The Book of Dads

by Ben George

  I told the woman what happened. There was no hiding it, really. The smoke alarm was scattered across three rooms, the house hung with black smoke, the dog still breathing hard.

  She lectured me, and gave me the look. We all know the look.

  “I told you,” she said, and I do not know why, honestly, women believe that will somehow head off a disaster. It has not, since the dawn of time.

  I went to my easy chair, to heal.

  The boy walked up, patted me, and gave me some candy.

  Then, just before bedtime, he gave me some more.

  I could have lost this lottery. I could have gotten a pampered snot, which I was certain I would get, since all I saw in the malls and movie theaters and schools seemed to be pampered snots, little princes and princesses who thought a bad day was a day without a latte. But instead I got a boy with a good heart and a sense of humor, and all I can do is hope that I do not ruin him, somehow, by being me. I taught him some bad things, on purpose. I taught him how to throw a punch, because he asked me to. I taught him a few other things, things I hope will help him survive.

  But the frightening thing is what I have taught him without meaning to. I had believed that, because he had a real father, there would be no osmosis, no learning from me just by watching me live.

  I am prone, when under attack by the woman, to joke that I will “just leave.”

  “I,” I say dramatically, “am the only one holding this family together.”

  The other day, the boy was under attack for some minor transgression.

  “Well, I’ll just leave,” he said. “And I’m the only one holding this family together.”

  I hope there is something good, some scrap of something I have dropped that he picks up, something that will make him a good boy and a good man.

  But that might be hoping for too much. He is already a good boy, a fine boy. He is the kind of boy who walks over and says hello when a boy at school is being made fun of. Last basketball season, when a boy on his team had been forgotten by the coach, he got up from his place on the bench and walked over to tell the coach that the boy had not played, risking the coach’s displeasure. He does things like that, all the time.

  Me, I just make him grin every now and then.

  I am, after all, just the stepfather. Not evil, not good, just getting by.

  I joke, sometimes, that the worst thing about having no blood offspring is that there will be no one to come and see me in the county home when I am old.

  I have a fear. I have seen the workers in such places put little party hats on the heads of the old people there. I don’t want that. I would hate that.

  But with no blood kin to come see me, who would stop them?

  “I wouldn’t let them put no hats on you, Ricky,” the boy said.

  NINE TIMES (AMONG COUNTLESS OTHERS) I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO CAME BEFORE US IN MY BRIEF CAREER AS A FATHER

  ANTHONY DOERR

  1.

  We’re in New Jersey, my wife is pregnant with twins, and I’m walking home from the library on a dark and relentlessly cold afternoon. The row of brick-and-siding apartments we live in comes up on my left, originally built as barracks, old railings and old steps, a capsized tricycle in a snowbank, door after identical door, window after identical window, apartments built with GIs in mind, their cigarettes, their wives, their red-white-and-blue children.

  I have spent the morning reading about some footprints in Tanzania, seventy impressions fossilized across twenty yards, left by three bipedal hominids, trudging barefoot through volcanic ash, three and a half million years ago. Two runty adults and someone smaller.

  “It is tempting to see them as a man, a woman, and a child,” Mary Leakey, who found the footprints, writes. One of the walkers veers to the left momentarily before continuing on. The spatters of raindrops have been preserved in the mud around the tracks.

  A wet day, a volcano erupting nearby, mud pressing up between their toes, and someone—a father?—has a second thought, or stoops to pick up something, or looks back at what has been left behind. Then they’re gone.

  In New Jersey twenty yards of ice crunch beneath my shoes. I climb our three steps. Through the front window I can see Shauna inside, bearing her huge abdomen from kitchen to couch, her feet swollen bright red, her body stretched to its limits. The two creatures that will be our sons are crammed against the underside of her skin, twisting, she tells me sometimes, like snakes.

  I stand in the cold and a flight of geese cruises overhead, honking above the trees, and I think: my sons might see Paris, Cape Town, Saigon; they might get in fights, swim the English Channel, cook banana pancakes, join an army, fix computers. They might kill someone, save someone, make someone. They might leave tracks in the mud to last three and a half million years.

