Seven Types of Ambiguity

  In part, this was due to the note. Mitch had left a note. In it he blamed his ex-wife, the Family Court, his former boss, Sam’s father, Donald Sheere, the character who ran the work retreat at which he was injured—he listed a cast of thousands. He blamed them all for what had befallen him, for what he was about to do. The cast included my father, and not as a bit player either. My father kept the note. He explains in the journal that he wanted to analyze it more carefully. He thought it might prove of some assistance if Mitch eventually came back to him for treatment. And if he didn’t, if he saw some other psychiatrist, it could be of value to him.

  When Gina didn’t receive any message of congratulations from my father after your acquittal, she assumed his silence was born of a rejected man’s injured pride. He, or maybe even you, should be so incredibly proud of me for the restraint I showed as I sat there, gripping one hand with the other, and Gina told me her sorry interpretation of his silence. What happened, what exactly happened, when, standing in the dock, you were referred to for the last time as “the prisoner” and asked by the judge’s associate to stand to take the jury’s verdict? I can imagine a courtroom in the city some twelve years ago filled to the gills with representatives of the media and members of the public who happened to be in the right place at the right time and just couldn’t believe their luck almost as much as they were not going to believe yours. I can easily imagine a packed room lined with wood paneling which has, since its construction, absorbed so many waves of anxiety and fear that it has lost the capacity to absorb those about to compete with the rising din from people whose excitement exceeds the level they are institutionally permitted to exhibit. It is here that you are led to the dock.

  The judge enters and everyone stands, then the jury enters and only you stand. The foreman of the jury—I’m assuming it was a man because had it been a woman, I’m sure Dad would have mentioned it—is asked if the jury has reached a verdict on all the charges. He says “Yes” and as each of the charges is put to him he responds, “Not guilty.” Were there gasps? Did your eyes moisten? Were your parents there? They must have been, surely? Did you want to shout or cry? I can even imagine you wanting to make some sort of speech or public declaration, a plea on behalf of pedantic, lying child stealers everywhere. I can imagine all and any of that, believe me. I wish I’d been there to see it. Really, I do. I really wish I’d been there, if not for the drama of the moment then at least to fly the flag, so to speak, to represent all the Klimas who couldn’t be there but without whom you would still be in prison.

  While I have no trouble imagining the day or even the hour of your acquittal, I cannot for the life of me, or of him, imagine why you didn’t insist that Gina call him. Did you have a drink with her? Did you go out and drink yourself spastic for three days straight only to find yourself hungover wearing the clothes you were wearing at the time of your arrest, at the time someone else’s six-year-old child was asleep at your feet?

  One can also imagine the period immediately subsequent to your release. Your family would have welcomed you back, at least briefly, although, from what I’ve read about them, and given the mud, the ignominy you’d traipsed through the house, the prodigal son’s welcome would’ve worn thin not long after the flashes from the cameras of the press waiting outside the court had faded. You left messages for Dad from your parents’ place, but he didn’t want to call you there. Well, he was reluctant to call you there. To your credit, you did set about trying to find Angelique. As for the clandestine meetings with Anna Geraghty, you know what my father made of that, don’t you? Maybe you don’t. But is this more or less what happened?

  That’s more or less the way Sam tells it, that part of it. Have you ever heard Sam’s version? You’d like it. He doesn’t spit it out, not exactly. It takes a while before he’s comfortable enough with someone new, but then it tumbles out of him like a chivalric romance of yore. I’m someone new. How do you do? We were going to meet sooner or later.

