36. Naming

Having an “illegible scrawl” is not such a bad thing sometimes. I’ve never liked putting my name on any kind of list. But how can I not name myself as one of the people who attended my mother’s wake and funeral? At least my mother, if she could see it, would recognize the long loop underneath a staff that contracts into the sharp joints of a seismometer wave. She’d know it anywhere—even in death, I believe—but no one else, not even my father, I’m sure, could ever read it. Not that it would’ve mattered. Something occurred to me as I signed guest book at the entrance to the funeral parlor: If anybody else could decipher that blue gash I sliced across the page, it’d be the lady whose name I never knew. I don’t know why I thought that—well, I didn’t know at that moment, anyway. But somehow it would make sense that she, who’d never before that day done more than glance at me while she spoke with my mother, could decode that scrawl, or many of the other things that, it seemed, only my mother understood. After all, she seemed to notice, as I did, mother’s mouth, firm but delicate with a top lip like a crossbow, the lines darting and disappearing around it into the soft but unyielding curves of her cheekbones. And, I thought, if anybody besides my mother could recognize my voice after not seeing or hearing from me for generations, for lifetimes, it’d be the lady whose name I never knew.

She short-circuited the sigh I was about to heave when she avoided looking at my name by staring at me. Besides her, only mother could’ve done that.

And then a dream—one of the few I’ve ever made any effort to remember—came to mind. I don’t remember when I first dreamt it, but I’m sure it was long ago, probably when I was still on this block. Could’ve been a daydream, for all I remember. A shadow descended—quickly, at first—but its plunge fluttered to a glide as it neared the ground like sand skittering under ripples spilling into foam in the horizon. Long, silky strands unfurled as the shadow touched the ground.

It swirled in the wind like clouds and whirled more furiously around something I couldn’t see; it was like the eye of a storm. In the distance, the wind stuttered the tail of the shadow. It was a mare -- Don’t ask me how I knew; you just know certain things sometimes in dreams. – that skipped in widening loops through tall reeds flickering where I would’ve seen a dusk—or a dawn—if the gray tide of the sky hadn’t spilled against the line of that shore.

The long strands of that shadow, turning brown and silky, writhed and wriggled in the wind, which was winding along curves I couldn’t see and wrapped themselves around cumulus curlicues.

I followed one strand, softening in a wind, that seemed to be falling off a line at the edge of that land—I wasn’t sure whether it was a tidal marsh, a beach or simply a cool, damp , windswept field.—until I saw her face. In my real world—that is, my everyday, waking world—she’d never had such hair. But in the dream, it was hers; it couldn’t’ve been anyone else’s: it was soft in a way you can only remember, like a light in a room where you spent your very first days: a light you never can experience again, except in your dreams

Mother and I never talked about dreams, and only rarely about other people. I can’t remember a conversation about “the future” or my future. For that matter, she never mentioned the past—not hers or anyone else’s—and this doesn’t surprise me now. Somehow it never occurred to me to ask her if she envisioned herself at a kitchen table with me, or with any one child—I am her only one, as far as I know—and no one else. No man, no friends—neither mine nor hers—nor any other sentient, conscious being.

I can’t remember her uttering any forbiddance of bringing my friends to the house. It would’ve been superfluous, anyway: I had no contact with the other kids beyond the school hallways ant the paths we took along the sidewalks and streets to and from our homes and school. And my mother talked to Mrs. Rolfe, Mrs. Littington and that lady who followed me to the bathroom and the sign-in book when they passed each other’s houses or when they met surreptitiously in a store or some other place.

I doubt she’d foreseen coming to know any of them, any more than I can envision this person whom I’ve become, who came to mourn her. Perhaps this was the reason she—and, as far as I could tell they—could only see themselves in that eternity of their own lives: that moment called the present, which of course they never named. Giving a moment--or any person, place or thing—a name, or calling it something, makes you as separate from it as my mother’s (and presumably their) God from the word, the light, the water, the garden and Adam and Eve. And those names for the way people acted, for circles of friends, for neighbors: Once you use them, they separate you from them or them from you, the way foods you ate when you were growing up become memories when you learn the names other people call them. I learned that mom’s eggplant salad was called caponata; the tomato sauces she made were called marinara, boulognese and so on. Once I learned those names, those foods—even though I still love them—were no longer mine or my mother’s.

