Though the conductor accepted Jerald’s ticket as if it were the correct ticket, and though Jerald didn’t miss his calculus class nor was he even late to arrive at the University, yet the experience has shaken him. He is thinking he can’t trust the trains, he must double-check his ticket each time. Can’t trust his mother.
TERROR IN THE MAGNIFICATION of the stranger’s owl eyes.
That a stranger might see so intently, peering into another’s soul.
His soul.
“I was your father, Jerald. For more than four years.”
Jerald is not sure that he has heard correctly.
Father? Owl Eyes is claiming to be—his father?
The man is explaining. Providing dates. Jerald is not hearing these words clearly.
“. . . your mother was separated from her husband, her first husband, when she became pregnant—”
Jerald flinches at such words. Pregnant!
“—with you. With the child that would be you. She and I were together at that time, though we hadn’t been living together . . . .”
Owl Eyes is speaking haltingly, awkwardly. Clearly it is very difficult for him to utter these words that seem like stones in his mouth.
In a moment of weakness Jerald has allowed himself to be detained outside the Math Institute—If we could speak for just a few minutes, Jerald. Please.
He has seemed to acquiesce, that he is indeed Jerald.
Seated on a stone bench outside the Math Institute, less than three feet apart. Jerald doesn’t recall sitting.
Staring at the man’s moving mouth, uttering such words. Jerald wants to jump up and walk rapidly away. Run away. Lose himself in the swarm of undergraduates crossing the quadrangle.
But as in one of those nightmares about which he never tells his mother he can’t move.
There is something wrong with Jerald’s breathing. A sensation like a coarse rag yanked through his chest. He is light-headed, an insufficient quantity of blood flows to his brain.
If you feel faint when I am not around lower your head between your knees. You know how to do this, and why. Do it.
Doesn’t dare lower his head between his knees for Owl Eyes is regarding him anxiously. He does not want Owl Eyes to touch him.
The man has provided a name but already Jerald has forgotten the name. Strangers’ names do not interest him.
He is a visiting fellow at the University, he explains. He has a permanent position at _____.
Jerald sees the man’s mouth move but hears only a fraction of his words. Jerald’s own mouth is shut tight as his throat is shut tight and he is sitting very still gripping his backpack in both hands.
The man has been telling Jerald how he and Jerald’s mother (whom he calls Imogene) had lived together intermittently for several years in the early 2000s. When he, Jerald, was a small child they’d traveled together as a family. They’d visited museums, planetariums. They’d gone to concerts and hiked along the lakeshore with binoculars, observing birds. He and Imogene had lived in separate residences but continued to be together—a couple.
“It was taken for granted by us—by Imogene and me—that you were my son, Jerald. You’d been born after Imogene had separated from her husband of the time, a man named Kovacs; though in fact, Imogene had not been divorced from Kovacs yet. She was excited by our having a child together and would study pictures of me when I’d been a child, to identify the ‘likeness’ between you and me. She was adamant that you were not the child of her former husband. Neither of us questioned the assumption of paternity. At least, I didn’t question it.”
Imogene. Jerald has rarely heard his mother’s name, and never from a stranger. There is something disagreeable in the very sound, uttered so familiarly in another’s mouth.
Kovacs is not a name Jerald knows. The only name he has heard, attached to his own, is Tabor.
