I grew suspicious, anxious, convinced his silence meant I had been molested. I would come home from meetings with my analyst exhausted. I had dreams of a green room, and that something had happened there, repeatedly. In another dream I am looking from my back steps onto Bobby’s house. A pack of wolves suddenly appears and chases me through the apartment. Once, after a session, I vomited outside, near the car. The analyst spoke of bodily memory. Hair began falling out in clumps. She assured me that victims of sexual abuse rarely become abusers themselves. But I worried as a father. I spoke to my wife, convinced that I had suffered abuse, from a man, from Bobby, based not on a recollection but on a sense confirmed—and encouraged—by a therapist.
Toward the end of 2006 as I was driving on a highway outside Atlanta, I found myself dialing the operator. I wrote down the number, dialed it, waited.
“Hello.”
“Umm,” I stuttered for a moment, thinking I should hang up.
“Umm, hi, is this Bobby B.?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Hi Bobby. It’s Clifton, Yvonne’s son. We lived on Chestnut Street, around the corner.”
I had last spoken to Bobby more than a decade ago, when I had traveled down to New Orleans for my father’s funeral in the summer of 1991. I wasn’t sure he would remember me. But Bobby did remember, and though many years had passed his voice seemed familiar.
I tried explaining to him that I was researching a book, a book about New Orleans, a book about my life, including the two of us. I said I had sent him a letter, and that I was now following up, phoning. And then I had to ask the question, except in my mind all sorts of variations flashed before me. “Did you touch me? Did you sexually abuse me, rape me, fondle me? Are you a pedophile?” But I found myself not wanting to accuse him. Indeed, I felt no anger at all. I simply wanted to know, to have some information, finally. So I found myself reaching toward some kind of neutral language.
“Uh, Bobby,” I began, “did something inappropriate happen between us?”
He knew exactly what I meant. And he answered clearly.
“No.”
My question now felt like a betrayal. I wanted to take everything back, start again by thanking Bobby for his kindness.
“I don’t know what your problems are,” he began saying, as if I were fucked up, until I interrupted and began arguing, explaining I was quite fine, with a lovely family and great job.
It was a lie. I wasn’t fine.
I thanked Bobby, said good-bye.
About a month later an envelope arrived in the mail. Bobby sent me five photographs; the two I had given him as a child, three from the parties at his home, and a long letter. I held in my hands all the documentary evidence that once connected the two of us. “I lied about [not] receiving your letter,” he began (I have reproduced the letter as it appears):
To be truthful I didn’t know what to say to you. You see there has been a lot of things going on. The old house was torned down and a new one builted in its place. There are a lot of things I would like to say to you … I tried to be a friend to you, but I think you either was shy are someone was miss treating you. I do know one thing. You turned out to be the best and I am proud that I know you.
Bobby was glad I was so successful, so smart, and that he had in some small way played a part in my life. And he was grateful I remembered him. But the letter actually says very little, and virtually nothing about what I want to know, his recollections of my childhood, our relationship, what happened.
When I first opened the letter, I had both hoped and dreaded that he would continue our conversation. Bobby would write No, I never touched you, ever, and then admonish me for the suspicion. You needed a father. I tried to take care of you the best I could. I offered you protection, love. Don’t you remember me teaching you how to tie your sneakers? I have kept photographs of you for nearly four decades now, and you come to me with this accusation …
Or he would explain to me what transpired in his room all those years ago. I would finally have an explanation, however disturbing. All the riddles of my past would somehow be resolved. There would be an origin to my suffering, a reason for my inability to remember.
And I could then write back, explaining that my search was not for justice, and certainly not retribution, but for truth, for some knowledge of the past. I could tell him what he did was terrible, basely wrong, and that I knew how love and abuse can go hand in hand. I could offer a modicum of forgiveness for our kindred shame.
