Daylight

  “My point is this,” he said. “I’m not religious or superstitious. I walked into all this with the lowest possible expectation of anything significant happening here. I mean … huge things have happened to me, but they didn’t have any significance. But now I know something funny is going on.”

  Daniel watched the tourist. He saw the young man’s throat moving hard as he swallowed. Daniel thought of his friend in Montreal, who had once accused him of only being able to show affection to the elderly. Father Neske had taunted Daniel, accused him of gerontophilia, and then said, “But I’m putting your lacks in a far too loving light. If it was gerontophilia, at least it would be some kind of erotic instinct, but you don’t feel anything; you don’t even feel—as I did when I was a young priest—afraid of beautiful young people. No, you’re unmoved and fastidious and … and I pray for you, Daniel.”

  Daniel gave his hand to the tourist, who took it. Daniel asked him for his name.

  “Bad,” the tourist said, then laughed. “My girlfriend once pointed out that I introduce myself to women by my given name, Brian, and to men by my nickname. Brian ‘Bad’ Phelan.” The tourist pumped Daniel’s hand. “But, Father, what do you think? Tell me—isn’t something funny going on?”

  Daniel said that it did look that way, but he thought that it lacked conclusive evidence—not evidence that would prove that things really were “funny” but evidence that would finally let Bad conclude that these strange events made sense of a statistically unusual but otherwise normal sort. Then Daniel told Bad a story.

  A few years earlier, Daniel had been fortunate to be in Paris and to have a few hours free. He had taken a walk to Notre Dame, passing through the Marais, where he happened to see an albino, remarkable in itself, but what was even more remarkable was that in the next street he saw another. “A coincidence, I thought. Then, a few minutes later, I saw a third albino. This shook me. Three albinos in one day, in one hour! It felt like a sign, something God was showing me. I walked on wondering what it all meant when—lo!—another albino. Oh, I thought, coming down to earth. It’s a conference. So you see, at this moment you’re sure that you’re facing a conspiracy, you’re seeing signs, but it’ll turn out to be a conference.”

  Bad Phelan sat blinking at Daniel. Then he asked, “Was it?”

  “Actually, I don’t know. I didn’t find out.”

  “So perhaps it was a sign,” Bad said. “Only God overplayed His hand.” Bad sat smirking for a moment, then blushed and said, “Sorry, Father.”

  Daniel was amused and showing a friendly face but was thinking of Thomas à Kempis: “Be rarely with young people and strangers.” He didn’t say anything to encourage the young man to talk more, and they sat in silence for the rest of the journey. He took refuge from intimacy in Thomas à Kempis. But Daniel knew that his detachment was less a product of his reverence for the life of the mind or of the novitiate’s process of emotional sterilization than of his childhood and its strange difficulties.

  Daniel’s grandmother had run a boardinghouse in old Montreal—which was, in the mid-sixties, a grimy ill-lit area nibbled by demolition, a moth-eaten map of historical ruins and rubble-filled lots, their redevelopment stopped by timely preservation orders. In 1965, when Daniel was six, the restoration hadn’t yet begun. His grandmother was charging what she could for her rooms, but the wharves were already being slowly depopulated by the fast turnaround times on the new container ships. Half the boardinghouse was empty and succumbing to the diseases of old age, its pressed tin ceilings covered in sores and weeping rusty water, its wallpaper coming away in air-filled blisters. Daniel’s grandmother explained to Daniel why he couldn’t have one of those—whatever it was he fancied, a packet of balloons or a nodding dog or a new book-bag: “We’re living hand to mouth.” But she was always pulling his hands down from his mouth, saying, “You don’t want to be like your mother.”