Now I know that people—some’re called psychoanalysts, others call them priests, fortunetellers, soldiers or any number of other names—have their names for my home, my mother, the clouds and everything else in the dream, and for the dream itself. And for whatever part of my brain, or whatever it was, that made the dream happen. I don’t know those names now, and maybe I never did or never will. Somewhere along the way I stopped getting an education (with a capital E). You spend enough time in school and everything becomes a type or a category—here or there, this color or that color, the past or the future. But not the present: there is only Time. (Yes, with a capital T.) Everything on this block—all of the people, the houses we lived in, the funeral parlor where we met, probably for the last time—are all moments out of Time. Until the moment when that lady followed me, I’d been living in Time, never in any moment, because all those other moments were gone.

But that lady didn’t know my name, the one I chose for myself. Nor did anyone else in that funeral parlor. If they’d wanted to, they could’ve talked all day with me and they’d’ve forgotten it by now because they didn’t know my name. I wouldn’t’ve minded that, really.

35, Behind Them

 

Someone gives the respectful yet truncated stare one directs toward, but not quite at, someone she vaguely recognizes. And she’s not sure she wants to find out. Barbara Fabriaferro, nee Moskowitz, the lady who lived two doors down from us. I used to spend afternoons, evenings and sometimes weekends at her house when my mother was out fulfilling obligations I wouldn’t understand until much later.

Mrs. Fabriaferro had a husband—Did he father her sons?!—who went “around the corner for a pack of cigarettes” and was never heard from again. Willie, the oldest boy, was my age and would never talk about him. Gerald and Tomy, the younger ones, never talked at all—not to me, anyway. Willie spent most of his time in school and away from it starting fights with other kids. Except for me. So we had no reason to acknowledge each other.—actually, he had even less use for me than I had for him. If Willie wouldn’t fight you, no other kid in the neighborhood would. I wasn’t worth hitting, especially not for him. Even under his school uniform—which, even though I saw him every day for years, I still cannot picture him in it—he seemed wired together, ready to pounce at any moment. I would never’ve tried to fight him back: My pituitary gland had done its work early, leaving soft flesh on the parts of my body where sinews twined with muscle on his. In those days, I wasn’t much of a runner, either, so there wouldn’t’ve been any thrill for him in a chase or capture.

In other words, Willie, though he seemed born to fight, was not the school or neighborhood bully. Although he won every fight—that I heard about, anyway—he only fought kids who could fight him. No question, he fought to win. But he always seemed to know whose reflexes matched his, and who could land a punch as quickly as, or faster than, he could.

I, on the other hand wanted to—could—fight only in self-defense. It wasn’t a matter of pacifism or pussilamnity: The fight itself and the opponent’s combat-readiness never interested me. If I were ever to throw punches, only death would stop me—or my enemy.

And the one time I had any reason to strike back at anybody, nothing in my mind or reflexes would’ve been enough: I didn’t get the chance to hit first, hit hard or hit at all. Not even to kick or throw something: from behind, he clasped his hand around my mouth and dragged me. But Willie never knew about this, at least as far as I know. Nor did his mother, or anybody else. He could just as well’ve been there, photographed it, remembered it. Then again, if any of the boys in the neighborhood could’ve seen it, it could just as well’ve been him. Then again, if he had, he might’ve fought that man. And, well, who knows…

Anyway, his mother, Barbara, came to the funeral. Was she remembering those afternoons, those Saturdays, when Willie sat taut and motionless on the edge of the couch while war movies rattled the television and I slumped at the other end of the sofa, reading or just staring? Or does she realize that up to this day, the eve of my surgery, I’ve had hardly even a scar, or even a scrape, mainly because of Willie. Had she known, would she have extorted an expression of gratitude from me—for her son’s contempt, even disrespect of me?

He wasn’t there. Nor were her other two sons. After I left this block, I never heard about them again. Or for that matter about Mrs. Littington, who said something—troppo malo-I didn’t know she spoke Italian—to a woman in a black nun’s veil.

