filled with steam, as Tom Harris tried to calm her and pressed a cool palm on my forehead.

My mother, at that time, was like two women trussed together, like rosebushes my father tied to a single stake to make them look more full. On the one hand there was Mother, the Scholar: a CV boasting a PhD, two books, and bylines in academic journals. She kept multiple copies of these on a special shelf in her makeshift office in the basement.
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I browsed them periodically and saw their titles—“Sexuality and Poststructuralism” and “The Frankfurt School and the Erotic Self.” I was thrilled not so much by her prose, which was incomprehensible to me with all its slashes (“the woman/vessel”), but by the appearance of so much apparently dirty material. Despite—or perhaps because of—my mother’s long-shanked, Gloria Steinem beauty, her cutting-edge library, her books and bylines, her degree from Smith and her doctorate at Columbia, she was unable to secure any position at Early College except the German grammar-instructor position reserved for women instructors (instructors, not professors). This I learned from listening to my mother’s side of various phone conversations:

Early College is an old southern institution,
she would say.
Paul loves
it, he has this reverence for southern aristocracy. But it’s one of the last all-
male institutions in the United States. Feminists are like killer bees to these
people; they’re hoping we don’t really exist, and if we do, they’d rather not be
the ones to find out. You should see the chairman of Modern Languages; he
looks at me like I might try and castrate him on the spot.
And so my mother commuted to The Women’s College of Central Virginia (shortened to “Central” for convenience, a nickname put to smutty purposes—as in “Pussy Central”—by the Early boys), a small women’s college of almost no consequence in nearby Foxcoe, where she was permitted to teach German, but where she again met with trouble, politics, obstacles. To find failure and obstruction in such a place—they had, for instance, no maternity leave policy at the time, hard as this may be to believe—infuriated her. But her opponents sensed her outrage—

the
hauteur
of the overqualified—took offense at the snub, and dug in deeper:

Central is not about to change its tenure track for a woman professor to
take time off to have a child. It’s a women’s college, but all the positions of
power are held by men: the head of my department, the dean of faculty, the
trustees. They’re going to make me start again, from the beginning, because
of my son. From the very beginning.

Like a bonneted wife in the nineteenth century, carried by wagon away from her “people” (in my mother’s case, from Killingworth, a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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Connecticut), Mother the Scholar had been brought to this town nestled in the Valley of Virginia. Preston had sprouted up around its colleges—

Fort Virginia, a military institute, and Early College, one of the country’s oldest, renamed in the 1860s after a Civil War general, Jubal Early, renowned not so much for his battle tactics (he once lost his brigade in the woods) but for establishing a revisionist camp of southern historians, who tended the tragic, heroic flame of Robert E. Lee and the Lost Cause. The hues of Preston were the rust of hundred-year-old brick, and the whitewash of Doric columns; its tourist attraction, the ivied mansions along its broad avenues (a few were still private residences, but most had been bought by the college); its backdrop, the Blue Ridge Mountains. These formed around the town a hazy, rolling, protective ring—keeping such notions as Women’s Studies out, and enclosing a stifling society, which was split into three camps.

First there was the Old School: families dating back generations to Revolutionary War officers and eighteenth-century Presbyterians, whose scions were so pompous, bow-tied, and erect (streets bore their last names: MacFarlane and Piggott and Bibb) that few actually envied them, and instead happily left them to their dingy country club—the one a few miles past the Hayfield development, with its algae-bottomed pool and the Sunday dinners with greasy gray steak. The alternative was the Bohemian Cluster, a clique of restaurateurs, lawyers, real-estate types, and theater folk, all in their thirties and forties, all slim and vain, who smoked reefer, cultivated a taste for local moonshine and bluegrass, and slummed with the town hippies (a mix of local craftsmen and musicians, blacksmiths and banjo players). This group created a mini California culture of wife-swapping divorces and brutal gossip: impotents and drunks; lawyers who cheated clients; wives who cheated on husbands; embezzlers, bankrupts, even toxic waste dumpers (there was a factory in nearby Canaan). The gossip thrown off by this group entertained my parents many a night, but, I honestly think, never inspired a glimmer of real curiosity. My father was too passionately religious; my mother’s fantasy of fulfillment, I suspect, was living in Berlin, androgynous, underdressed, and steeped in literary theory.
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The rest of Preston society, such as it was, was a constant flow of professional professors. These were the straight arrows, the folks who took their jobs, if not their intellectual calling, seriously; academics who lived in Preston as strangers to the South and who suffered from the same ironic fate as type A New Yorkers who quit the rat race, move to

“quaint” New England towns, and find themselves in a place that, due to its deep roots, has zero use for them. The aristocratic brotherhood of Preston did not care if the new Romance languages professor had studied at the Sorbonne. Preston had its own gods, its own shrines and temples: the mountains, the houses, the families, the horses. Professors had been coming and going for generations. Each one arrived polishing his vanity, ready to lend a little culture to this tiny, pretty, culturally impoverished village. Each one, just as inevitably, grew puzzled when the town did not display the proper gratitude. Then, according to kind, the professor would adjust: buy a house and take up tennis; kick up vicious academic controversies; or duck out of public view, and through isolation, grow odder and odder. Adapt, rebel, or withdraw. My parents were more or less of this last group. My mother was not tempted by the rewards of becoming a local artist or a lady of the garden club. She was determined to clear herself of the backwater by sheer labor. Her basement office was less a study than a factory. Afternoons, evenings, weekends she spent crouched over sheaves of photocopied manuscripts, her long, sandy brown hair tied back, peering through her glasses like a diamond cutter. In these manuscripts she made notes; the notes flowed into prose on legal pads; the legal pads were typed into articles, books, reviews. All the while she pursued new ideas, new grants. She planned trips to academic conferences and devoured the latest
Lingua Franca.