  Grandma looked after Daniel and his mother. Daniel’s mother talked all the time, so he wasn’t good at listening. Grandma was always having to lead him to the basin to wash his hands. “Didn’t you hear me?” she’d say. Daniel did try, but he had trouble hearing adult voices, and before he went to school, when Grandma was busy and the house was well populated, he was confined to the top floor with his mother. Then sentences with “you” or “I” in them would begin to sound odd and striking to him. It was a strangeness he was able to recognize as a strangeness in himself, even as a small child. His mother had her ways, but they didn’t seem to work for him. Grandma’s ways worked, and when he went to school he was shy but compliant, because it was all right, because Grandma made his lunch and when he reported to her to receive it she would give him “a lick and looking over” before he went out the door. Daniel was good at school and from the start always did more than he needed, forged forward through textbooks and assigned reading and revised his spelling. After school he’d settle with his homework in his grandmother’s big back kitchen. Grandma didn’t want him bothering the lodgers. She wanted him where she could see him. She’d take his hands off his face or out of his hair if he started to scratch. She threatened him with his mother—who was in the attic at that moment, in her “studio,” making lampshades from papier-mâché. She’d made five already, but for each Daniel and his grandmother had endured three days of talk on technique. Daniel’s mother’s imagination was ambitious and planning and populated by practical solutions to perceived problems. But Grandma had learned long ago, and Daniel was to learn, that whether you listened or not, advised or not, it was with the same result—that is, no result. Daniel’s mother would simply rather tell people what she planned to do than do it. She wanted to be admired. She needed a go-ahead like others needed air, a whole hermetic green-lit environment, in which she was told, “Yes, do it,” in which she had endless encouragement, and in which she would never advance. While Daniel did his homework and more, his mother planned and pottered and pulled out her eyelashes and ate them.

  “You don’t want to be like your mother,” Grandma said. “I’m sure she has a ball of hair inside her.”

  But Mother didn’t eat the whole hair, said Daniel, only bit off its root. He picked up the scallions and showed his grandmother how his mother bit off the bulb of each hair she pulled. And she was systematic, would never denude her browbone and eyelids at the same time. It was as if she were rotating crops.

  Then Grandma would give him a sharp look and say, “You’re very clever, Daniel, but too cold. You shouldn’t examine her like that. You must try not to mind her … because she’s afflicted.”

  Daniel did try. It was his first exercise in “Custody of the Senses.” He put his mother out of his mind—he was able to tune out her loud, toneless, repetitive talk, unless he was trying to read. He gave up reading. He sat idle. Or, sometimes during the day, he’d stand on a chair on the table in their sitting room and take out the lightbulb, give it a sharp shake till the filament broke, then replace it. When evening came and the light wouldn’t work he could go to bed early. He’d pull the curtains around his bunk and listen to his mother wind down in his absence—silence alone wasn’t enough.

  They all went to church. Daniel’s grandma was religious—she enjoyed her faith. Mother went to church, too, and Grandma and Daniel would try their best to impose stillness on her. She could stay still if she had to, if she could be made to recognize the necessity as a necessity and not a meaningless imposition. The old woman and child would sit, absolutely still and straight-backed, facing the front and would will her into silence. It would work, for most of the service, and when Grandma was still alive his mother wouldn’t do things like get up out of the pew to get more comfortable by pulling her perishing underpants out of her crack. You didn’t want her stirring herself like that. She claimed to have “no sense of smell,” certainly couldn’t be made to see the virtue of a regular wash. In fact, Daniel’s mother couldn’t be made to see the virtue of anything. What others did, and expected her to do, was all tyranny and imposition.
>
  Daniel had confided all this, finally, to the old man, his only real friend, a month after his ordination, when he had visited the seminary at Saint Paul before taking up his position teaching at Loyola. Father Neske was then nominally employed minding and mending the seminary’s sports equipment and skimming its pool. Father Neske had taught history at Daniel’s high school, but he’d had a breakdown and had retired from teaching. He was Daniel’s inspiration, and it was his terminal initials, S.J., that first made Daniel hanker to join that family, that brotherhood. The old man was charming, sardonic, at ease. Daniel chose him as a model, and after his twelve years’ training it was to Father Neske that Daniel came to check himself, to check his appearance. The old man was a mirror—Daniel felt—in which he might finally admire himself.

