Something Happened

  ("What are you worrying about?" I will ask him when I can no longer endure in silence the thought that he might be worrying alone.

  "I'm not worrying," he will reply.

  I wish I could be more of a help to him. I wish he would let me try.)

  "What are you worrying about?" I will ask again.

  "I'm not worrying," he answers, looking up at me an instant with a glimmer of surprise.

  "What makes you look so glum?"

  "I was thinking."

  "What were you thinking about," I persist with a smile, "that makes you look so worried?"

  "I don't know. I forgot already."

  "You looked so glum."

  "I don't know what that means."

  "Sad."

  "I'm not sad."

  "Tired?"

  "Maybe I'm sleepy."

  "Do you stay up late?"

  "Sometimes I don't fall asleep right away."

  I sometimes wonder if he really worries as much as I think he does. I sometimes think he worries more. He is a cautious little thing (or seems to be. I know I worry for him and expect the worst to happen to him also. So does my wife. I used to worry about my daughter too when she was little, but now she is past fifteen, and the worst hasn't happened. What is the worst? I'm not sure). Maybe the worst has happened and went unrecognized, because my boy, now that I look back, has never had an easy time of things (and my daughter is having a lousy time of it now, unless she is acting too. Wouldn't it be funny if both were acting more unhappy than they are merely to spite and upset us? Ha, ha. I wouldn't find it funny at all. Even as an infant in a playpen he always seemed to be siphoning everything around him in through large, mysterious, intelligent eyes and judging everything he absorbed tentatively before making up his mind and allowing himself to react--even when he reacted spontaneously, as when grinning or giggling suddenly, there always seemed to be a premeditated delay, an infinitesimal lag, but a lag nonetheless, during which a decision had been arrived at. Even an offer of money, or an ice cream pop, would bring a moment's weighty consideration before acceptance. I lose patience with him often. I shout and shame him sometimes--then deny I shouted and try to persuade him I was only being emphatic. It's no way to build confidence. I try to be generous and companionable to make up for it.

  "Say yes or no," I demand of him in explanation. "What difference would it make if you are wrong? What would you lose by making a mistake?"

  He is confused.

  He is afraid of making mistakes.

  So he makes them with me by vacillating).

  I know he must wonder now why his life has been arranged to be so unceasingly difficult (why I shout at him so frequently, or seem to, why I undoubtedly do raise my voice) or if there ever will come a time of tranquillity and bliss for him in which no new implacable demons are waiting in ambush for him, stirring in time as the moment of contact draws near, making ready for him, practically in view. (I know I wonder all of that for him. When will he be able to relax and take things easy, so I can relax and take things easy too?) "Tell me, what do you want to do?" I ask him so many times out of disconsolate, moody concern. "What do you want to be?"

  "I would like to learn how to drive a car someday."

  "Everybody does that."

  "If I can. Do you think I will?"

  He likes the smell of gasoline and is afraid of fire, height, and speed (but not of airplanes, if he is in one).

  How weary (I feel) he must be already of challenges and adversity, like a spent and weatherbeaten old man (homunculus), or a resigned, moribund, white-haired old woman embracing her own demise with relief. Often, when something of a particularly eroding nature seems to be preying on his mind, a shadow of gaunt consternation will fall across his fragile, fine features, a stricken look of transfixing amazement, as though he is troubled deeply by the fact that he is troubled at all.

  He hardly seems altogether at ease anywhere but at home, although he has always laughed a great deal when with people he knows. He makes jokes. He has wit and a talent for giddy and imaginative tricks. They are mainly verbal, always harmless, usually successful by one light or another. He seeks safety and invisibility in humor. (I do too. I find it in sex, which is always humorous too.) And he labors industriously to surround himself inside a womblike atmosphere of compassion and good spirit and survive there eternally (like the me I really think I am, I think, swaddled cunningly inside my cocoon, hiding secretly in a foxhole no one knows is there), dissembling, peeping out guardedly nearly all the time (one part of me anyway) to reassure himself (myself) that our outer shell of protection is still there and intact (and we are there and intact too), recoiling hastily (searching in horror for some unobstructed avenue of escape, I am sure, and searching in horror in vain) when we spy or think we spy any omen of any hazard of puncture, deflation, and disintegration. (He is upset by basketball, which he does not understand.) His impulse always is to be endearing; he wants no enemies, dislikes disagreements, and does not enjoy competition. He feels least in jeopardy when everyone around him is happy and sated with contentment (he feigns complete indifference to Derek when we let him and tries to pretend he is able to ignore him); he feels most in jeopardy in proximity to somebody sullen or someone manifesting anger, especially me. (He is as much afraid of me at times, I believe, as he is of any sullen stranger glaring to himself in a cafeteria, or even as he is of Forgione, or Forgione's assistant, with their demands for rope climbing, chinning, tumbling, pushups, and basketball games that my little boy finds impossible to do well and baffling to understand.) He is the only member of my household who hesitates to come into my study to interrupt me. (He is even too diffident to come inside to say good night to me at bedtime, though I keep asking him to do so and keep assuring him that I will not mind.

