Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

—

I look down at the characters; I finish the red-eye and contemplate asking for another. It’s been forty-five minutes, but I’m not at all hungry; probably I’ll just have a dry sandwich from the pastry case.

I look back at Souls , at the next paragraph, and the next, not thinking, not stopping, just reading:

No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil! If one must have gone, why not I? Why may I not rest me from this restlessness and sleep from this wide waking? Was not the world’s alembic, Time, in his young hands, and is not my time waning? Are there so many workers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed away?

Your self-pity is unbelievable, I tell myself, as my sinuses begin to stick, a little contorted sob rattling in my throat, you myopic, narcissistic, privileged motherfucker, with your brand-new offshore bank account, your severance checks, your sheer, everyday whiteness, your get-out-of-jail-free card, you who can have it both ways, any way you like, but I am still looking toward the wall, so no one can see me frantically scrubbing the tears off, and getting up to slide the book onto its shelf where it belongs.

Recording #2 (24:23)

Source: Maxell cassette tape, 60 minutes, condition +

Labeled side one “Tape 2 PRIVATE DO NOT DESTROY”

I have to say a little more about him. It’s not right, leaving off the way I did.

This is the story he always told me: he grew up on a turkey farm in South Carolina. His dad died of liver failure at age six. His stepfather beat him with a rake. He spent three hours a day feeding turkeys and dragging the dead ones out of their cages and burning them. His dissertation was on Alexander II and the freeing of the serfs, and by god, he used to say, I was a serf. By those lights, could I really blame him? He went to Vanderbilt, by some miracle, and then when he was a junior some frat boys caught him coming out of a gay bar with his boyfriend. They were in the classics club together. The frat boys broke both of his legs and left the boyfriend a paraplegic. He used to say, I had a hard time making it to twenty.

But here’s the thing: it was all a pack of lies. Except for the part about going to Vanderbilt. His mother — my grandmother — came down for his funeral. From Tuxedo Park, New York. Some of his colleagues posted an obit in the Times: that was the only way the family found out. He’d never changed his name, but in every other way he’d disappeared, lock, stock, and barrel, for twenty-five years. I asked her, what was he like, what was Dad’s childhood like? and she said, uneventful. When did you know he was gay? Horrified: I had no idea he was gay. His dad, my grandfather, was some kind of executive in the early years at IBM; he had two older sisters, a handful of nieces and nephews. Grandnieces and nephews, surely, by this point. Afterward she sent me a whole file of photos, clippings, the works. His bar mitzvah tallis, his Bible. You should have these things, she said. They wanted to have me up there, a big family reunion, all the Lipkins together again. Thanksgivings, Passover Seders: until I moved out of the house, I got a call, every time.

Of course by then I knew I was Jewish. Part Jewish, of course, not technically Jewish at all, since Mom wasn’t. Apparently, he knew that much. But Jewish enough that as soon as I went to Roland Park someone asked me which temple I went to, where I did Hebrew school. When I went home and asked Dad about it, he said, tell them you’re a Hare Krishna. He wouldn’t discuss it. It means nothing to me, he said; it means nothing to you. Just because you’re surrounded by them doesn’t mean you’re one of them. And so what was I going to do, at age twenty-four, with his tallis, his old yarmulke, from 1958? Eventually I had to mail it all back. It was either that or burn it. His secrets, not my secrets. He was given something; he disowned it. I never had the chance.

What do you do with a guy like that? I mean, I should try to list, now, all of the small kindnesses, the little delights, of our life together. I should try to make him lovable. He was a good cook, of a kind. Much addicted to phyllo pastry, and anything pressed, pickled, or salted. A maniacal housekeeper. A catalog shopper — everything he bought for me came from Lands’ End, L.L.Bean, or Sears, through the mail. If the Internet had existed then, he’d have bankrupted himself in an afternoon. He had none of the campy habits you’d expect — old movies, Judy Garland, opera — except he loved ballet. A mad fan of Maya Plisetskaya. He insisted I play the piano. He insisted I learn French. He taught me how to tie a Windsor knot. Which is more than most men can say of their fathers these days. There, is that a good enough list? Because the fact is, I think about him and I’m just blinded, still, even now, with this rage, that I will never know why he pissed so much of his life away on useless, pointless schemes for avoiding companionship and love. You can’t simply call it agoraphobia. You can’t call it trauma. Yes, maybe he nursed some secret pain; maybe, just maybe, he was abused, or what have you, violated. But I don’t think so. He was in full command of his faculties. He knew what he was doing. In the end that was the kernel of his whole being, it was all he cared about.

For the longest time I thought it all went back to Beneficent. And believe me, I scoured the country, looking for any text, any article, something in an archive, a pamphlet, anything. Maybe with Google I would’ve found something. In any case — and this was later, when I was in college — it finally dawned on me: there’s nothing there, really. There’s no secret. There doesn’t have to be a reason for human perversity; it just is. Spend enough time in Baltimore and you see that pretty clearly. There are people who are just a teaspoonful less human than the rest of us. And you take a decaying city, a ruined city, like this one, where the rents are cheap, where no one’s looking over your shoulder, and it’s just a magnet for them. Dad was just letting his freak flag fly.

This is what I mean. This is my whole point. About Sherry and Tamika. What do I think about Dad? Does it really matter, now, in itself? What do I do with Dad? is more the question. What did I learn? No mysteries. No questions unanswered. One day they’ll know everything. Total sunlight on the whole fucked-up picture. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Why am I making these tapes? Because now is not the time. But there will be a time. They won’t have to wonder what I was thinking. Call it revenge? All right, then. All right, Dad. That’s my revenge.

By the second week of my new life — my post-work life, my early-bird retirement, as a friend from WBUR put it, when I forwarded him the news — I’ve reached a kind of equilibrium, if not a routine. There are still a few hours of work to do every day at the office, signing unemployment applications and writing letters of reference, packing files into boxes and sealing them for storage. BCC has hired a new program director, Ken Wong, a twenty-five-year-old fresh from the Towson college station, and Ken’s first order of business has been to blanket the office with the new station’s call letters: WZAK, the Zak! — a bolt of yellow lightning across a royal blue field. On our desks, overnight, appeared The Zak! coffee mugs and pens, mouse pads and refrigerator magnets, and thus Ken’s second order of business was an interoffice memo posted on the front door and every other surface: Throwing away WZAK promotional materials is theft and violators will be prosecuted. This applies to current and former employees. He turned off all our swipe cards, too, so we have to buzz, like deliverymen, and wait for Matilda, the poor security guard, to leave off watching The Price Is Right in the maintenance closet and let us in.