Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“My younger son will be starting at the preschool.”

“Michael. Michael and Cecil? They are your boys.” She’s tightened her speech to match my cadence. “Well, we’re very happy to have them. Cecil is”—she checks her folder—“a wonderful student. I’m sure Michael will flourish, too.”

She’s too calm, too distant, and although I can understand why she doesn’t share my urgency, I won’t accept it. I exhale, audibly. And it seems to reach her. She folds her hands and leans forward. She exhales, too.

“Talk to me, please.” She gestures to the chair again, trying to recreate our meeting. I refuse again.

“When I was a boy, I went to a school like this. It was wonderful. On Wednesday and Friday afternoons Madame St. Croix would send for me, and I’d make my way to her room, in the attic of a cottage in the corner of the campus. We’d have tea, and she’d do the best she could to keep our conversation in French.”

“That does sound wonderful.”

“I would like to have stayed. I couldn’t. The Boston public school system, however, was crumbling. So my mother faked an address in a nearby suburb that had an excellent reputation for education. Every morning, until she felt I could do it on my own, she snuck me across the border.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten.”

She opens her hands and puts her face in them.

“That’s what we did, until she found a place in the town.”

She keeps her hands on her face and I think that she doesn’t want to hear anymore — wants to pretend that I’m gone. But when she re-emerges, there’s a newness to her, a burning in her eyes, more than curiosity or sympathy. It looks like anger. She traces a small circle on the desk with a finger, as though trying to focus her rage into the smallest spot possible.

“I have never understood”—she pauses, brings her finger to the bridge of her nose—“how in a country where equality is said to be the rule, that access to something so fundamental as education is such an exclusive thing. Access — it is a thing, a tool, something you must possess.” She takes a deep breath, too big for her little body. “Where, may I ask, is your mother from?”

“Virginia.”

She nods, answering for herself all the questions she could want to ask. “And she placed a premium on education — your education.”

“Yes.”

“Quite a woman.”

“Quite.”

“Quite a boy.”

She restudies the documents, plumbing the teacher evaluations, Stanford-Benet scores. Finally, she looks back up. There’s the flash of sadness again, then nothing.

“Your sons are a valuable part of our community. I want to help.”

She brushes imaginary dust off the corner of the desk, then re-assumes her posture from when we first met. “This is what I can do.”

I take the bait and turn my body to her.

“I can waive the late fees for both boys, and”—she lets that hang for a moment to allow for my response.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She brightens, ready to reveal more. “And I can extend you more time.” She starts nodding again. “Friday.”

“This Friday?”

“Well, if you consider that you missed your final payment for last semester, as well as being quite late with this semester’s. . We have to determine who will be with us this year. There are several candidates for the spots.”

“But you have our deposit?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Your deposit, which we could have just as easily applied to your outstanding balance, which at this time is. .”

“Eight thousand.”

“Eight thousand four hundred.”

“I thought you said you would waive the late fee.”

“That’s true.”

“What about financial aid?”

“The application deadline was April first. The fund is spoken for. Next year, however. .”

“You said they can’t stay.”

“They could reapply. They would be strongly considered.”

“Could we pay off the balance over time?”

“We don’t allow that.”

“What if we drafted something — if I signed a contract.”

“You already did.” She looks down. I wait for that flash, but it doesn’t come. “I can hold their places until the end of the day Friday.” She looks up again, squinting, waiting for an answer. And what can I do but scrape and nod?

I have never really considered the shape, size, or location of my father’s personal hell. I am ashamed of that. I haven’t seen him since C was a toddler. Claire used to keep a picture out; the two of them hand in hand, walking through leaves beside a playground. She kept it out for our sake — mine and the boy’s — as though we, or at least he, would honor the man. I know it made her burn with sorrow that her father — good man, father, and grandfather — unquestioningly so — was gone. C has no memory of my father. I haven’t told him much about him, either. My father has never met his other grandchildren. I’ve offered to send him tickets, even rent a car to go get him, but he’s always found a way out. Promises of meeting them stopped — no birthday cards, no holiday calls. He behaves much like a dead man: He haunts; he groans from the crypt of memory. He is a crumbled marker, a vague cautionary tale. Then word comes from up north through third and fourth parties that he’s having a rough go, that he misses me, that he loves his unknown grandchildren, and that he is thinking of us, always — always thinking of his lineage, keeping them in the best of all worlds, the platonic. He’s only held C’s hand — no hugs, no scent, diapers, blood, tears. Ideal — best thought about in an armchair over a can of Miller High Life after a greasy sandwich, cigarette in the ashtray, television on too loud, but just the same, unheard, as one program becomes another and the voices become one. Then not even voices — only sound, then not-sound. It becomes solid, a fixed part of the environment: a wood-veneered end table with weeks of magazines; stacks of newspapers on the floor; a historical novel and the crippled spider plant on the sill; the juniper outside his front window; the distant whoosh and roar from the secondary highway that is hidden behind the young evergreens; wooden fence and dumpsters behind the strip mall where he walks slowly, bum-kneed, short-breathed, to get the pepper steaks and orangeade at the Greek pizzeria, the cigarettes and beer at the mini-mart while he waits. Sometimes they let him cash his government checks there and he upgrades the beer, gets a magazine. Maybe he thinks of us. Maybe he wanders over to the small toy section, stares at the miniatures hanging on the racks and thinks about sending the kids something plastic wrapped in plastic. He doesn’t know what they like. He huffs and limps back home with a little cash and a greasy bag.

I think of his two little rooms, a grab bar and stool in the shower. No visitors. There’s dust in the air. You can see it floating. It rises from the armchair when he sits. You can see where it’s settled — on the television, the windowsill, stuck to the pane. Dust and ash from cigarette ends absentmindedly dropped on his sleeve. He sits with his failures. The past ones echo and multiply in the now. They become solid iron, barring entry to the present, denying any future. And memory can be an affliction. I can feel it. He is sad. He is lonely. He has nothing — no wife, no teeth, no audience, and so, in a sense, no story, no language. He is old and he is not regarded well by his son, perhaps the only one who can free him from his flat bench in hell.

I miss my father. I remember liking him. I would like to go back there — to liking him, feeling safe with him. He exists across an ocean of memory. It is deep, almost frozen, and swimming with monsters. Beowulf, on a dare, once swam across an icy sea in his suit of mail. There were sea beasts— “fiend-corpses” —that tried to pull him down into the dark, where they would rend the drowned king limb from limb. “On a whim,” he went. He made it, soaked, frozen, and spent. If he’d known what was waiting for him, would he have taken that dare? If he’d known what was waiting for him, would he have made it across, or would he have gone down?