The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (34 page)

I woke with the most profound sense of regret, I told Carolyn. She asked me why, and I said I felt a fierce longing for my father. A terrible sadness that he hadn’t been there. That I blamed him.

“For what?” she asked.

“For not protecting me!” I blurted.

She nodded, and we sat with that for some time. I was shaken by the admission, the words, that had leapt from my mouth. I felt what I’d said to be absolutely true. And then, not true. Did I really want my father (or mother) to have saved me from the way things happened? The way things are. The way I turned out? I can’t lay that at their feet. I said to Carolyn, “I’m not sure what the truth is. I feel I want to have been protected, but from what? From knowledge? From what would be my own life? This is who I am. The blame, the regret feels . . . useless.”

Then she said, “Remember when you suggested that everyone in your dream may actually be you?”

“Including the man with the steady arm,” I said, my voice suddenly breaking. I had the greatest desire to go to sleep right there on Carolyn’s blue couch. “This stuff is bottomless,” I said to her.

“It’s complex,” she said.

“What are we doing here, do you think, on earth?”

She smiled her calm smile.

“Sometimes,” I said to her one snowy day, “I think about finding him. Facing him, if he’s still alive. I’ve started so many letters to him, never finished, never sent.”

“What do you think you’d want from a meeting?”

“I’m not sure. It’s this feeling that I want to lay eyes on him, bring him down to scale. To see the evidence of the story, maybe? To show him I’m a person. See if he remembers me? If I mattered? If he’s sorry? Maybe it’s having a chance to say something I couldn’t then, a way to put my arm around twelve. You know?”

“You’ll know when the time is right, if you’re meant to find him. When you have more clarity about what you want to say and how to do it while taking care of yourself. Give some thought to what you would want from such a meeting.”

I thought about it, off and on, for four more years.

I
REMEMBER THE
muddy snowdrifts melting along the curbs of Cabrini Boulevard. The winter of 2002 was warming to an end. I recall I was to meet Henry later that day at the fountain at Lincoln Center to go to a movie. I was planning a trip west, I remember, to see Dad in Vegas, friends in Los Angeles. A trip I managed to make about once a year. But why it happened after all this time on this particular day in this particular year that I finally wrote him a letter, I do not know. Maybe it was watching the painful Catholic sex abuse scandal explode in Boston and erupt across the country. Maybe that was a catalyst. Perhaps it was the writing I’d been doing and my own revelation that thirty years to the day since I’d met him was fast approaching. Perhaps, without my knowing, something had shifted inside and I was ready. I struggled still with anxiety and compulsions but in so many ways my life was flourishing. I was working steadily, Henry and I were happy. Bob would pop, now and again, into my head. A jab, a nuisance.
I wonder if he’s alive? What would it be like to see him? Would that put an end to it? To thinking about him?

The letter to him felt like a whim, though I’m sure that fate played its part. It was as if I suddenly recalled I had a dentist appointment and I dug from my wallet the crumpled little business card. The card I had never misplaced. Heart pounding (will it ever be thus?) I walked to the phone in the bedroom and dialed him. I got the recorded voice of an operator.
I’m sorry, the number you have
reached is no longer in service
. I checked information, nothing, no sign of him. He’s gone, I figured. Moved or since died. Lost. I’d waited too long. I’m not meant to find him. Just as well. I had never come to any conclusion about what I wanted from such a meeting, anyway. What in the world would I say to him? I was about to toss the useless card into the trash but instead ripped a page from a notebook and scribbled.

I addressed and sealed the envelope and wrote in large letters,
Please Forward
. And on my way out the door to an audition I slipped it, hurriedly (absentmindedly, it seemed), into the small box in the lobby of our building. As the flap snapped closed I thought, well, at least you finally tried. By the time I was halfway down the block moving toward the A train, I’d forgotten the letter.

Until the moment, a few weeks later, driving down the Hollywood Freeway, when my cell phoned bleeped and I pressed voicemail. It was then that I recalled I’d actually sent the note.
My God
, I thought, as I listened to the tired words of an old man—“I would dearly love to see you.”
My God. It’s him
.

