Late City, page 14
I am afraid. That this present haziness about the L train rushing northward and my son sitting beside me, that this very haziness suggests why chronology persists in my dying brain. I neglected him. And time has rolled on with no way to make it up.
I spent too much of his first years on earth apart from him, in my work, in my preoccupations, in my focused attention, even as he passed from an infant floating in my hands to a smart, articulate, rapidly growing boy sitting beside me on a Saturday morning nearly six years later.
I loved him all along. Through that whole passage. I truly did. And I know I told him so. Overtly. Now and then at least. As I had never heard from my own father, nor felt. And I spent what time I could with my son. I sense all this from the cold and freshly besnowed Saturday morning that my memory has chosen for me, even if I’m presently prevented from remembering any specifics backward or forward from it.
But I didn’t do enough for my son. I realize that. Even on this elevated ride. I wasn’t present enough with him. Surely that’s what God wants me to understand.
A testament to my neglect sits sidewise in the aisle, propped vertically against me, my arm around it to keep it steady. Weeks ago Ryan woke to Christmas morning and to the object I am presently clutching upright. A Flying Arrow sled, with a horizontal backless seat of hardwood slats varnished red and blue and its name writ large in the center and with runners made of tempered spring steel fully controlled by a steering-arm slat across the front. This swell sled has sat propped against the wall of Ryan’s room for this past month and a half, during which Chicago has been filled every day with snow and I’ve had several of those days off and it did not previously occur to me to instigate this outing. The sled was given on Christmas morning with a promise that he and I would learn to use this wonderful thing together, seeing as his Louisianan dad never had one. And Ryan has been a good boy—a very good and courteously indulgent boy—not to push me about that promise. He waited for his dad to feel on his own that the time was right. Though my son’s courteous indulgence shames me now.
Which dispels the haze.
And I turn my face to Ryan.
He is watching the flash of second-floor windows at the back of the brick three-flats, our elevated track nearer a flat’s window than its front door. Most are curtained, some are not, and when a figure is visible, Ryan lurches ever so slightly toward it and flips his face ever so slightly to follow its passing. One window frames a boy pressed there watching the train and Ryan sees him and starts to lift his hand, but the gesture he wishes to make is stymied by the quick vanishing of the boy.
Ryan turns away. He realizes I’m watching, and he looks up at me.
“Were you going to wave at him?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“He was gone too fast,” I say.
“No,” Ryan says. “I was gone too fast.”
I laugh. He’s right, of course. My smart little man. I have never talked baby talk to him. Colleen has picked that up too. Tender talk but not baby talk.
I say, “That happens sometimes with people.”
Ryan nods gravely, looks away outside, but I sense him thinking.
The mood is catching. I am surprised to find the Black boy from Lake Providence come to mind. Cyrus Dobbs. Dobbs, and his voice: Not rightly our name, seems to me. I turn my head to look at him and he is striding away on the crest of the levee.
My head clears.
My son still sits with his thoughts.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“I’m glad we’ve got all day,” Ryan says.
“Me too,” I say.
“That boy doesn’t care,” he says. “He just watches everybody rush by. He doesn’t expect to make a friend.” And Ryan rolls his shoulders a little. Shrugs off this topic.
“I can’t wait to get sledding,” I say.
He nods at this and looks away again. He squares around and presses close to the window to watch some more.
I find myself briefly, faintly surprised. In spite of seeing my little man in my little boy, I expected the prospect of sledding to make him bubble. I now hear his invocation of the long day ahead as a subtle rebuke for the long delay.
But I let it rest.
He wants to watch the passing city and I turn to the sled leaning against me. I never had one as a boy, snow being unknown in Lake Providence, Louisiana. But I’ve done my reportorial research on all of this. He and I will learn together.
