It had been an astounding, appalling, and delightful performance, and when the room was empty, David went up to the lectern and said he’d never met a dead man before. Gaines asked him what he meant.
“I believe you just committed professional suicide.”
“Oh, I did that long ago,” Gaines said airily. “I keep going all the same, making enemies where I can—and an occasional friend.”
Over drinks he told David what keeping on going meant: He had his own publishing company, desperately undercapitalized and only marginally solvent, but one that supplied honest and challenging materials to a growing number of like-minded heretics in the world of education.
“I decided long ago,” he said, “that I’d rather be a flea jumping an inch on my own than a flea on the back of a giant going nowhere.”
A month later, after convincing Ellen that doing what seemed to be valuable work was worth taking a substantial cut in salary, they moved to Runnell, Indiana, home of Educational Enterprises, Inc. Bob Gaines and his wife had welcomed them by taking them to dinner at Fredo’s.
“So?” Bob said, tossing the cocktail napkin aside.
“What is a teacher who knows nothing except how to teach?”
“A state-certified fraud,” Bob answered after a moment’s thought.
“It came to me this morning, after all these years of producing what we consider the most exciting and sophisticated educational materials in the world, that I’m the biggest fraud of all.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Why are you a fraud?”
“Because all I know is what kids are supposed to learn in school. That’s where I start. I know math and physics and chemistry and geology and meteorology and sociology and geography and history and literature. I’m a goddamned walking universal textbook, Bob. And that’s all I am. That’s not just where I start, that’s where I end. At the age of forty-two I am the world’s champion high-school graduate.”
“Jesus,” Bob said. “Okay, I guess I see that. But how does that make you a fraud?”
David spent a while studying his Bloody Mary. “You may not believe it, Bob, but I’ve always had the strange feeling I was missing something profoundly important in my education—something absolutely fundamental. I felt humanly inadequate on a very deep level. Does that make any sense to you?”
“No.”
“It didn’t to me either, so I ignored it, and I thought I was ignoring it very efficiently. But this morning I woke up to the fact that, more than anything else, this sense of inadequacy is what’s shaped the whole of my adult life.”
“How so?”
“Bob, you know there are a lot of young people out there who go into psychology or psychiatry because they need psychological help themselves. Consciously or unconsciously, they figure that making other people feel adequate and whole is bound to make them feel adequate and whole.”
“True. So?”
“I’m telling you it was the same sort of motive that drew me to education. I figured if I could supply what was missing in other people’s education, I was bound to supply what was missing in my own. I became an educator not because I was convinced I had something to teach but because I was convinced I had something to learn.”
He flicked a finger at the Bob Gaines postulate. “And that makes me a fraud.”
“Well, I guess it would if …” He shook his head angrily, like a bull trying to throw off a fly. “What the hell is it you think you need to learn?”
“How could I know that, Bob? All I know is what it isn’t. It isn’t something you learn pretending to be an educator. It isn’t something you learn in Runnell, Indiana, working at a nice respectable job, living in a nice respectable house, trying to be a nice respectable husband and father.”
Bob looked at him, away, and back again—a little pantomime of amazement and disgust. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this crap from you, David. You really believe there’s something out there you’ve missed?”
“Yes.”
“Missed how, for God’s sake? By not being a drug addict? By not living in a slum? By not doing stoop labor in a tomato field? What the hell are you talking about? Don’t just shake your head at me. I think I have a right to an answer.”
“I don’t have the answer. That’s why I have to get out.”
“This is intellectual garbage, David. It isn’t worthy of you.”
“I know, Bob.”
“Shit. Look, take a month’s leave of absence. Two months, at half salary. We can both survive that.”
From that point on, David hardly bothered to listen. He was thinking about the next confrontation to be gotten through—by far the most painful.
CHAPTER 15
He was parked outside the schoolyard long before the last bell rang and kids began scrambling, shoving, slouching, and straggling out. Tim was one of the stragglers. For nearly ten minutes he stood with another boy just outside the doors, listening to some problem with the air of a thousand-dollar-a-day consultant: respectful, composed, alert, fully focused—all personal thoughts and concerns set aside for the sake of his client.
Tim had the sort of lithe and long-limbed figure Ellen had had as a girl—though there was nothing soft or feminine about it. He had her oval face as well, but the eyes that looked out of it were thoughtful and rather solemn, like David’s. The calm, confident presence, however, was entirely his own.
Finally, after asking a few questions, Tim gazed off into the sky for a while and then delivered his opinion, which was received with an expression David had often seen on the faces of executives hearing things they didn’t want to hear. As Tim went on, the other boy nodded in defeat and finally took his leave with a sour grin.
Tim was crossing the yard to the bus stop when David tapped on the horn. He paused, stared at the car with puzzled recognition, and strolled over to peer in through the open window on the passenger side.
