The judgment greets Wright as fact: there is nothing to be done about the way certain people come into the world, nothing to be done about the way the world comes easily to certain people.
Vincent had skimmed the letters for information, of which there was little. The final months with her, she had sometimes been cold and strange—Your life is a promontory you carved yourself and walked way out on, she said—and he had waved it away, her maudlin tendency. In two years, when the last letter comes, when he finds it waiting in his mailbox after a last trip to Edwards, he will read it carefully, more than once, not rising when the afternoon goes to turn on a lamp. For now he sits, listening to the television.
We’ve grown used to wonders in this century, the president says. It’s hard to dazzle us.
* * *
October 17, 1988
Dear Mr. Kahn,
I don’t talk to anyone about my mother. What I say is, she died. I never want to catch a look on somebody’s face as they talk to me and imagine it’s about her, like they’re trying to identify the ways in which who she was shows up in who I am. So I guess this was practice, writing to you, for a someday when I’ll pause between sips of water and say, like people do, and I’m always so jealous of how offhanded they can be, that reminds me of something my mother said. My mother had a dress just like that.
Less like a person and more like an event, is how I think of her. She was an accident I could not have avoided. Sometimes I ask if this is also how she thought of herself. The days before the bomb in the Village I saw it, however briefly. They were discussing the number of officers to be in attendance, a guest list that Randy had stolen somehow, and she said something like, a hundred and six, and flapped her palm open and shut to say, gone. Then the look on her face like a change in light, an old part of her almost coming through to say, what?
What frightens me the most about who she was at the end, the tendency I’m most afraid of having inherited, is how resigned she was to all of it. She behaved as though every shocking fact, the bombings, her face on the news, the most-wanted flyers in towns where we could only stop long enough to eat, was part of the same inevitability—speaking, also, as though she and I were equal victims of the same circumstance, using the word “we” in ways that made me beat my pillow. We’re both hungry, she would say, but it’s our job now to focus on just making it to the next place. During a thunderstorm we watched from a motel in Georgia, I suggested to her she go find the roof of the highest building and wait to be struck. My temper had become a part of how we lived, something factored into how long or hard a trip might become. We didn’t speak for four days.
They were farther apart toward the end, moments when she cried or begged and seemed to be looking for a way back into who she had been, and they passed like a sneeze. An hour later it would feel like a hallucination I’d had, her face returned to its rigid economy, creaseless and lightless.
If she hadn’t met Randy, would she have found her way to Shelter? I want to think no, although I know this doesn’t say great things about her constitution, Mr. Kahn, and I’d love to say great things about her constitution, particularly to you, whom I have reason to believe she loved, and who I have reason to believe humiliated her. I overheard her in a fight with Randy once, the first few months in the country, when she was saying, You’re like every other man. You love the woman who worships you, and the ones you respect you fuck like they’re trash. You love what you pity and destroy what you admire. I was stunned by this, the life before it must have referenced.
Was she against the war, yes. Was she angry. Was she wild. Was her life’s lack of structure what allowed her to change it completely. Yes, yes, yes. But my mother, Mr. Kahn, was the kind of person who reassured spiders as she carried them outside. She wore a button that said “Children Are Just Smaller People,” and wanted my opinion on everything, always, before I could even spell my name, and once let me paint what I know now was an incredibly valuable suitcase, a last gift from her father to her sister, with a very large and crooked portrait of a whale. She eschewed toy guns and once kicked Randy out of their bed for a night because he’d made me a slingshot. Is this the sort of person you imagine becoming a top twenty-five most-wanted domestic terrorist?
What happened in the brownstone in New York City was a distracted mistake. Whether it was my mother’s distraction that killed that man upstairs, the fault of Annabelle or Randy or some combination I don’t know, although I have my theories. My mother loved Randy, maybe in the same way she loved you, and by that I mean she loved the way he thought. I don’t know if it was ever about how he made her feel. It was about how he made her see. What he didn’t account for was how well she would see, better than he could, wider and farther and uninterrupted by rage. That she became the bigger star of Shelter was a deep shock to him, and even that she understood before he did, from where she was always standing beside him, a light hand on his elbow—how it would undo him. The image of a weaponized woman is a new one, I heard her say to him, during a sulky fit he had after Philadelphia brought her the fame it did, in the voice she had used to comfort me when another child had been cruel.
In the last months I knew her, in the motel rooms where she faded, my mother was a fount of American commercialism. Though she had spent years decrying the Television, talking about it in that vicious way—the Television has spoken, A true American consults first and last the Television—her position allowed her, finally, to understand its appeal. She mouthed the slogans in perfect mimicry. The electric pour seemed to be going both ways, from the television to her, from her to the television, the belief and its believer entwined ad infinitum, becoming interchangeable. If I had to choose the moment I lost her, Mr. Kahn, I couldn’t. But if I had to choose the moment in which I knew she was lost, it was this, her mouth soulless around a jingle. MY BOLOGNA HAS A FIRST NAME, IT’S O-S-C-A-R. Easily, this.
