Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  And maybe you thought of him as the seasons passed—of what had happened to him, of what could have gone wrong—remembered his voice, his face, the way you were together . . . and maybe you didn’t. There was nothing to do—the heart had to sleep.

  And months turn to years and you leave Australia and return to Europe where you live for a while in a dank, beautiful house outside Munich, then sail to New York—the Statue of Liberty emerging from the fog, the city skyline looming white in the morning sun like cliffs in a dream—and six years pass and McCarthy’s long gone and Sputnik’s been launched and it’s January 28, 1958, a night of heavy snow, and lying in a hospital bed in Queens, exhausted, cramping, you write in a small blue diary, “A little boy was born to us today. . . .”

  And you breathe him in like a second life. He’ll be the world made right. He’ll be your friend, your soul mate, the one you trust above anyone on earth. He’ll be everything you’re not.

  The world rushes on. It won’t leave you alone. Khrushchev pounds his shoe and the world holds its breath and then your mother’s gone and Kennedy’s been shot and your father’s coming to New York to visit and the river runs faster through Berlin and Selma and on to Vietnam, from Will you still need me? to the Summer of Love, and Alexander Dubek’s reforms are holding and they’re calling it the Prague Spring and for a moment, just one moment, everything seems possible and then it’s summer and you’re at the cabin at Lost Lake watching the tanks enter Prague on the news and nothing is. And life begins to close in.

  It’s so hard to hold on to it. Everything breaks. Things start off well, then fail you, betray you. Your love, your trust. It’s always like that. Everything’s like that. If only you could sleep, rest; if only you could hold on, but life slips through your fingers, willfully, maliciously, running away from you. But you still have your boy—by God, you have that. He’s changed, of course, though that’s to be expected, and he spends evenings in his room reading Field & Stream and lately he’s been picking up things at that school of his because he’s begun talking back, even accusing you of things in a tone of voice you’ve never heard from him before, with this look, deliberately pushing you, testing you, but he doesn’t know you—you have your limits—and when you grabbed him by the collar the other day like your mother would have if you’d ever dared talk to her like that and washed out his mouth with soap (though the bar was too big to fit in his mouth, which was awkward), it seemed to have some effect. Because he’s a good boy, really—my God what a sweet child he was. There’s no one in the world you trust more.

  That boy, Jan Palach, who immolated himself on Wenceslas Square to protest the invasion—what must that be like?

  Sometimes you feel like that dog, Laika, that the Soviets sent into space. Circling till you die.

  But you still have your boy. He’s a good boy—you used to laugh so much together. People say he looks just like you.

  This summer in Connecticut will do you all some good.

  XXXVIII

  LOOKING BACK ON OUR lives everything appears foreordained, a series of amazing coincidences leading us unerringly to where we are. No discussion, no debate. It’s a form of tyranny, no more legitimate than the divine right of kings. The sceptered present—sanctioned, no, sanctified, by what is—lords it over the past, and we bow down and pay fealty: After all, how could it have been otherwise, since it wasn’t? But apply just a light wash of imagination and the narrative quivers, branches, flowers into the million ways it might have gone.

  The past conditional tense is the only time machine I know. And the seedbed of all regret.

  What would have changed if my mother had known, say, twenty-five years earlier than she did, that F.’s letters had stopped coming not because he’d forgotten her but because her letters had stopped coming to him—because she’d obviously moved on, started a new life with her husband, forgotten. If she’d known in 1950, or 1952, that he’d continued writing to her for months, keeping it light at first, then growing desperate, finally asking for nothing more than an answer, clarity, anything. Eventually shutting it down, moving on, because there was nothing else to do.

  It would be another twelve years before F. would learn that his father, disapproving of the affair, had intercepted my mother’s letters to him while at the same time generously offering to post his—and burning them instead.

  By then he’d be married, with two sons of his own.

  It could have gone differently. It didn’t.

  There’s a footnote.