  2.

  Owen is born with acid reflux and has to be given Zantac every few hours. Henry has to be strapped to an apnea monitor the size of a VCR that squeals like a smoke detector any time his breathing pauses or the adhesive on a diode slips off his chest. The doctor makes us put caffeine in his milk to stimulate his breathing.

  They are five pounds, fraternal, wormy-armed, more blankets than flesh, no eyebrows, no kneecaps, and they need to be fed every three hours: three, six, nine, noon, three, six, nine, midnight. Most nights I take the shift from midnight to three a.m. I change diapers, fill bottles, listen to the BBC. The traffic light out the back window makes its mindless revolutions, green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red. No cars pass for hours.

  One April night, two in the morning, I come out of a half dream on the sofa. Henry and Owen are in their Moses baskets on the carpet beside me. They’re lying on their backs, wearing cotton hats, eyes open, neither making a sound, their gazes trained on some middle distance in the gloom. Henry’s monitor flashes green, green, green. Owen shifts his eyes back and forth. In the dimness I can watch expressions flow gently across their faces; they assume enchanted, glassy, mysterious looks, then frowns, then their eyes widen. They are partly me and partly their mother, but they are partly strangers, too, tiny emissaries from forgotten generations, repositories of ancient DNA; there are genes in them from Shauna’s great-great-grandfather, from my great-great-grandmother. Who are they? They are entirely new human beings, genetic combinations the universe has never seen before and will never see again. They are little brothers arrived from the mists of genealogy to lie in wicker baskets on the floor of our apartment.

  As I lean over them, watching, they blink up at me at the exact same second.

  3.

  We move to Rome, Italy, for a year. I research stratigraphy, excavations, the accumulation of sediment. Mud, ash, sand, pollutants, and bits of architecture rain down over the city at a rate of something like half an inch per year. Emperor Hadrian would have entered the Pantheon by climbing stairs; now we have to brake the big double stroller as we coast down toward it. Today’s Romans cannot dig a subway tunnel, swimming pool, or basement without stopping construction to call in archaeologists. In some sites researchers find ten, fifteen, twenty different layers of human settlements.

  Emperor Nero built a three-hundred-room, one-hundred-acre party villa in the first century C.E., and fifteen centuries later it had become a series of underground caverns. Renaissance painters used to rappel into the rooms to study the frescoes by torchlight.

  On Thanksgiving morning I take Henry and Owen to a Roman landmark known as the Protestant Cemetery. Inside the walls are umbrella pines, box hedges, headstones in clusters. The pyramid of Cestius, a magistrate’s tomb a hundred years older than Nero’s party villa, looms half inside the walls, its marble-faced blocks mottled with weather and lichen. Crumpled leaves roll across the paths, and big, dusky cypress trees creak like masts.

  John Keats, whose grave we’ve come to see, is buried near the corner. The stone reads:

  This Grave

  contains all that was Mortal,

  of a

  YOUNG ENGLISH POET,

&
nbsp; Who on his Death Bed,

  in the Bitterness of his Heart,

  at the Malicious Power of his Enemies,

  Desired

  these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone

  Here lies One

  Whose Name was writ in Water.

  The tombs sleep heavily in the grass. Henry and Owen squirm against their stroller straps. I gaze down rows of memorials into silent corners. We are hemmed by brickwork, ivy, history; we are the only living people in the cemetery. I begin to feel outnumbered. A breeze drags through the trees, the lawn.

  On the bus home I hold Owen at the window, put my thumb in Henry’s palm. For every living person on earth, I wonder, how many dead people are in the ground? Do they care that we walk around on top of their heads? Do our ancestors follow us around throughout the day, and do they shake their heads at us when we repeat their mistakes?

  We get off the bus in Monteverde; I wheel the boys home. In the old cage elevator they smile into the mirror from beneath their hoods. We rise through the stairwell. Owen reaches for the bakery bag in my fist. Henry fumbles for the keys.