“What ever you write in your book will be tops so don’t get discouraged and I know it shall turn out real good. It sure is good to know that you have found happiness altho as a child I don’t think so but God has a way of rewarding those who wait on him. I do a lot of praying,” Bobby wrote toward the end of his letter, “and that is the only thing that keeps me going.”
Bobby’s letter is a good-bye of sorts. He has, in a sense, gotten rid of me. He has returned the photographs I once brought to him as a present, as a token of my affection for the man who taught me how to tie my laces. There is now no record of me in his house, nothing he can look at on a boring winter’s day, thumbing through old photographs in the final years of his life. My research, all research, bears costs; I have been expunged, disavowed, and I have hurt people in my past, more than once. Bobby doesn’t want to know me, wants indeed to forget me, wants no trace of our past.
Bobby promised to answer any questions I might have, and that he would do his best to respond promptly. He wrote that he was a Catholic, though not a good one, and that he had been collecting Mardi Gras beads for me whenever I visited, as if I were still nine and he wanted to offer a simple gift of New Orleans.
I did visit the neighborhood again, walking around taking photographs. I passed Bobby’s new house a few times, thinking I should knock on the door. I saw a man upstairs on an exercise machine, but it wasn’t him. Then as I was about to get into my car I saw him. Bobby saw me too, from a distance, and for an instant I think he recognized me. I got in my car and drove away.
FIVE
LEAVING NEW ORLEANS
MARIE HANDS ME THE CARDBOARD BOX.
“Take them. I’m not sure what’s all in it, just pictures I suppose, stuff Dad had.”
It’s a small box she must have brought home from the hospital where she works as a nurse, just big enough for fifty pairs of pre-powdered surgical gloves.
Bill senses her discomfort. He’s a kind, if imposing man, 6’4” and 250 pounds, with a linebacker’s neck. He and Marie have been together since they met at a high school dance in the late 1950s. Marie was seventeen, Bill a year younger, children except for their bodies. They made out, and made love, wherever and whenever they could. Marie soon became pregnant. They tried eloping, driving to Alabama where the magistrate told them they were too young and sent them back home to New Orleans.
They married in the end, against the protests of Bill’s parents, who ran a successful bakery delivering bread around the city. Bill was the favored only son, expected to carry on the family business, marry well, and live in a well-appointed Uptown house. They were certain Bill was ruining his life, or more precisely that my sister and our dissolute family were. My father congratulated Marie for snagging a man from a good family by getting pregnant.
“Too much dwelling on the past,” Bill says. He would rather be out on the water fishing or walking on the beach, doing anything but revisiting those difficult years when they had one child in diapers and more on the way but spent their weekend evenings scouring the city, plucking my mother from bars. They would try to get her into the car without the usual spill of acid words, and back in the apartment Marie would help Mom into bed and lay a cool compress across her head.
Bill thinks I’m wasting my time. He watches over Marie, who is just over five feet tall and bent over as if tugged to the ground by her life’s travails, thin as rails and as fragile. Whereas Kinta’s reserve seems a kind of self-protection, and Sabrina revels in a hippie’s exuberan
ce, Marie harbors a terrific guilt over not having saved everyone. I wonder if part of it began with the burdens the court created in May 1966 when the judge, in response to my father’s petition, told Marie and her husband that they were responsible for the minor children. In Marie’s and in everyone else’s recollection she had guardianship, not permanent custody. In fact Marie was supposed to have taken us in, and she was to receive child support payments from Dad. None of this happened, and it has not been possible to discern the conversations that unfolded that May and why we didn’t move in with my sister, who had just turned twenty-one and had two children of her own. But the judge must have created a terrible weight on my sister, a set of obligations she could not possibly have met.
“You can’t do nothing ’bout it,” Bill tells us, standing by the sink, rinsing the dishes from a meal of Shrimp Creole we spent all day making and about an hour devouring.