  In 1966, not long after John Lennon declared the Beatles “more popular than Jesus,” F. found himself appointed to a delegation of engineers traveling to New York. The forty-one-year-old former Green Beret from Žár had done well for himself, and the authorities in charge of denying exit visas had deemed him a safe bet: with a wife and two sons staying behind in Czechoslovakia (the secret police dossier described the marriage as flawed, but his relation to the boys a strong one), the chances of defection were slim.

  What the powers-that-be couldn’t have known was that the chief engineer had heard a rumor that my parents had emigrated to New York. That he’d called in every favor he had to be sent abroad. That once in the city he’d go off the reservation—risking his career, possibly even his freedom—to look for my mother.

  Ten days are a long time to search for someone you haven’t seen in eighteen years—someone who’s married (as you are), who has children (as you do), someone who, for all you know, may not want to see you, or worse, may greet you with that “Oh, my goodness, well this is a surprise” distance that tells you it’s dead and never coming back.

  It would have been natural for him to falter, to wake up to the insanity of it, to allow reason to gently take him by the hand and lead him back to the conference room.

  Apparently, faltering wasn’t in the man’s nature. For ten days he made phone calls, followed leads, pushed on with a few phrases of English and a pocket dictionary. And then he had it: our address in Rego Park, Queens. He found the IND subway, dropped the token in the slot.

  A rainy April morning, the loaf-shaped hedges beginning to green. No one was home. The super was out. He waited outside the building, leaning against the glass doors, smoking, then went back inside and left a note with his phone number at the hotel, and another one, for the super, which he worked out with the dictionary. Both went unanswered.

  That evening, someone named Rosenfeld or Falconetti or Kabata would find an incomprehensible note (Was it Polish?) on the door of their new apartment on 63rd Road in Queens. Less than half an hour away, meanwhile, my mother was unpacking cartons marked KITCHEN in our new house in Ardsley. Our new number wasn’t listed in the phone books yet.

  He didn’t find her. Time ran out. The delegation, including the disgraced chief engineer, returned to John F. Kennedy Airport. There would be questions to answer in Prague; the event would go into his file. It would take years to make up for the transgression. I don’t believe he regretted it.

  It’s 1966, a rainy April morning. My mother’s making bábovka in the new kitchen, fluffing up the heavy batter with a wooden ladle. I’m in my room, pretending to write a report on volcanoes while secretly studying the picture from the Garcia Fishing Catalog of the man rearing back on his rod, desperately tightening the star drag on his blood-red, Abu Matic 170 Spincasting Reel as a thirty-pound musky thrashes in the foreground. My father’s at the auto repair in Dobbs Ferry getting ripped off by George, who he thinks is his friend.

  “Kluku, maš hlad?” my mother calls from the kitchen—Hey, kiddo, you hungry? “Chceš nco k—” You want something to—?

  And the doorbell rings, and my mother pushes her hair back with her forearm, dusts the flour off her hands, and goes to answer it.

  XXXIX

  HER LAUGHTER COULD BE so wonderful, so child-like—snorting and gasping for air, Oh, God, please, stop, enough—that it would just sweep everything before it. I remember it so well. Eventually it retreated somewhere inside of her, but eve
ry now and then I’d still hear it, or some echo of it, and whenever I did, especially in the later years when she seemed like a guttering candle, for that second I’d see her again, waving to me from inside the tower.

  Let me tell you about my mother.

  Sometimes when I watched Daniel Boone on TV—I had green, high-top Daniel Boone sneakers and regularly busted my father’s axes throwing them against trees like Fess Parker, then burying the parts in the woods—she’d make me palainky for dinner: Czech crepes so light and thin you could tell if the jam inside them was apricot or raspberry. I’d eat them one by one, draping them over my thumb and pinky while Dan’l and his sidekick Mingo fought off another Cherokee war party or split dead trees with axes that didn’t break, and in those moments I’d be so happy I couldn’t sit still and she’d take one of the palainky for herself and watch Daniel Boone with me and everything would be perfect.