The result of this labor, this ideation as industrial toil, was two shelves of journal articles, and three slender books. But it only amounted to, at the time, a tiny flutter; bringing her maybe a foot or two into the national view; drew some attention; earned another contract at a university press. In the meantime—I think she realized with a sigh—

she had a family to attend to: her difficult husband, and me. a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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That was Mother the Scholar. Her other face was the Mommy Mother, the fussy mother, harmless ditzy confidante and pal. This was a role she played with assurance, and, I think, some joy. My mother had a goofy laugh; she plonked big plastic glasses over her elegant features; she packed my lunch every day into the NFL lunchbox (and its predecessor, the Peanuts lunchbox); she shopped for toys and Halloween costumes and kindergarten supplies. She listened carefully; she deflated self-pity and drama with precise observations, followed by practical suggestions. She learned how to soothe, to calm, to pacify. And though I was always grateful for her patience and her care, these attributes sometimes felt studied—like she was carefully executing memorized steps. At some level I fretted that if she came across a problem to which her tools did not apply—one that would require her to reach for something deeper and different than her training had prepared her for—she would be lost. In the meantime, she put on her serious face and addressed each problem with aplomb. And it was this mother, the pacifier, who appeared in my bedroom that morning after I fell in the shower.

“I let you sleep in today,” she said, still stroking my hair.

“Don’t you have work?”

“I canceled my classes.”

I thought about this. This only happened when things were serious, like somebody had to go to the hospital. Then I remembered the face. I must have held my breath, because my mother’s hair-stroking paused.

“Sweetie,” Mom said, “do you remember what you told us last night?”

“No.”

“You said you saw somebody looking at you while you were in the shower.”

“I did?”

“Yes. Do you remember anything about that?”

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Had it been real? I wasn’t sure. “Maybe.”

“You saw someone, then?”

“I guess.”

“Well, sweetie,” she said, fighting frustration, “tell me what you mean. What did you see?”

“I saw a face.”

“Was it a man?” she said, urgently. “Did you hear anybody come in?”

“It was just a face,” I said. Then I added, to be clear: “No body.”

My mother took this in a moment.

“George,” she said carefully. “It’s been difficult for you since your father died. But just because things are tough doesn’t mean you need to suffer. Maybe Clarissa Bing can recommend someone at the clinic. Someone to talk to.”

I had the sensation of having been pitched off the end of a pier: a lurching free-fall feeling.
The clinic
had been a phrase I’d heard around the house for years, usually in the context of grown-up professional, psychological chatter; the words
therapy
and
analysis
and
Freud
and
Lacan
were perpetually in the air. The idea that I would now, at eleven, be a target for all that technique seemed, at minimum, a little unfair.

“Okay,” I said. Then, a little mournfully: “I guess I’m prematurely complicated.”

My mother smiled. “Let’s see.”

After dinner, I heard my mother call Clarissa Bing. Clarissa was a psychologist at the Mental Health Clinic and shared my mother’s passionate interest in things psychoanalytic. A strongminded eccentric, she rehabilitated hillbilly drunks and gave succor to beaten county housewives, and she once threw a patient out of her office for saying “nigger.” My mother viewed Clarissa as an odd duck, another outsider, and an ally.

I listened to my mother’s voice, beginning high-pitched, sociable, a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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charming, then shifting gears into professional straight talk. Then concluding: “Thaaank you, Clarissa, thank you so much, this is really helpful. Mm. Thank you so much.” She hung up and came in to give me the skinny: there was a man Clarissa highly recommended, experienced with children, slot available. I said fine. Mom smiled and patted my leg.

“I think you’ll be glad you did this.”

Later, as I got ready for bed, the phone rang. I heard Mom talking on the phone in her bedroom. Thinking it was Clarissa Bing again I sidled up to her cracked door and listened. Mom had just gotten out of the shower. She was wrapped in a towel and sat at the edge of the bed. But to my surprise she spoke in murmurs and laughed softly into the receiver, her back turned to me. “Of course I would,” she said, and her voice had transformed; it had grown warmer and softer, and it was as if she were pouring it through the phone like melted butter. “I would really enjoy that,” she said. Then, “Yes. Yes, I said yes.” Then a laugh, not the haw-haw goofy laugh that I knew, but one beginning low in the throat and rising into a glittering giggle. Finally, “See you then.” She stood to replace the phone on the receiver, then turned to look at herself in the mirror. She stood, gazing and drying, turning herself absentmindedly. She let the towel drop. I moved away quickly. I lay in my pj’s in the dark. The savage daydreams about Dean resumed, mingled with anxiety about facing him. I imagined the school hallways filled with hostile students—the hicks, the black kids, the cold-eyed developers’ kids—and realized with apprehension that after the incident on the hill yesterday I would probably be ostracized for weeks. Socially radioactive. Dean was not finished. It was nearly midnight when I fell asleep. I woke from a dream to the sound of my own name.

George.

My room was dark, no hall light visible under the door. Moonlight pooled around the radiator by the window. I rubbed my eyes.
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George.

With a jolt I realized the voice was not inside the room—I was alone. Yet there it came again. My fingertips tingled.
George.

I inched down my bed, and on instinct I peered out the window. There was a figure outside my window looking in at me. It was the same face that watched me in the shower. Only now I saw it more clearly, as if I were more used to it and could focus on its presence: it was a boy, like me, standing on the branches of the tree. He had strawlike hair and scruffy clothes. He reminded me of Huckleberry Finn. I registered two things very quickly. First, the boy was suspended on the thin branches at the end of the bough. Those twigs could not support his weight. Second, I glanced at the clock. It read 2:14. I was certain I was not dreaming.