  I heap the boys onto their mother. They laugh and laugh. We eat croissants; we drink pineapple juice from a box. Yesterday, Shauna tells me, Owen clapped his hands twice. Henry can now roll halfway across the room.

  It is a strange thing to bring five-month-old twins to a city stamped so indelibly with age and ruin. Every street corner rings with decline: decay of republic, disintegration of empire, the ongoing crumble of the church—decay is the river that runs through town, driving along beneath the bridges, roiling in the rapids beside the hospitals on Tiber Island. And yet nearly everyone we pass smiles at the twins. Grown men, in suits, stop and crouch over the stroller and croon. Older men in particular. “Che carini. Che belli.” What cuties. What beauties.

  In the States, practically every time someone would stop us on the street or in the grocery store, they’d gesture at the stroller and say, “Twins? Bet you have your hands full.” They’d mean well, of course, but to be reminded of something you can’t forget is debilitating. I prefer the Italian mothers who lean over the stroller and whisper, “So beautiful,” the smiles of passing children, the old Roman who stopped us today outside the cemetery and grinned at Henry and Owen before shaking my hand and saying, with a half bow, “Complimenti.” My compliments.

  4.

  We take our sons to Sardinia for a week. Early May is early for tourists and everything is closed and hardly anybody is on the beaches. The big resort hotel below our rented condominium is completely empty, just a lonely bartender named Claudio and a white stretch of beach and the wind blowing our footprints into dunes.

  Henry and Owen are fourteen months old; they run laps in the sand, half-drunk with the pleasure of such a forgiving surface, tipping past us and cackling, “Go, go, go.” Around and around they go, carrying their Legos or water bottles or balls, wiping out every twenty or thirty seconds. Shauna lifts them, kisses them, brushes them off. In a heartbeat they are running again.

  Despite some telephone wires and the little hotel, this still seems like a place the first Sardinians would recognize: the flies, the thorns, the big granite hills crumbling and baking all day, the hours folding over the inlets like fog; the stars and sea, the caps of the rocks that show themselves at low tide before going under again—all of it has been there since before any of this had a name, and all of it will still be here after the names are forgotten.

  Gulls soar hundreds of feet above us like confetti. The sun swings over the hills in a low, smooth arch.

  Inside, Claudio makes us caffe lattes, hot and foamy and perfect, and he wheels a little round table toward the boys with great ceremony and busies himself filling tiny coffee cups with foamed milk and sprinkling chocolate on top. The boys sit strapped into their backpack carriers and show varying degrees of interest. Mostly Henry just wants the spoon so he can drop it and hear it clink on the tile and then peer down at it and say, “Uh-oh.”

  In the evening we carry our boys up the hill to their port-a-cribs and the maquis fills with night sounds: the wind, some insects, an owl. A herd of goats tramps along the cape road in the darkness, and their wooden-sounding bells clank softly.

  After everyone is asleep, I hike back down to the abandoned hotel for a drink and tell Claudio that his resort is very beautiful. I am his only customer. He shows me a snapshot of his daughters, who live on the other side of the island, in Alghero, an hour and a half away. They are two and four years old, one blond, one dark.

  We grapple forward in my sledgehammer Italian. Claudio’s father was a fisherman. He does not like George W. Bush. He sees his wife and daughters one day a week.

  “Is this common?” I ask.

  “It is Sardinia,” he says, and then says more, but I don’t understand it. I nod anyway. Claudio chews his lip, and folds and refolds his bar towel into a perfect white square.

  “Is it difficult?” I ask. “Not seeing your daughters?”

  He nods, and I nod, both of us at the limits of our fluencies, and we look up at the TV where two Indian men wrangle a cobra into a basket. When I look back at Claudio, tall and trim in his vest and collar, there are tears on his cheeks.

  5.

  We move back to the United States. Idaho. Suburbs, exurbs, brown foothills, and long-drawn skies. Welcome to America: in our first week back I drive to six ATMs, a bank, and a check-cashing agency; I spend an hour on hold with someone in a magazine-subscription department; I wait two hours on the leather sofa in a car dealership to get a “check engine” light turned off in our car.