  "Good night," he will call out to me from the hallway, keeping himself so deeply withdrawn that I will be unable to see him when I turn my head and look up, and recede skittishly into his own room unless I call right back: "Good night. Come in here a minute. Will you?")

  Unless I make him. Once I do make him step inside my study to talk to me, we have little to say to each other. He brings a barrier with him. Or I have one of my own. But I do want to talk to him. We have nothing to talk about. I have to search for questions. He is unresponsive. He makes me interrogate him; he gives one-word replies. I think he knows I am not really interested in answers to the questions I ask him--he seems cross and stubborn with me for even trying.

  He is wary of strange men with mean, sinister faces and of wild-eyed men and women in the street who talk out loud explosively to themselves. (He keeps an eye out for them always. Many of them use such filthy language.) He is unnerved by erratic behavior of any kind (even mine when I'm drunk or kidding around in certain ways in public or with his friends. He prefers me to remain dignified when other people are around). If I do lose my temper with my wife or my daughter, or if one or the other of them begins shouting at me, my boy is apt to continue fretting over our abrupt motions and cruel threats and accusations long after the argument has ended and the rest of us are back on favorable terms. My wife and I make endeavors now not to quarrel in front of the children, mainly because of the bad effect our fights have on him (and the salubrious effect they generally have on my daughter. They cheer her up. My daughter will come sniffing up avidly whenever she scents the elements of a marital quarrel brewing and will often gratuitously, and shrewdly, supply the remark needed to make it erupt, although she will sometimes blanch and shrink out of sight in dismay if the outbursts she had hurried up so enthusiastically to observe, and so hopefully to participate in, turn more vicious and hurtful than she could have envisioned. There were times, in large, noisy, crowded cafeterias or restaurants near sports arenas, circuses, or shopping centers, or in hotel lobbies or railroad stations or other cavernous, ceilinged areas in which we found ourselves surrounded by strangers, when he would feel that someone there was glaring at him with hot fury and cold dislike, planning so
mething hurtful. He told me this; and sometimes he would describe and single out the person, always without daring to turn his own face around to look again. When I moved my own eyes swiftly to gaze at the man he was indicating, I was unable to be positive he was wrong. But I always told him he was imagining it. I did this to reassure him). He has a patient habit of mulling things over privately for long periods of time, roving through his mind in search of keys to secret riddles, and I am often unable to determine positively if he is indeed bogged down in something clutching and constraining or if he is merely relaxing and I am only imagining that he is in difficulty. (I make him enigmatic. I do not want my boy to be troubled by things he is unwilling to discuss with me, even if I am prominent among the things that are troubling him. I do not like him to keep things from me. I would like to know he confides in me. I would like to be certain he is eager to answer all my questions fully, even though his answers might be lacking in excitement and amount to little of interest to either of us. How can I know something he is thinking about is boring until I know what it is? I would like him to want to tell me everything he thinks of even before it occurs to me to ask. He is, after all, really my only son, and I think he should understand how much I need him.) He is a good-looking son, kind and inquisitive, and everyone likes him (or seems to. You never can tell with people. Although he can. I know I do). He has fine, sandy hair, a sense of humor impish and intelligent, and pale, slight shoulders and arms. He is not strong. He is slim. His health is good. (We are pleased with him. My daughter is pleased with him now too, although she used to be envious and nasty, and we all enjoy talking about him to others.) It is like pulling teeth from him sometimes to get him to complain. (We tend to think of him as happy and to diagnose his occasional episodes of disobedience, resistance, or distress as symptoms of fatigue or sore throat and fever or as normal lapses into tolerable, childish misconduct.) He is a good little boy and always has been. He is, as my wife or I reflect aloud with pride on occasions, almost too good to be true (and he isn't! Something's wrong, and I think I have always known it, although I have never been brave enough to say so or even to face the thought without diverging from it in haste. All my wife worries about is that he not grow up to be a homosexual, although there is not a single reason to suspect he will. I worry about that only a little.

  "He's being good just to spite me!" my daughter will allege impulsively in his presence during some of those playful or tempestuous disputes one or the other is always instigating, sometimes in humor, sometimes with virulence. "Nobody is that good all the time."

  "Lesbo," he retorts winningly.

  And we are all compelled to chuckle in affectionate appreciation, although my wife is not certain such language is appropriate in front of us or healthy or proper for either one of our children to use, or even know).

