My best . . .
“If it’s anything questionable or weird . . .”
No, it’s just the past. A past that I had tried to entomb long ago.
But here it was again, back to disturb an already troubled present.
“Wie bald ‘nicht jetz’ ‘nie’ wird.”
“How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never.’”
Until a package arrives . . . and everything you have spent years attempting to dodge comes rushing back into the room.
When is the past not a spectral hall of shadows?
When we can live with it.
TWO
I
’
VE ALWAYS WANTED
to escape. It’s an urge I’ve had from the age of eight onward, when I first discovered the pleasures of evasion.
It was a Saturday in November and my parents were fighting again. There was nothing unusual about this. My parents were always fighting. Back then we lived in a four-room apartment on Nineteenth Street and Second Avenue. I was a Manhattan kid, born and bred. My dad worked as a midlevel executive in an advertising agency—a “business guy” who wanted to be a “creative guy,” but never had the “word talent” to write copy. Mom was a housewife. The apartment was cramped. Two narrow bedrooms, a small living room, and an even smaller dinette/kitchen, none of which could contain the frustrations that both my parents vented on a daily basis.
It was only years later that I began to comprehend the strange dynamic that existed between them, a profound need to combust over anything, to live in an endless winter of discontent. But at the time all I knew was: my mom and dad didn’t like each other. On the November Saturday in question, an argument between them escalated. My father said something hurtful. My mother called him a bastard and fled into the bedroom. The door slammed behind her. I looked up from the book I was reading. Dad was gripping the front doorknob, no doubt wanting to pull it open and walk away from all this. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes and lit one up. A few deep inhalations of smoke and he got his rage under control. That’s when I posed a question I’d been wanting to pose for days.
“Can I go to the library?”
“No dice, Tommy. I’m heading into the office to catch up on some work.”
“Can I go alone?”
It was the first time I’d ever asked to leave the apartment by myself. Dad thought this over.
“You think you can walk there all by yourself?” he asked.
“It’s only four blocks.”
“Your mom won’t like it.”
“I won’t be long.”
“She still won’t like it.”
“Please, Dad.”
He took another long drag on his cigarette. For all his tough-guy bluster—he’d been a Marine during the war—he was in thrall to my mother, a diminutive, angry woman who could never get over the fact that she was no longer the princess she’d been raised to be.
“You’ll be back here in an hour?” Dad asked.
“I promise.”
“And you’ll remember to look both ways when crossing the street?”
“I promise.”
“If you’re late, there’ll be trouble.”
“I won’t be late, Dad.”
He reached into his pocket and handed me a dollar.
“Here’s some money,” he said.
“I don’t need money. It’s a library.”
“You can stop at the drugstore on the way back and get yourself an egg cream.”
Egg creams—milk and chocolate syrup topped up by soda water—were my favorite drink.
“They only cost a dime, Dad.” Even back then I was always cognizant of the price of things.
“Buy yourself some comics or put the change in your piggy bank.”
“So I can go?”
“Yeah, you can go.”
As I was getting into my coat, Mom emerged from the bedroom.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked me.
I told her. Immediately she turned on my father.
“How dare you give him permission to do that without first consulting me.”
“The kid is old enough to walk a couple of blocks by himself.”
“Well, I’m not allowing it.”
“Tommy, run along,” Dad said.
“Thomas, you’re to stay here,” she countered.
“Scram,” Dad told me. As Mom began to shout things at my father, I made a beeline for the door and was gone.
Once outside I felt a moment of fear. For the first time ever I was on my own. No parental supervision; no outstretched hand to guide, restrain, or discipline me. I walked to the corner of Nineteenth and Second. I waited for the light to turn green. I looked both ways many times. I crossed the street. When I made it to the other side, I didn’t feel a great sense of accomplishment or freedom. I was simply aware of the promise that I made to Dad to be back within an hour. So I continued north, exercising great prudence at every street crossing. When I reached Twenty-third Street, I turned left. The library was halfway up the street. The children’s section was on the first floor. I browsed the stacks, finding two new Hardy Boys detective books I’d yet to read. I checked them out, then hurried back to the street, retracing my steps home. Halfway there, I stopped at the drugstore on Twenty-first Street. I took a stool at the lunch counter and opened one of my books and ordered an egg cream. The soda jerk took my dollar and gave me ninety cents change. I looked at the clock on the wall. I still had twenty-eight minutes before I was due home. I nursed my egg cream. I read my book. I thought:
this is nice.
I made it home five minutes before the deadline. In the time that I was absent, my father had stormed out—and I found my mother sitting in the kitchenette with her big Remington typewriter in front of her. She was smoking a Salem and clattering away on the keys. Her eyes were red from crying, but she seemed focused and determined.
“How was the library?” she asked me.
“It was good. Can I go again on Monday?”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“What are you writing?” I asked.
“A novel.”
“You write novels, Mom?” I asked, really impressed.
