by Ben George
I don’t remember, clearly, the things one would expect a father to—first teeth, steps, and words—the milestones we use to somehow identify our offspring’s qualities, their peculiarities, their charms. I remember when you cut your hair, and when you set it on fire—that acrid smell on a cool afternoon. I remember, will remember, your quiet laugh, the patter of your sparkly shoes on the secret bluestone path through the church garden that led to your kindergarten.
I also remember the top floor of the old house in the early afternoon, ambient light about to warm the window at the top of the landing. I was coming up the stairs and your mother had just hung up the phone. She was standing in the hallway, on the other side of the shaky rail. I stopped three steps from the landing. “There’s a real chance of Down syndrome,” she said, paused, and leaned against the wall. “That’s what the screening seems to say.”
What I wanted to do was sit and rock and weep and moan, not because you might have Down syndrome, but because there was nothing I could do. It’s a shattering moment, when you realize how stiff and empty you may be, and find yourself stranded in a storm. I remember your mother, watching me try to be strong, but perhaps I should’ve done something else—shake or cry—that would have told her that I trusted her, and knew how much she loved me. But I recited some statistics—numbers as a balm—as I walked to her, slowly, up the stairs. She asked, “We’re having this baby, no matter what?”
“Yes,” I said, at the top.
We waited twenty-four days to find out—ten until the amniocentesis date, and then two weeks for the results—twenty-four days of not knowing, of trying to calculate, manipulate, do anything but feel. I used to prepare, in school, for my father’s Sunday visit. All week long I’d practice not hoping, snuff out expectation. Marking time. I’d try to outlast the clock’s second hand—stare down its spasmodic ticks—get so close to it that I’d forget I wanted the day to be over. All so my Sundays by the window wouldn’t end with heartbreak. And if he did come, he’d get the same deadeye every cop or teacher got.
You never miss your water…Ella, those three-odd weeks I was a desert of reason. I should be clearer: I felt for you. I felt for your mother. I can feel for another, but that’s relatively easy. I don’t know how to be felt for by another, to expose myself to their scrutiny, truly, without bracing beforehand for the slap of their judgment. I lost this quality because I ignored it and let other parts of me—what I mistook for reason or wisdom or maturity—inform my decisions: how to be; how much of myself to expose and invest in moments with those I claimed to love. But what is love when it isn’t informed by innocence? What is faithless love?
One of the last acts of desperate men is prayer. So I prayed, not for some conventional wellness or health—my child would be my child, regardless—but for strength. What a paradox: alone, on my knees, asking for the strength to change things, the strength to endure, the power not to bend. I pray so I won’t need to pray—hardly humble. In supplication one should experience one’s greatest vulnerability, be open to faith. Only a cynic makes requests for power while kneeling.
The test results discounted the screening. And although I was present for your mother—through her hypertension, your early arrival, your early lungs, and the umbilical cord knot—I was frightened, but also hardened to the wish that for a time I could be wrapped in your mother’s arms. But you were the tiniest of things, less than half the size of your beloved cat. You couldn’t get enough air. All you did in the ICU was sleep among the tubes and wires. I rubbed your belly—only two fingers—thought for a moment about how good it felt. And for that moment, I was the boy with the birds again—“all hatred driven hence.” Then he had to disappear.
I pride myself on being someone who rejects our culture’s stifling conventions, but I’m so typically male. This trait would simply be boring if it wasn’t so dangerous to me and to those I love. I have wrestled with your brothers too much, tried to make them what I thought they needed to be, as though they’d been born ill-equipped. Frightened, faithless, I’ve never trusted that my love and presence would be enough. Ugh, my manhood; my insistence on being hard, on believing that being so, and making my boys hard, could profit us anything worthwhile. But this hardness stokes whatever spark of resentment they may have for me, forces them to move secretly under my cold scrutiny, fuels their desire to escape it; wounded boys with matches in their father’s tinderbox house. When they have left, and that house is burned, this hardness I have taught will serve them only in their ability not to feel for me—not to rue the distance between us. I’m a fool, because I know: my father helped make me hard, but I still miss him every day.