“Mrs. MacGruder told us in the second grade never to accept rides from strangers,” he said.
“That’s only if they offer you candy,” David countered.
Tim got in and asked, “What’s up?” Instead of answering, David put the car in gear and pulled away.
He’d always felt an almost suffocating pride in Tim—not because he was his son but because he was in so many ways not his son. It was as though, in fathering Tim, David had exceeded himself, had participated in a miracle. It was as though Tim had been constituted to inhabit a different world from his. David’s had always been a hostile, tight-fisted world that would yield up success only to bitter striving. Tim’s world, by contrast, seemed welcoming and open-handed, and success came to him without effort. Even at his present age of twelve, tall for his age and a good-looking boy, Tim had a kind of assurance about himself and his place in the world that David envied. He’d always hoped it would survive the turmoil of adolescence. Now he hoped it would survive the blow he was about to deal him.
“What do you think of me, Tim?” he asked, turning into a street that would take them out of town.
Tim raised his brows comically. “What’s this?”
“This is talk time. Serious talk time.”
“You want to know what I think of you?”
“That’s right.”
“Wow.” He slumped down in the seat and propped his knees up against the dashboard. “I don’t know.”
“You’ve met your friends’ fathers, haven’t you? Think about them and think about me.”
“Compare and contrast, huh?” The educator’s son. “Well, you’re intelligent. That’s obvious. You’re very fair.” And, as if this were what he’d been groping for: “You worry a lot.”
David laughed. “What do I worry about?”
“About being fair.”
“Oh. Go on.”
“Well … you try real hard.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hmm. Do you mind if I smoke a joint before answering that question?”
The year before, David and Ellen had asked Tim
if drugs were being sold at his school, and this—after a few moments of thought—had been his answer. It had become a running joke that was repeated whenever he was asked a question he thought was inane or an invasion of privacy. David ignored it now.
“I don’t know. Other kids’ dads just seem to be there, you know what I mean?” David said he didn’t. “I mean, some of them are creeps and some of them are nice guys. But sometimes … I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”
“Take your time.”
“Frank Hawkins’ dad seems like a nice guy most of the time, but every once in a while he gets juiced up and starts slugging everyone. You see what I mean?”
“Not yet.”
“What I mean is, he’s not trying. You would never do that.”
David thought about this for a while, a little disconcerted by the portrait Tim was painting of him. “You’re saying that other people just let themselves be what they are, and sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. But because I try very hard and worry a lot, I’m very fair, very consistent.”
“Yeah, I guess so. That’s the way it seems.”
David nodded. “Let me give you some advice, Tim, and I hope you’ll take it very seriously. Keep on going the way you are. Be like them, not like me. You don’t need to try hard. You don’t need to worry a lot. You really don’t.”
Tim gave him a doubtful look and said, “Okay.”
By now they were out in the country, and Tim asked where they were going. David said they were just driving.
“Is Mom okay?” the boy asked tensely, and David knew he couldn’t put it off any longer.
“Your mother’s fine, Tim. We have to talk about you and me.” He swallowed, and his face twitched with pain. “I have to do something that’s going to hurt you worse than an occasional belting, and you’ll probably never forgive me for it. I know I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
The boy looked at him with worried eyes.
“I’m leaving, Tim. And I don’t expect to come back.”
“Leaving?” David nodded. “You don’t mean … leaving here?”
David nodded again.
“But why?”
“I’ll try to explain, Tim, but no explanation will be good enough, believe me.”
Tim took in a shocked breath that was half a sob.
“First of all, it’s not because of you or your mother. I want you to know that for a certainty. I love you both very much and I always will.”
“But then … can’t we come with you?”
David’s insides shriveled into a ball of self-loathing.
“No. I’m sorry, Tim.”
“But where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
He pulled off the road, killed the engine, and turned to face his son. “I told you I’d try to explain, and I will. It won’t satisfy you and it won’t make you feel any better, but it’s all I can do. Okay?”
Tim nodded, and tears spilled down over his cheeks.
“I’m a man who tries hard, Tim. I’m a man who worries a lot. Remember?”
He nodded again.
“You nailed me there, Tim, right on the button. And that’s got something to do with what I’m doing now. Your friends’ fathers are the way they are because they’re not acting a part. They’re just being themselves, so they don’t have to try hard, don’t have to worry a lot. Do you understand?”
Tim shook his head.
“I’ve always tried hard, Tim, always worried a lot, and I just today figured out why. I’ve had to try hard, because I’m like an actor on a stage. I’ve been trying to fake it.”
“Fake what?”
“I’ve been trying to fake being a human being, Tim. I’ve been trying to fake being a father to you and a husband to your mother.”
“I don’t understand.”
David sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. “You remember Miss Otis.” Miss Otis had been Tim’s fifth-grade teacher; in the single year she’d lasted at the school she’d made enemies not only of the kids but of the parents as well. “She was a fake, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“What was she trying to fake?”
