by Ann Leary
“That’s very interesting,” replied Kate. “However, if you really understood yer friend Faith, you’d be aware that she knows perfectly well what’s wrong with her baby. He was born addicted to heroin, and he’s being weaned off it through the methadone in his mum’s breast milk.”
Unfortunately, this experience is a sad but accurate example of my pitiable abilities at character assessment. I am constantly mistaking shyness for arrogance, for example, and in this instance I mistook a junkie for a highly evolved spiritual guide.
I DID GLEAN an interesting fact about the SCBU from Kate that day. She informed me that a large three-ring binder that sat on the nurses’ stand, in plain view, was used by the nurses to jot down their observations of the parents, and their interactions with their babies. In a case like Faith’s, a social worker would review the documents before making a decision about whether the baby should be allowed to go home with the mother. Faith was being scrutinized closely, Kate confided. She would have been allowed to take the baby home already, if it weren’t for the fact that she’d been spotted “pinching” syringes from the doctor’s cart the day after the baby’s birth. I was less interested in Kate’s crime report than I was in the fact that the notebook contained observations about me and my suitability as a parent. I suddenly realized that most of my time in the unit had been spent either crying or sharing my paranoid thoughts with the medical staff. I imagined an entry:
Leary mother arrived quite early and, as usual, insisted on peering in through the window during doctors’ rounds. Depression and lack of sleep evident. Again displays unhealthy preoccupation with babies who are not her own. DO NOT leave her unattended in unit. Discusses feelings of guilt and inadequacy with attending nurse. Staff has experienced difficulty persuading this mother to put her baby back in isolette after holding him. Be firm.
I recalled confiding to a young nurse that I blamed myself for Jack’s prematurity, and I wondered now if she thought this meant I had spent my last days of pregnancy in a crack house. I thought about my interactions with Denis, around the time of Jack’s birth:
Serious marital problems evident. Mother clearly despises father. Perhaps all men. Very likely a lesbian. DO NOT allow yourself to be alone with mother. Make sure other staff are in earshot at all times.
I soon got into the habit of casually standing next to the nurses’ station when I arrived at the unit. “I don’t want to be in anybody’s way,” I’d say to the nurse. “I’ll just stand over here.” Then, when she was busily inserting somebody’s nasal gastric tube, my eyes would slowly turn downward toward the open notebook, and I’d frantically skim through the nurses’ notes, looking for any references to me or Jack. One day Miss Borthwick surprised me by dryly asking if I could pass her the notebook when I was finished reading it. I passed it to her, red-faced, and that was the last I saw of it. I imagined that day’s entry went something like …
This woman’s behavior is abnormal, if not pathological, even taking into consideration the cultural differences (she is an American; arrogance, perversity, ignorance are to be expected to a certain degree). DO NOT leave notebook in unit anymore.
My worrying and questioning and harassing of the staff was exhausting, and each night I would return to the nurses’ home and go straight to sleep. Usually around two in the morning, I would awaken drenched in postnatal sweat, breasts painfully engorged, to hear a wild party in the next room. I would insert one of my udders into the breast pump and wonder if my baby was going to live or die, and I would express, usually, more tears than milk. I would waddle down the hall, passing young couples “snogging” drunkenly, and put the expressed milk into the communal refrigerator, next to cans of beer. Then, as I tried to go back to sleep, I would pray that there would be no sirens, but as I was next to a hospital there always would be, and suddenly the weee-a, weee-a, weee-a World War II—movie sirens would sound. Then my sense of alienation would be complete.
ELEVEN
WHEN I WAS a teenager, my brother, sister, and I spent every Christmas with my mother, and then a day or two later, we would take the train from Boston to Stamford, Connecticut, to visit my father. When we arrived, we would grab our bags and shuffle uncomfortably out onto the platform. We knew what was coming, and, sure enough, we immediately heard a two-fingered whistle followed by “Halloo!”
Our eyes would scan the parking lot until we saw him stepping slowly toward us, tripping over rubbish and walking into cars, one eye sealed to the viewfinder as if by suction, the opposite half of his face swept up into a giant squint. Although in those days my father’s video camera was the size and weight of a large suitcase filled with cement, he shouldered its heft with the proud determination of Atlas himself.*
We usually stood there on the platform for a moment, frozen with stage fright. Then my father would beckon us toward him, and we’d make our way down the steps, smiling and waving into the camera. Eventually our smiles would fade and we would stop waving, but my father was always intent upon videotaping an entire sequence. If he picked us up at the train, he liked to show us walking all the way to the car, so he walked along—several feet away from us, silently indicating where the car was parked.
Always, before we reached the car, my father would clear his throat and ask, “How was the trip?” in the grand, stagy voice he used when he knew he could be heard on tape.
“All right, I guess,” “Good,” “Fine,” were our mumbled replies.
“Good, good,” Dad would emote. “Everybody’s waiting for you back at the house!”
Back at the house, Terry and her three boys were, as scripted, waiting for us. Before we had a chance to open the car doors, my father would leap from the driver’s seat, camcorder in hand, and videotape his wife and her children waving from the porch.