Your grandfather wasn’t innocent, but he was an ignorant man—a lonely man, and not just in the end, but most of his life. He spent much of it, at least the part I’m aware of, clutching that ignorance. He had neither the humility to ask for help nor the strength to help himself. When he was dying, I didn’t bring you with us for that last visit, although you wanted to see the man you’d met once as an infant, a second time as a toddler. I didn’t want you to be haunted by visions of the gaunt man—cleft chest, toothless—by his desperate rooms with oxygen tanks and cigarettes, or by the face I’d have to wear to greet him: the one with the dead eyes. Insane: my punishing him with a more pernicious strain of his original sin of absence; the one stoic son and his poor sons, lost as to how to emulate such blank cruelty.
But he was already there, roaming through your head. You mourned a man you didn’t know. You made me that book: I Didn’t Want Him to Die—held it up, crying for him, for me. Looking with sad wonder at why I didn’t do the same. Radical innocence, I have grown to understand, is not willful ignorance. It exists in spite of what we come to know. It perseveres “while the storm wind howls.” It’s what allows us to have faith beyond reason, when such faith seems to profit us naught.
O Ella, sometimes my mind is barren and dry. And in the narrow cracks strange weeds grow, which, in time, will strangle the host. I long to recover that radical innocence, the part that believes. I feel myself too much of a burden for a child of any age, but there’s something in you that makes me believe and want more than mean survival. Like your maternal grandmother—your namesake—you possess rare grace, fierce intelligence, a resolve that belies your small frame. You have her heart face. You both have those delicate, sloped noses, which make you look wise and young. Like my mother—soul-brown eyes—you will not quit, no matter what. You have a voice that turns a simple word to song. And you have that glow of the recognizable yet unfamiliar. Perhaps it’s the influence of so many lines of different folk—African, Celt, Anglo, American Indian—converging, becoming reconciled in one. I should just say I think you are beautiful.
It’s taken me seven years to fully feel your love. Seven years—a long time for a man, a lifetime for you, waiting for your father. I don’t know how much of this letter will resonate with you, or when, but it’s as honest as I can be, it’s, humbly, what I have. In order to be honest, one must express or embody the truth. But I don’t know the truth. I can only begin, somehow, to move roughly toward my own—what I have tried to keep hidden. When you call I will always answer yes, and come. Perhaps now I have the faith that you will answer mine.
This past winter, just after New Year’s, I was sitting in a room in the growing dark when I realized that you were kneeling on the floor. I could see only a few soft coils of your hair. I don’t know whether you were trying to hide, but you must have sneaked in, like one of those elegant cats that are always padding through your imagination. I wonder if you remember it, or how you will. You pressed into the small space between the armrest and my side, lay back, and tried to see what I’d been searching for in that gloom. I wanted to send you away—I’ve grown used to living in the dark, hiding, enduring, hoping you’ll never see anything more than the strong man with the funny dances. But you climbed into my lap and stayed with me.
Ella Sweet, I’ve watched you from the beach as you sprang to
the water: a bronze, bright, lissome girl. Not fearless, not ignorant. You know about the crab, the jellyfish, the great white that prowled the waters of Naushon, and the riptide—but you don’t yield. First you run, then paddle out beyond your depth, turn and ride the high swells, and coast in on the foam. If I believe I can fix anything and everything for you, that belief is just the edge of a great expanse of love. The farther shore can be gained only through the willingness to be made well by another, to recover that radical innocence so I can love and be loved by you.
Love,
Your father
ZEKE
DAVY ROTHBART
The story of my strange, unexpected foray into fatherhood starts with a girl named Cassandra. Cassandra was a childhood friend of mine who moved away when she was thirteen—to Chicago, then to California, followed by a few brief stints in other places before landing for high school in Pensacola, Florida. She always had a tough go of things growing up—she never really knew her dad, and she and her mom and brother moved around so much that a couple of times she called me crying when she had to pull up stakes again. For the most part, though, she was incredibly upbeat and resilient, a good listener with the kind of sweet laugh that made any troubles in my own life seem to evaporate in an instant.
