I took a seat at the top of the west balcony steps. One of the transit cops gave me a quick eyeball, but as I was now dressed for the part of respectable white-collar professional and was neither asleep nor visibly drunk, he left me alone. I took logistical stock of my surroundings. Grand Central was more than a train station; it was a principal nexus of the city’s substrata, its vast underground world of tunnels and chambers. People by the hundreds of thousands flowed through this place each and every day, most never looking beyond the tips of their own shoes. It was perfect, in other words, for my purpose.
I waited. The hours moved by, and then the days. No one seemed to notice me or, if they did, to care. Too much else was going on.
And then after some unknown interval of time had passed, I heard a sound I had not heard before. It was the sound that silence makes when there is no one left to listen. Night had fallen. I rose from my place on the steps and walked outside. There were no lights burning anywhere; the blackness was so complete I might have been at sea, miles from any shore. I looked up and beheld the most curious of sights. Stars by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions, locked in their slow turning above the empty world, as they had done since time’s beginning. Their pins of light fell upon my face like pattering drops of rain, streaming out of the past. I did not know what I was feeling, only that I felt it; and I began, at last, to weep.
15
And thus to my woeful tale.
Observe him, a capable young man of passable looks, slender and shaggy-haired, tan from a summer of honest outdoor work, good with math and things mechanical, not without ambition and bright hopes and possessing a solitary, inward-looking personality, alone in his bedroom beneath the eaves as he packs his suitcase of folded shirts and socks and underwear and not much else. The year is 1989; our setting is a provincial town named Mercy, Ohio—famous, briefly, for its precision brassworks, said to produce the finest shell casings in the history of modern warfare, though that, like much else of the town, is long faded. The room, which is to be unoccupied within the hour, is a shrine to the young man’s youth. Here is the display of trophies. Here are the soldier bedside lamp and matching martial-themed curtains; here the shelves of serial novels featuring intrepid trios of underappreciated teenagers whose youthful intellects enable them to solve crimes their elders cannot. Here, tacked to the neutral plaster walls, are the pennants of sports teams and the conundrumous M. C. Escher etching of hands drawing each other and, opposite the sagging single bed, the era-appropriate poster of the erect-nippled
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit model, beneath whose lubricious limbs and come-hither gaze and barely concealed pudenda the boy has furiously masturbated night after adolescent night.
But the boy: he undertakes his packing with the puzzled solemnity of a mourner at a child’s funeral, which is the scene’s appropriate analogue. The problem is not that he cannot make his belongings fit—he can—but the opposite: the meagerness of the bag’s contents seems mismatched with the grandeur of his destination. Tacked above his cramped little-boy’s desk, a letter gives the clue.
Dear Timothy Fanning,
it reads on elaborately decorated letterhead with a crimson, shield-shaped emblem and the ominous word
VERITAS
bespeaking ancient wisdoms.
Congratulations, and welcome to the Harvard class of 1993!
It is early September. Outside, an earthbound, misting rain, tinged by summer’s green, hugs the little hamlet of houses and yards and storefront commercial concerns, one of which belongs to the boy’s father, the town’s lone optometrist. This places the boy’s family in the upper reaches of the town’s constricted economics; they are, by the standards of that time and place, well-off. His father is known and appreciated; he walks the streets of Mercy to a chorus of amiable hellos, because who is more admirable and worthy of gratitude than the man who has placed the spectacles upon your nose that enable you to see the things and people of your life? As a child, the boy loved to visit his father’s office and try on all the eyeglasses that decorated the racks and display cases, longing for the day when he would need a pair of his own, though he never did: his eyes were perfect.
“Time to go, son.”
His father has appeared in the door: a short, barrel-chested man whose gray flannel trousers, by gravitational necessity, are held aloft by clip-on suspenders. His thinning hair is wet from the shower, his cheeks freshly scraped by the old-fashioned safety razor he favors despite modern innovations in shaving technology. The air around him sings with the smell of Old Spice.
“If you forget anything, we can always send it to you.”
“Like what?”
His father shrugs amiably; he is trying to be helpful. “I don’t know. Clothes? Shoes? Did you take your certificate? I’m sure you’ll want that.”