And what of Mr. Littington, who met her during the war in Toulon. Came back, never looked back, he said. She followed. When he didn’t understand her, which was most of the time, he’d promise, “N’aura pas de faim.” Apparently, he learned just enough to know that they say “Je t’aime” only in movies and first-term French classes. When Phil first brushed his epaulets against Francoise’s black dress, she said something about how he’s an American who thinks life is “just like een ze moo-vees.”

Glancing at me, she arched, then lowered her high fine brows—some things don’t change—then turned toward the casket and clasped her hands. I thought I heard her whisper, “Sacre Dieu, ce ne’est pas important” or something like that. Then again, I might’ve been remembering something—that was her response to anything he couldn’t answer with “N’aura pas de faim.”

Once, after she’d moved away—something to do with Mr. Littington’s work—she wrote to Mrs. Rolfe, whose earliest memories followed her to and from the camp where she and her family were imprisoned with other Japanese-Americans. Mrs. Littington wrote about the place to which she’d moved: some town with mediocre, expensive coffee shops and a theatre that showed Dirty Harry and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Mrs. Rolfe described the letter to my mother. “She asks about you. And she says ‘but it is not so important.” My mother never spoke about her again. But I remember Mrs. Rolfe mentioning her to another woman the rest of the neighborhood saw only when she picked up her mail from the curbside box or planted or pulled from the patches of rock and dirt between her house and lawn.

That lady came to the funeral too—the only time I’ve ever seen her away from her house or wearing anything besides pastel-colored smocks. Her black dress, also a smock, hung in loose folds from her shoulders to her calves, where even her support stockings couldn’t smooth away the wrinkles.

Even she—until and after that day I didn’t know her name—glanced with furtive recognition. I didn’t know why she’d remember me, except for the fact that I lived on the block. In fact, I don’t know whether she knew anybody else besides my mother, Mrs. Rolfe and perhaps Mrs. Littington: I never saw anyone go to or come from her house. Years later, at the funeral, I recognize her the way I can recognize just about any woman: by her voice. Especially hers, which I’d heard only once before the day of the funeral. One of those sounds that’d never change, ever: rather low, but not throaty; rather like my mother’s—and mine. Even though they don’t echo, I hear them again and again, because somehow I return to them when I’m not thinking about them.

Now I realize that she and my mother probably hadn’t been talking about me, or anybody on that block. In fact, the one time I can recall hearing her speak to my mother, she said something like, “They will not come back.” At least that’s what it sounded like: She spoke in a way I hadn’t heard before or haven’t heard since. It wasn’t her accent because she came as anybody I’ve heard to speaking without one. And, although the phrase came out seamlessly, it was too taut, too terse to seem smooth or polished: It had none of the effected restraint one hears in the uninflected speech of actors and academicians.

I only heard her that once. Any other time I walked by when she and my mother conversed, my mother’s stare would glance off her, in my direction, then just as quickly back to her. I’d immediately head for our house, school—any place but there. Of course I wanted all the more to hear them, but no matter how quietly, how softly I walked, my mother’s face’d dart in my direction as soon as I’d gotten close enough to see what either of them was wearing.

Talking to that lady whose name I never knew, my mother’d lose or leave something, some force, that kept the corners of her eyes and mouth horizontal and parallel to lines I didn’t see but seemed to radiate from her jawline into the air around her. Whether she listened to or interjected in that lady’s talk, her cheekbones arched and furled broken swirls underneath her eyes and around her lips, which would seem softer. She didn’t seem older or younger—indeed, at those moments, my mother and that lady seemed to be unbound by time and undefined by age. Perhaps this was the same look that Mrs. Littington said when she declared that my mother was “pretty” and “sympathique.” I don’t think the man who fathered me, or any other man, saw her that way.

I think the one other time I heard the lady whose name I never knew speak, she told my mother, “You look very pretty today,” even though that day she hadn’t brushed her hair and she wore beige stretch pants and a T-shirt that didn’t conceal the weight she’d been gaining. Perhaps my mother looked less like an anonymous housewife than other mothers, but I don’t think that’s what that lady liked about her. Maybe it was something in the sound of her voice, or more precisely, the expression in her speech.