  9. Sam is quite uncharacteristically uncynical about the story of his mother, his still-young and beautiful mother and how she overcame convention in the public eye of a courtroom at the eleventh hour to save her childhood sweetheart, letting the loose renegade thread of her never-ending affection for you snare the yarn of her stultifying marriage and completely unravel it. The formal resurrection of the relationship between you and Anna and your subsequent renaissance, that part gets glossed over. Not so in the journal, where my father described the gradual beginnings of the reconciliation of Anna and you as “a marriage between your enduring obsession and her pragmatism.” Why pragmatism? Well, I’m guessing it’s because by the time you were acquitted, Sam’s father, Joe, had been all but destroyed in most respects, and whoever she’d really had waiting in the wings—the one Sam has always been permitted, even encouraged, to think was you—well, this white knight had slunk out the back with the chorus when the houselights were turned on again. And I’m not getting the part about Joe Geraghty, Sam’s dad, from the journal. I get that from Sam himself.

  You see, I’m the one you and his mother get to only hear about, the mysterious one you never meet. He stays over at his girlfriend’s place all the time. He’s even been away with her a couple of times for weekends yet you and Anna have never even met her. Now you know why, and I can tell you, it hasn’t been easy. He obviously never even knew you had a psychiatrist, and I wasn’t going to tell him, however much he could have benefited from an explanation. He’s very sweet, your stepson. He tries to appear detached about such things, but he’s not very good at it, which makes him all the more cute.

  He tries to pretend that he’s not in the least put out by the fact that, not only have I never shown the slightest interest in meeting the two of you, but I actively come up with excuses not to. I know it hurts him and, believe me, I hate doing anything that’s even remotely likely to hurt him but, given our family histories, I haven’t really felt I could.

  It’s actually your fault we met in the first place. It was your influence he says that got him to take psychology in his first year. What were you thinking? That’s not actually where I met him, but it’s where I became aware of him—initially as just a sweet, very good-looking young man who seemed most obviously uncomfortable only when he was having difficulty playing down his own earnestness. It was a very big class and at first I didn’t even know that the name, Sam Geraghty, which I’d seen a little above my own on various bulletin boards, belonged to him. That it did I learned later, without making any special effort, I might add. I’m human and that weakness sufficed. The academic year was ending and I think maybe we smiled at each other in doorways and corridors a few times. He says he doesn’t even remember that, but I don’t believe him. He’s a terrible liar. But I’m not.

  Was it really him, this man who looked so good in every sense of the word? It had been toward the middle of that year that I first read my father’s journal and learned about the Sam Geraghty my father’s patient had taken from school one afternoon twelve years earlier. Not that it really mattered to me whether he was the same Sam Geraghty or not. I liked the look of him anyway. So I couldn’t lose. That was my thinking. I’ll admit I was a little cavalier, I suppose, because I didn’t really think it was him. Of course, the realization after just a short conversation that he was Sam Geraghty did nothing to dampen my growing enchantment. I wanted to swallow him whole. Who could blame me? Pretty much anyone but you. You know what it is like to be so fueled by something that everything you do is an error waiting to be discovered.

  Before I knew it, it was the full-blown undergraduate courting catastrophe. We would lie beside each other on a couch or on the floor, and his past would take shape before my eyes as he spoke about it. Do you remember such a time? It seems to come when you’re still young enough to be telling it for the first time but already old enough to need to tell it. It comes around the time you and your lover regularly pretend to be nonchalant about each other’s nakedness, it comes around the time you laugh yourse
lves to tears in bed in the dark, singing the very worst pop songs of your shared youth, the more esoteric the better. Yes, you remember. You’re going to implore me to hang on to these memories with all my might. There’ll be no other time like this, right? Somewhere in all this we started filling in the dots of our lives for each other, as one does. Everyone has some story, right? But it’s very few people who get caught out not knowing that they’re getting it wrong. They’re getting their own story wrong, and they don’t realize it. Sam and I, we were never entirely strangers. I knew he had some of it wrong. You saw to that.

  He became quite confessional after a short time and I learned about his parents’ breakup and the alleged kidnapping, all of which I already knew the truth about, and I was kind of sad for him and a little disgusted with you and Anna for keeping up the lie all these years. Perhaps because my interest in his past was more than polite, he began to tell me about his troubled relationship with his father.