He is speaking of the boy’s second-place award in the Western Reserve District 5 Science Day competition. “The Spark of Life: Gibbs-Donnan Equilibrium and Nernst Potential at the Critical Origin of Cell Viability.” The certificate, in a plain black frame, hangs on the wall above his desk. The truth is, it embarrasses him. Don’t all Harvard students win first prize? Nevertheless, he makes a show of gratitude for being reminded and places it atop the pile of clothing in the open suitcase. Once in Cambridge, it will never make it out of his bureau drawer; three years later, he will discover it beneath a pile of miscellaneous papers, regard it with a quick, bitter feeling, and pitch it into the trash.
“That’s the spirit,” his father says. “Show those Harvard smarties who they’re dealing with.”
From the base of the stairs, his mother’s voice ascends in an insistent song: “Tim-o-thy! Are you ready yet?”
She never calls him “Tim”; always it is “Timothy.” The name embarrasses him—it feels both courtly and diminutive at the same time, as if he were a little English lord on a velvet cushion—though he also secretly likes it. That his mother vastly prefers him to her husband is no secret; the reverse is also true. The boy loves her far more easily than he loves his father, whose emotional vocabulary is limited to manly pats on the back and the occasional boys-only camping trip. Like many only children, the boy is aware of his value in the household economy, and nowhere is this value more lofty than in his mother’s eyes.
My Timothy,
she likes to say, as if there are others not hers; he is her only one.
You are my special Timothy.
“Haaa-rold! What are you doing up there? He’s going to miss the bus!”
“For Pete’s sake, just a minute!” He returns his eyes to the boy. “Honestly, I don’t know what she’s going to do without you to worry about. That woman’s going to drive me crazy.”
A joke, the boy understands, but in his father’s voice he detects an undertone of seriousness. For the first time he considers the full emotional dimensions of the day. His life is changing, but his parents’ lives are changing, too. Like a habitat abruptly deprived of a major species, the household will be wrenched into realignment by his departure. Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are; for eighteen years he has experienced their existence only insofar as it has related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he’s not around? What secrets do they hold from each other, what aspirations have been left to languish? What private grievances, held in check by the shared project of child rearing, will now, in his absence, lurch into the light? They love him, but do they love each other? Not as parents or even husband and wife but simply as people—as surely they must have loved each other at one time? He hasn’t the foggiest; he can no more grasp these matters than he can imagine the world before he was alive.
Compounding the difficulty is the fact that the boy has never been in love himself. Though the social patterns of Mercy, Ohio, are such that even a modestly attractive person can find opportunities in the sexual marketplace, and the boy, although a virgin, has been from time to time its beneficiary, what he has experienced is merely love’s painless presage, the expression without the soul. He wonders if this is a lack within himself. Is there a part of the brain from which love comes that in his case has drastically malfunctioned? The world is awash in love—on the radio, in movies, in the pages of novels. Romantic love is the common cultural narrative, yet he seems immune to it. Thus, though he has yet to taste the pain that comes with love, he has experienced pain of a different, related sort: the fear of facing a life without it.
They meet the boy’s mother in the kitchen. He expects to find her dressed and ready to go, but she is wearing her flowered housecoat and terry-cloth slippers. Through some unspoken agreement it has been determined that his father alone will accompany him to the station.
“I packed you a lunch,” she declares.
She thrusts a paper sack into his hands. The boy unfolds the crinkled top: a peanut butter sandwich in waxed paper, cut carrots in a baggie, a pint of milk, a box of Barnum’s Animal Crackers. He is eighteen: he could devour the contents of ten such bags and still be hungry. It’s a meal for a child, yet he finds himself absurdly grateful for this small present. Who knows when his mother will make him lunch again?
“Do you have enough money? Harold, did you give him any cash?”
“I’m fine, Mom. I have plenty from the summer.”
His mother’s eyes have begun to pool with tears. “Oh, I said I wouldn’t do this.” She waves her hands in front of her face. “Lorraine, I said, don’t you dare cry.”