So we ride to the end of the Northwestern Line, passing from Chicago through Evanston, until our train finally descends from its elevation into the Linden Avenue Terminal in Wilmette. I’ve learned of a place with good sledding in otherwise flat Chicago and its flat environs. Ryan and I walk north and then east and across Sheridan Road and into a woods where slopes lined in ash and maple run down toward the lake.
There are other boys and sleds busy at their sport. But there are several slopes, and I find one for us that’s lightly populated. It’s a gentler slope, without a dogleg and with a leveled foot in plain sight. Perfect for a couple of beginners.
Ryan is quiet still, focused and studious but perhaps darker than that, perhaps even fearful. I need to adjust my plan. I thought we’d go straight to belly flops. We’d laugh at our failures. He would bubble. This isn’t happening.
So we discuss the sled for a time. Its relevant parts. Discuss and examine it closely. We prepare for this the way a smart and articulate five-year-old has decided things should go. And he participates fully in the discussion, though thoughtfully, observing how the runners have grooves like skates and admiring the arrow shot through the Flying Arrow name emblazoned on the center slat, how clever a design that is.
I talk sliding strategies with him, discounting the belly flop, with the sled held vertically before you and a running, diving start. A more moderate approach would be perfectly fine, with a few pushing steps while bent forward into a grasp of the sled on the ground and a belly-first easing onto the seat. He nods an understanding of this.
Then we have talked as much as we can talk. It’s time to actually sled. But. Though he has participated in our discussion with the precocity I admire in him and which I know he enjoys in himself, his somber mood persists. The little man mood. But I have expected my little boy to appear, bubbling at last about this adventure.
And I suddenly worry about all the time I’ve spent away from him. He’s had a full-time mother but far less of a father. Less, no doubt, than most other boys, even those who have hardworking fathers. The jobs of those men can be left easily behind in the office or in the factory. My job is to observe life—everything about life that is striking or dangerous or influential—and to give it daily voice to four hundred thousand Chicagoans. I have trouble turning that off when I arrive in the life of my child. In my head, at least, there is no end to my workday.
So now I see a problem in Ryan’s life. I blame myself. I helped create it. A problem with his being a five-year-old little man is you can miss the risk-taking of childhood. You miss the chance to teach your body and mind to be brave. To fool them forever into thinking there’s no price to be paid in order to be fully a man.
“Are you all right?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he says, unquaveringly. But he says no more.
“I’ve never done this before either,” I say.
“Because of Louisiana.”
“Yes. So this is a new thing. The world is full of new things.” I hesitate. But I add, gently, “Be brave now. You’re a brave boy. I know who you are.”
He looks at me. He looks at the sled, which I have placed between us. He looks down the slope.
“Shall I go first?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
“I’ll test our plans.”
“Be brave,” he says. And he shoots me a sly smile. I am glad to see the soberness dispelled.
“I will,” I say.
“You’re a brave papa,” he says.
“I am,” I say.
And he steps back and I bend to the sled from behind and grasp it and push it along into the slope in an awkward little crouching rush and I flop forward onto the seat, my torso fitting okay with my legs bent straight up at the knee, and I’m gliding along headfirst, going faster than I’d expected and gaining speed, and I grasp the handles of the steering slat for stability but it’s too much of a temptation to try to feel I’m in control and I try to steer, which of course I overdo badly and I veer and tilt and now my man size on this boy’s sled prevails and I find myself on my side in the snow and then on my back.
I jump up, forcing a laugh even as I’m rising, to reassure Ryan. I realize I’m a little disappointed that I feel the need to do this.
I look up the slope.
I don’t see him.
I pick up the sled, climb the slope, not worried but puzzled.
And there he is. Lying on his back, his arms and legs extended. I am oddly relieved. He’s making fun of his old man. Good. That’s a spirit he can grow up on. He’s even moving his arms and legs in an arc in the snow, as if I were thrashing after my fall. In slow motion yet. I laugh an unforced laugh.
But I’m wrong.