  She loved to sing, and she knew more verses to more Czech folk songs—and could sing them later into the night, accompanied by violins and guitars and our friends’ disbelieving laughter—than anyone who ever lived.

  She’d get a kick out of dumb pranks—the water balloon perched above the door, the legs unscrewed off the chair, the forty-pound snapping turtle with the griffin claws that we hid in the steamer trunk in the living room of our cabin that hissed and lunged like a locomotive when our friends put down their drinks.

  One early summer morning when I was ten, we were reading on plastic deck chairs in the garden when she suddenly went inside the cabin, returned with a ball of string and rigged up a kind of clothesline so that it ran just in front of our faces, an easy arm’s reach away. She hung the line with bunches of grapes, and we spent the afternoon reclining like Roman senators on our plastic deck chairs, reading and plucking the fat muscatels like low-hanging fruit.

  When I was sixteen and sad for some reason, she swept me up and the two of us drove out to the mountains of western Pennsylvania, where I took a fourteen-mile run through a narrow river valley at dusk, the chill, October air smelling of wet leaves and water, the evening star like a pinhole in the blue, then returned to our creaky wooden hotel for dinner. We talked about everything that evening, and the next day, and the one after that. She was my best friend. It was the last good trip we had.

  She had the complicated gift of compassion, of understanding others’ pain.

  She loved Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia,” and the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water.”

  Later, she also loved Helen Reddy’s “You and Me Against the World,” which ends, God have mercy on us all, with a child’s voice chirping “I love you, Mommy,” and Helen answering “I love you too, baby.”

  She took great pride in “not letting herself go,” hunted for designer dresses in the thrift shops on 2nd Avenue, did exercises with Jack LaLanne—And ten more, ladies!—who, in his black jump suit, biceps a-bulgin’, always looked to me like one of those action figures you could twist so their feet stuck out of their armpits.

  This is like trying to build a hawk out of wire and wood.

  Fuck Jack LaLanne.

  Let me tell you about my mother.

  These aren’t facts—they’re truths:

  My mother loved me when I was young, in that bone-of-my-bone, flesh-of-my-flesh kind of way which leads so easily to betrayal.

  She came to hate me as I grew older—you could see it in her face, hear it in her voice—which was like watching someone you love draw a razor down their arm to hurt you.

  There are harder things than being hated by someone who loved you once and not knowing why, but not many.

  I hear her inside of me. I always will. Both of “her”—the person “before” and the person “after.” The mother who held me, and the one whose rage sprayed my face with spittle.

  I hear them both.

  And I fly from anger to love like a kid on a swing.

  When I was nineteen, I read Moby-Dick in a thirteenth-floor dormitory room where I’d gone to escape my home. The building was nearly empty. I read at night while blizzards swept in over the Hudson, rattling the windows. And I remember being brought to tears by “crazy” Ahab, as much by his iron indomitability—“Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!”—as by his one moment of vulnerability when, moved by the inexplicable scent of grass on the air, he pictures mowers resting in the shade of the Andes, and weeps.

  My mother loved the world—deeply, desperately—and the world betrayed her. She never forgave it.

  XL

  IT WAS BETHLEHEM THAT finished her. Bethlehem with its self-righteous thumb up its ass, its Presbyterian propriety, its sexlessness and silence. I’ve never hated a place more.

  We lived at 3452 Lord Byron Drive (which suggests at least 3,000 other sad little ranch houses like ours), just off Chaucer and Walt Whitman Lane, surrounded by miles of cornfields—snowy stubble half the year, stifling monocrop the other—that children never played in. Of course, it wasn’t Bethlehem alone; Bethlehem just made it easy to pretend it was.