She gestured, in my direction, by the foot of my mother’s casket. I jerked my head away and turned toward the door of the airless, climateless funeral parlor. Out the door, to the left, a few steps down the corridor to the bathroom. Wrong move: She followed.

Relief! It’s a single stall, and I got to it first. Why do they always assume that in a room full of people, especially women, only one will have to go at a time? And doesn’t anybody ever clean these things? You can go to nice restaurants, libraries, opera houses—all those places where people are supposed to be, or at least appear, civilized, and they all smell like they’ve been power washed with piss, and the seats and bowls are always stained, streaked and marked. I mean, women are better about picking up after themselves and cleaning themselves up, but how is it that our bathrooms are dirtier and smellier than the ones for men?

But at least the door closed on this one—before that woman got to it!

Not that I didn’t trust her. Or more exactly, I couldn’t think of anything she could use against me. I didn’t expect to see her or anyone else in that room, ever again, and of course there was nothing she could tell my mother. My mother’d’ve probably reacted differently to anything that woman could’ve said if I could say it too.

But for some reason I became curious. How would that pale gray lady see me? What would she find in my eyes, in my face, that she couldn’t find five, ten, twenty years ago? She hadn’t changed much, except that she seemed a little heavier even though, as far as I could see, she hadn’t gained any weight. And she still had those austerely, nakedly feminine jawline and eyesockets I remembered. Hadn’t heard her voice, though. What could she say to me?

After combing my hair, brushing my face and smoothing over my clothes (One good thing about black: It doesn’t show wrinkles too much1), I opened the door to the narrow, colorless alcove where she stood. Didn’t look like she’d turned her head, or even flinched, while she waited. Her gaze, then as in my childhood, always seemed turned in my direction. Whether she noticed me or not seemed to depend on what she’d been thinking about. However, if she wasn’t looking at or noticing me, no movement or gestures could bring me to her attention.

She stared, her nearly black eyes not meeting mine but sweeping a tide of chilly crystalline light under my skin. “It’s good that you made it,” she intoned. I nodded, thinking of all I could’ve said, none of which would’ve mattered: Wish we didn’t have to be here. Should’ve come to see her sooner. I know, it does seem odd that I could talk to mother every week but still manage not to visit her. Other people I could write off if they didn’t come to see me. And I did, even though I made it next to impossible for them to find me.

“I’m sure she would’ve appreciated you herE”…her tone fit the moment too well for her to have been relieved. “Perhaps you can sign the book.” She gestured toward black leather covers opened to one of a dozen pages.

34. Destinies of Choice

She doesn’t know I’m here now. I’ve never believed in ghosts, spirits or anything that’d wander whatever someone’d just left. I’m not saying there’s no existence after or before this one, and I’d never argue with someone who believes in reincarnation. But I’ve never experienced déjà vu as far as I know, and for that matter I’ve never had any wish to find out that I inhabited someone else’s body in Ancient Greece or some village just outside the farm where my great-grandfather was born. It would’ve been useless information to me—actually, very few facts and almost none of the ideas I’ve encountered could’ve changed the course of my actions.

Yes, my actions. I won’t try to explain them as the results of any other person’s actions or words, or any other force outside my own body. I killed. Yes, I killed. I could’ve claimed self-defense but I never have; I don’t expect to. None of it matters anyway: Nothing has changed the fact that someone is dead. Someone, perhaps the state, could’ve imprisoned, tortured or killed (Don’t you love that euphemism: Execute?) me, but it wouldn’t’ve brought him back or made his family—actually, his mother—whole again.

Anyone who’s ever taught—In fact, anybody who’s had as much time as I’ve had to see people from the other side of one-way mirrors—knows that the fear, the anticipation of punishment doesn’t cause someone to reconsider the action he or she is about to take; the actual punishment, once the act is done, is useless. It didn’t take long for me to realize that whatever ostracism, whatever abuse, I might run up against for killing him wouldn’t change the fact that he’s gone, that other people knew—or simply believed, which on this block is the same thing—that I’d aborted, cut down, short-timed, snuffed out, or whatever descriptive phrase they used to avoid saying “killed,” someone they might’ve treated even worse than they treated me.

