Stories for Boys: A Memoir (25 page)

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Authors: Gregory Martin

BOOK: Stories for Boys: A Memoir
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“Edna says, ‘You tried. I believe that.’
“Your father turns to Edna then. He’s burning holes into her with his eyes.
“Edna blurts out to the whole room, ‘He tried. Sometimes he didn’t try hard enough.’
“Jake Martin nods. He narrows his eyes and turns to your father. He says, ‘Okay, then. Was I a good father? What do you say, son?’
“I’ll never forget that. That ruthlessness. Your father stared at his father. He stared at his father for a long time. He didn’t say anything. They stared at each other. It was awful. It was awful at the time, and it’s even more awful now, knowing what I didn’t know then.
“I don’t know what happened next. I don’t know when we left or what else was said.
“That night, your father sat up for hours, shaking with anger. He sat at the end of the bed. He never changed out of his clothes. I woke up in the middle of the night and he was gone. I talked about this one time with your MomMom, about how some nights your father never went to sleep at all, about how I’d wake up and not know where he was. She told me that he used to do that all the time as a little boy. They called him ‘the night wanderer.’ MomMom would wake up for some reason, maybe she heard something, and your father wouldn’t be in his bed. She’d look and look and then she’d find him – six, seven, eight years old – sitting out on the front porch in the dark.
“The next morning Jake Martin was gone. Edna took him and put him back on the bus to North Carolina.
“I can see the officer’s club right now. I can see us at that table. Jake didn’t get loud. You know how it is with some drunks. But not Jake. I remember. It was almost as if he was drunk after the first drink. Once he started, it didn’t take much. They should not have done that to him.
“I never saw Jake Martin again. Your father never saw him again, either.”
Survival Rate
 
ACCORDING TO RESEARCH COMPILED BY THE HARVARD School for Public Health, nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date. It is my mother’s continued survival, not my father’s, that is the statistical anomaly. Nine out of ten women diagnosed with Stage IIIC ovarian cancer do not survive eighteen months. My mother has been in remission for eight years. I don’t know what the survival rates are for women with bipolar disorder, closeted gay husbands and Stage IIIC ovarian cancer, but they can’t be good.
Had my mother died of ovarian cancer in those first eighteen months, or any time over the next four years, she would have gone to her grave not knowing my father’s secret. My father did not want my mother to die of ovarian cancer, but it must have crossed his mind, at least once, that if she did die, he would be free of the burden of keeping his secret. I don’t mean to suggest that he hoped for this, for her death from cancer. He would never have hoped for that. But he would have hoped – must have hoped – that the need to keep his secret would someday be gone from the world.
This hope has come to pass.
My mother does not regret knowing. She prefers pain and loneliness to ignorance and deception. But she wishes that she’d known long before, sometime after her children were born, sometime when she would have had more time to live with the truth of things as they were. But in life, as in cards, my mother is a purist. She scorns, she derides – she will not play – those soft games where you pass cards left or right, dumping the cards you need least. You play the hand you’re dealt.
Two Different Stories
 
I CAME INTO OUR BEDROOM ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON. I forget what I was doing. Maybe I was carrying a basket of laundry. Christine doesn’t fold or put away laundry. That’s not her department. Oliver was sitting on our bed reading a magazine. He looked pale and troubled. He looked up at me and said, “I don’t understand.”
He showed me the magazine, published a year earlier. The October 2008 issue of
The Sun
was open to an essay written by an author named Gregory Martin. The title of the essay was “The Family Plot.”
T
he summer after my father attempted suicide, I found myself wandering through a graveyard near my house, up and down the rows of sunken headstones and faded pink cloth roses. I didn’t know a soul buried there, and I didn’t know what solace I expected to find. All I knew was that here, if anywhere, was an object lesson in impermanence: hundreds of graves bordered by a six-lane thruway, a storage warehouse, and two used-car lots packed with suvs. There was no entrance, just an opening where the drooping chain-link fence fell apart completely.
 