“The three of us—your mother, you, and me—lived isolated lives for years. I was a university professor, your mother was a Ph.D. candidate in computational psychology, a brilliant woman. Brilliant but ‘nervous’—that was said of Imogene. Yet, for some reason I never understood Imogene did not want to marry me. Her first marriage had made her very unhappy, she’d said. She did not even want to live together openly. We rarely appeared together in public. Your mother was not a social person, she had no friends. She was estranged even from her closest relatives. Eventually she had what must have been a nervous breakdown and dropped out of the Ph.D. program. She blamed me for the breakdown, and she blamed you—you were three or four by this time. She would say that being a mother had been a mistake, and for the mistake she would have to be punished. But still—in her way—she loved you. It was a burdensome sort of love, an obsessive love, a weight around her neck that made living with her almost impossible . . . Whenever we tried, and we tried many times, it soon became hopeless. Your mother created complications in all lives that touched hers. She was a beautiful woman in a way not every man would appreciate. She was beautiful to me. (I have not seen Imogene in more than ten years. I would not be able to bring myself to see her again, she’d so badly wounded me.) I loved her deeply but could not really understand her. Even when she made an effort, when she most insisted that she loved me, she seemed to resent the fact that I was close by—that a man was close by. Propinquity was painful to her. Her skin seemed to smart as if she were allergic to me—to us. You and me. She had breakdowns, illnesses. She refused to seek medical help. She was anxious about you, always anxious about you, for she didn’t really want to be a mother to you, and so she had to be extra cautious, she said. She was terrified that she would hurt you. The temptation to hurt the helpless is too strong. You can’t be weak, to resist such a temptation—she’d said.”
Faltering, hesitating, yet the owl-eyed man continues. Now that he has begun he cannot be stopped. He is leaning forward as Jerald, in a kind of trance, remains unmoving, paralyzed.
“Her focus shifted to you, Jerald. Obsessively. Imogene no longer trusted me to be alone with you even for a brief while. She’d run back to me after twenty minutes desperate to see you—to see if you were all right. She’d check your breathing countless times a day—and at night—when you were an infant, terrified that you would stop breathing. As if breathing isn’t autonomous and has to be willed. It was she who had accidents with you, not me—dropping you on the stairs, overturning a pan of boiling water so that some of it splashed onto you, household accidents . . . When we went out together as a family she became particularly high-strung, accusing. For a long time she’d said that we would be married when her life was more ‘stable.’ But when her life was stable she became quickly bored, she couldn’t bear peacefulness. She threatened to ‘harm’ both herself and you. I made the mistake of putting pressure on her to acknowledge me as your legal father and to allow me to spend more time with you—but she refused.”
The owl-eyed man pauses. Jerald tries to think of something to say, to ask. But his throat is shut tight. He is mortified by these disclosures, even as he cannot believe that they are true.
“Yet—though it sounds unbelievable—we did many things together as a family. Our lives were bound fiercely together. I loved you and your mother so much—you were the center of my life. You were a remarkable child with your own sort of dignity. You were exceptionally quiet and watchful. And very bright. Even in preschool you were precocious. You had not much interest in other children as other children had not much interest in you. I think it must be the same way now, judging from what I’ve seen of you on campus . . . You are a very dignified boy but dignity must come at a price, of loneliness.
“It was about this time, when you were four years old, that I made a mistake out of exasperation and despair. I wanted you to have my name. I wanted your mother and me to be married, finally. But your mother reacted in a kind of panic. She became very unreasonable. She threatened to report me to the police, and accuse me of harassment. Suddenly she was insisting that you were not my son after all. She’d m
ade a mistake, she said. She arranged for a DNA test to establish the fact that I was not your father . . .
“This revelation was devastating to me, heartbreaking. For years your mother had behaved as if I were your father and she was very happy with my being your father but now it seemed that I was not your father after all. Nor was her first husband your father . . . Somehow, it seemed that another man, whose name I would never be told, was your biological father; but this man, according to Imogene, had no knowledge that he was your father, didn’t even know that Imogene had had a baby, for there was no connection between them. Even now it’s impossible for me to comprehend that your mother had deceived me so cruelly. Why at first she’d insisted upon convincing me that I was your father but a few years later changed her mind and wanted me out of her life—I never understood . . .”
In silence Jerald has been listening to these terrible words. His eyes have misted over with tears of disbelief, rage.
“It was purely chance that I saw you at the Institute, Jerald. I recognized you at once—of course! Though it has been eleven years . . .”
Earnestly Owl Eyes speaks as if he has no idea how Jerald is trembling with emotion.