“Maybe some records too,” Marie adds, pretending she hasn’t heard Bill’s warnings. “I got them from one of Letha’s daughters. You know, when they cleared things out, after Dad … She sent it all.” Dad’s third wife, Letha, had died. One of her daughters, Sherry, ended up with the stuff. Sherry separated a lifetime’s records, keeping everything from before Dad’s marriage to Letha. The rest headed to Marie in Florida.
“Go on, take them. Keep them as long as you like. Really. They’re yours.”
Back in Atlanta, I start rummaging through the box. A few photographs are in plastic cellulite frames, four-by-eights of high school graduations, weddings, studio portraits taken against a gray-blue backcloth, children buttoned up in tight collars looking like they want to be out on the playground with their friends. The rest are from an old album, the kind with a spring binder that allows you to add new pages as children marry and have babies, vacations, gatherings, family accomplishments.
I begin by trying to be a scholar, as if I were assessing a box of records brought to my desk from some musty archive: number of documents, provenance, how the material is ordered, dates, identification of individual records. Historical research typically unfolds this way, or at least that’s what we historians usually tell ourselves. Organize, categorize, these are the basic rules of archival research, the due diligence that precedes interpretation. During the nineteenth-century professionalization of the academy, historians made claims to being scientists by employing increasingly complex forensic methods. Scholars believed that these procedures of evaluating evidence would allow them to recreate a past world that they could evaluate objectively. They could thereby produce a true history in contrast to more literary approaches that seemed rife with bias and perilously close to that most subjective form, the novel.
I resist the temptation to begin ascribing intention while these arcane debates swirl within my head. But very quickly, too quickly, I start looking for records of me, and from there all sorts of wonderings tumble forth—what if my parents hadn’t divorced, and we had money, and I had been a wanted child. Then an entire story unfolds about a middle-class white family and picnics in Audubon Park eating fried chicken before this fleeting wistfulness turns to disaffection. I become jealous upon discovering there are only a couple of photographs of me compared to dozens of my siblings, nieces and nephews. Jealousy turns to anger and feelings of disavowal, as if these photographs stand accused and are the reason I didn’t once rest on the mantle in his California home.
The manufacturer had sprayed a mild adhesive on the pasteboard. I imagine Letha looking over a pile of newly developed photographs, deciding which ones to throw out and which ones to affix to the page, bringing a plastic sheet over top, and then showing my father her dutiful work. The plastic sheet was supposed to seal the images in place, to protect them as my father and Letha, and now unexpectedly his son, leafed through pasteboard lives.
There must have been a design flaw, or time’s passing has weakened the bonds that once held the images in their intended order. Many of the photographs have started coming unglued, slipping free from the page and sliding into the jumble of images at the bottom of the box. A few more lie scattered each time I go looking for something that might awaken memory and help me figure out what happened all those years ago. It is as if the impersonal forces of entropy defeat any attempt to restore order. I sort through the hodgepodge, but with each effort I seem to be less successful. The past deteriorates steadily, inevitably.
Sometimes I think about reassembling the album differently. I would loosen every photograph from its page, then put the whole thing together again in a new album. I would add photographs; I could even make them look old. The orthodox historian in me says this would violate basic rules of evidence. This documentary of me would be a plagiarism, a mere fiction, though I also wonder just how much our fantasy lives shape the histories we imagine and write, our desires and fears and hatreds reverberating in the characters and dramas we summon from the past.
Many of the photographs are of Dad and Letha. In the background brown scrub foothills lie beneath Southern California’s unfettered light. The two of them are invariably smiling, celebrating a special event, enjoying each other’s company, in love even, whereas the Dad of the 1950s photographs seems saddled and dour. I’ve not been able to figure out why he moved all the way to California. Perhaps it was Dorothy the Witch’s idea. Let’s get away from everyone, she might have told him, away from New Orleans and the heat, away from Yvonne and your wretched family. Anything was better than hidebound Mississippi, and returning to New Orleans was out of the question. California was about as far away as one could go without leaving the continental United States. Maybe he thought there might be safety in distance, or just wanted to make a new start. Dad knew about the huge growth in the defense industry from working in an air-conditioned trailer at NASA. Whatever the reason, the move was part of a massive westward migration; by 1970 one out of every ten Americans lived in California.