  Daniel talked to Father Neske. He took off his jacket and helped Neske move the vaulting horse and parallel bars. He told the old man about the boardinghouse and the back pew of Notre Dame de Bon Secours. He explained what had formed him. He said that Father Neske mustn’t imagine that they’d had no friends. Grandma had friends. She cultivated the people who had shown her daughter kindness, her daughter’s former schoolmates, old neighbors, other “artists.” These were the people who would drop in and swallow a small dose of Daniel’s mother’s choking output of talk. They came and sat, eyes glazed, over Grandma’s cakes and tea while Daniel’s mother told them what she was up to, up to despite the hindrance of superficial people and silly social institutions. “Most people think …” she’d begin; then, twenty minutes later, “It’s true, isn’t it?” she’d conclude, without any modification in address between different listeners, sometimes even producing exactly the same speech, the same words, in the same word order. When her program changed it was on its own timetable. Those who came learned not to interrupt. They were kind and quiet; they helped Grandma wash up (Daniel’s mother never did, never thought to, never saw what others did for her, and, ever consistent, never missed it when it wasn’t done). The visitors bore it; they put in an hour or two for the sake of some life or charm or possibility they’d seen once in Daniel’s mother. Or, perhaps, because of erroneous beliefs they had, about giftedness and eccentricity, genius and egocentricity. They kept faith; they said to Daniel’s grandma, “Someday she’ll surprise you. There’s so much she can do.” As if Daniel’s grandmother hadn’t already been greatly surprised to see her funny, gnomic, inventive child become diffuse, defensive, slovenly.

  Daniel’s mother moved to the beat of a different drum, the friends said, in congratulation and in consolation. And—when Daniel’s grandmother died—the same friends were considerate of Daniel’s mother’s rights, her independence. They didn’t interfere. They stopped visiting—wouldn’t come to clean up after her or to have their advice go unheard, their concern met by hostility. They told themselves that Daniel was decently fed and she never hit him, that he didn’t need to be rescued from a parent who was, after all, only unconventional.

  “They were good liberals,” Daniel said to Father Neske’s turned back as the old man plied a wide bristle broom across the scuffed gymnasium floor. “Child Welfare wasn’t to be trusted; they were an extreme measure—something like ‘armed force’—only for abusive parents, not loving, eccentric, incompetent ones.”

  “Yes, I see,” Father Neske said.

  Daniel’s grandmother died when he was eight. His mother thought that there were things the doctors could have done and hadn’t. She went to the library and took out books on her mother’s condition. She made notes and formulated arguments. She rehearsed her arguments on Daniel. She made photocopies of pages from pharmacology books; she inter-loaned books from other libraries; she requested her mother’s medical records under civil liberties laws. She told everyone she saw about her research. She found patient advocacy groups and subscribed to their newsletters and carried them with her on these visits—or into Daniel’s room to show him what she’d found. The newsletters had passages in emphatic italics. They capitalized “Western Medicine” just as Restoration writers had capitalized “Wickedness” and “Folly.” Daniel’s mother would underline the italics, would underscore certain words once, twice, or even three times.

  Grandma’s friends stopped coming—her best friend after an evening when she came and listened to Daniel’s mother’s summary of her research, a cyclone of indignation and resentment. The room got dark and no tea was offered. Daniel sat beside his grandmother’s friend. He wanted to support her, to help her through this. After an hour or so of unheard interjections, questions, soothing noises, the friend began to cry. She didn’t hide her tears but fished in her sleeve for a handkerchief and applied it to her eyes, blew her nose. Daniel’s mother went on, imperturbable. She didn’t see the tears—wasn’t prepared for them. Her mother’s friend wasn’t another person with feelings, grieving, too, but only the blur of a face in the dark kitchen turned her way.

  Daniel put his hand into the hand of his grandmother’s friend. She held him hard, squeezed his hand to show she knew he was there. Her touch—her cold, clammy hand and swollen knuckles—was to Daniel a sensation of magnificence, like a first sight of a mountain range or sunlit sea. It filled him up, inflated a space inside him to its fall size. But she let go and went home and didn’t come again, and nothing else ever appeared to fill the space that the old woman had made with her touch and her tears. In time a shell formed around that space, and it became something like one of those glass buoys found in antique shops. It was hard and empty, but it kept Daniel afloat.

