Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

You want to kill my baby, she said.

When Che was slow to talk, his grandma said it was because the mother would not speak to her all through her pregnancy.

She was in contact with the father, of course. Of that Phoebe Selkirk was positive, but how that happened she never could quite figure. Books came for the girl, books of an entirely new type, philosophy, economics, books that would never once have interested her. For years and years afterward she would upbraid herself for paying no attention to the poisonous content of the books-Marx, Sartre, Marcuse-when she spent so much time looking through the marginalia attempting to decipher a code. There was no code. They spoke on the telephone, but by the time the first bill came, quarterly in those years, the boy had grown a proper face and all his insides were working as they should. Then the two women drove down to the city and booked into the Gramercy Park Hotel where no one the Selkirks knew would ever stay.

It was from here, at the bottom of Lexington Avenue, that the mother got a cab to take her to Beth Israel where she gave birth to the boy whose name she registered as Che David Selkirk.

The name caused a huge upset at the hospital, but it was the David that really got the grandma going. Much later, when David Rubbo shook his fist at the secretary of state, the grandma recognized him straightaway.

Ha, she cried, that nose.

The mother had not been able to see the father from December 1964 until July 23, 1965, the night the boy was born. He had been discovered around dawn, his head on her milky breast, asleep. He had long fair curly hair, long lashes, a wide brow and a nose with a Roman hump. Beakish, Grandma would say later, which represented a softening of her opinion. It was a New England nose she now decided. The nurses who had already judged the father of a Che revised their opinions when they had seen him. They gathered in a semicircle, and when he woke they brought the baby for him. He was a baby still himself; they blew their noses.

The boy, the mother and the father would not be together again until freshman registration of 1966 when Miss Selkirk and the babysitter-a scholarship girl from Girls’ Latin-quietly took a floor of a triple-decker in Somerville, and the mother entered Radcliffe once again.

Dean Gilpin welcomed the returning student and her mother over tea. She left Che behind on that occasion, and although Dean Gilpin did not order her to hide her baby, this was what they meant when they used the word discretion.

So Che was kind of hiding from the start of his life. First at Kenoza Lake and then at Somerville and in both these places he was looked after by the girl from Southie.

The dean was preparing for bigger things than babies. There were fifteen thousand hippies living in Haight-Ashbury. The Beatles said they were more popular than Jesus Christ. Dave Rubbo burned his draft card on NBC. Everyone was ready for anything except, as Anna Xenos noted, Harvard “men” still “craved your bod” and clinked their glasses when a girl walked into the dining hall. They thought it was a whole new world, but they were the babies. Harvard was not ready for the first nursing mother to attend Ec 1.

Che also audited Gov 146. It is hard now to imagine how impossible this was. Harvard graduates with unfailing memories will tell you this could not have happened, but there was a picture in the Crimson the next day. Volume 23, issue 3. The father was often in the same pages, first because of the draft card, then because he was leader of SDS.

When Robert McNamara came to Harvard in September of 1966 it was SDS who led the protest. There were extreme left factions in SDS but it was still three years before the famous split that produced the Weathermen. Che’s dad did not have a gun in 1966. What he had was a list of ten questions for the secretary of defense.

The crowd was in good order but the Maoists were watching the back of Quincy House and one of them yelled, Back door.

The boy would remember none of this, of course. But the crowd broke, sprinting toward the back. The mother was in the front, Che in her arms, her wild hair streaming, the famous “fabulous” Tibetan shawl flying backward. The crowd bucked. The mother tripped. She plunged forward as the black Lincoln sped around the corner. There was so much criticism to come, but everyone who saw her said she fell like an athlete, rolling, landing on her back with the child safe against her stomach as she slid, not toward home base, but under the front bumper of the rocking car. The crowd went dead quiet then. This is known. A flashbulb popped, five times. That is all recorded. The mother lay still, headfirst, beneath the steaming radiator. Then the boy began to cry, and as the mother slowly raised her head, she saw a small man with a Hitler-like mustache. He was Bill Hicks of the Boston Globe and he had just taken the most famous photograph of 1966.

The mother’s long tanned back was all messed up and bleeding, but no one else was even scratched, certainly not Che. So it did not matter, you would think, his father thought, his mother thought, especially when looked at in the light of all the deaths in Vietnam.

Grandma Selkirk had a different opinion, and Bill Hicks’s famous photo made it comparatively easy to have herself appointed the boy’s sole guardian. After that, the boy did not see the mother.

The boy got some of this information from Cameron. But mostly what he had were scraps of paper and rubber bands. It was the babysitter, staring at him in the Queensland moonlight, who could have given him the rest. She kept her silence, imagining it would not help to know that your mother took pills to dry up her breast milk, that she had decided to harden her heart against you.

The pussycat was drunk with heat, passed out in his malodorous cardigan pocket, paying no attention to the ten people, just a few feet away, who were trying to agree on the correct way to hold hands and make a circle. That number included two of America’s most wanted and eight Australian hippies. The hippies wore khaki shorts, Kmart shirts at $2.95 or $4.25, Kuta Beach sarongs, overalls, Indian pajamas from a head shop in Caloundra. They all sat cross-legged in what was called the Crystal Community Hall although it was no more than a warped and buckled floor, held up on ten-foot-high bloodwood stumps, both a folly and a sacrifice offered to the Queensland rain and sun.

The knotted bundle of cardigan lay inside the circle, just in front of Dial. The boy sat beside her, leaning forward, listening intently, as their neighbors continued to discuss which arm should be uppermost, which palm up, which palm down, in order that a golden ball of energy would pass around the circle.

Dial was generating sufficient irritation to power a golden ball all by herself.

This is all about Buck, she whispered to the boy. Trust me.

He did not turn.

Did you hear me?

He was deaf to her, completely entranced by the mumbo jumbo.

Hold my hand, she demanded. I’ll show you.

Instead he copied Trevor and she had to switch her palm around. The defeat felt way bigger than it was.

To the boy she whispered, Don’t worry. This is nothing.

Shush, he said.

And he straightened his back in unconscious imitation of the dreadful Rabbitoh who was directly opposite.

Shush? she thought.

Rebecca engaged her, smiling, and Dial noted the teeth and the stressed-out vein in the dark pool of shadow beneath her eye.

Next to Rebecca sat a short-haired woman whose overalls showed the starved bones of her chest, probably not Dial’s enemy but who could tell? Next was a wispy-bearded long-nosed man who appeared to be named Chook. Then Trevor whose eyes had become lidded and evasive. She thought, Trevor sleeps with Rebecca. Next to Trevor lay his machete. Next to the machete was pretty Roger who was gay or a dancer or maybe just a superhippie. He had white teeth and beads around his neck. There were also two boys, Sam and Rufus, running around so wildly that Dial was sure they would fall and die. Who would be a mother?