He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex? That’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms, drew diagrams, seemed to be living in a state of emergency, planted in the office most days for ten to twelve hours, or rushing to airports, or preparing for conferences. At home, he stood before a full-length mirror reciting from memory speeches he was working on about risk appetites and offshore jurisdictions, refining his gestures and facial expressions. He had an affair with an office temp. He ran in the Boston Marathon.
What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back—I was his personal Antichrist.
He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk, where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over, “sine cosine tangent.”
Why did my father leave my mother? Neither ever said.
Years later, I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in Upper Manhattan. One evening, there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross Lockhart in Geneva, sort of double-imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? There was a reference, in the subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up. (...)
Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke, but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. “Coarse woman, a shrew.” I had to look up “shrew.” “A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse.” I had to look up “shrewmouse.” The book sent me back to “shrew, sense 1.” A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up “insectivorous.” The book said that it meant feeding on insects, from the Latin insectum, for “insect,” plus the Latin vorus, for “vorous.” I had to look up “vorous.”
Three or four years later, I was trying to read a lengthy and intense European novel, written in the nineteen-thirties, and translated from the German, and I came across the word “fishwife.” It swept me back into the marriage. But when I tried to imagine their life together, mother and father minus me, I came up with nothing. I knew nothing. Ross and Madeline alone, what did they say, what were they like, who were they? All I felt was a shattered space where my father used to be. And here was my mother, sitting across a room, a thin woman in trousers and a gray shirt. When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small, crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down and pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. I liked sitting on our tiny concrete balcony, reading, with a fractional view of the ring of glass and steel where my father worked, amid Lower Manhattan’s bridges and towers. (...)
Ross dragging me along to the Morgan Library to read the spines of fifteenth-century books. He stood gazing at the jewelled cover of the Lindau Gospels in a display case. He arranged access to the second and third tiers, the balconies, after hours, up the hidden staircase, the two of us crouching and whispering along the inlaid walnut bookshelves. A Gutenberg Bible, then another, century after century, elegant grillwork crisscrossing the shelves.
That was my father. Who was my mother?
She was Madeline Siebert, originally from a small town in southern Arizona. A cactus on a postage stamp, she called it. She drapes her coat on a hanger whose hooked upper part she twists so that it fits over the top of the open closet door. Then she runs the roller over the back of the coat. It’s satisfying for me to watch this, maybe because I can imagine Madeline taking commonplace pleasure in the simple act of draping her coat on a hanger, strategically arranging the coat on a closet door, and then removing the accumulated lint with a roller.
Define “lint,” I tell myself. Define “hanger.” Then I try to do it. These occasions stick and hold, among other bent relics of adolescence.
I returned to the library a few times, regular hours, main floor, tapestry over the mantelpiece, but did not tell my father.
When I was fourteen, I developed a limp. I didn’t care if it looked fake. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks, and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself.
I used to look at an old photograph of my mother, Madeline in a pleated dress, age fifteen, and I’d feel sad. But she wasn’t ill, she hadn’t died.
When she was at work, I’d take a phone message for her and write down the information, making certain to tell her when she came home. Then I waited for her to return the call. Actively watched and waited. I reminded her once and then again that the lady from the dry cleaner had called, and she looked at me with a certain expression, the one that said, I am looking at you this way because there is no point wasting words when you can recognize the look and know that it says what should not need to be said. It made me nervous, not the look but the phone call waiting to be returned. Why isn’t she calling back? What is she doing that’s so important that she can’t call back? Time is passing, the sun is setting, the person is waiting, I am waiting.
I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was, in our modest garden apartment in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word “steep” was the whole point. Once I had decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work. I tried at times, made an effort, but failed. I was technically unsteeped but also ever-intentioned, seeing myself in the chair reading a book even as I sat in the chair watching a movie on TV with French or German subtitles. Later, living elsewhere, I visited Madeline fairly often and began to notice that when we ate a meal together she used paper napkins instead of cloth, because, understandably, it was only her, just another solitary meal, or only her and me, which came to the same thing, except that after she set out a plate, a fork, and a knife next to the paper napkin she avoided using the napkin, paper or not, using a facial tissue sticking out of a nearby box, Kleenex Ultra Soft, ultra doux, to wipe her mouth or fingers, or walking over to the roll of paper towels in the rack above the kitchen sink and tearing off a segment of a single towel and wiping her mouth on it and then folding the segment over the smudged part and bringing it to the table to use again, leaving the paper napkin untouched.
The limp was my faith, my version of flexing muscles or jumping hurdles. After the early days of its development, the limp began to feel natural. At school, the kids mainly smirked or mimicked. A girl threw a snowball at me, but I interpreted this as a playful gesture and responded accordingly, clutching my groin and wagging my tongue. The limp was something to cling to, a circular way to recognize myself, step by step, as the person who was doing this. Define “person,” I told myself. Define “human,” define “animal.”