A
PRIL
4, 2002. We have just stepped outside the Veterans Hospital. I’ve finally clicked on the tape recorder; I feel it buzzing, proof in my pocket that this whole thing is happening. There’s not a cloud in the sky and we move to the shade of a palm tree—me on a bench, Bob in his wheelchair. I am so aware of the face-off, of all my grown-up effort, my thousands in therapy, for this: to be frank. As I am about to speak, a little brown sparrow arrives, flutters close to Bob’s head, and disappears. Then he says,

“I must have read your letter a dozen times to try and see . . .”

“What I wanted?”

He nods, then looks down at his hands clasped tightly in his lap. “To try and see your state of mind, I guess. I fix up old cars for a living. Can’t work much anymore.” He gestures toward the bandage on his partly amputated foot. “Lost my lease.” His right hand becomes a fist now, which he’s squeezing around his left index finger. It makes me think of a little boy who’s got to pee bad. He looks up and says, “I mean, if you’re thinking of suing me, I don’t have anything.”

His lips lift with a hint of a grin, his eyes saying:
your move
, and I wonder if he’s joking. But then I think, no, he’s worried. It’s all over the papers, isn’t it? Younger men like me, nailing older ones like him, seeking answers, damages.

“Look, I’m not here for that,” I tell him.

He unclasps his hands. “It was my fault,” he says, grabbing the arms of his wheelchair. “When you called me all those years ago, I didn’t have words. Mentally . . . I still don’t have the words . . . mentally it’s like I was the same age as you. But, I have to take it on my shoulders.”

This strikes me as a sentence from his psychiatrist.

“It was your fault. You were the adult and I was a child and I did not have consent to give.” I feel a sudden heat beneath my sternum, like the breath of the twelve-year-old I’m here to represent, as if he’s in there saying:
Yeah, that’s good. Say that, get me off the hook, please
. “I . . . I wanted to help you. You were such a gentle soul,” Bob says.

“Soul?” I say. “My soul? You went for me the very first chance you had. Didn’t even wait for a second date.” He seems (chooses?) not to hear this remark.

“Mentally you were way ahead of the other boys. You were special.”

“Now
that
I hate. What does that mean,
special?
How many specials can you have, Bob?”

He holds up a hand and says, “There were others, I admit. But not like you. You were so curious about things but you were afraid and . . .”

“Afraid? What do you mean?”

“Well,” he says, “you were kind of wimpy.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t say that to me!”

“No, I mean you were shy and I wanted to teach you about the land and animals and help you gain confidence. And you did.”

I want to disown it but it flashes through me that with this guy: I rafted a river, I watched a calf being born, cleared a field, conquered a glacier, learned a Hereford from a Holstein, a spruce from a cedar.

“I watched you grow to be a young man.”

“Yeah, you did, didn’t you.”

“There were lots of levels to what we shared,” he says, dropping his head again.

The brown sparrow is back, circling the crown of Bob’s head as if tracing a halo. As if it might land. Bob is slumping there, his silver head shimmering in the California sun, completely unaware, it seems, of the bird, and I wonder, in some Catholic way, if the creature bears a message from On High.
Be gentle
, the fluttering spirit seems to say,
I’ve come to bless him to whom you speak
. Then I tell myself:
Marty, stop it. The bird’s scoping for food, or nesting material
.

“Who was it that sent you to prison? A camper?”

He nods. “Yeah, the boy’s family . . . and the archdiocese. They hounded me. It got the attention off the priests who’d been fooling around at St. Malo. I was a scapegoat.”

I have the sense that he’s lying or exaggerating and I ask, “I heard you got ten years, Canyon City? Is that true?”

He shrugs and gives a little nod.

“Must have been awful.”

“You can’t imagine. It made my eighteen months in Nam look like a walk in the park.”