  We buy a house with a slate stone fireplace. One crystalline, frosty night, when they are not quite two years old, Henry and Owen refuse to go to bed; they sprint laps around the family room singing, “Chasing! Chasing!” and Owen chants, “Jump, jump!” and they grab opposite ends of a dog leash and perform short-lived matches of tug-of-war. It is after eight p.m. when Owen jumps off the sofa, trips, and strikes his forehead hard enough against the fireplace that a piece of stone, the size of a dime, chips off. The sound is that of dropping a small block of wood onto a concrete floor.

  Shauna has Owen in her arms in an instant. His screams are loud and edged with fear: a new kind of scream. The fireplace has gouged a hole in his forehead just below his hairline—it is the size of a paperclip and a quarter of an inch deep. There is enough blood that, by the time we have strapped Owen into his car seat, every square inch of a dish towel we’ve clamped over the wound is wet.

  We drop off Henry at his grandmother’s. The examination room at the hospital is glaring, fluorescent. Owen is brave. A nurse numbs his forehead. Teletubbies wander across a television mounted in the corner. The doctor says it is good news that Owen did not get knocked out. He checks his eyes, his ears; he says our son is going to be fine.

  There is dried blood on Shauna’s hands, arms, and T-shirt. I’m thinking how lucky we are; I’m thinking about cholera, dysentery, fevers, oxcarts, and open wells—all of history’s child destroyers. If you had a baby in Chicago in 1870, there was a 50 percent chance he’d die before he reached age five. If you had a baby in London in 1750, there was a 66 percent chance he’d die before he reached age five. For the entire history of humanity, except for the past, say, eighty years, parents were losing every other child. You get to keep Henry, but Owen’s got to go. That’s how things were for Phoenician dads, Babylonian dads, Aztec dads, Cherokee dads, for pioneer dads, and for caveman dads. The earth brims with the bones of children.

  Just two days before this trip to the emergency room, Shauna was watching the boys play with ice in the backyard when she turned to me and said, “If we lost them now, after getting them this far…”

  Instead of a needle and thread, the doctor uses superglue on Owen’s forehead. One gloved hand pinches the wound, the other floods it with epoxy. Owen watches the Teletubbies, holding his mother’s finger in his fist.

  Afterward we drive home in the frozen darkness an
d pet the dog and scrub the blood off the kitchen floor and put our son to sleep next to his brother.

  6.

  A brown disk of glue clings to Owen’s forehead for months. When it finally peels off, the scar beneath is smooth and forked and pale. He and Henry turn two; they become muscular, long-haired, frighteningly smart. Their enthusiasm for the world astounds. Everything warrants investigation: spiderwebs, thornbushes, potato bugs. They crouch in our driveway, poking strips of sun-softened tar with their fingers.

  “Boys,” I say, “let’s go. I’ve told you three times.” I stand over them, clap my hands. “You guys need to learn how to pay attention.”

  They don’t even bother to look up. Usually I would grab them, wrestle them into the car. But today I pause. Whoever says adults are better than children at paying attention is wrong; we adults are too busy filtering out the world, hurrying to some appointment or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new continents all day long. Sometimes, looking at them, I feel as if Henry and Owen live permanently in that resplendent state of awareness that grownups reach only when our cars are sliding on ice through a red light, or our airplane is thudding through turbulence.

  The boys drive their fingers deeper into the tar, then pull back and laugh as the tar rebounds to its original shape. They try jabbing sticks into it; they take off their shoes and press their toes into it. I try to imagine my great-great-grandfather at age two. Did he also think poking at tar—or squishing palmfuls of mud, or throwing pebbles into a creek—was the greatest pastime imaginable?

  Eventually I coax the boys into the car and drive them to a park and release them like hounds into the grass. They sprint toward the playground equipment and yell, “Running! Running!” As I watch them, the shadows of leaves flicker over the grass and the afternoon seems so precious that I wonder, only partly in jest, if I ought not to spend the rest of the week doing only this: watching my sons, watching the light falling through the trees. As if every minute spent doing something else would be a minute wasted.