Now that I’ve seen his little parody, now that I’ve laughed in appreciation, he should be looking at me, sharing my pleasure at this joke. But he continues the slow thrash and ignores my presence.
I do not know what to say to my son.
I stand in silence.
Then he stops his arms and legs.
Now he looks at me. “Papa,” he says. “Wait and see.”
And with meticulous movement of legs and torso and placement of feet and hands, Ryan slowly rises and rotates to the side and lifts one leg and takes as long a stride as he can and then quickly another as if not to disturb something. Now he briskly comes to me and turns to stand at my side.
He directs my attention to where he was lying.
I see for the first time what is there.
An imprinted outline in the snow.
The imprint of his stocking-capped head and the length of his body. But instead of extended arms, the image is of extended wings. Instead of legs, the image is what can only be described as a gown.
All this I perceive but I am struggling to put these elements together.
“It’s an angel,” Ryan says.
And so it is.
I wish to find words. Instructive words somehow. Corrective words. Failing those for the time being, perhaps even carefully circumscribed approving words. Fatherly loving words. But in spite of words being my profession—even my life now—I have none for my son at this moment.
He’s bubbling beside me.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” he says.
I do put my hand gently on his shoulder. A gesture he might well take as approval.
But I am unsettled.
And Ryan rushes forward, lies down beside his angel in the snow, and he begins to make another.
The particularity of the scene begins to fade now. But I am aware that I will go on to teach myself to sled on this day, as Ryan creates a choir of angels in the snow. Out of what I consider pitying consideration for his papa’s enthusiasms, Ryan joins me once, to ride on my back after I’ve mastered the sledding. But in that single run down the slope I sense his deep unease, and I press him no further. He returns to the snow to play on his own terms until we head back to the elevated.
Ryan presses against the window on the trip home. He has led us to sit on the left-hand side of the car, viewing the same three-flats that he watched coming out. It occurs to me that he’s looking to see if the boy at the window will be there.
But as I sit beside him, I vanish from the train. I am in France. I am barely seventeen years old. I am still a boy. And I am a killer. I see my weapon in my hands, my Pennsylvanian Enfield, and I lean into a broken wall, chest high, and across a rubbled field before me is a road and beyond is a tree line of oak and beech. The Bois-le-Prêtre, the Priest’s Wood. The September offensive has not yet begun. I am forward on reconnaissance. But also to watch for a target of opportunity. A passing German staff car is the prize. Or a German sniper coming forward to us.
And he emerges from the trees. I put my eye to the scope and my forefinger to the trigger. I see him clearly. But what is fully there lags a fraction of a second behind what only fits my expectation. At first a German soldier—armed, alone—emerging cautiously from the trees, square before me, and, as I see him through that veil of expectations, he is professionally alert enough to spot my flimsy cover and evade me or crouch and aim and pose a mortal threat. And so he becomes an immediate target. I see his forehead clearly in my scope and my crosshairs are upon it and the process begins, the tip of my forefinger lying soft upon the trigger, my knuckle aiming, my breath calmly suspended, but in the next fraction of a second, just before the squeeze, I see him fully and I know he is not a fellow sniper. His rifle is slung on his shoulder, his emerging step is not cautious but fearful, his assessing first look is unsystematic, inept. And his face is the face of a boy. Perhaps seventeen. Perhaps a prematurely thoughtful boy. Perhaps a boy who’s had a neglectful father. A boy who is ill prepared for what the world is. And all of this next-fraction insight rushes into me even as my forefinger, trained effectively for this world as it is, does its work and the spot on the boy’s forehead between his eyes explodes.
I am beside my son and panting hard.
I can hear myself clearly. My desperate, labored breath. I look to Ryan. He is unmoved, watching the distant three-flats rush past, his limbs comfortably weary from making angels in the snow.
And I am afraid.
I am in the dark again.
I cannot see forward from that moment in France.