  But something is wrong, I think, although I have always kept my chilling doubts to myself (as though by not taking notice of anything unpleasant that might be emerging, it will go away. There are people who believe they cure their own cancers that way. My wife. Something bad is going to happen to him. I know that now. I know it will. And something bad is going to happen to me too, because it does happen to him. Perhaps it is happening to him already. I think it is. It started far back) with the foolish, unarticulated prayer that (primarily for my benefit, rather than his) it would heal itself adequately by and by and spare me the anguish and difficulty of having to deal with it, or at least that it would remain dormant and undetected by anyone else until I have lived out my allotted three score years and ten in joy, prosperity, and fullest contentment (ha, ha. And am dead, of natural causes) and can no longer be harmed by whatever tragedy it is that pains and cripples him severely (I can't stand pain) or strikes him down fatally. I am skeptical about my chances, for I have noticed that people tend to grow up pretty much the way they began; and hidden somewhere inside every bluff or quiet man and woman I know, I think, is the fully formed, but uncompleted, little boy or girl that once was and will always remain as it always has been, suspended lonesomely inside its own past, waiting hopefully, vainly, to resume, longing insatiably for company, pining desolately for that time to come when it will be safe and sane and possible to burst outside exuberantly, stretch its arms, fill its lungs with invigorating air, without fear at last, and call: "Hey! Here I am. Couldn't you find me? Can't we be together now?"

  And hiding inside of me somewhere, I know (I feel him inside me. I feel it beyond all doubt), is a timid little boy just like my son who wants to be his best friend and wishes he could come outside and play.

  On the positive side, he seems to be outgrowing his fear of bees, spiders, caterpillars, crabs, and jellyfish, he tells me, and I want very much to believe him.

  "I am," he repeats, insistently. "The last time I saw a bee I didn't even want to move away."

  "But were you afraid?" I question him closely. "Did the bee come near you?"

  "I was with someone," he admits.

  He is marvelous at math and good at science, but no longer cares to excel in either (to the chagrin of his teachers, who express disappointment with him. He is puzzled by their disapproval). Mixed in with all his confusion, I'm sure, is an unresolved Oedipal conflict of staggering dimensions and attendant horrifying castration fears (mine, of course), but he is still too young, ha, ha, to be bothered by any of that stuff now.

  He thinks (I think) that he is much smaller than he actually is. I think he thinks he is funny looking and disappointing and that we want to abandon him, take him somewhere far, and leave him there. For what reason we should want to do this he doesn't know; he doesn't say. (Maybe he believes we want to abandon him because we think he's too small. He isn't small. He is average, and only seems small in comparison to boys his age who are taller. He is a little small, and it's no use telling him he isn't.) It used to be that when we brought him someplace he had never been before, or even to certain places he had been, to somebody's home, or to a public place that was deserted or one that was noisy and crowded (dark or bright didn't matter. He didn't like crowds; he didn't like emptiness. Or the taking him there. Or taking him anywhere. When we went, he was not convinced we were going where we told him we were going until we got there and not sure when we were there that we intended to bring him back), he would maneuver craftily to keep his shoulder or hand against my wife or me, persevere at remaining in physical touch with one or the other of us, at least until he had scrutinized his surroundings and us to his satisfaction and concluded that the time had not yet come (that it was not yet the occasion of his doom. Sentence had already been passed. Only the moment of execution remained in doubt). He wants to hold on tight to what he knows he has (even though he is far from pleased by what he knows he has). He does not want to lose us. He does not want to be alone, not even at home, and usually leaves the door to his room open. He doesn't spend much time inside it. (He is disturbed when he comes upon doors to other rooms in the house that are closed. The door to my daughter's room is always closed, almost as a flamboyant gesture of spite. Ours may be open or closed. And evenings and mornings when my wife and I make love, or one of us thinks there's a possibility we might, it is closed. We don't feel we want anybody to watch. Group sex will never be for us.) He does not want to be with people he doesn't trust; and he does not trust people he has not known long. He does not always trust us. (So who else does he have?) He would take hold of our hands and be unwilling to let go. We were often embarrassed. We made him let go.

  "Let go," we would coax. "Let go of my hand. Please let go now."

  The blood would drain from his cheeks and lips (which would turn blue. His lips would take on a bluish tinge when he was very tense). He would tremble, swallow, and gag; especially if, after forcing him to let go, we then also forced him to go off somewhere alone to play or told him to sit in one place while we moved out of sight to another. He always hung back an instant with a sickened, pleading look whenever we told him to go off someplace and play. So we stopped. (He would
not want anyone to see his painful apprehension, even while baring it to us. We have stopped making him come with us to places he does not want to go. He has the choice of remaining home without us. My daughter is usually too busy now to devote much attention to him.) He is always saddened and disconcerted when one of our Black maids or white nurses leaves (even though he might not like her. He usually does not like them and wants no more to do with them than he has to). He feels we may be planning to get rid of him the same way.

  "Do you want to get rid of Derek?" he has asked.

  "No," I have lied.

  "Do you want to get rid of me?"

  "No. Why should we want to do that?"

  "Do you want to get rid of anyone?"

  "No."

  "People who work for you?"

  "No. Just one. Why should we want to get rid of you? You're too good."

  "Suppose I wasn't?"

  "You'd still be too good."

  "Sometimes," he confesses ruefully, with a soft (perhaps tricky) smile, "I dream at night that I'm all alone someplace and I don't know where to go. And I cry. When I wake up, my eyes are wet. Sometimes," he continues humbly, now that he has decided to tell, "I'm not even asleep when I have this dream."

  His look is sad when he finishes, and he waits in silence for my answer with a searching, sagacious air.