What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back—I was his personal Antichrist.He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk, where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over, “sine cosine tangent.”
Why did my father leave my mother? Neither ever said.
Years later, I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in Upper Manhattan. One evening, there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross Lockhart in Geneva, sort of double-imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? There was a reference, in the subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up. (...)
Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke, but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. “Coarse woman, a shrew.” I had to look up “shrew.” “A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse.” I had to look up “shrewmouse.” The book sent me back to “shrew, sense 1.” A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up “insectivorous.” The book said that it meant feeding on insects, from the Latin insectum, for “insect,” plus the Latin vorus, for “vorous.” I had to look up “vorous.”
Three or four years later, I was trying to read a lengthy and intense European novel, written in the nineteen-thirties, and translated from the German, and I came across the word “fishwife.” It swept me back into the marriage. But when I tried to imagine their life together, mother and father minus me, I came up with nothing. I knew nothing. Ross and Madeline alone, what did they say, what were they like, who were they? All I felt was a shattered space where my father used to be. And here was my mother, sitting across a room, a thin woman in trousers and a gray shirt. When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small, crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down and pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. I liked sitting on our tiny concrete balcony, reading, with a fractional view of the ring of glass and steel where my father worked, amid Lower Manhattan’s bridges and towers. (...)
Ross dragging me along to the Morgan Library to read the spines of fifteenth-century books. He stood gazing at the jewelled cover of the Lindau Gospels in a display case. He arranged access to the second and third tiers, the balconies, after hours, up the hidden staircase, the two of us crouching and whispering along the inlaid walnut bookshelves. A Gutenberg Bible, then another, century after century, elegant grillwork crisscrossing the shelves.
That was my father. Who was my mother?
She was Madeline Siebert, originally from a small town in southern Arizona. A cactus on a postage stamp, she called it. She drapes her coat on a hanger whose hooked upper part she twists so that it fits over the top of the open closet door. Then she runs the roller over the back of the coat. It’s satisfying for me to watch this, maybe because I can imagine Madeline taking commonplace pleasure in the simple act of draping her coat on a hanger, strategically arranging the coat on a closet door, and then removing the accumulated lint with a roller.
Define “lint,” I tell myself. Define “hanger.” Then I try to do it. These occasions stick and hold, among other bent relics of adolescence.
I returned to the library a few times, regular hours, main floor, tapestry over the mantelpiece, but did not tell my father.
When I was fourteen, I developed a limp. I didn’t care if it looked fake. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks, and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself.
I used to look at an old photograph of my mother, Madeline in a pleated dress, age fifteen, and I’d feel sad. But she wasn’t ill, she hadn’t died.
When she was at work, I’d take a phone message for her and write down the information, making certain to tell her when she came home. Then I waited for her to return the call. Actively watched and waited. I reminded her once and then again that the lady from the dry cleaner had called, and she looked at me with a certain expression, the one that said, I am looking at you this way because there is no point wasting words when you can recognize the look and know that it says what should not need to be said. It made me nervous, not the look but the phone call waiting to be returned. Why isn’t she calling back? What is she doing that’s so important that she can’t call back? Time is passing, the sun is setting, the person is waiting, I am waiting.
I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was, in our modest garden apartment in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word “steep” was the whole point. Once I had decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work. I tried at times, made an effort, but failed. I was technically unsteeped but also ever-intentioned, seeing myself in the chair reading a book even as I sat in the chair watching a movie on TV with French or German subtitles. Later, living elsewhere, I visited Madeline fairly often and began to notice that when we ate a meal together she used paper napkins instead of cloth, because, understandably, it was only her, just another solitary meal, or only her and me, which came to the same thing, except that after she set out a plate, a fork, and a knife next to the paper napkin she avoided using the napkin, paper or not, using a facial tissue sticking out of a nearby box, Kleenex Ultra Soft, ultra doux, to wipe her mouth or fingers, or walking over to the roll of paper towels in the rack above the kitchen sink and tearing off a segment of a single towel and wiping her mouth on it and then folding the segment over the smudged part and bringing it to the table to use again, leaving the paper napkin untouched.
The limp was my faith, my version of flexing muscles or jumping hurdles. After the early days of its development, the limp began to feel natural. At school, the kids mainly smirked or mimicked. A girl threw a snowball at me, but I interpreted this as a playful gesture and responded accordingly, clutching my groin and wagging my tongue. The limp was something to cling to, a circular way to recognize myself, step by step, as the person who was doing this. Define “person,” I told myself. Define “human,” define “animal.”
by Don DeLillo, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Abbott Miller
