'Oh.'
But change that to:
'Why did he leave his wife with a retarded child?'
'He didn't want to be married anymore.'
And there'd be plenty of:
'He was only thinking of himself, wasn't he?'
And:
'How selfish. That poor woman. He left her alone with a retarded child just because he didn't want to be married to her. What will the poor woman do?'
I can hear those choruses of opprobrium reverberating to the four comers of the company. Not that I'm much help to her now when it comes to him. I don't have the strength. I'd rather slink off or look away. Someone will have to make the decision for me:
'He'll be much better off there, safer. They have good ones now. It's best for all of you, the other children too. It hasn't been fair to them. You deserve a rest. You've both been marvelous. I know it will be hard to give him up.'
Or an illness or accident will have to occur.
Till then, I'm powerless. (I don't have the guts even to want to talk about it. I've got no answers to the unspoken criticism I imagine I'll hear. I do not want to listen for the rest of my life to my wife's second thoughts. I could forgive myself in a second for putting him away. She would not forgive either of us.) I am not the pillar of support she wants. I keep my mouth shut and my sentiments suppressed, and I adamantly refuse to merge my feelings with hers. (I won't share my sorrows. I don't want her to have a part in them. They're all mine.) I wish I had no dependents. It does not make me feel important to know that people are dependent on me for many things. It's such a steady burden, and my resentment is larger each time I have to wait for her to stop crying and clinging to me and resume placing the silverware in the dishwasher or doing her isometric hip and thigh exercises. (I can't stand a woman who cries at anything but funerals. I feel used.)
'For God sakes, what do you want from
'I need someone to talk to. I wasn't asking you to feel sorry for me. Can't I even say how I feel?'
'Call your sister. You know damn well I can't stand crying anymore.' I don't want to hear how she feels. I don't want to have to talk to anyone about Derek. I don't want to have to hear anyone talk about his own troubles. (I find it harder and harder to feel sorry for anyone but myself.) 'I can't help you with this. I don't know how. I didn't order it this way and I don't know what to do, either.'
And I saw it happening before anyone. Someone cursed us. I am ashes and stale air inside when it comes to him, have the fortitude and fiber of dried mushrooms and wet fallen leaves. I am cold. I could have prophesied. When pediatricians said he was slow, I saw he was clumsy. His knees and feet and fingers seemed angled slightly out of kilter. I discerned he could not seem to hold his head up straight for long. I had a feeling of disaster about him even before he was born (but I had that anxious feeling about the others too). I expected a Mongoloid. I would have settled readily beforehand for a harelip or cleft palate and trusted to surgery — with all three — although I can't visualize either my boy or my daughter wading through life even this far with any kind of serious birth defect. They've had trouble enough without it. I can't see how my wife really expects me to feel sorry for her when I have so many good reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Among them, her.
I want to get free of her before her health fails. I see an ailing wife in my future. There are eloquent forerunners now of chronic invalidism. (She's sure she has, is getting, will get cancer, and maybe she will.) I know her health will degenerate before mine does. She's better at it. I don't want to be tied to her by sickness (hers, that is). I will. I'll get battered by continuing hurricane warnings of bursitis, arthritis, rheumatism, diabetes, varicose veins, dizziness, nausea, tumors, cysts, angina, polyps, the whole fucking shebang of physical dissolution. (I can do without everyone else's but my own.) I'll be caught on that barb. And my grown-up children will keep me there.
'Dad, how can you even think of leaving her, when she's feeling so bad?' they'll say to me in reproof.
'But how can I ever leave her, when she never feels better?'
'I don't feel well,' my wife wakes up whimpering some mornings in a little girl's voice (when she feels someone wants something from her).
As if I care.
('I was watching you sleep,' a girl will tell you while she's still in love with you. 'You were snoring.'
When she's not in love with you, it's revolting, and she will not want to see you again unless she's lonely or needs your money.)
My wife snores now sometimes, and occasionally her breath is bad in the morning. But, so is mine, and so do I, so we are already in a headlong race toward decrepitude. The children join in with sniveling complaints of their own.
My daughter gets sore throats and stomach pains. My boy pleads tiredness and nausea and will sleep past noon some days if we let him. I use headaches. So does my wife. I've got chest pains I can draw upon, for everybody has great respect for a heart attack, and a liver up my sleeve I can play in a clutch. My wife can counter with cancer scares, and it's even-Stephen down to the wire in the shadow of the valley of Blue Cross major medical benefits. Wouldn't it be a laugh if my wife died of chest pains and I was the one who got cancer? When my wife is depressed and my daughter drops innuendoes of suicide, I can plunge into thick, sepulchral silences for days and feign such absorbed distraction that every remark to me has to be repeated — I can out-ail any of them at anything but hysterectomies if I want to make the effort, any of them but Derek, who begins with certain congenital handicaps that are impossible for me to overcome. (Ha, ha.) All of us boast of insomnia, not always truthfully. Were we taken at our word, not one member of the family has ever enjoyed a good night's sleep. Except, perhaps, Derek, who just can't bring himself to complain. (Ha, ha.) I wonder what's done with them in homes when they reach sexual maturity and discover they might just as well masturbate as do anything else. I'm glad he's not a girl. Castration's inhuman. So they cut off their arms. I wonder how they control attendants. How do they keep them away from the idiot boys and girls? My thoughts go haywire when I try to think of him. Tell me he'll not progress to a mental age past five: and I find myself thinking again if people at five know how to clean themselves properly after defecating. Of course not. My boy of nine still leaves stains on his undershorts, and so do I. (So does everyone, probably, so why must I single out us?) I see him now so lovely, touching, and pitiful I can't bear to look. I see him next at thirty moving toward sixty, and he is appalling. I am dazed, horrified, stricken dumb. Dark hair is growing on his face and on the backs of his hands, and his eyebrows are bushy. Will he look like me? He'll be balding. His suit won't fit. No one will groom him. His dandruff falls like fish scales. I color his sweaters and jackets dark and his face pale. He is slack-jawed and flabby as they steer him about, he is repulsive, lame, and monstrous. He still won't be able to speak. He will not know how to diet or play tennis, squash, or golf, and his build and muscle tone will be sickly. He'll be ungainly. People would stare with hostility if he were anywhere else. They'll forget to clip his fingernails. People will want to kill him. They'll call him Benjy. I will not want to visit him. I hope I can't remember him. I hope I don't find out my wife is committing adultery, even though she probably should.
'Do it,' I'd advise, if she were someone else's.
'Okay. I will.'
It might do wonders for her morale, if she didn't expect too much. It's also time she struck back. Wouldn't it be funny if my boy is the one who turns out to be homosexual and I do not? It would be tragic. I, at least, have inhibitions of steel. It would be worse than tragic for me: it would be socially embarrassing. A suicide, a fag, and an idiot, the Slocum offspring from the Slocum loins. And an alcoholic, neurasthenic, adulterous wife. God bless the girl — she'd come in handy. I'd blame the children on her. Until someone as astute as I am pointed an accusatory finger at me and inquired:
'Hey, wait a minute, buddy. Buddy, wait a minute. Was she always this way?'
'I don't know. All of this takes time to mature and emerge. You'll have to ask some reliable, revolutionary, evolutionary, psychological historian, an experienced botanist of the psyche. Was I this way?'