He steps into her warm embrace. She is a substantial woman, good to hug. He breathes in the smell of her—a dusty, fruit-sweet aroma, tinged with the chemical scent of hair spray and the off-gassing nicotine of her breakfast cigarette.
“You can let him go now, Lori. We’re going to be late.”
“Harvard. My Timothy is going to Harvard. I just can’t believe it.”
The ride to the bus station, in a neighboring town, takes thirty minutes along rural highways. The car, a late-model Buick LeSabre with a soft suspension and seats of crushed velour, makes the roadway beneath them seem vague, as if they are levitating. It is his father’s one self-indulgence: every two years a new LeSabre appears in the driveway, all but indistinguishable from the last. They pass the last houses and ease into the countryside. The fields are fat with corn; birds wheel over the windbreaks. Here and there a farmhouse, some pristinely kept, others in disrepair—paint flaking, foundations tipping, upholstered furniture on the porches and abandoned toys in the yards. Everything the boy sees touches his heart with fondness.
“Listen,” his father says, as they are approaching the station, “there’s something I wanted to say to you.”
Here it comes, the boy thinks. This impending announcement, whatever it is, is the reason they’ve left their mother behind. What will it be? Not girls or sex; apart from one awkward conversation when he was thirteen, the subject has never been raised. Study hard? Keep your nose to the grindstone? But these things, too, have already been said.
His father clears his throat. “I didn’t want to say this before. Well, maybe I did. I probably should have. What I’m trying to say is that you’re destined for big things, son.
Great
things. I’ve always known that about you.”
“I’ll do my best, I promise.”
“I know you will. That’s not really what I’m saying.” His father hasn’t looked at the boy once. “What I’m saying is, this isn’t the place for you anymore.”
The remark is deeply unsettling. What can his father intend?
“It doesn’t mean we don’t love you,” the man continues. “Far from it. We only want what’s best.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The holidays, okay. It wouldn’t make sense for you not to be here for Christmas. You know how your mother is. But otherwise …”
“You’re telling me you don’t want me to come home?”
His father is speaking rapidly, his words not so much spoken as unleashed. “You can call, of course. Or we can call you. Every couple of weeks, say. Or even once a month.”
The boy has no idea what to make of any of this. He also detects a note of falsehood in his father’s words, a manufactured rigidity. It is as if he’s reading them off a card.
“I don’t believe what you’re saying.”
“I know this is probably hard to hear. But it really can’t be helped.”
“What do you mean, it can’t be helped? Why can’t it be?”
His father draws a breath. “Listen, you’ll thank me later. Trust me on that, okay? You might not think so now, but you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. That’s the point.”
“That’s not the goddamned point!”
“Hey, let’s watch the language. There’s no reason for that kind of talk.”
Suddenly the boy is on the verge of tears. His departure has become a banishment. His father says nothing more, and the boy understands that a border has been reached; he’ll get nothing more from the man.
We only want what’s best. You’ve got your whole life.
Whatever his father is actually feeling lies hidden behind this barricade of clichés.
“Dry your tears, son. There’s no reason to make a mountain out of a molehill.”
“What about Mom? Is this her idea, too?”
His father hesitates; the boy detects a flash of pain on the man’s face. A hint of something genuine, a deeper truth, but in the next instant it’s gone.
“You don’t have to worry about her. She understands.”
The car has come to a halt; the boy looks up, amazed to discover that they’ve arrived at the station. Three bays, one with a bus awaiting; passengers are filing aboard.
“You’ve got your ticket?”
Speechless, the boy nods; his father extends his hand. He feels like he’s being fired from a job. When they shake, his father squeezes before he does, mashing his fingers together. The handshake is awkward and embarrassing; they’re both relieved when it’s over.
“Go on now,” his father urges with false cheer. “You don’t want to miss your bus.”
There is no rescuing the moment. The boy gets out, still clutching his paper sack of lunch. It feels totemic, the last vestige of a childhood not so much departed as obliterated. He hoists his suitcase from the trunk and pauses to see if his father will emerge from the Buick. Perhaps in a gesture of last-minute conciliation the man will carry his bag to the bus, even send him away with a hug. But no such thing happens. The boy advances to the bus, places his bag in one of the open bays, and takes his place in line.