  He told me how, as a little boy, he had seen his father viciously assault someone by the swimming pool in the family’s backyard. He’d heard sounds coming from the back while he was inside. A photographer was trying to take pictures of him or the house for one of the tabloids. It was after you’d taken him. His mother tried to keep him from the window but he sneaked a look and then, when Anna apparently had to rush out to keep Joe from killing the guy, little Sam pulled back the curtains and watched the whole thing. He saw his father rain blows on the man, on the man’s face, with his fists. He remembered what he described as a sea of red. How does a small child process that, the sudden creation of a sea of red issuing from a man’s face as a result of the incessant hammering of the mallet at the end of each of his father’s trunk-like arms? He has dreamed about it, and not merely as a kid, but as an adult too. Did you, did Anna, think he would forget? But whatever you thought about their relationship, you still encouraged, pressured, Sam to see his father. “I love you, Sam, but I’m not your father,” you would say. Then Anna would chime in, “Yes, sweetheart, you only have one father. He loves you very much . . . in his own way.” Was that to assuage your guilt?

  He knew he had only one father. His father was the guy whose fists could turn a man’s face to liquid before a child’s horrified and disbelieving eyes. He was the one who had the suspended sentence hanging over his head for years after that assault. Was that what Anna meant by Joe loving Sam “in his own way”? I have no doubt that Sam grew up a little scared of him. Could you not see that or was it that you would let nothing stand in the way of a little time alone together without the boy? His father drank, enough for a little boy to notice. Didn’t anyone else notice? Then there was the bizarre succession of what Sam says Joe variously called “second,” “new,” or “other” mums. He says it was as though his father was getting them out of a catalogue, trying them out, then returning them. Did you know that from his bedroom in a few of the places Joe lived, Sam could hear his father and these women have sex on the other side of the wall and that for a long time he tried to pretend to himself it was the sound of cats outside his window? When he couldn’t fool himself any longer, he took to putting a pillow over his head and singing the pop songs of the day to himself till the final cry that signaled an at least temporary halt in his father’s desperate attempt to dull the pain that drove him to live like that.

  But for all the unpleasantness of one night a week and every second weekend with his father, the packaged food, the strained good humor, for all that Sam hated it, he felt guilty and even ashamed that he did. Joe was trying, and Sam knew that he was. It was just that his father completely failed to “get” him. From as far back as Sam can remember, his father never understood him, well before he was a teenager and was supposed to be misunderstood. It was as though the two of them weren’t related. Each birthday or Christmas, Joe would give him some elaborate and obviously expensive toy, which had the effect of rubbing his face in their failure to have any kind of relationship that was not simply one that went, however politely, through the motions. Sam would always pretend to like the gift, but he knew that Joe knew that he really didn’t. These gifts, sad bribes—call them what you will—would sit in boxes on the floor of the room allocated to Sam each time his father moved from one place to another. It got to where the boxes would overflow and the gifts would spill out onto the carpet and break under the feet of a little boy trying to find the bathroom in the dark, while in the next room his dad was attempting to fuck his way out of this year’s rented accommodation into a brighter future, a golden past, some heaven that did not resemble the way things actually were.

  Then there were the times when, fueled by drink, Joe would decide to share some insights with his boy, insights into Sam’s mother, and more often into you. He seemed to hold you responsible for pretty much everything except cholera, and particularly for the distance between him and Sam. In a way, there was something in this. It wasn’t that you or even Anna were turning Sam against him by speaking ill of him. Quite the opposite. Sam has spoken of how much the two of you would plead with him to go to Joe’s. But such is Sam’s affection and regard for you and, from what I’ve read of you in the journal, such is his emulation of you, that Joe, however obtuse he is, could not have but seen it. Sam is just too much like you and too little like his father. Or should I say that he’s more like Anna than he is like Joe? But the way my father tells it, if Sam is more like Anna than he is like Joe, at least in terms of Sam’s interests and his sensibility, it is because she has taken on so much of you. Am I unfair to her? Do I flatter you? Whatever the case, the things that made me fall for him—beyond his looks which, excepting his stature, clearly come from Anna—equally clearly do not come from Joe. How can I be so sure of this? Well, even apart from what Sam himself says, which, as we know, can be wrong, I’ve seen Joe Geraghty for myself. I’ll get to it. I promise.