Even as a child I could understand why it was her and not Randy. He was incapable of hiding, from anybody, first of all himself. What woke him up in the morning was a litany of wrongdoings, those done by the country pressing on him as much as some cruel nickname that had followed him around his childhood playground. In the places where my mother could slip in undetected, hard to pin to a specific stratum, still adorned with certain formal gifts of her upbringing, Randy was obvious, all angles and ragged political patches. The war was on his face. She could put on a secondhand white overcoat, no buttons, all sash, and pass like a slightly unclean Lana Turner through the revolving doors of Brutalist high-rise municipal buildings. She could say beg pardon and ask for directions without anyone guessing what was ticking in her suitcase. Though she was the oldest of the women in Shelter, she looked the youngest, something if pressed she attributed to the inversions of yoga, and that she never wore underwear if she could help it.
One piece of Shelter’s agenda, often left out in the TV movie reenactments, was the rejection of monogamy. They felt that in the work they were doing the romantic-sexual attachment was anathema, a sure route to a weakened purpose. Randy railed at her later for how free she became, slipping from one cot to the next in the early morning sometimes, but he was the first adopter, disappearing for days with Annabelle and then barely shrugging when asked about it, as if discussing matters beyond his control, road closures or outdated laws.
The Philadelphia bombing, of which my mother was arguably the star, incensed him, though he talked about it as a failing of ideology, and he was the one who pushed for a change in the model, who rallied for the practice of evacuating these buildings to end. It’s not enough that they fear for their institutions, he said. They have to fear for their lives. He was the one who identified the officers’ dance that was to be the target of the bomb that blew up the town house. Fifty military officers and their wives. Tuxes and tulle.
She was not only the one who planted it, in Philadelphia, curtsying her way in with a typewriter case, more than convincing as the part of the stenographer, but also the voice on the memora
ndum that so many radio stations played. It was coy but forthright, feminine but unfaltering. Someone likened it to Marilyn. Let it be known that America is now subject to the same obliteration it has brought elsewhere, she said. Thank you and good night. She had come into life with all advantages and she had scorned them, and that was a compelling argument for something being very wrong with the heart of the country, of course more so than Randy, whose missing finger was too personal an injury, too clear a sign of the ways his country had hurt him, not clear enough about what it had turned him into. To be truly famous here is to have lost or gained everything, reversed positions completely. The photo that had surfaced of her, beaming astride Charlie’s horse, was in every paper.
The network of Shelter pay phones had almost completely regenerated by the time the AARRMW got ahold of her, and she believed, not entirely incorrectly, it had been changed to keep her from using it. She went on trying those numbers months after they went silent, something like thirty she had committed to memory. Randy had his wish; he became the star, and she went on trying those numbers months after they went silent, something like thirty she had committed to memory. I still hate to enter a Laundromat or arcade. The sound of the coins dropping sends me right to her fallen face.
The group that gave my mother her last stage had formed only shortly beforehand, and disbanded immediately after. The shock on their faces around her is part of what made the photo so famous—a mean, easy comment on how the radical left had eaten itself. She told them she would begin seated, or so went the account in the news. She said she needed to meditate before she gave any speeches, and I suppose that was not a lie. They were younger than I am now, but I have a hard time forgiving what they failed to see about her when she showed up. People in gas stations had seen it, at rest stops where she was afraid of the herds of children that bounded from station wagons.
Is your mom okay, said a woman on the bus I had watched stow three garbage bags of clothes in the undercarriage—leaving a bad relationship, she told me at a rest stop, keeping a hand over a very obvious bruise on her jaw. She must have seen how my mother insisted we switch seats four times, then fell so deeply asleep she tumbled, during a jerky lane change, into the aisle.
Would she have agreed to any protest that vaguely aligned with the way she’d been living before, to attach her face to a cause for the price of a bus ticket? It’s possible. The car she’d bought, unregistered, had broken down. Our money was gone. She’d sold a belt buckle of her sister’s, a figure on a horse with a lasso, the twist of rope spelling the words “WHAT FUN.” But like all other decisions she was making then, she agreed to the trip to Florida having eaten only what came from motel room vending machines, never having slept more than an hour at once. Every person we saw, in those days, was someone who would make the call the second she turned a corner. Dogs were suspect, their sense of smell. Birds too cheerful. The sun too bright, the window too big, the sheets too stiff, the water too cold. There was no part of the world left for her, was the way she was acting. I know now that this was because she had turned her curiosity toward leaving it.