“I’m trying to,” she said and continued tapping away. I adjourned to the sofa and read one of my Hardy Boys books. Half an hour later Mom stopped writing and told me that she was going to have a bath. I heard her pull paper out from the typewriter. As she disappeared into the bathroom and turned on the taps, I approached the dining table. She had left two manuscript pages facedown next to the typewriter. I picked them up. The first page just contained the title of the book and her name:
THE DEATH OF A MARRIAGE
A Novel
by
Alice Nesbitt
I picked up the next page. The opening sentence read:
The day I discovered that my husband didn’t love me anymore was the day that my eight-year-old son ran away from home.
Suddenly I heard my mother shout:
“How dare you!”
She came racing toward me, tight with rage. She pulled the pages out of my hand and slapped my face.
“You must never,
never
read my work.”
I burst into tears and ran into my room. I grabbed a pillow off my bed and did what I often did when things got out of hand at home: I hid in the closet, locking the door behind me. With the pillow clutched tight, I sobbed into it, overwhelmed by the feeling that I was all alone in a very difficult world. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes passed. Then there was a knock on the closet door.
“I’ve made you chocolate milk, Thomas.”
I said nothing.
“I’m sorry I slapped you.”
I said nothing.
“Thomas, please . . . I was wrong.”
I said nothing.
“You can’t stay in there all day, you know.”
She tried opening the door.
“Thomas, this is not funny.”
I said nothing.
“Your father will be very cross . . .”
Finally, I spoke:
“My father will understand. He hates you, too.”
This last comment provoked a terrible sob from my mother. I heard her stumble away from the door and head out of my room. Her crying escalated. It became so loud that, even from within my self-incarcerated lair, I could hear her weeping. I stood up and unlocked the door and opened it. Immediately I had to readjust to all the afternoon light cascading through the windows of my room. I followed the sound of Mom’s lament. She was lying facedown on her bed.
“I don’t hate you,” I said.
She continued crying.
“I just wanted to read your book.”
She continued crying.
“I’m going out to the library again.”
The crying instantly stopped. She sat up.
“Are you planning to run away?” she asked.
“Like the boy in your book?”
“That was make-believe.”
“I don’t want to run away,” I lied. “I just want to go back to the library.”
“You promise you’ll come home?”
I nodded.
“Be careful on the street.”
As I turned to leave, Mom said:
“Writers are very private about what they do. That’s why I got angry . . .”
She let the sentence die.
And I headed for the door.
Decades later, during our third date, I remember recounting this story to Jan.
“Did your mom ever finish the book?” she asked.
“I never saw her typing again. But perhaps she worked on it while I was at school.”
“Maybe’s there a manuscript hidden in some attic box somewhere.”
“I found nothing when Dad asked me to clear out all her stuff after she died.”
“And it was lung cancer that got her . . . ?”
“At the age of forty-six. Mom and Dad never stopped fighting and they never stopped smoking. Cause and effect.”
“But your father is still with us?”
“Yeah, Dad’s on his fifth girlfriend since Mom’s death and still puffing twenty a day.”
“And meanwhile, you’ve never stopped escaping.”
“More cause and effect.”
“Maybe you’ve just never found a good reason for staying put,” she said, covering my hand.
I just shrugged and didn’t reply.
“Now you have me interested,” she said.
“Everyone has an old ache or two.”
“True. But there are aches you can live with, and ones that seem to never fade away. Which is yours?”
I smiled and said:
“Oh, I live with most things.”
“And now you’re sounding far too stoic.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said and changed the subject.
Jan never did learn about that ache—as I always dodged discussions of it. In time, however, she did come to believe that it still impacted on the present and colored so much between us. Just as she also came to the conclusion that there was a significant part of me that was closed off to any real intimacy. But that analysis was reached some time down the road.
And on the next date—the night we also first slept together—I could see her deciding that I was . . . well,
different
. She was a lawyer, an associate at a major Boston firm. She earned her money representing big corporations but also insisted on handling one pro bono case per year “to salve my conscience.” Unlike me, she’d been in a long relationship, a fellow lawyer who took a job out west and used the move to end it between them.
“You think things are solid, then you discover otherwise,” she said. “And you wonder why your antennae didn’t pick up the fact that all was going wrong.”
“Maybe he was telling you one thing and thinking another,” I said. “Which is often the way these things happen. Everyone has a part of themselves they prefer not to reveal. It’s why we can never really fathom even those close to us. The unknowingness of others and all that.”
“‘And the most foreign place is the self.’ That’s a direct quote from your book on Alaska.”
“Well, I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I was flattered.”
“It’s a great book.”
“Really?”
“You mean, you don’t know that?”
“As I have the usual writerly distrust of anything I’ve ever committed to paper . . .”
“Why such incertitude?”
“It just goes with the territory, I suppose.”
“In my profession incertitude is not allowed. In fact, an uncertain lawyer is never trusted.”
“But surely you have a measure of uncertainty?”
“Not when I’m defending a client or making a closing argument. I have to be indisputable. In private, on the other hand, I’m unsure about everything.”
“Glad to hear that,” I said, covering her hand with mine.
That was the real start of things between us, the moment we both decided to let our defenses down and fall for each other. Is love often predicated on good timing? How often have I heard friends say that they got married because they were
ready
to get married? That was my dad’s story—and one that he related to me just after my mother died. And it went like this: