We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  • • •

  Gusting winds rolled across the burial yard. His mother cleared her throat.

  “Dear God,” she said, “watch over the soul of my dear husband Ed.” She looked at Connell. “Let him know that we miss him and love him.” She looked at Connell again. “I’ve never been much good at prayer. If there’s a heaven, your father is there. That’s one thing I know. Ed,” she said, turning back to the grave, “there’s not an hour goes by that I don’t have you on my mind. Maybe you know that already. Maybe you can listen in on my thoughts. If so, that’s a nice thing. That means I probably don’t need to speak at all. But I can’t stop talking now that I’ve started. Sometimes it feels like you never left. I go to tell you things and you aren’t there. I fold the paper down to tell you about an article and you aren’t sitting across from me. Connell misses you. I’d catch you up on everything that’s happened in the last year, but if you can hear me, then you know it all already. If not, I’d just be talking to myself. I love you dearly. I guess we’ll say the Our Father now.”

  She started to say the Lord’s Prayer and Connell joined in. It had the soft familiarity of a bedtime routine. The words came easily to him; he wondered if they were stored so deep that they’d be among the last things he remembered when he died.

  When his mother finished, she patted the ground in search of pebbles to leave on the gravestone. It was a Jewish custom she had picked up like a magpie building a nest of grief. The capillaries in her cheeks were red, but the cold seemed to have no other effect on her. She was tough, but as they stood in that astringent wind, Connell thought of her living in the house alone, so many empty rooms, all of them still and quiet. After he left the house later, after tea and cake, she would remain behind in it. He had been glad when she told him she was thinking of selling it, but in the end she hadn’t put it on the market; something held her back.

  His mother put two pebbles on the gravestone and stepped back, buffeted by wind. “Your father picked this spot out,” she said. “We looked at the brochures right after we moved. This was before we knew anything about his illness. It sounds morbid, but it wasn’t. He wanted to see the plot of land, so we came out here and looked at it. This area wasn’t filled in yet, but they had it all planned out. Your father wanted to be on this hill. He would have loved a day like this, chilly and misty, the sky full of rain clouds. I don’t know if you remember, but he loved cemeteries. Any trip we took, we had to stop at a cemetery. He liked to read the inscriptions on the gravestones. Maybe I should have come up with something better.”

  He considered the carved words: “Beloved husband and father.” It was boilerplate, but novelty wasn’t called for on a headstone, and it was a fitting summation of his father’s life, even if it fit a lot of men’s lives. Beneath that spare etching was a space where the inscription for his mother would go. She was standing with him now, and the day would come when she no longer would be, when he would arrange for the lowering of her into the earth. He wanted to put his arms around her and shield her from what was to come, and he felt a kind of panic bloom in his chest. The most he could do to try to chase it away was drape an arm across her shoulders.

  “This was the only real estate your father ever really cared about,” she said, as if in answer to a private thought. It was a paltry plot, but the view was beautiful. If you added the adjacent space that Ruth and Frank McGuire had bought, it started to look like a little neighborhood. They’d been trailblazers when they’d secured the plots, but in the intervening years the march of mortality had swept past the area and filled it up, and another vanguard was forming a little way up the road. There wasn’t room there for Connell, which was just as well. He would make his own decision about a final resting place, or perhaps someone he didn’t know yet would make it for him.

  Real estate. He couldn’t help hearing another meaning in the phrase. What was his father’s real estate? There was the investment portfolio, and the house and the things in it; there was the contribution to science; there were the altered lives of the students he’d taught, and the impacts those students had had, and would have, on others. And then there was him. He was his father’s real estate. At the moment he was an underwater asset.

  He picked up a pebble and added it to the little pile atop the gravestone. They headed toward the car.

  “Your father got a kick out of the fact that Babe Ruth was buried here.”

  Connell remembered reading about ballplayers driving to Ruth’s grave to soak up some luck, but he hadn’t realized this was the cemetery in question.

  “Where’s the grave?”

  “Not far.”

  “Did Dad ever see it?”

  “He stood in front of it for a long while.” She chuckled. “Silent. Sort of solemn. The way you two get about baseball.”

  They drove until they reached a tall marker set back from the road, with a plinth that said RUTH in big block lettering under a large central stone that depicted Jesus gesturing to a little boy. One smaller stone bore a quote from Cardinal Spellman: “May the divine spirit that animated Babe Ruth to win the crucial game of life inspire the youth of America”; another listed the years of Ruth’s birth and death, as well as those of his wife, Claire. There were baseballs stacked in a little offering, a solitary bat, baseball cards taped to the stone.

  He thought of his father down the road, ignored except by family members. Death may have been the great leveler, but there were still hierarchies in cemeteries.

  He went up and rubbed his palm on the gravestone. He wasn’t above asking for a little luck. He might even have knelt if his mother hadn’t been there. It felt for a moment as if he were back in church as a little boy, as if he’d placed a quarter in the box and lit a votive candle and now the time had come to say a prayer. Saying a prayer, making a wish, having a thought—were they all the same? Was anyone listening? Was there anything other than a void in the universe? Help me, he thought. Help. But the Babe just stood impassive in his frieze, a gray block, silent as the stone it was quarried from.

  • • •

  When they got to the house, his mother put on a pot of tea. Connell went into the study to use the computer. The study still smelled like his father, or at least like things he associated with his father—old books, pencil shavings, the heated metal of the desk lamp. His mother came in and picked up something from the desk.

  “I was going through these file cabinets,” she said, “and I found this.” She handed him an envelope with his name on it. “Your father wanted me to give it to you a while ago, but with everything that was going on, I must have mislaid it.”

  He tried not to let her see the anger that was coursing through his system like a poison. “What does it say?” he said, calmly as he could.

  “Well,” she said, “I didn’t exactly steam it open. I remember he wanted to get some thoughts down for you. He wanted me to wait until he wasn’t compos mentis to give it to you. But obviously he didn’t want me to wait this long.”

  Connell held the letter warily. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Maybe you want to be alone for this,” his mother said, and left the room.

  Instead of opening the letter, which sat like an unread verdict, he went to the filing cabinet and looked through the drawers. One was full of mementoes from his youth—report cards, honors certificates, birthday and Father’s Day cards he’d written his father, art he’d made in the early school years, a once-essential stuffed rabbit he’d forgotten about. As the years passed, his father had saved increasingly more things, no doubt as mnemonic devices, until he had stopped saving anything.

  In another drawer he found shoeboxes full of those four-by-six photo albums that used to come free with a developed roll. The albums didn’t have dates, but one contained shots from a cross-country meet of his, so it must have been taken during his freshman year. They were mostly shots of Connell, though there wasn’t a single photo that depicted him looking at the camera. It was as though his father had been waiting fo
r him to turn and look at him. A terrific loneliness came over Connell as he imagined his father looking through the camera and calling for his gaze silently with his own. He was relieved to see a few landscape portraits of the meadow at Van Cortlandt Park, but when he came to a photo of his father standing with his arm around his old teammate, a sensitive kid who left the school after an unhappy freshman year—he had to jog his brain to remember the kid’s name was Rod—he felt jealous. Rod dwarfed his father; he appeared to be leaning down to be in the shot with him. Their faces were close together, and they had such smiles on. It looked as if Rod was his father’s own child.

  He was terrified to read the letter; he saw that clearly. He went to the bookshelves. All that remained of his father’s library were two shelves of reference books and some hardcover volumes of philosophy and literature that his mother hadn’t parted with. Another shelf held his father’s intellectual output—a shrine of published papers, notes, and notebooks. Connell remembered how much time his father spent in the lab just before he retired. He saw now that his father must have known he’d have to give up his lab soon. Was it possible to imagine him chasing an understanding of, even a cure for, the disease he was afflicted by? Whatever he’d been working on had come to naught, but maybe it would have had an impact on the larger world. If so, then these notebooks could hold the key to reclaiming him from the forgotten dead men on that hill. He wanted people to visit his father someday, paying posthumous respects.

  Connell found a notebook from this later period, but there was no cache of revelatory notes, no raw materials from which he might fashion a second act for his father in death. There were only scribblings in a wavering hand and endless, unlabeled columns of numbers.

  He sat back down and held the envelope before him. His fear of the verdict had waned as he read his father’s notebooks. He flashed with a juvenile hope that it contained something he urgently needed to hear, and now he hesitated to open it out of fear of disappointment. He wanted to preserve the seal of possibility on it; to reserve the option to project whatever he wanted onto it; to use his imagination to drag himself out of the hole he found himself in.

  98

  May 16, 1992

  My dear son,

  I wanted to take some time to tell you a few things that I think you should hear and that you can only hear from me, because a while ago I got some bad news, and to the extent that your knowing the things I will tell you here can answer questions you may have someday, I want you to know them. I don’t mean to insist on their importance by telling you them; I want my presence in your life when I’m gone to be a hand on the shoulder, not one around the throat; but if these things are important to you, then they are important to me to precisely that extent. I hope you can read my handwriting, let alone follow the train of my thoughts, which I fear may be hazier than I understand it to be at any given moment. I want to write this before the opportunity slips away.

  I want you to remember me, but only if you want to remember me. I tried to be the kind of father that a son could recall with a full and open heart and not out of a sense of duty. The way you know me as your father is the way I most purely am. The understanding between us goes beyond words, and it is there that I live most fully, there and in the mental space I inhabit with your mother. It may be important to future generations to know the biographical facts of my life, to place some leaves on a bough of the family tree, but that is an abstract notion; you are the reason I am writing, you whom I feel in my blood and bones. I don’t want to leave you with questions. I want you to carry me around to the extent that it makes you happy to do so and gives you strength. I want you to forget me if you need to. I want you to suck the marrow out of life.

  I am going to slow down. I am going to take a deep breath.

  If you want to remember me, remember all the things we did together. The times we ran through words for your spelling bees, hours and hours of words. You used to sound like a monk chanting. We started before dinner, picked it up afterward, went until your bedtime. Remember the driving range, emptying buckets of balls. Remember the fishing trips, the canoe trips. The catches we had, the games we went to. Remember the radios we built together, the remote-controlled car. Remember the trips to the comic book store, the trip to Italy, the trip to Disney World. Remember us going through your homework together. All the times we went to the batting cages. When I taught you the names of birds and plants and animals. When we went bird-watching. The symphonies we went to. The plays. The Mobil games at the Garden. The time we watched the pole vault record get broken. The long-jump record. The mile-time record. The Knicks games. The wrestling matches. George “The Animal” Steele. King Kong Bundy. Andre the Giant. Hulk Hogan. The way I rubbed your back until you fell asleep. The Mets games we listened to on the radio together. The times we read together at night. The ground balls I hit you. The fly balls. The times I drove you all over the five boroughs and beyond to your friends’ houses, or picked you up from the train when you called. The trips to the museums. The trips to the barbershop. Getting our hair cut side by side. The way we went to get you your new baseball gear every year. The jogs we went on. The push-ups we did together. All the times we went out in the cold to throw the football around. The way we got you over your fear of the rope swing at the Coakleys’ summer house. The way we got you to jump off the train trestle. Making Easter eggs. The way you loved to watch the tablets dissolve and the cloud of dye suffuse the water. All the times we shoveled snow.

  What matters most right now is that you hear how much I want you to live your life and enjoy it. I don’t want you to be held back by what’s happened to me.

  I want you to know that I loved my work and did some good with it, and I believe that is worth more than any amount of money. I have not given you a lifetime of riches, but I have faith I have given you a father you can be proud of.

  You will not have me there to speak to about the major events of your life, the ups and downs. But when the hardest times come, I want you to think of this:

  Picture yourself in one of your cross-country races. It’s a hard pace this day. Everyone’s outrunning you. You’re tired, you didn’t sleep enough, you’re hungry, your head is down, you’re preparing for defeat. You want much from life, and life will give you much, but there are things it won’t give you, and victory today is one of them. This will be one defeat; more will follow. Victories will follow too. You are not in this life to count up victories and defeats. You are in it to love and be loved. You are loved with your head down. You will be loved whether you finish or not.

  But I want to tell you: this is worth summoning some courage for. It doesn’t matter that you win; it matters that you run with pride, that you finish strong. Years will pass in an instant, I will be gone. Will you remember me on the sidelines, cheering for you? I will not always be here, but I leave you with a piece of my heart. You have had the lion’s share as long as you have lived.

  When I am gone, I want you to hear my voice in your head. Hear it when you most need to, when you feel most hopeless, when you feel most alone. When life seems too cruel, and there seems too little love in it. When you feel you have failed. When you don’t know what the point is. When you cannot go on. I want you to draw strength from me then. I want you to remember how much I cherished you, how I lived for you. When the world seems full of giants who dwarf you, when it feels like a struggle just to keep your head up, I want you to remember there is more to live for than mere achievement. It is worth something to be a good man. It cannot be worth nothing to do the right thing.

  The world is closing in on me. I have begun a race of my own. There will be no laurels waiting at the finish line, no winner declared. My reward will be to leave this life behind.

  I want you never to forget my voice.

  My beloved boy, you mean the world to me.

  99

  His mother was reading the newspaper over a cup of tea. There was a plate of cookies in front of her. She had set him up with a cup and saucer
.

  “Well?” she asked. “What did it say?”

  He stood in the doorway. “I didn’t finish.”

  “Why didn’t you finish? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Here, sit down.”

  He made his way to the chair. He had the letter in his hand. He placed it on the table next to his saucer.

  “Why didn’t you finish reading it?”

  “I read it,” he said.

  “You just told me you didn’t finish it.”

  “I finished it, Mom.” He could feel his lip quivering. “Give me a second to think.”

  “Fine. Tell me when you’re ready.”

  He took a cookie in order to do something. They were the jelly-topped ones she liked, butter cookies. He took a bite but didn’t chew it. He let the little chunk dissolve on his tongue.

  “I said I didn’t finish,” he said. “I didn’t mean the letter. I meant something else.”

  “Didn’t finish what? What the hell are you talking about? You’re not making sense.”

  “College,” he said. “I didn’t finish college.”

  “Of course you did,” she said quickly, taking a cookie.

  “I didn’t.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “I didn’t finish college. I was a couple of classes short, and I just came home.”

  She gave him a long, hard look and chewed slowly.

  “You’re telling the truth now?”

  “Why would I lie about this?”

  “You tell me. You’ve been lying all along, apparently.” She took another cookie and ate it quickly. He did the same, to distract himself from the anxiety he was feeling.

  “I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell the truth.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t have a diploma?”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  She sighed, put her face in her hands. “Is that why you’re working at that goddamned building?” Her voice was muffled a little from talking through her hands.