All through high school we wrote letters back and forth, and when we were twenty we traveled around eastern Europe together, not as romantic partners, just as friends. Every couple of years since, she’ll surface in my life by way of a middle-of-the-night phone call. She’ll be in the midst of a crisis, and desperate for advice about problems at her work, or with school, or with a boyfriend, or worried about her little brother and his scrapes with the law. She’ll say to me, “You’re so sensible. You understand how things work. You’re so smart about things—not just smart, but wise.”
When she calls me with a problem, for a week or so we talk every day, just going through it all, and by then we’ve figured out an approach. If she’s got a manager at work who’s overly flirtatious and making her uncomfortable, I’ll ask her a bunch of questions: What’s he doing exactly? How often? Have other people witnessed his behavior? Who’s his supervisor? After all of our discussions, she inevitably feels a whole lot better. We make a plan for some kind of decisive action and I always end up feeling sensible, knowledgeable, and smart—not just smart, but wise.
A few years ago, Cassandra called me all freaked out. She had a new kind of crisis that wasn’t like anything I’d ever dealt with before. She was pregnant—almost three months pregnant. The dad was her sometime boyfriend, a hippie wanderer type who went by the name Rainbow Bear, though his California state ID said Paul Danielewski.
She was living in Santa Barbara without any close friends around. She had no one to turn to, she told me, and she sounded upset and confused, torn up about whether she should have this baby or not. “Davy,” she said, “tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
“Holy shit,” I thought.
I ended up doing pretty much what any sensible and smart (not just smart, but wise) person would do in that situation: I told her I couldn’t make the decision for her, but that I would do everything I could to equip her with as much information as possible so that she’d feel better suited to decide on her own what to do.
I knew of one friend of mine who’d had an abortion and had always been haunted by it, and another friend who’d had an abortion and, while sad about it of course, really believed it had been the right thing to do. I also found a woman who’d given her baby up for adoption and another who’d kept her baby and was a single mom. I wanted Cassandra to talk directly to all these women, but she was really shy, and too upset to reach out to strangers. “Those are your friends, not mine,” she said. “I’d feel weird calling ’em.”
Instead, I talked at great length to each of these women myself, then relayed their stories to Cassandra, careful to present the stories in a balanced way, so that it wouldn’t seem like I was favoring one option over another. I told her how one of the women who’d had an abortion still had horrible dreams about it, and how she still—miserably—celebrated the child’s birthday each year on the day her baby would have been born. Cassandra gasped. “But the other woman who had an abortion,” I told her, “she ended up having a wonderful family many years later.” My friend who was a single mom had given up her promising music career to work as an attendant in a parking garage, and even though her little son was dear to her, she was consumed with disappointment that she’d never been able to follow her dream of being a singer. The woman who’d given up her baby girl for adoption felt like it had been the right thing to do, but still had bouts of loneliness and wondered if her life might be richer if she’d raised her daughter herself. Cassandra listened to all these stories very quietly. I told her I’d even gone so far as to talk to a couple of friends in medical school to gauge the risks of an abortion late in the first term. (Relatively safe, it turns out.)
At the end of all this, Cassandra was only more confused. She seemed frustrated and anguished and utterly overwhelmed about her decision. “Please,” she begged me. “Tell me what you think I should do.”
Now that’s where I should have said, “Look. Nobody can tell you what to do in this situation. This is a decision you have to make by yourself. Spend a day in the woods. Meditate. Pray. Of course this is agonizing. But only you can know what path to take. And whatever you choose, that will be the right decision.”
But that’s not what I said.
Cassandra was barely getting by on her own as a cashier at a health food store. No medical insurance. Shady roommates. A shaky lease. A boyfriend named Rainbow Bear. “Umm, Cassandra,” I said. “I know being a mother appeals to you, but you’re still so young. Maybe this isn’t the right time. Down the road, you’ll have the chance to have a baby with a guy who’s gonna be there to raise the child with you. It’s just gonna be so hard on your own. I think you should wait.”