In 1968, Highway 10 whisked Dad, my sister Sabrina, and Dorothy the Witch right across the country. They stayed in one cheap motel after another until they turned off the freeway and found a shabby two-bedroom apartment in Burbank just off the main road. Dad was in his mid-fifties, with just a couple of hundred dollars in the bank, few qualifications, and a track record of broken employment. But he had a routine for jump-starting his life, dyeing his hair black and slicking it back with Brylcreem until it looked like polished obsidian. Youth had a perpetual edge, he figured. It was important to appear young, to look like a married, mid-career man far from the desolation of age, ready to make good in a land where everything seemed perpetually new. Dad would buy the Sunday Los Angeles Times and spend the morning drinking Folgers Coffee and penciling circles in the employment section. He found a job at Chevy Chase Staff & Stone as a bookkeeper. The housing boom in Orange County and San Bernardino Valley created a huge demand for landscape products—pebbles for rock gardens, stone squares leading through closely cropped lawns, cement bird feeders, the suburban American idyll. The company needed someone to keep track of all the bills of sale, someone like Dad who was good with a Remington Rand adding machine.
Mom kept calling him, complaining about child support checks that hadn’t arrived, unpaid bills, utilities about to be disconnected, errant children, every hurt she had endured during a seventeen-year marriage. For three decades after the divorce she kept all the bills in his name, as if she were still claiming Dad as her own or expecting him to provide for her, to be the man she had so wanted and felt she deserved. “Get the money from him, my husband. He’s in California,” she would tell the collectors, before giving them my father’s phone number and address.
At least once a year she wrote Dad a letter telling him what a bastard he was for leaving her with a bunch of kids, moving her all over the South, never owning much of anything, for every misfortune and ruin.
She’d call him every few months, on the weekend when she was lonely and desperate and unpaid bills had come due. It became a kind of ritual, requiring beer, a fifth, and a pack of
Salem mentholated cigarettes. Mom would dial the rotary phone when she had gotten very drunk, not quite ready to pass out but well into slurring her words, somewhere between unrestrained spleenful anger and outright incomprehensibility.
Howard! I imagine it would begin with an accusatory yell that also sounded as if she was nauseated.
Howard, Howard it’s the fifth and … yousonsabitch Howard, the goddamn check isn’t here. They’re gonna cut off the goddamn phone any day, any goddamn day now. And how am I goin’ feed these kids. That son of yours, he got bronchitis again. You gotta pay the doctor.
Dad would say something, probably that the check was in the mail. There would be an extra pause between what my father had to say and my mother’s response, as if the booze had slowed down her neural connections so that the words didn’t quite arrive in order, and then you could see her about to say something, something real angry, downright reptilian.
Look what you’ve done, Howard! You goddamn coward, leaving me with these kids, moving us all over the place. My family lived on Esplanade, don’t you forget that, and I’m livin’ poor as dirt. And you can’t even pay your goddamn bills, your obligashuns. You know what I mean awright. Don’t you hang up the phone on me, you fucker. Howard! I want that check. You owe me. You owe me everything. Howard!
She would slam the phone down, yell for a beer, take a swig, light up another cigarette. An hour later she couldn’t get her index finger into the rotary phone or read the number.
Clifton! Clifton! Your goddamn no-good father, Clifton, come dial this goddamn number, can’t pay his bills.
She would be sitting on the bed in a slip, unable to stand, her eyes glassy and cheeks mascara-stained. Her head would swing around toward me like some menaced, cornered animal.
Dial this number. You know who your father is? I’ll tell ya, he’s no good. He didn’t want ya, didn’t want any of ya. All he cares about is himself. And don’t ya forget, ever, he didn’t give a damn about any of ya.
History Lessons Page 13