“Halloo! They’re here!” he’d announce.
“Hi, come in!” Terry said, directly into the camera, and then my father turned the camera on us as we filed self-consciously into the house.
My father adored Terry’s sons, and now, looking back, I can see why they might have been, at that time, slightly more appealing to my father than his biological children were. For one thing, they were younger, still in that sweet, wet-behind-the-ears stage during which teachers and parents are admired. We had graduated to that unattractive teenage stage during which all adults are viewed with derision and our worlds revolved around our friends, our clothes, and the acquisition of cigarettes and any controlled substances we could get our clammy little hands on. Also, Terry’s kids had another sire, so their quirks and shortcomings were more easily overlooked by my father, who could enjoy them without any guilt or feelings of accountability. But I think what made parenting most rewarding for my father during his second marriage was the availability of the camcorder.
The video camera gave my father something he had been seeking all his years of fathering: control. When the camera was turned on, he could manipulate the behavior of everybody in his presence. We, his subjects, learned not to complain or whine, because it would be so unpleasant having to view the behavior later on. Instead we would move about in an altered, camera-ready fashion, careful not to swear or, in my case, speak at all. The sound of my recorded voice never ceases to horrify me. (The nasality is so severe that, listening to it, one might imagine it’s my nostrils moving rather than my lips.)
We hated the video camera, my brother, sister, and I, but Terry and her kids seemed not to mind it at all. The boys acted completely normal when it was turned on them, occasionally hamming it up with a sight gag like pretending they were vomiting onto each other’s food, and Terry always smiled pleasantly when the camera was turned on her. When it was turned on us, we sat stone-faced, unable to think of anything to say or do that would be worth having to watch at the mandatory viewing session after lunch.
“First presents,” my father would say as we sat down to a lunch of taco salad. “Then, since you couldn’t spend Christmas Day with us, we videotaped it for you, so we’ll watch that
!”
After lunch we were herded into the family room, and as Paul and Meg and I started to flop down on the couch, my dad cried out, “No, no, kids! Over here. I’ve got everything set up.”
In the center of the room was a tripod holding the video camera, which now was fitted out with lights. The lights beamed down on three chairs in the opposite corner of the room. “Go on!” my father said. “You kids sit over there.”
We sat in the stiff dining-room chairs, side by side, and Terry laid our Christmas presents before us. Then my father turned on the camera, and we could see nothing but the bright lights boring into our eyeballs.
“Go on! You first, Meg.” My father’s voice could be heard from someplace behind the camera.
“Open the one with the pink wrapping, Meg! That’s for you!” Terry would chime in from what sounded like the direction of the sofa. She, too, had a special home-video voice she sometimes used.
Meg would open her present and hold it up for the camera. “Great sweater! Thanks … Dad? Terry?” Meg couldn’t see them, so she started to rise.
“No, stay there!” Dad’s voice was now a stage whisper. “You’re welcome!” he then boomed for the benefit of the camera.
“I have something for you, it’s in my backpack.” Again Meg tried to stand.
“No, we’ll open ours after you kids have opened yours,” my dad whispered. “Ann, you’re next!”
The camera made my father a director of sorts. It removed him from the scene, from the action, and put him in the role of creator. “Climb under the tree and get that present, Matty,” my father would whisper to his youngest stepson. “Now give it to Paul—go on!” Matty would hand my brother the present, Paul would give Matty a friendly pat on the shoulder, and my father would have a moment to view later, and for eternity. It really didn’t matter to him that the moment was something he had exploited. The unbridled randomness of family life was too much for my father, and the viewfinder was his way out. He taped, edited, stored, and archived his family, but later, when we watched these tapes, along with the tapes of Terry’s boys’ baseball practice, birthday parties, and their family trip to Cape Cod, they’re all present but somehow not focused completely on what they are doing. Instead their every movement and all their words are performed for the benefit of my father, who, in all our family videos, is just a disembodied voice.
MY FATHER’S FLIGHT arrived in London at five in the morning, and he took a taxi directly to the hospital. I wasn’t there yet, so one of the staff nurses led him over to Jack’s isolette. Then, security being absolutely nonexistent in that SCBU, the nurse took my father at his word that he was related to Jack and asked if he would like to hold his grandson. My father asked if he shouldn’t first put on a gown and mask, since he had just gotten off an international flight where the man in front of him had coughed for five solid hours, but the nurse said he should just wash his hands. Then she said, chuckling, “You Americans are so funny about germs.”
When I arrived in the unit, my father greeted me warmly. Then he handed Jack to me and began examining the machinery and the monitors carefully. He watched me hold Jack for a while and listened to me recount every burp and bowel movement the baby had made since his birth, and then, I think, he saw the next four days stretching out before him—four days in an exciting foreign city, watching his daughter hold a tiny, sleeping baby—and his mission was to get us as far away from the hospital as possible, for as long as possible, every day.
“Let’s go to Covent Garden,” he said. “I’ll buy you lunch.”