  When Daniel’s grandmother died, Daniel’s mother turned the lodgers away. Mother and son lived in the whole house. Over the years the house filled with things Daniel’s mother might need for her artwork. Daniel would come home from school into darkness and dust, flammable staleness. He’d edge down the hallways sidelong, his back to the stacked newspapers. In the kitchen his mother would recite the best bits from the day’s paper. She might have shopped but not put the shopping away. Daniel would try to remember what he should do. Sometimes his mother would cook; sometimes he would. He forgot that dishes had to be done. The washing machine stopped working. Daniel’s mother washed his clothes by hand, but it was hard work and Daniel had to make his clean clothes last. His whites went gray or yellow. Kids at school moved their desks away from his. Daniel couldn’t smell himself; he went about in a capsule of his home: a musty, musky smell of sweat and piss and rancid food. The filth only became a problem when it moved, like the fat lice crowning his forehead at the end of their life cycle and falling out of his hair. His mother wept over the medicated shampoo. She wept over the Roach Motels, their poisonous litter—till they became part of her everyday, filled to capacity, no longer effective, brittle with age. She didn’t throw them away but simply bought more. She bought warfarin for the rats but was distressed by it. She saw the poison as a cloud in the house, an intelligent powder that would smuggle itself into their food. She washed her hands so often her skin cracked, and she locked Daniel in his room. The rats were supposed to run outside to die, driven by their thirst. But the house was sodden and there was always laundry left soaking for days in a soup of fermented soap, so the rats stayed indoors. They plunged in agony through the walls. One managed to run into the circuit behind an outlet and died there, died and cooked. Daniel and his mother went about for weeks with rags filled with powdered herbs pressed to their noses. The lights went, one by one, their Bakelite collars cracked and unable to hold the bulbs anymore. Daniel made his way about in the dark, his hand running across the fibrous, fraying walls of piled newspaper.

  Daniel had no peace at home, so didn’t mind that in the playground he was left to his own devices. He had a library card and borrowed as much as he was able to, meekly accepting the limits imposed. He read on the bus, using his bus pass as a bookmark. No one much bothered him. He read when his teeth kept him awake at night. He read under the desk in class. The teachers let him read, because he wasn’t disrupting the class and his grades were good. He was
a puzzle to them but no trouble, the egg-stained boy by himself at the back of the room, his head and jaw wrapped in a double thickness of dirty scarf, armored in his sour miasma. For Daniel his smell was silence, a barrier of bad air. Daniel’s eyes moved; he traveled the page. His mother had gone to the same school seventeen years before. And the community remembered her. No one asked the questions they should have. (“Why do you tear up your bread into tiny pieces? Why do you chip at your apple like a rodent, instead of chewing it?”) They turned away, blinded by disorder—the shame of it—and did nothing.

  Daniel’s mother didn’t stop talking. But one Saturday, when the library had closed, Daniel found a quiet, warm place near his home. A dark corner. He found the back pew of Notre Dame de Bon Secours. He would read there, on Saturdays and after school, till he got hungry; then he’d go home to see what he could find. Daniel came and went at Notre Dame de Bon Secours. No one spoke to him or asked him what his business was. Daniel might—he sometimes thought—have gone to the church throughout the winter and never been noticed and his whole life would have taken another turn—if it hadn’t been for the conjunctivitis.

  For weeks Daniel’s mother practiced her own remedies. She boiled water on the gas range to help bathe Daniel’s eyes open. Every morning he woke to find that overnight his eyes had been mortared shut with yellow crusts of what his mother called “sleepy dirt.” She tried the remedies she remembered her mother using—two eggcups fall of Epsom salts dissolved in warm water and held in his eye sockets. Daniel opened his eyes each morning and got himself off to school. But his teacher eventually sent him to the school nurse, who gave him a talk about hygiene and germs transferred from hands to nose to eyes. She wrote a note to his mother. At home his mother railed against the note and spent much of the night writing her own note in reply. She gave it to Daniel in the morning, a fat roll of pages fastened with a length of unbleached string, ends feathered and its knot covered by a blob of wax. She was showing off. Daniel didn’t want to deliver this missive, so for the first time he skipped school. He went to church and sat in his pew trying to read, trying to see the page through the cables of mucus strung between his upper and lower eyelashes.