And I realize I do not know when this fear actually was felt. Ryan did not hear me panting. And as I heard myself, I did not hear the rush and clack of the train. Did the memory and its insight visit me upon the train or only just now?
“Didn’t I understand my son?” I cry to the darkness. To God.
I didn’t. Not then. Not fully. Whatever my fear for my son was at the time, it didn’t move me to adequately teach him about the world.
“Was that my sin?” I cry.
God does not answer.
Instead I’m on another train. Not the elevated. That’s still to come. This is the Illinois Central’s Louisiane, heading south. Ryan is pressed against the window. But he is on his mother’s lap, getting a bit too big for that, having turned four some months ago. He’s growing rapidly but he’s not quite a little man yet.
He is enchanted by the view.
Colleen is leaning into the window with him and the two of them are seeing everything and naming everything and discussing what everything is for.
I am sitting across from them. I’ve looked up from a sheaf of newspaper clippings. News items that have caught Kirch’s eye. He is now the managing editor at the Chicago Independent. I’ve been dispatched to a news development tailor-made for my attention: in my Louisiana, the dramatic rise of a flamboyant politician with a progressive agenda. And the aftermath of massive river flooding in the state this past spring. And there are matters of my own. By now a desk drawer at home nearly full of letters in my mother’s familiar hand; and that growing little boy in the opposite seat as well.
All of that has diversely accumulated to put the three of us together on this train, heading for Louisiana. In those letters was my mother’s hand, but also Colleen’s handiwork.
Soon after Ryan was born, Colleen poured my coffee at the kitchen table, and as I was in mid-sip, she pulled her chair near to me. When my cup was down, she laid her hand gently upon mine. She said, “May I ask you a very personal question?”
“That’s part of the Crown Point deal,” I said.
“Seriously.”
“Of course.”
“Will you promise to answer with all honesty? Knowing that whatever the answer is, I fully understand? I suspect for both of us that the unsaid things about our fathers are much stronger than the said things. Which is a terrible complication in several ways.”
She was serious indeed. “Yes,” I said. “I promise.”
She asked, “I know why you had to utterly separate yourself. But do you miss your mother?”
I hesitated. Not because the simple answer was a difficult thing to say. I said it at once to see if it would be enough. “Yes.”
“Does it bother you that there seems no way to communicate with her?”
“It does,” I said. The answer was sincere, as far as it went. Of course I missed her. But this second question nudged me closer to the thing I wished not to confront about myself.
For a moment I flicker a return all the way to my deathbed. I sense I am near another moment I am meant to reckon with, even as I also sit before Colleen while she seems to wait for more of an answer. Missing my mother, loving her, should not have been outweighed by my struggles with my father. I understand how my mother—as a wife, as a woman, especially in her middle age—was convinced she had no viable identity other than the middle-aged wife, the woman, of her husband. That fate was decided when she married him in the state of Louisiana in 1898. But perhaps I should have remained in Lake Providence. After all, my father had stopped beating me. If I had remained, perhaps I could have figured out a way to keep his ongoingly abusive hands off her.
But then who would I have become? A small-town assistant banker and a bodyguard of my mother. As her bodyguard, however, since I also would have lived an adult life physically apart from my parents—even if only down the road—I would have inevitably failed. And indeed, having failed to adequately protect her, and because my country and a world at war would still have given me that alternate identity—though conditional, that identity was still operative in me—at some point, I likely would have killed him. Killed him in fact. Personally. Not just by proxy as a sniper from a cottage window in France.
My mother understood when I had to go away from the two of them. She blessed my escape. She wished for my escape. I tell myself, Surely she felt that a part of her escaped with me. It was the only way she could.
But I sit once more before Colleen at the kitchen table, her hand still on mine, and in this moment I curse myself, silently. It is to her that I must make my reckoning. She has asked a question that is not rhetorical. Even though it was the only way to break with my father, do I suffer for leaving my mother behind? In all the time Colleen and I have been together, I have said and done nothing that would have answered this for her.