  Could another family have been happy there? I have no doubt they could (though I’ve always sensed a terrible loneliness in these American spaces carved overnight out of meadows and woods, then named after nineteenth-century poets or Ivy League universities or the things that were destroyed to make them). For our family, though, configured the way we were, it was the perfect match for misery, Emersonian correspondence (there was an Emerson Circle as well) with a Kafkaesque spin to it—instead of wonder interlocking with wonder, the arrow finding its wound.

  Olga and Zdenek. What could have been more perfectly designed to break them than life on Lord Byron Drive? There they were, after Italy and the Arafura Sea and the slums of Sydney, after Munich and New York, finally brought to ground. Surrounded by “Up with People” neighbors who could talk about Lehigh wrestling and lawn care and how awful it is what happens when the blacks move in but had no interest in politics or history, in Cambodia or Malcolm X or, for that matter, any of the writers their lanes and circles were named after. Who could mention Jesus and real estate values in the same sentence. Who’d say “My, but you two certainly do have a lot of books” but never, ever, go over to look at them. Who’d call you “my dear” (even though they were two years older), while explaining, patiently, “how things were” in America.

  They laughed along for years, tried to fake it, tried to work up an opinion on the new restaurant opening at the Westgate Mall or whether Freedom High or Liberty would win the homecoming game, but it was no use. They were the exceptions to the American Dream, pieces of the mosaic that didn’t quite fit and that the myth of integration couldn’t acknowledge. Like so many others, they were the ones whose irony or range of references continually gave them away, whose attempts at humor fell flat, whose past pulled the conversation into contexts no one was interested in and few understood, whose Ghanian or Senegalese or Hindi-inflected English might pass at the office but would keep them from being invited to watch the game on Sunday because, you know, people just wanted to relax.

  This was a different kind of exile, one with few solutions. While the majority of immigrants might eventually work their way in, often by outdoing the Americans in their “Americanness,” for those like my parents, my mother especially, there were three options: live in a city diverse enough to make your otherness acceptable, surround yourself with émigrés like yourself—that is, live in an immigrant ghetto—or slip into a perpetual state of mourning for the deep, maternal familiarity of your language, the smells and tastes of home—that Eden you’d barely escaped.

  New York had made the first two possible; our move to Bethlehem (and my mother’s nature) made the third inevitable. Like a long-dormant seed, her talent for regret began to grow. Isolated for months, then years, driving the same two miles to the Westgate Mall or out to the south side past the abandoned steel mills looming over the Lehigh River, she reached some sort of tip
ping point. Hope, like anything else, has a half-life.

  It was a hard thing to watch. I would have spared her if I could.

  In The Visible World I let her step in front of a bus, leaving behind nothing more than a casserole dish half-filled with ashes and a few feathery bits of letter paper.

  It should have been a hellish scene to write. It felt like a lungful of air.

  In the dream-time of the novel, it was 1984. We were living in Bethlehem. Which seems right.

  XLI

  IT’S GETTING HARDER TO hold together. Like a character in a slapstick comedy trying to set up a tent (I vaguely recall Rock Hudson doing just that somewhere), the pieces of this story seem increasingly misaligned; when I insert one, another comes loose, demands attention. I need to pause, reset.

  I need to acknowledge that you don’t imagine your mother’s death, even in a novel, without there maybe, just maybe, being some issues to think about.

  I need to talk about betrayal. And guilt, its Siamese twin. And rage, their problematic offspring.

  It begins with my mother’s father, František Kubík. His was the original sin, the featuring blow, and like all acts of abuse—even those far less horrific—it was a betrayal of trust. At some point—when, exactly, I’ll never know—that awful line was crossed, then crossed again. It’s not news that people do unspeakable things to each other—even, at times, to those they should be closest to.

  It doesn’t take long for a cancer like that, left unacknowledged, to metastasize, and because it’s in your heart, your mind, the turning cells, so to speak, are everywhere. Outside of you, the world mimics your betrayal—the smallest leaf puts out its shape. And how could it not? You’ve been betrayed at the very root, at the very source of trust—how could your world not answer in kind?