OLIVER DID NOT look sad so much as confused. The magazine had been in the magazine rack beside my bed, in the back, behind other literary magazines. I didn’t know that Oliver looked through the magazines in my magazine bin.
Oliver said, “Did Grandpa attempt suicide?”
Oliver knew about suicide. He knew about hara-kiri, the ritual suicide by self-disembowelment on a sword, practiced by samurai in traditional Japanese culture. He knew about Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II who flew their planes into American ships.
I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Yes. Grandpa did attempt suicide. It happened three summers ago.”
I sat down beside Oliver on the bed. I put my hand on his shoulder. I asked him how much of the essay he had read.
He said, “Not very much. Why were you in that graveyard?”
I said, “I don’t really know. I guess because I was so sad.” I took the magazine from his hands. Then I said, “I’m going to get Mommy. Okay? I’ll be right back.”
Oliver said, “Okay.”
Christine was in the living room. I can’t remember what she was doing and neither can she. I held up the magazine. I said, “Oliver was reading this.”
“Goddamn,” she said. She looked scared.
We went back into the bedroom together. Oliver was still sitting on the bed, his legs crossed. Christine and I stood near him. I was waiting for Christine to say something first. But she didn’t say anything for a long time. Oliver had that look on his face that meant that he thought he was in trouble.
Christine sighed.
“It’s okay, son,” I said.
Christine said, “I’m so sorry, Oliver. I wish you didn’t know. You’re not old enough. That essay is for adults. That magazine should not have been out.” She turned and shot me a look even though she knew it was there as well as I did.
Oliver said, “Why did Grandpa try to kill himself?”
I said, “Grandpa was terribly sad when he realized he and Granny were going to get a divorce.”
Oliver nodded. “But how? How did Grandpa try to kill himself?”
“He took too much medicine,” Christine said. She sat down on the bed next to Oliver. She put her forehead on his forehead. She put her hand on the back of Oliver’s head and held it there. She let go and looked him in the eye. “He took lots and lots of medicine, and so his body tried to shut down. He made a terrible mistake. His brain wasn’t working well because of his sadness.”
Oliver put his elbows to his knees and his chin in his hands.
Christine said, “Oh, sweetheart, I wish you hadn’t found out this way.”
“It’s not your fault, Oliver,” I said. “It’s our fault. It’s my fault.”
Christine said, “This is not a secret, but Evan is not old enough to know this. Do you understand?”
Oliver said, “I won’t tell him.”
“Mommy and Daddy will tell him when he’s older,” I said.
I don’t remember what else we said. I don’t remember if Oliver asked more questions that we weren’t willing to answer. I don’t think he did. I think he became quiet and serious. Maybe he was puzzling over events in his memory, looking for clues. I don’t remember if the three of us stayed there on the bed for awhile before leaving the room one by one, or if Christine left first and fumed somewhere, and I stayed with Oliver for a few minutes longer. I don’t remember where Evan was when this happened, except that he was not there.
That night, after the boys were asleep, Christine and I were in bed, and she turned to me. “We can tell the boys that Grandpa is gay, and we will. They should know that. But there are things you keep from children. I hate that Oliver knows his Grandpa tried to kill himself. That he even knows it’s a possibility. It’s almost worse that it was an attempt. Go ahead, when you’re sad, try to kill yourself, but you’ll live to tell about it and be happy again. Everything can turn out okay. I hate that Oliver knows that. We should have known better. Everybody knows better. That’s our mistake. Every kid knows what’s in their parents’ nightstand. I know I did.”
I didn’t know how to feel. But I trusted Christine’s conviction more than my confusion. I lacked Christine’s conviction and clarity because I wanted so badly to unburden myself. I wanted to release the pressure of my own silence. But that was not what my children needed. There was a difference between the story my children needed to hear and the story I needed to tell them. Those were two different stories.
Secret Talent
 
BENEDICT CAREY WROTE IN
THE NEW YORK TIMES
, “Psychologists have long considered the ability to keep secrets as central to healthy development. Children as young as six or seven learn to stay quiet about their mother’s birthday present.” Carey quotes Daniel Wegner, the white bear psychology professor, who says, “In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret … And we are now learning that some people are better at doing this than others.”
Ice Cream
 
EVAN WANDERS THE FIELD. THE SOCCER BALL HAS NO magnetic attraction on his imagination or desire. When it rolls near him, he regards it with only mild curiosity. I sometimes feel as if Evan has been sent to earth to administer me a Zen lesson on the dangers of the desire to compete, to win, to dominate one’s opponent.
I’m Oliver’s soccer coach but not Evan’s. It’s too difficult for scheduling – with all the games and practices – for me to coach both boys’ teams. So I’m the referee when Evan’s team, the Poison Geckos, are the home team. Evan’s coach is a good guy, competitive, fun. His son’s a ringer, the best player on the team, not that this matters. One day at practice Evan ran around hugging his teammates instead of kicking the ball. A few of Evan’s teammates greeted his affection warmly and returned it. Other teammates were impeded from kicking the ball and scoring goals. I intervened. Evan stopped hugging. He ran around and sang a song instead.
When I returned to the sidelines where I belonged, another father, my neighbor Andrew, whose son was sometimes also yellow-carded for hugging, suggested that the two of us start a support group.
“Do I look murderous?”
“We have to take the long view,” he said.
On the drive home from practice, I told Evan that he needed to try harder. When it was time to play soccer, you played soccer. He could hug his friends some other time. He could wander around and sing to himself at recess or at home.
“You’ve got to try to kick the ball,” I said.
“But the other kids are so much better than I am,” he said.
“They’re not that much better,” I said. “They might not even be better at all. They’re just watching the ball and trying to kick it. Will you try to watch the ball?”
“Okay, Dad.” He had tears in his eyes.
“Hey, Evan.”
He didn’t answer.
“It’s okay. I want you to have fun. And you had fun today, didn’t you?”
Evan looked out the window. It was getting dark. He was probably hungry and dinner must have seemed a long way off.
That night, Evan was constipated. He called out from the toilet. “I need some FIBER!” So Christine mixed him an orange Metamucil highball, which I can’t even look at without my stomach turning. She sat down on the green tile floor and handed it to Evan as he sat naked on the toilet. He thanked her. He drank it. He gave her back the empty glass. He said, “I don’t want to play soccer next year. I don’t want to let my teammates down.” I hadn’t said this to him, that he was letting his teammates down. Maybe I had. Inside the bathroom, Christine was saying nurturing things. They were in there a long time. What was wrong with me? Why did I care so much that Evan be competitive? Some games, Evan didn’t make a single attempt to kick the ball, especially if it was a hot day. At his best, he ran alongside the herd. He was the one the wolves had their eye on.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up thinking about my father, who came to all my games when I was growing up. I played soccer, baseball, basketball, football, and ran track. I was crazy about sports as a kid and as a teenager and, well, pretty much now. I can’t teach an 11:00 a.m. class because it interferes with my stretching and warm-up before the noon basketball game at the university gym. When I was a boy, my father sat in the middle of the stands where I could see him. He was always supportive; he never once pressured me. I pressured myself plenty all on my own. My father cared if I won or lost but only because I cared so much. Otherwise he was calm and gentle in away that I was not, not ever, not when it came to sports.

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