Independence Day (3 page)

All this is not a good recipe, I know. In fact, it’s a bad recipe: a formula for a life stifled by ironies and disappointments, as one little outer character tries to make friends with or exert control over another, submerged, one, but can’t. (He could end up as an academic, or a U.N. translator.) Plus, he’s left-handed and so is already threatened by earlier-than-usual loss of life, by greater chances of being blinded by flying objects, scalded by pans of hot grease, bitten by rabid dogs, hit by cars piloted by other lefthanders, of deciding to live in the Third World, of not getting the ball over the plate consistently and of being divorced like his Dad and Mom.

My fatherly job, needless to say, is not at all easy at this enforced distance of miles: to coax by some middleman’s charm his two foreign selves, his present and his childish past, into a better, more robust and outward-tending relationship—like separate, angry nations seeking one government—and to sponsor self-tolerance as a theme for the future. This, of course, is what any father should do in any life, and I have tried, despite the impediments of divorce and time and not always knowing my adversary. Only it seems plain to me now, and as Ann believes, I have not been completely successful.

But bright and early tomorrow I am picking him up all the way in Connecticut and staging for both our benefits a split-the-breeze father-and-son driving campaign in which we will visit as many sports halls of fame as humanly possible in one forty-eight-hour period (this being only two), winding up in storied Cooperstown, where we’ll stay in the venerable Deerslayer Inn, fish on scenic Lake Otsego, shoot off safe and ethical fireworks, eat like castaways, and somehow along the way I’ll work (I hope) the miracle only a father can work. Which is to say: if your son begins suddenly to fall at a headlong rate, you must through the agency of love and greater age throw him a line and haul him back. (All this somehow before delivering him to his mother in NYC and getting myself back here to Haddam, where I myself, for reasons of familiarity, am best off on the 4th of July.)

And yet, and yet. Even a good idea can be misguided if embarked on in ignorance. And who could help wondering: is my surviving son already out of reach and crazy as a betsy bug, or headed fast in that dire direction? Are his problems the product of haywire neurotransmitters, only solvable by preemptive chemicals? (This was the New Haven guy’s, Dr. Stopler’s, initial view.) Will he turn gradually into a sly recluse with a bad complexion, rotten teeth, bitten nails, yellow eyes, who abandons school early, hits the road, falls in with the wrong bunch, tries drugs, and finally becomes convinced
trouble
is his only dependable friend, until one sunny Saturday it, too, betrays him in some unthought-of and unbearable way, after which he stops off at a suburban gun store, then spirits on to some quilty mayhem in a public place? (This I frankly don’t expect, since he has yet to exhibit any of the “big three” of childhood homicidal dementia: attraction to fire, the need to torture helpless animals, or bed-wetting; and because he is in fact quite softhearted and mirthful, and always has been.) Or, and in the best-case scenario, is he—as happens to us all and as his mother hopes—merely going through a phase, so that in eight weeks he’ll be trying out for lonely end on the Deep River JV?

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.

O
utside 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 ’70 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.”

“Sorry to hear that. About what?”

“Stuff, I guess. I don’t know.” I hear the weatherman on
Good Morning America
giving us the good news for the weekend. Paul has activated his TV now and doesn’t want to talk more about his mother’s marital dustup; he simply wants to announce it so he can refer to it usefully on our trip. For a while I’ve sensed (with an acuity unique to ex-husbands) that something wasn’t right with Ann. Early menopause, early nostalgia all her own, late-breaking regret. All are possible. Or maybe Charley has a honey, some little busty button-nosed waitress from the boatyard diner in Old Saybrook. Their union, though, has lasted four years, which seems long enough under the circumstances—since its chief frailty is that Charley’s nobody anyone in her right mind should ever marry in the first place.

“So look. Your ole Dad’s got to go sell a house this morning. Slam home my pitch. Reel in the big fish.”

“D. O. Volente,” Paul says.

“You got it. The Volente family from Upper High Point, North Carolina.” He has decided, from his one year of Latin, that D. O. Volente is the patron saint of realtors and must be courted like a good Samaritan—shown every house, given the best deals, accorded every courtesy, made to pay no vigorish—or bad things will happen. Since the rubber incident our life has largely been conducted as a reticule of jokes, quips, double entendres, horse laughs, whose excuse for being, of course, is love. “Be a pal to your mother today, okay, pal?” I say.

“I’m her pal. She’s just a bitch.”

“No she’s not. Her life’s harder than yours, believe it or not. She has to deal with you. How’s your sister?”

“Great.” His sister Clary is twelve and as sage as Paul is callow.

“Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow, okay?”

The volume suddenly zooms up on the TV, another man’s voice blabbing at a high-decibel level about Mike Tyson making 22 mil for beating Michael Spinks in ninety-one seconds. “I’d let him sock
me
in the kisser for half that much,” the man says. “Did you hear that?” Paul says. “He’d let him ‘sock him in the kisser.’” He loves this kind of tricky punning talk, thinks it’s hilarious.

“Yeah. But you be ready to go when I get there tomorrow, okay? We have to hit the ground running if we expect to get to Beaton, Texas.”

“He was Beaton to the punch, then socked in the kisser. Are you gonna get married again?” He says this shyly. Why, I don’t know.