It is a curious thing. The more I stare at this portrait, the more I look into his eyes, the more I begin to feel that he has begun to stare back at me. It is as though I am the painting and he is the man standing in my daughter’s dining room. It gives me a strange sensation. I hurry into the warmth of the living room, into the golden gleam of the floors reflecting the afternoon light. I turn on the television to a baseball game. Thevoices of the announcers are soothingly ordinary. Now that I am an old man, I begin to lose myself in things.
My wife and daughter have disappeared deeper into the suburbs for a morning of shopping. My daughter is pregnant with her first child and they are out looking for more baby things. What more can a baby need? I asked my wife, who is overjoyed at the prospect of becoming a grandparent. I am as well, of course. It is an unspeakably wonderful feeling to be awaiting the birth of a grandchild.
My wife shushed me when I asked how much more a baby could need, even though my daughter and son-in-law were in their room sleeping and could not hear me, and even though she agrees with me. We have wondered at the boxes of diapers and wipes, the lotions and shampoos, the neat rows of baby bottles stacked in the kitchen cabinet, the closetful of tiny baby clothes on tiny hangers in the baby’s room. The room is painted yellow and green, decorated with flowers and rabbits. It is a wonderful room, full of quiet peace. Over the crib is our first gift to the baby, a circle of tiny, dangling animals, bears and lions and elephants, their fierceness diluted by their soft colors and diminutive size. When wound, it spins slowly and tinkles a tune that I could not place at first. It is a song my wife used to sing to our children about a tiny twinkling star. I did not know Americans sang the song as well.
Because we are in California, the game being televised is the San Francisco Giants versus the Yankees. The Giants are winning and the pitchers are walking Barry Bonds every time he is up at bat, fearing another home run out of the park and into the ocean. My son-in-law has told me that people wait in their boats with their radios, hoping to catch a ball hit by Barry Bonds. Sometimes they do. I do not particularly care about the outcome, except that I am always happy to see the Yankees lose. They are the enemy of my favorite team, the RedSox. My favorite because Boston was my first home in America twenty-three years ago.
My daughter then was only twelve and my son was nine. I was forty-two and my wife thirty-eight. For a long time there was nothing but work. We moved out to the suburbs, where my wife and I worked in a factory making and testing computer chips. For a long time I handled the chemicals with which they coated the chips, foul-smelling liquids with long names that I could not pronounce and that I have now happily forgotten. We wore goggles and masks and thick, heavy gloves that grew black from the residue of the chemicals. Sometimes I had terrible headaches that made the world go dark and I would lie in bed and try to block out all thought. I pressed my mind to see only images of mountain streams and forests of cool green shadows, but I could only see blue, a shadowy gray blue like the lonely hour after the sun goes down. Perhaps that is it. There is something about the man in the picture that recalls those times to me.
Later, some of the men I worked with developed terrible cancers—of the liver, stomach, prostate, and lungs—but nobody could prove that it was due to the chemicals we worked with. So far, I am one of the lucky ones. Although the headaches have grown worse so that I am nearly blinded by them for one whole day or longer, I am still alive.
In our third year of working at this factory of cancers, my wife grew sick. Green from the growth inside her, she threw up several times a day. At first, I was relieved when the doctor told us that she was only with child. It meant that I would not lose her, my only companion, she who bore our fate with steely cheerfulness. But another child was impossible. What little money we had was reserved for our two others—for food and clothes and for the schools that would offer them the prospect of better lives, jobs that would not endanger their health.
For two weeks, we vacillated. At night, we held each other,fear suffocating us. What hope was there for us? My wife would have to leave her job, the paycheck that made it possible for us to exist. Who would take care of the baby? My sister, our closest family member, lived more than two hours away.
In the end, it was I who made the decision. I could not burden her with it, though she suffered. It was I who failed to make enough money, I who lacked the vision, the ambition to create fortune where there was none. I who had turned my back on the chance to go into partnership with a man who now owned several prime properties back where we had come from. I had committed the crime of timidity.
One Friday, we both called in sick to our supervisors. A sudden cold, we said, aching and fevers in our bodies. We drove to a clinic one town over,