  As far as I know, you and Anna exhibited a discretion Sam’s father and the new “mothers” could not be relied upon to match. Sam never heard the two of you writhing at night. If he ever did, he hasn’t mentioned it to me. But he heard you. You cried out in the middle of the night and the sound of your cries would wake him. It distressed him far more than the sounds from his father’s various bedrooms over the years. And it didn’t really help much when his mother explained why you cried out and from where the nightmares came, that they were a legacy of your time in prison. The explanation meant that there was no reason you should ever stop crying out in the night and it did more than this. It forced a critical re-examination of the myth he was inheriting, the myth of Anna and Simon. What does it say about his mother that she would let Simon, the Simon he loved more than his own father and that she too was always meant to have loved more than his father, rot in prison for even one day, let alone for however long it was? If his mother could abandon Simon while weighing up her options, who else could she abandon and under what circumstances? What would it take for his mother to abandon him? What if he stopped bringing home good marks? What if he didn’t practice the piano? I’m not saying these fears are your fault.

  As long as he heard you cry out in your sleep someone was going to have to explain the nightmares to him. And you were probably right to eventually disregard Anna’s advice not to write about your time in prison. I’m sure she genuinely thought writing about it would only bring it all back to you but since it had obviously never left you, and the book no doubt jump-started your academic career, I think we can safely say she was mistaken. She would have to admit that now, wouldn’t she? As ever, she was just trying to be practical. You really should have talked to someone professionally. In the absence of that, it makes sense to have written it all down. Wouldn’t Dad have said that?

  10. The question of Mitch’s intention exercised my father’s mind excessively. Mitch had taken too many pills in too short a space of time to continue living. That was straightforward; a conclusion reached by way of the empirical and quantitative side of medical science. “What was his intention, Dr. Klima?”
my father himself asked on many occasions as though he might respond, “Bear with me, will you? I’ll just go and look that up.” Had Mitch meant to kill himself? You bet he had. Dad knew it, at least in the same way, I suppose, that Gina knew that you did not have permission to take Sam to your home.

  But that wasn’t really knowing. That was only suspecting strongly. Other than by asking Mitch, and he didn’t want to talk to my father, how could he know? Through a note. One in four suicides leaves a note. That’s the average. The presence or absence of a note is indeterminative, of course, unless the note evinces an intention explicitly or implicitly. The note can just say “Good-bye.” That’s enough. It can attempt to explain. Few notes attempt to explain, and even fewer succeed in providing any real explanation. Usually they’re banal, which tends to make them, in their context, perhaps the most haunting documents imaginable. These are the ones written as though the suicide has just stepped out to buy some bread and milk and is leaving some hastily dashed-off instructions: take care, study hard, sorry for ducking out but it seemed like the best thing to do, I’ve fed the dog, so tired of this, be good to yourself.

  Virginia Woolf began the second of two suicide notes to her husband by exonerating him.

  Dearest,

  I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done.

  Please believe that.

  But you probably already knew that.

  Mitch had written a note. If the attempt was genuine you have to think about the mind of the man whose last act of communication with the world was a note like his. How much anger must he have had inside him to write, not to his son—he had a son—but to the world at large, excoriating just about everybody he’d ever known and blaming them for his problems. On the other hand, it might not have been a genuine attempt. It might have been a cri de coeur. He hadn’t answered his phone for weeks. He’d left his front door open. Perhaps he was counting on somebody, it could even have been my father, finding him in time as he lay there in his new pajamas.