I Think You Should Wait. Sort of a pleasant euphemism for Kill the Fetus.
Cassandra seemed to understand and quickly come to terms with what I’d said. We talked maybe once more the next day, and then she disappeared again. For months afterward, I felt weird about what I’d done. I did think it was probably for the best, but what if something went wrong and she was never able to have children again? Or what if she never found the right guy and this had been her one chance to be a mother? I think I would have felt equally weird if I’d told her to have the baby, too. I just felt like I shouldn’t have been the one to decide.
Three years later I was living in Chicago and I got a call from Cassandra. She was in the Chicago suburbs, staying with her grandfather. She invited me out to visit her, and we agreed to meet the next day at the playground across from her grandfather’s house. I pulled up, hopped out of my car, and there was Cassandra, waving to me from beside the swing set. Then I saw, tearing through the grass toward me, a little blond two-year-old boy. It was Cassandra’s son, of course—she’d had the baby after all. And he had the same name as my favorite basketball player in the world—Isaiah. Like Isiah Thomas. “Davy,” she said, “meet Isaiah Bear.”
I felt overjoyed, completely shocked, knocked off balance—a whole bundle of emotions all at once. My eyes got watery.
Isaiah, I quickly discovered, was the most incredible, joyous, dazzlingly intelligent two-year-old boy I’d ever met in my life. I swear this is true: that night we brought him to my friend Nicole’s house—I was couch-surfing at her place at the time—and when we introduced him to twelve people in a circle, he went right back around and knew every single person’s name. A truly incredible kid.
At the same time, as amazing as Isaiah was, Cassandra was struggling. Rainbow Bear had rumbled off, and she’d been bouncing from town to town, first staying with his parents, then with an old boyfriend or two, and now with her grandfather. But that was a bad situation, too—her grandfather was a drunk and his place was in shambles; he needed as much care as Isaiah did. She had to get out of
there.
I felt pretty guilty for having pressed Cassandra to have an abortion. Now that I’d seen how ill that advice had been and what a beautiful boy she’d had, I felt all the more responsible for Isaiah’s happiness and well-being. Somehow, I thought, if I could help his path toward a good life, I could make up for that little part where I’d suggested he be exterminated. So I jumped back in again. I took over. Because, you know, I was smart. Not just smart, but wise. And I came up with a plan: I’d move back home to my folks’ house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a little while, and bring Cassandra and Isaiah to live with us for a couple of months. A chance to make a new start. My folks had lived in town for thirty years and I’d lived there most of my life. Helping Cassandra to find a job, a place to live, friends, a support network—it all seemed feasible. Those are the kinds of things that can be really difficult if you’re entirely on your own, but with me as advocate they could be accomplished quite easily. Cassandra was up for it all—stay with my folks, get a job, work and save money, then move into her own place and raise her son. She had no drug problems or anything. It seemed like a reasonable plan.
I was excited by it all. Cassandra had been a lifelong friend and I truly wanted to help her, and I also liked the idea of feeling altruistic—and the idea that this other girl I was chasing after at the time might see me as altruistic.
There’s also something kind of gangsta about having a little kid when you’re young yourself, and it occurred to me that living with Cassandra and Isaiah would be like having my own kid. At the basketball court where I’d played a lot of ball in Chicago, there was a guy who always brought his two kids with him, two and four years old. He’d play ball with us, and his kids would shoot around on the sad little eight-foot rim that faced the grass, or just watch us and roll in the dirt. Between games, he’d mess around with them lovingly for a couple of minutes or shout at them for wandering too far away. I liked the idea of showing up at the court in Ann Arbor with Isaiah, and being able to cuff him, scold him, roughhouse with him, love him and teach him how to shoot. Fatherhood makes you seem a little more tough and rugged, like getting a tattoo on your face. And being a dad—or acting as a dad—makes you feel more like a man.