Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Did they say what it was about?

She shakes her head no.

It’s probably nothing. One of my students in a spot of trouble. He gets up from the table and refills his plate and pops it into the microwave and waits, watching the timer count down to zero.

But your parents, that’s not nothing. They’re alive?

No, it’s not nothing. And yes, they are alive. I have been profoundly, painfully alienated from them for many years. Painful for them, perhaps. Not so painful for me. Since long before we met, Gloria. Glory. Hallaloo…

But why would the police be questioning them about you, if it were only a student in a spot of trouble? Like you said.

I have no idea. The timer rings, and he carries his overloaded plate back to the table and sits down. With his yard-wide back to his wife, the Professor resumes eating.

I have never asked you about your past. Even when you made me tell you everything about mine, all the way back to childhood. Even when you made me tell you about my sexual experiences.

Thank you, Gloria. It’s one of the reasons we are still married.

Yes, I know. But now it’s different. Because of the children, the twins. I need to know about your past, so that I can protect our children if necessary.

From me?

From your past. If necessary.

Well, it’s not necessary.

Are you going to tell me about your mother and father? And why you lied to me about them? My God, if you’d lie about that, what wouldn’t you lie about? And if you’d lie to me, who wouldn’t you lie to?

He turns in his seat and looks at her in the gloom, still leaning against the doorframe, in her pink cotton bathrobe and pale gray nightgown, her arms crossed over her breasts. He imagines what he is to her at this moment: a big fat liar. How ridiculous he must look. How pathetic. The smartest man in Calusa, eh? A genius. One in a million when it comes to IQ, the puzzle-meister, the professor with the photographic memory who seems to have read and remembered everything ever printed in a half-dozen different languages. But here, now, at table in his kitchen seated in the dark before his second heap of food, he is just a big fat liar. A liar caught out somehow by his own parents, whom he long ago disowned, prompted by some local police detective’s curious visit to his parents in another state two hundred miles north of here. A visit occasioned by what? Gloria is right, it can’t be merely because some student got into a spot of trouble and invoked his professor’s name as guarantor or alibi or character reference. And it can’t be because he himself has broken the law. He’s been a model citizen for years.

He knows where and how his parents live now, just as they know where and how he lives and that he is married to a woman and that there are two seven-year-old grandchildren his mother and father have never met and have not seen even in photographs. He knows they have tracked him on the Internet in recent years, ever since he ended up in Calusa. His father even managed to uncover his university e-mail address and for a few years every six months or so has sent him a brief report on their lives and politely asked for a return e-mail, photographs, confirmation of receipt — anything. No explanations for his long silence necessary. No apology requested. Just write back, please. All the old man — for he is old now, in his late eighties — and his wife want is their son’s acknowledgment of their existence. We’re happy here at Dove Run, as happy as can be expected, the old man types into his computer. Except that we do not hear from you, son. Your mother and I do not understand what we have done to deserve this. Please tell us so that we can say we are sorry and can again be your parents as we once were. Love, Dad.

The Professor knows from his father’s e-mails that his mother is ill, suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and that his father has become her caretaker. The two of them have sold their house in Clinton and moved into an assisted-living compound outside Tuscaloosa. They have a small apartment and there is an attached full-time nursing unit where the Professor’s mother can live when his father can no longer care for her by himself. The Professor, when he read that bit of news six months ago, felt a small ripple of relief wash over him. Soon she will forget she has a son, if she hasn’t forgotten already. As her past gets erased so in a sense does his. That’s the Professor’s ideal lived life — one with no witnesses, or as few as possible.

From the evidence, his father’s memory of the Professor’s childhood and youth, up to the point when he left Kenyon College and went off to graduate school at Yale, is intact. And the old man knows as much of his son’s life since then as he can learn from the Internet: his publications, articles about him in the Calusa newspaper, mentions of his name in certain sociology blogs, his e-mail address, and his home telephone number; he knows his son’s academic rank and place of employment; he knows that he is married to the former Gloria Bennett, who is employed as a librarian, and that there are two children by that marriage, fraternal twins, a boy and a girl.

Of the years between his son’s departure for Yale and his arrival thirty years later in Calusa the old man knows nothing. His letters went unanswered and then after a year were returned stamped ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. Phone numbers in his son’s name were not listed anywhere in America. Eventually the Professor’s father gave up trying to contact his son, and gradually the Professor’s mother began to forget that she had a son and needed to be reminded of his name, and she would brighten then and ask where was he. When will he be here? Then, early in the century, along came the Internet, and the Professor’s father was able to renew his search with a more thorough and efficient tool at his disposal than he’d had in the early years. He finally located his son and learned about his present life. Not all of it, of course, but enough to excite his desire to know more and a powerful fantasy of presenting his son and his wife Gloria and their two children to his son’s mother before she forgot altogether that he had ever existed.

But now it looks to the old man as if it’s too late. In his most recent, unanswered e-mail to his son he wrote: Your mother’s memory of all but her own childhood is pretty nearly gone. She recognizes me, but she confuses me with her father. It’s very sad, he added, hoping to make his son sad enough to want to see his mother again. But he has never seen his son sad, even as a child, so it was probably useless to try arousing in him an emotion that he appeared incapable of feeling. Still, he had to try. But when the Professor read his father’s e-mail he felt relieved, not sad. Then he hit delete .

He clears his throat. So now, after all these years, now you decide you need to know my past. We agreed, didn’t we, from the beginning that there was much about my life before we met that I could not reveal. Not to you, not to anyone. There were oaths I had taken and pledges I had signed. And you understood and accepted that. It was to protect you. You and the children.

Yes, I understood. I did. I knew enough about you and your past, the public part anyhow, to accept not knowing more. But your parents? Why would you say your parents were dead, when they weren’t? Why would you lie about a thing like that?

That, dear Glory, is one of those things I cannot reveal to you. So that when the police or anyone else comes ’round asking questions of you or of my parents, none of you has to lie in order to protect me. You’re free to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Jesus. You don’t know enough about me to feel obliged to lie. I withhold information so that you don’t have to, m’dear.