I remember looking up at him from my little chair next to Jack’s isolette. Lunch? Jack couldn’t go to lunch. What could my father be thinking?
“Why don’t you go?” I replied. “Jack usually wakes up for a few seconds this time of day. I really should be here.”
One of the neonatal nurses, no doubt desperate to be relieved of my constant, depressing company, said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake! That’s why we’re here. Go on, now, it’ll do you good to get out with your dad for a little while. Go on!” So, after I bade Jack a teary farewell, we started down Gower Street toward Covent Garden, my father and I.
Outside, in the pale gray light of a London morning, it occurred to me that my father looked different. He seemed thinner, his forehead less furrowed, and after some time I finally realized what it was. My father didn’t have his video camera with him. I had seen him frowning into a viewfinder for so many years that I’d almost forgotten what he looked like without it.
“Dad, where’s your video camera?” I asked.
“Well…,” he began, and then he sighed and shook his head sadly. “I decided to leave it at home. I didn’t have a converter. I thought still pictures would be enough, but as soon as I saw Jack, I wished I had it.”
“Oh,” I replied.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t have any way to charge it—the voltage is different here—and those darn batteries only last about an hour.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“You won’t think so later, when you want to see what he looked like when he was just born.”
“I don’t know if I’ll want to see all this later. It’s bad enough now,” I said, but my dad wasn’t listening. He had suddenly stopped walking.
“Will ya get a load of those nuts up ahead?” he said, nodding toward two college students with spiky pink hair and dog collars. “Let’s cross the street.”
“What? Why?” I asked, but my dad was already halfway across the street, and I was forced to follow him.
“You’ll wanna keep your eyes open. This doesn’t look like the best neighborhood,” my father informed me.
I looked around at the beautifully kept buildings with flowers freshly planted in the window boxes. Striding past us were businessmen, construction workers, and the occasional mother pushing a stroller.
“Dad, this is a perfectly nice neighborhood …,” I started to explain, but when I turned to look at him, he was glaring at a pair of Islamic women walking toward us, dressed in full burqas.
“Crazy, crazy people around here,” my father whispered to me as they passed.
“Those women aren’t crazy, Dad. They’re Muslims,” I said, but what I thought was, Who is this man? and I realized that I had not spent more than fifteen minutes alone with my father in my entire life.
“Look, here comes a real English bobby!” my father exclaimed as a cop approached on foot. “I knew I was going to regret not bringing the camcorder. Terry would have gotten a real kick out of that!”
We waited for a bus, and when it came, my father said, “Darn it! A double-decker! Now, that, I would really like to have on tape.” We climbed on board and rode to Covent Garden, where my father was forced to look longingly at all the American and Japanese tourists who were viewing the marketplace through the lens of a camcorder.
My father stayed in London for several days, and I was grateful for his company and also for the opportunity to observe him unfettered by the video camera. It was fascinating, for example, to listen to his frequent lamentations about what he wished he could be taping. These were always the most overly photographed and televised British scenes: a double-decker bus, the changing of the guard, the black London taxis speeding around tight corners—everything he had seen a million times, my father wanted the opportunity to record himself.
“Damn it!” he exclaimed as we watched a tourist being swarmed by pigeons in Trafalgar Square. “That, Terry would really get a kick out of!”
Faced with sights that really make London unique and exciting—a young man dressed in a tailored business suit staggering drunk and bloody through Central London in broad daylight, for instance—my father’s eyes would dart about for something—anything—else to watch. He wanted to view things that supported his ideas of the English as a quaint, intelligent, gentle race, but he found most aspects of their lifestyle … well, “crazy.” He repeatedly announced that the system of driving on the left-hand side of the road
was “crazy.” The British currency, lacking a paper pound note, was “crazy, absolutely crazy.” And the prices, everywhere, were “just plain crazy.”
The other interesting thing I learned about my father is that he has a remarkably high shame threshold. Take, for instance, his habit during that visit of suddenly, and loudly, speaking with what he believed was a good stab at an English accent.
“Look, there’s Buckin’am Palace. Maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of the queen mum ’erself, or Prince Chahls!” my father would say as we rode past in a city bus, and although in his mind he sounded like an Englishman, in fact he was doing a dead-on impersonation of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. “Ah, he’s a right jolly ol’ chap, that Chahls!” my father would chuckle, digging his elbow into my arm and winking at the other people on the bus, who stared at him in astonishment.
When it was time for him to return to the United States, my father made one last visit with me to see Jack in the SCBU. Jack was sleeping in his isolette, so we stood watching him silently. Again, as I had many times during that visit, I longed to see the camcorder cradled in my father’s arms, not because I wanted him to videotape Jack but because without it we were all too exposed. Good-byes were always videotaped by my father, but now, within a few moments, we would bid each other farewell without the camera between us, and we both felt vulnerable and defenseless.
“Look,” my father said, pointing at Jack. “His eyes are starting to blink … good God, they’re opening! Why in God’s name didn’t I bring my camcorder?” he said, and then he lowered his head to get a good look at Jack’s face.