I’m telling you because I don’t want you believing that what she did was some act of revenge toward you, that you were that big to her. Revenge is an act of pride, isn’t it? And pride is an act of self. It requires a person to believe they have been deprived of something they deserved. My mother, Mr. Kahn, no longer had any sense of what she deserved. She didn’t even have a sense of what she liked. On our last stop on the bus ride before we reached the cape, at the rest area where we were allowed ten minutes to stretch our legs in the aisles of a gas station, I watched her fill a cup of coffee with two packets of condensed creamer. She had always, with no exception and a fair amount of insistence, taken it black. When I pointed this out to her, she gave me a look of total guilt. I’m so sorry, she said, as if I’d be the one with the wrong taste in my mouth.
She had never loved the program, of course, and we took a bus to Quito to protest a parade for your friend Sam. She called Apollo Our Happiest Lie and said things like, Here’s our country, dressed to the nines while its house burns down. All my childhood, she simmered about the coverage it received, talked about how it was the same, the money that lit the rocket and the money that killed the children. Two sides of the same coin. It makes sense that a country destroying life on one planet would need to lay claims on another.
When we got to the cape, my mother asked me something she hadn’t in a long time, a question that for most of my life had given me a deep thrill: Would you like to take a walk? I never knew when it was coming, this question, and it usually followed a period during which some book or thought had kept her from me—she would have been quiet for hours, moving only to underline or scrawl in the margins. That she wanted my company after this had always seemed like the greatest compliment.
Passing the tents set up on the beach and the people tailgating in baseball caps, my mother looked at them with a kind of benevolence, like they were some hand-painted exhibit, quaint representations of simple, parochial lives. She was dressed more like she had when I was younger, in box-cut linen that diminished what was beautiful about her, and she asked me, as she always had when we started out, what I was thinking. I was sullen and I didn’t want to say and for ten minutes I kicked a beer bottle along the sand in front of us, rolling my eyes like even that was a tedious burden forced upon me. I wasn’t asking myself, Why isn’t she afraid of getting caught? Why aren’t her sunglasses on? She had her shoes, some drugstore espadrilles worn out the summer before, in her hand, and she started speaking in the automatic way people do when telling a story they know very well.
I don’t know if you’ll remember, she said. This was soon after we got here. Those couple weeks in Berkeley. Do you remember Karen and her baby Henry? He wasn’t as curious as a baby should be, I always thought. And he cried at anything. She was asked to leave soon after this, because of him. Anyway, there was this afternoon. Henry’d been left on the back porch in a bassinet, someone saying what he hadn’t gotten enough of was sunshine. The jelly for the mimeograph was on the oven, and I was stab-binding some poems written by the women of Shelter, and I didn’t know where you were, but this was before things became so strict, and I wasn’t worried. Then I heard the screen door open and saw you come through, carrying him. The remarkable thing was how you were holding him, textbook. All the women were mouthing at me: Has he ever held a baby? Has he?
I don’t know how you knew. It took me four months to lift you naturally, because it’s counterintuitive, holding a life that small—you have to start not with the heaviness in the torso, but the head, which can feel too downy, impossible to secure. You were inured somehow to the fragility of it. It’s one of the first things I remember when I think, Who is my son? It makes me believe you will know what you need in life, and that those needs will always include the happiness of others.
I understand now, Mr. Kahn, that this was the version of me she wanted to remember as she went, a boy who was likely to survive without her, one who was possibly better off. For a long time I worried I had lit the match, because the way the photo was composed somehow makes that case, and because in a bacterial, bodily way I had hated her. Claudette and James, for all their fear of difficult conversation, always had the time to remind me of my innocence. She did that to herself, they would say. She did.
My mother had the presence of mind, at least, to keep me from the demonstration, or to try. She had arranged for someone to look after me in the parking lot, a short college student named Brad who was pissed to be kept from the action. We were sitting in his car with all the doors open smoking a spliff and not talking. There were Buddhist prayer beads hanging from his rearview and in the seat pocket in front of me some porn magazine folded back and barely stuffed down. I could see most of the image, of a woman being fucked in two ways by two men, black and white, and the text said something about ebony and ivory. None of them were looking at each other. One of them had both her wrists. H
er mouth was open too wide. The point seemed to be pain.
Brad turned on the radio, eventually, and closed his eyes like somebody alone. The noise of it seemed like my cue to exit. With the doors already open, leaving was just a matter of swinging my feet onto the asphalt and going. I don’t know how long until Brad realized I was gone, just that he didn’t come after me. What you see in that photo, a boy holding a match as he crawls back, a woman sitting with her palms faceup on her knees, is true and it isn’t. The peace on her face is less that than a total vacancy. Rather than cleaned out, abandoned. That match in my hand is one I took from her, ignoring the fact that a whole booklet remained, fighting, like the child I still was, with the small pieces as though they would change the whole. I know the papers speculated about the words that passed between us, what she whispered. Shadow shine, is what she said, which is how, when I was very small and living in another country, I referred to the ends of things, and how, finally, she referred to me.
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