“If you don’t believe what I’ve been telling you, ask your mother. As if she remembers—”
Again Owl Eyes speaks his name, that Jerald seems not to hear.
There is a buzzing in his ears like cicadas, deafening.
(But does Jerald remember? A man . . . )
(There have been men in his mother’s life. In his own young life. But so young was Jerald at the time, his memory is discontinuous and blurred as in a dream.)
It is too confusing to Jerald, and distasteful. He does not want to recall any of it. At least he knows that his name is not Kovacs.
Seeing that Jerald is about to break away from him the owl-eyed man says again urgently, “Ask her. Please. Your mother. If she remembers—”
Jerald wants to murmur Leave me alone. But all he can manage is a near-inaudible—N-no.
Stammering he has to leave, he will be late for his train . . .
Turning to run, without a backward glance for the flush-faced man seated on the stone bench gazing after him with an expression of hurt and yearning.
“AM I ADOPTED?”
It is a bizarre question. Out of nowhere Jerald hears himself ask his mother.
“Adopted? Of course not.”
His mother laughs, this is too ridiculous.
“Considering that we look so much alike, you and I, adoption is not very plausible, is it?”
Jerald has no idea why he has asked his mother this question. Yet, he has no idea how he might have asked her another question.
Was there once a man who loved me, who believed he was my father, why did you send this man away . . .
Jerald’s mother continues on the subject of adoption. Her initial amusement is shading into something like impatience, annoyance. For it is not like her son Jerald to ask stupid questions, still less questions lacking some point.
Jerald is somewhat shocked at the suggestion that he and his mother look so much alike. Never has Jerald noticed this.
His mother reaches out to touch Jerald. It is her prerogative to touch her son at any time but on long deft legs Jerald outmaneuvers her and exits the room.
SEARCHES HIS MOTHER’S THINGS when his mother is at work.
But his mother is not like other mothers, Jerald must know this. Consequently she has accumulated few “things.”
As she owns few books so she owns few articles of clothing and virtually no jewelry. Few letters, few documents. No photographs.
Doggedly Jerald rummages through the drawers in his mother’s bedroom with a rising sense of self-disgust.
Of course, he finds nothing.
(What is there to find?)
(Resents her, for having so little.)
(Resents him, stupid Owl Eyes!)
Jerald has been told that he has a father, for of course he has a father, but your father has never been a factor in our life together.
His mother has explained. Or rather, his mother has not explained but has told him all he needs to know.
Not a factor in our lives.
Still, Jerald seems to know that the man presumed to be his father lives in another state. Whether a nearby state, or a distant state, Jerald does not know.
This man (whose name is Kovacs?) (whose name is not Kovacs?) has never contacted Jerald. Or so his mother has claimed.
This man who’d been Imogene’s first (and only?) husband and who is not Jerald’s father has never been interested in Jerald—of course. Jerald has never given any thought to the man lacking a name, a face.
This man is not the owl-eyed man. But Jerald does not recall the owl-eyed man either.
(But Owl Eyes would have been younger then, eleven years before, and he would have looked different.)
That night Jerald wakes from a confusing dream of rushing faces and muffled cries and realizes that yes, he remembers the owl-eyed man very well.
He had not thought of him as Owl Eyes. Not then.
Remembers the man’s deep voice, the voice bearing a faint accent that has not changed in eleven years. Remembers the man close beside him reading a storybook, with illustrations. A rhythmic accent to the voice, a kind of buoyancy.
Memory is tonal. This tone, Jerald remembers.
Soon then Jerald recalls a museum with high ceilings, hard-shining floors, echoing sounds. A hall of dinosaurs.
Enormous skeletons. Flying reptiles.
Nighttime sky, a planetarium, a long line of children, an exhibit of aeronautical inventions. A man with dark hair loose to his shoulders, dark eyes. A man who laughed often.
Took hold of the little boy’s hand so that on the stairs the little boy would not slip and fall.
Hiking in a pine woods. A beach of hard-packed sand.
Peering at shorebirds through binoculars—sandpipers.