So it’s not even a matter of how or who you kill, whether the victim was intended or not, a friend or an enemy, or a relation of any kind: I’ve paused longer for the deaths of people I’ve never met, or of whom I’d never heard except for their deaths, than for the one whose life I terminated. Even the death of Mother Teresa, whose work I always detested, left a hole in me no one else could and that couldn’t be filled with anybody or anything else. Some people can’t, won’t or don’t mourn their own fathers; others dissolve like rainclouds over the loss of a non-sentient being.

I’ll admit some guilt: I never stopped to grieve my father. The fact that he wasn’t there for me to grieve doesn’t explain or rationalize my lapse any more than necessity, whatever that may be, excuses my killing.

Of course he knew, if only for a moment, that when I had the power of life and death over him, I made the only choice, consciously or not, that could hold any meaning for him. Our lives did not intersect, as some would say: They never could have. Instead, he existed on one side of an opaque window. I began on the other side. Nothing in the life he lived has changed, or will be changed, by actions I or someone else have taken since his death.

So why, then, did I attend her funeral. She’d never know I was there; even if she did, she might not’ve recognized me. No, not even she—she’d only see what was, who was, in a moment called the present only because nobody’d yet decided what to call it, in a new suit of clothes—or at least something she’d never seen me wear before.

She, as much as anyone else could, or at least would, see someone who hadn’t killed—not even a “yet” attached to my story. I would not be the one who left, who ran. I’d still be that child who crept by the door and peeked through the window when she didn’t want me to know what she’d seen or heard outside. To her, I’d still be the one who wasn’t supposed to know the truth about Adam’s death—about Death—years after poking my nose through a curtain and lifting a slat of the Venetian blind. I still wasn’t supposed to know, or at least let on that I knew.

I’m sure she knew—Mother wasn’t stupid—but somehow I never wanted to tell. I never wanted to disillusion her. And what is disillusionment but the loss of one’s prerogative not to know that his or her life up to that point was an illusion, a dream. So what did I do but keep up one last illusion, even though she wasn’t there to notice.

Even though I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, I went to her wake and funeral out of respect for what I perceived to be her wishes. She’d’ve wanted me there, I told myself. And still tell myself. Me—or at least a memory of me—that’s who was in that room, along with my memory of her. Of course nobody goes to a funeral to remember: One only transports and transposes a memory of someone onto the corpse in the coffin. I couldn’t see her any more than she could see me. But nothing has ever seemed more imperative to me than to stand before that amalgam of wishes, dreams and fevers, frozen in an embalmer’s moment, encased in silk from the neck down.

I lied to her, disobeyed her, even stole from her, though I see now there are some things even I couldn’t’ve taken from her. Her half-hearted attempts to inculcate me with a faith she never questioned but never really believed did not take. Her more serious efforts to instill conventionally correct notions of sexuality and family in me proved even more fruitless.

I repeat, I’ve never been free from hypocrisy; probably never will be. I want to honor feelings my mother had now that she can no longer have them. For years, many years, whenever we could’ve gotten together, I made some excuse or found another obligation. Or I simply managed to be in some remote part of the world with no convenient way of getting back to this block to see her. Certainly we didn’t abandon any thought of each other: through all those years, we talked every week, usually on Sundays. She could sense, over the phone, that I’d changed, that I was changing. She’d never mention the differences she’d noticed in the pitch of my voice or the speed of my speech. She’d simply demand, almost plead, “Is everything OK?” How could she not know that I was trying to comfort her, or at least not worry her, with my evasions: “Yeah,” “Could complain, but won’t.”

Everyone learns not to tell a parent what he or she already knows, or at least believes. I learned that lesson after I’d been away a few years, when I told her I’d smoked back in the days on the block. I’d never again reveal what she never want to know. Not married, no kids—“You just haven’t met the right girl yet. Some day, maybe.” Right, mother. “You’ll find your calling, your purpose.” Of course, I’d never tell her I wanted any such thing, or believed anyone had one.

There was only one thing I ever wanted—myself, now, becoming. I killed only because I thought it’d bring me to the one I know now, who would never know him. And she would never know me in this moment any more than the women—There were only women—at her funeral knew me, or would know me.