Something Happened

Why did we proscribe and threaten and interrogate? (Why did we feel so affronted?) Why did we not chortle and prattle complacently to him also (as we did in conceit to our friends) because he gave those pennies, nickels, and dimes away, instead of only criticizing and reprimanding him and extracting reluctant confessions and recalcitrant vows? (If I were him — he, I know — I think I would hate me now. Why can't I leave him alone? Why can't I leave it alone, even now?)

And, of course, most contemptible of all, we did give him his penny, his nickel, or his dime the very next time he asked for it (he was invariably right about that, too, and we were invariably wrong), and his dollar or his dollar and a half for the movies, although we generally could not refrain from giving him something of a sermon with it. (Waste Not, Want Not. He could anticipate our catechism with unsettling accuracy and frequently would recite the words right along with us, especially if our daughter was present, for she could join in with him. I begin to perceive what a stereotype I am only when I realize how often my daughter and my boy can predict and mimic my remarks with such verbatim precision. Have I really become so calculable a bore to them without my knowing it? I smart secretly when they succeed in aping me and do not forgive them easily. I forget, rather than forgive. I do not like them to ridicule me.) And we knew we would give him the money he wanted the next time he asked, even as we were declaring to him that we would not. So why did we confound and torture him (put him through the wringer) and make him stand there and take it? Why did we make him feel, perhaps (and perhaps intentionally), like something bizarre, different, like some kind of freak?

(For a penny and a nickel or a dime.)

To teach him, we told ourselves, a lesson.

(What was that lesson?)

(We never found it. We didn't even look.)

'Have you learned your lesson?' I would catechize him further the next time he came to me for money.

'Yes.'

'What is your lesson?' I would make him recite.

'I shouldn't give money away.'

'Will you give it away?'

'No.'

'Promise?'

'I want gum, Daddy.'

'Do you promise?'

'I promise.'

'What do you promise?'

'I won't give it away.'

'What will you do with it?'

'Spend it.'

'On who?'

'On gum.'

'On what?'

'On me. I want gum, Daddy. Don't you understand? I just want some gum now.'

'If I give you more than one penny, what will you do?'

'Buy more gum.'

'And if I give you no pennies, what will you do?'

'Buy no gum.'

'But you had pennies yesterday, didn't you? If you didn't give them away you wouldn't have to ask me for any today, would you?'

'Suppose I spent them yesterday? I'd have to ask you for some today anyway, wouldn't I?'

'I suppose you would. But do you understand now why you shouldn't give money away?'

'Yes.'

'Do you?'

'Yes.'

'Why? Why is it wrong for you to give money away?'

'Because,' he begins — and his eyes gleam suddenly in anticipation and he finds it is impossible to resist giving the impish reply that comes to his mind — 'because,' he repeats, with a reckless, mischievous laugh and decides to plunge ahead with his joke, 'it makes you and Mommy angry.'

What a nice kid.

I am so pleased. And I have to laugh along with him to let him know the risk was a good one and that I am not going to make him pay for it.

We have brisk, Socratic dialogues, he and I, on just about everything (the lines fly crisply in rhythmic questions and answers), and we both enjoy them. (With my daughter, I have arguments and demoralizing discussions that tend to become overladen with personal imputations and denials, even when she starts out discussing, objectively and dispassionately, life and its meaning or her friends or mine. She has many comments to make about the people my wife and I know, as though they were any of her business.) I am Socrates, he is the pupil. (Or so it seems, until I review some of our conversations when I am alone, and then it often seems that he is Socrates. I know I love him. He loves me. He is nice. I am not.

'You're nice, Daddy,' he exclaims to me frequently. He hugs me a lot.

'You know, Daddy, you're really nice sometimes,' even my daughter remarks to me every now and then.

So maybe I'm not really always as bad as I think I am. I enjoy being praised, by anyone, even by members of my family. It makes me feel important; I grow expansive. Nobody is good always. Everybody is good sometime.) And there is no predicting in what directions our words will fly, for there is no telling in advance what closely guarded observations of his might suddenly spring to his tongue and flash out almost involuntarily, or what preoccupations, deliberately, after tense, inner centuries of concentrated brooding and speculation, he might choose without preliminaries to bring out into the open. (And once he does decide, there will be no deterring him.

'Did you have to fuck Mommy to get me?' he has asked.

'That's not why,' I told him.

'Why what?'

'Why we did it or why we got you.'

'It's how, though, isn't it?' He doesn't seem to like the idea.)

He won't take chances he doesn't have to. (Neither will I. Except with girls, and even then I tend to play it very safe.) He has never, to my knowledge, been in a fist fight. (I wouldn't get in one now either unless it was clearly a matter of life or death. The apple has not fallen far from the tree.) He has no taste for bullying or beating children smaller or weaker. He tries as best he can to avoid associating with anyone he's afraid of, even at the cost of giving up activities he enjoys or forfeiting the companionship of other children he likes. He does not know what to do when an older or tougher or even smaller kid shoves him or shouts at him or when a roving band takes away his bicycle or his baseball bat (as did happen to him in the park in the city on successive days that first time I was away at the company convention in Puerto Rico; maybe that's why he still does not like me to go away anywhere in an airplane, although I would not have been there with him in the afternoon anyway to protect him and his bicycle and his baseball bat from that gang of Puerto Rican kids one day and Negro kids the next, so maybe it is not. Other parents, mothers, were there, and they couldn't. Everything is so much more confusing than it ought to be). On the other hand, he is capable of acts of great courage and emotional strength that leave my wife and me flabbergasted. (We compliment ourselves on these, too.) He will sit still and docile if a doctor or dentist tells him he is about to hurt him and submit without flinching (though white as a sheet, or sallow, and with the tips of his fingers trembling) to whatever he has been told has to be done to him. I will flinch for him. I feel dizzy and am compelled to look away in terror and nausea when his slim arm is bared by a doctor working speedily to inoculate him or take blood. I see on his face in a doctor's or dentist's office that same sickly pallor I recognize now from mornings when he has to face Forgione later in the gymnasium or give an oral report in one of his classes (the whole impression I have of his person when he looks this way is one of phlegm. His total substance is phlegm. But he is certainly not phlegmatic. Ha, ha).