Just then, a black guy sits down on the bench next to me, same hospital uniform as Bob, smoking a cigarette. Bob lets out a rude growl, says, “Let’s go,” and wheels himself down to the shade at the next bench, where he launches into a monologue about the good parent he’s tried to be to his daughter who’s all grown up and doing great. He speaks then of Karen, their breakup and troubles. After a time I try to interrupt, to get back to the “us” of this but, “Just let me finish,” he says, raising his hand sharply and somehow this, more than anything else, lets me know I really don’t like the guy. My candy-striper quotient evaporates and I say,

“Hey, I had sex with both of you . . . several times. Remember? You, me, and Karen. One morning there was blood in the bed. I thought something terrible had happened until you explained it was her period.”

This shuts him up.

Then he says, “It was an awkward attempt, I guess, at helping you be more, you know . . . a man. I knew you were worried about . . .”

“Being gay?”

He nods.

“You know, Bob, you used to tell me that homosexuals were people without love. Interesting thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“Have you ever figured you might be gay?”

He brings his hands to his face and says, “I’ve had to climb so many walls in this life, I suppose there are some things I never could really look at.”

“Imagine, Bob, what our friendship might have been if . . .”

“If what?”

“If you hadn’t crossed the line. Do you
know
what it does? Did? The utter chaos when you walk back into Mass, or your sixth-grade classroom, and you’re standing there in your muddy boots, listening to your teacher, thinking,
Wow, this thing’s happened. I’m gonna be a man. But it’s happened all wrong, I’m broken, broke the rules, I can’t belong here
. And God only knows where you turn because even the mountains and the statues look at you differently and because no one speaks of such things in our Catholic world with all our secrets and our terror of the body. And crazily enough, Bob, then the
only
place to find five minutes of relief, five seconds of what felt like forgiveness, was back in your arms, again and again.” He looks away and I tell him, “You know, I grew up to be insanely sexually compulsive. I mean, back alleys, bathhouses, hurtful, crazy secrets from my family, my lover, you name it. And it has a lot to do, I think, with all that happened between us. I mean, Bob, I was twelve.”

He shakes his head and looks down at his tangled fingers, and I wonder if I could ever convey to him how that was too young to get shot up with desire. And suddenly I’m thinking of the picture of the boy I saw on page twenty-eight of
Time
magazine, when I was standing with my dad in the checkout line a few days earlier in Vegas. The photo of the boy who didn’t make it. And I want to ask Bob what he thinks of that. And I’m wondering if he remembers the photograph he took of a fine-boned boy standing in a kayak near the edge of a pond, where we went, just the two of us, three weekends after it first happened. I wonder if he remembers how small I was, holding up an oar, wearing the life jacket he gave me lest I drown.

And all at once, I just want to make clear to this man in the wheelchair how much he’s haunted me, of the terror that lives in me still of repeating, in some way, his trespass. I wonder if I could describe for him how there isn’t a time I don’t squeeze with crazy joy and affection my gorgeous eleven-year-old nephew and think to myself:
Oh, God, careful, careful now
. I want him to know how I know this child is sacred, and to respect this child, a moral imperative. A certainty. This I know in my body, in this world, now: That
here is the Face of God
. But I don’t have the words or the will to say any of this to the wounded vet sitting at my side, and all that finally comes out is,

“You know, Bob, I almost didn’t make it.”

He glances at me, then off to the hospital roofs. “I guess,” he says, “on the one hand I wanted to build you up, but on the other, I was tearing you down.”

“OK,” I say. It’s funny but I’m hearing Sister Agatha’s words from way back when. About the angel and the devil, about the tangle inside. And I am looking at this man, this wreck of a man, I’m looking at
his
face and I can see it. I can see that some part of him means, meant, to be good. And at a time I was lost—my father drinking, my mom gearing for divorce—in he clomped and, in some way his love, and my love for him, helped me. Stranger things have happened in these Disturbed Regions.

“I’m sorry you went through all of this,” he says. And I don’t know if
sorry
was the sound I was after, but suddenly it’s all enough and I stand to go.

“Will you be here in the hospital long?” I ask.