It took a visible effort for Tim to shift his mind to this irrelevancy. “I don’t know. I guess she was trying to fake … being better than everyone else. Smarter. But you’re not like that.”
“I know. I’m a different kind of fake, Tim.”
“But you’re not! You’re … You’re …” The words got choked off in his throat.
David swallowed painfully. “I know, Tim. I don’t seem like a fake to you. That’s because I’ve worked hard at it. I’ve tried real hard and fooled everybody, even myself.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s true. And I’m sorry as hell about it.”
“But, God, I don’t want you to leave. I mean, I don’t want you to leave!”
David wanted to take the boy in his arms, but he knew that would only increase the pain. “Tim, I’m going to tell you something you probably can’t understand now. You’ll understand it later. Will you listen to it?”
Tim shook his head, rejecting the lecture.
“I’ll tell you anyway: Becoming a father doesn’t make you perfect. It doesn’t really change you at all. If you’re a foolish man, you’ll be a foolish father. If you’re a selfish man, you’ll be a selfish father. If you’re a violent man, you’ll be a violent father. If you’re a childish man, you’ll be a childish father. Do you see what I mean?”
Tim shrugged.
“But all children want their parents to be perfect: to be kind and generous and wise and good-natured and good-humored and considerate and all the rest. But in fact they just go on being whatever they were before they became parents.”
Tim stared at him in blank incomprehension.
“What I’m trying to say, Tim, is that I’m sorry as hell that I can’t be what you want me to be and I can’t do what you want me to do. And I’m really, truly sorry to let you down this way.”
“But I don’t understand why you have to leave.”
David sighed, suddenly drained of energy. “Tim, look. Would you understand if I said I couldn’t be a movie star for your sake?”
“Yes, but—”
“I know. You don’t want me to be a movie star. But would you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Would you understand if I said I couldn’t be a quarterback for the Chicago Bears for your sake?”
“Yes.”
“What I’m telling you now is that I can’t go on being this for your sake. I’m sorry as hell, but I just can’t.”
“But …” Tim’s face twisted painfully as he tried to keep back his tears. “But … couldn’t I go with you?”
Oh God, David thought and nearly gave it all up. He even pictured it briefly: Tim’s relief, Ellen’s joy, Bob’s delight. Even he would have been relieved—briefly. But in a week or a month or a year, he’d just have to do it all over again. He said: “Tim, if there was anyone I could take with me, it would be you. That’s for sure. But it’s something I have to do alone.”
Tim nodded, swallowed, and finally stopped fighting the tears.
David started the engine and pulled away, feeling on a level with the slimes.
When they were a few minutes from home, he said, “Just before I picked you up at school, I spent a couple hours at the library writing you a letter.”
“A letter?” Tim was shocked, incredulous.
“Yes. There’ll come a time when.… You’re not going to remember this conversation forever, Tim. And I’ve told you things I haven’t told anyone, not even your mother.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s not my son.”
After thinking it over, Tim nodded.
“I don’t know what she’s going to tell you in the years to come. You understand? She’s probably going to tell you I left because I didn’t love you—didn’t love you or her.”
/> Tim said nothing.
“You’re going to wonder what it was all about, and you’re going to want to hear it from me. That’s what the letter is for.” He took it out of his jacket pocket and shoved it across the seat. Tim made no move to pick it up.
“You can show it to your mother if you want to, but I’d rather you didn’t. It’s just from me to you.”
“I don’t want a letter,” Tim snapped, staring out of the window.
It was still on the seat when they got out of the car at home. David retrieved it and put it back in his jacket.
Ellen, seeing them drive up, was waiting in the doorway. Tim tossed his book bag on a hallway table, said he was going out, and left.
David, awkwardly confronting his wife in the hallway, tried to find the strength he’d need to get through the next ordeal.
“I called your mother,” Ellen said.
“Why on earth did you do that?”
“Don’t you think she has a right to know what you’re planning to do to her grandson?”
“To her grandson? Yes, I suppose she does.”
“She wants you to call her.”
“Yes,” he said again. “I suppose she does.”
They were still standing just inside the front door, as though he were about to leave that minute.
“She thinks we should at least talk to a marriage counselor.”
“I’ll bet she does.”
“So do I.”
David sighed. “There’s nothing wrong with our marriage, Ellen.”
“Gee, that’s terrific news, David. You’re leaving me flat, but there’s nothing wrong with our marriage. I’m really glad to hear that.”
He left her to go into the kitchen for a drink. A roast was in the oven—a pathetic touch of hopefulness. Ellen followed him and said, “She thinks you ought to see a psychiatrist, David.”
“She’s a thinker, Mother is.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing much.” It wasn’t worth explaining.
“Will you talk to a psychiatrist—to someone? For my sake?”