Memories return in waves, overwhelming. You can drown in memories.
“Jerald! Wake up.”
Jerald’s mother is surprised and disapproving, Jerald has slept so long. It is not like her son to sleep past 8:00 A.M. on any day of the week but especially on a day he will travel to the University for Calculus II.
Jerald sits up in bed. He is fully awake, his eyes are open and staring. Yet he is very tired, as if he has not slept at all.
JERALD TELLS HIS MOTHER that he will be staying later at the Institute that day, in order to attend a lecture. He will return on the 6:12 P.M. train. His mother is surprised to hear this since Jerald has not mentioned any lectures previously but she checks the University calendar and indeed it’s true that there is a math lecture that afternoon at 4:30 P.M. at the Institute.
In the privacy of his room Jerald packs his laptop into his backpack as well as his iPad. He packs his charger cords. He packs a single change of clothes. Underwear, socks. He folds his clothing into tight squares, as tight as he can to force inside the backpack. He has some money, in cash in his wallet. He does not have a credit card.
Before he boards the train he double-checks the number of the train and the number on his ticket. Hears his mother call to him from the parking lot and remembers to turn to her, to wave good-bye.
After calculus class that afternoon Jerald lingers in the vicinity of the Math Institute waiting to see the owl-eyed man but does not see him.
Walks slowly to the train depot on the far side of the University and there waits beyond his usual train, that departs at 5:16 P.M. Shyly he peers at strangers standing on the platform waiting to board this train but the owl-eyed man is not among them.
Rapidly he calculates: two weeks, three more days in the summer session. These thirteen days can be broken down into a small infinity of seconds. Jerald will wait.
Except You Bless Me
1. NOVEMBER 1974. DETROIT, MICHIGAN
Hag lady. Aint you hot shit.
Those boots you wearin they are shit.
> Open yo mouth yo tryin to talk to us. Think we gon hurt you.
White bitch needin more then red grese on that mouth look like somebody some man want.
A PERSON WHO HATES ME has entered my office. Fourth floor, Starret Hall of Wayne State University.
I have been waiting for her, so I am not surprised. Her name is on my appointment sheet—Larissa Wikawaaya. 6:35 P.M.
Larissa is late for the appointment by about eight minutes. I have the idea that she has been out in the corridor for a while, hesitant to enter. Twice previously, she failed to show up for an appointment with her Composition 101 instructor, to discuss her work; but now in the final, rapidly passing weeks of the fall quarter she has taken a begrudging interest in the course—that is, in her grade.
Hag lady. You ugly got to know it. We just laughin at you hard as you try be PRETY.
It is a marvel to me, Larissa Wikawaaya’s bravado. This swaggering young woman enters the office as she enters the classroom, sulky, stiff-faced, resentful. She is carrying a bulky quilted coat and a hefty shoulder bag in her arms. Her hair is tight narrow braids, cornrowed. Her manner is imperial. She doesn’t exhibit the slightest unease, still less any concern, or guilt—that her instructor has guessed she is (surely) the person who has been leaving hate-notes shoved beneath this office door. Mz Rane you plain ugly. You pitful. Everbody wonder how you don t kill youself lookin like you.
Her hatred for me, the (white, woman) instructor, must be a shield: it will protect her from harm.
Since class ended that afternoon at 5:20 P.M. I have been seeing students for more than an hour, in twenty-minute sessions, and I am feeling slightly dazed. A ringing in my ears of unease, anxiety, that has been mounting, with the prospect of confronting Larissa Wikawaaya at 6:35 P.M., the last conference of the day. The students who’ve preceded her have not been difficult or disagreeable but each has presented a singular problem, as most students enrolled in this remedial composition course, in the night-school division of the university, are “problematic”—their writing skills, so-called, don’t meet the university’s basic criteria. Yet their problems are navigable, and I believe that I have been teaching them to write—to a degree. What we love in teaching, if we love teaching at all, is this conviction of progress: spontaneous exchanges, sudden insights, smiles and even laughter.