“Clem,” I said. I said it was true that I had not been in the hospital when she was born.
With the tine of her fork, Clementine was drawing beet-juice curlicues on her plate.
“So she died alone?”
“Not alone alone. There were doctors, of course, and nurses, trying to save her.”
“But Mom’s parents were trying to say that she died alone. Shouldn’t the judge—the magistrate—have just laughed at them? I mean, didn’t women use to pretty much die all the time in childbirth? Nobody sued their husbands for custody.”
“It made it more complicated that Miriam and I weren’t married.”
“It still doesn’t seem fair,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It didn’t seem fair to me either.”
“What kind of difficult time had you been having? Had you like socked her or something?” Clementine pantomimed an uppercut.
“No, Clem. Never.”
“But Dan must have done something. Perhaps Dan was spending too much time at work?”
“Hardly. I had become—how to put it…”
“Insensitive?”
“More like involved.”
“Self-involved?”
“No, Clem, I had become involved with someone else.”
“Like involved involved?”
“Involved enough. Involved enough for her parents to say—to argue that I wasn’t a fit parent.”
“Involved with who?”
“And for good measure they said I was a drunk.”
“A drunk! You never drink.”
“Before I never drank, I drank.”
“Like drunk drank?”
“Drunk drank. In short, they wanted to convince the judge I was a bum.”
“I still think the judge should have laughed at them.”
“A magistrate has to listen to both sides.”
“He could have listened and then laughed.”
“It was a she. Everybody gets to make an argument and rebut the other guy’s argument, and then there’s all the technical maneuvering and bureaucratic business. Your mother’s parents were hoping I would just give up.”
“Instead you won and punished them by turning their precious granddaughter into an American.”
“Is that what you are?”
“God, why can’t I have normal grandparents, the kind you can visit in Yonkers? Did they stay angry with you after the trial?”
“I don’t know how they felt. We never communicated.”
“Never ever?”
“No, Clem,” I said. “It had all been too hard.”
—
When Clementine was still a baby, I took on a supplemental position in the laboratory of a Dr. Tauer, a well-known developmental analyst. Parents would bring their children, between six months and eighteen months old, to what Dr. Tauer referred to as “the play-space.” In an airless closet, seated behind a one-way mirror, I would watch the parents and their children, recording their interactions with a series of numeric codes. Normally this would have been the job of a research assistant or even a college intern, but I had volunteered for my own education. The job, I thought, would teach me how to be a father. With Clementine, nothing felt instinctual, nothing felt natural, while every one of these parents possessed an innate ease and confidence, even those who clearly found child rearing boring or disquieting.
I have never been able to find a suitable word to describe what I saw in those exchanges, however dutifully I applied the appropriate code: Giving an object; Hiding an object; Eye contact (questioning); Eye contact (anxious); Eye contact (delighted); Parental intervention (requested); Parental intervention (volunteered); Distress; Agitation; Acknowledgment….
Acknowledgment—is that what pierced me as I stared secretly at those parents and children? It was like a field, invisible, existing nowhere except in the space between parent and child. The parents I observed—whether sweet or severe, harried or amused—they were there, there with their children and there for them. Whether eager or hesitant, each did what the day, the hour, the minute, required. I felt that I had been visited by an epiphany, without knowing what it was that had been revealed. Was it a vision of openness and intimacy I despaired of ever providing for Clementine? Was it the obscenity of my learning to parent by sealing myself in a closet behind a one-way mirror? (But surely I was no more or less Clementine’s parent in the booth than when I was sponging oatmeal from the crease in her neck or rocking her to sleep!) Finally, I understood. What had pierced me was a fact as immediate and unmistakable as Clementine’s own face turned toward me: that I was hers, that her claim had been made. She had claimed me for her own.
In session, in supervision, in case presentations, how often it recurs, the threadbare truism: you cannot choose your parents. But as I think back, Father, to those suffocating days, watching the children and their parents, I am convinced now there is something exactly and precisely wrong about that statement. Nothing more fateful—nothing, I tell you—has befallen me than the moment Clementine’s newborn gaze, solemn and slate-eyed, fixed me for her own. And today I believe I understand how mythical Love takes the form of a baby, staring down the shaft of his drawn dart, his intentions unsearchable but his aim unerringly true.
“Oh,” the nuns would say when I went to visit Clementine, “regarde comme elle tend ses bras! Quelqu’un connaît son papa!”
See how she opens her arms!
Somebody knows her daddy!
THIRTY-FOUR
How long do you have? Reggie had asked.
Days had passed since my return from the communauté. She had just returned to my apartment after going out for soda and another bottle of whiskey. With two packs of cigarettes this time (she added), so that I didn’t smoke all of hers. I had met her at the bookstore that afternoon, and we had returned to my apartment.
Before I go back?
No, dork, before you die.
Eight days, I said, though it was a lie. I had done nothing to reserve a flight back to the States.
Oh! she said. She would have divorced me long before that. I was cute enough, even though I was like, what, ten years older? And anyway, shrinks were bad news. Everyone knew that. Common knowledge. Which wasn’t to say she didn’t like that fuck-you-awake thing I did in the mornings.
—
Was it weird to be in France banging a German chick? American German, that is, from-Texas Germans, brewers, polka dancers, tuba players all. Some French dude told her
