Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash
Lucius heard the baby wail from the yard, where he sat cross-legged with his head leaned all the way back, considering the stars. In another life, he would have been an astronomer and known them all. He would have had the opportunity to see the flares of those distant suns, winking in and out of existence. But in his life, the life in which he felt increasingly trapped, they were as nameless and faceless as strangers on the sidewalk.
Somewhere, behind him, echoing softly out the open front door, came Madeline’s sweet refrain of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The wail subsided; his son had been placated. But Lucius felt his stomach turn with the knowledge that that wail, that horrible piercing scream would come again and again. For every lullaby there would be ten more midnight alarms, ten more sleepless nights sprawled helplessly at the foot of his son’s crib, wondering how and why he ever agreed to this.
Had he agreed to this? Or had it all been her idea? That was the worst part about his anger and his fear—how he had found a target for them in his wife. Because if they were just his, if they amounted to nothing more than self-loathing, he could bear it. His father always told him that family was the one thing for which you sacrificed everything else. But he worried, with each passing day, if the love he felt for Madeline would be one of the things that he had to sacrifice in the name of family.
Inside, the telephone began ringing. He heard his wife’s footsteps passing through the house, a few murmured words. She appeared at the doorway behind him.
“For you,” she said. “Your father.”
Lucius joined Madeline in the doorway. There, in the pleated moonlight streaming under the eaves, she was beautiful. More beautiful to him than she had ever been, because in the half-darkness, he could pretend that they were the only two people left alive. He could fold her in his long capable arms, and they could hide, forever. Just the two of them, the way that he had always dreamed. As she handed him the phone, the illusion shattered.
“Hallo son,” his father said, “Thought I’d check to see how everything’s going over there.”
“Hallo,” said Lucius in the way of men the world over, parroting their fathers as soon as they raise a receiver to their lips.
His gaze followed Madeline through the open door and into the kitchen. As he watched her receding back he sniffed the air, hoping to recover her fading scent of love that made him burn for her and only her. He remained standing on the porch, where the wind and cricket-chirp and faint roar of the distant interstate might distract from his leaden voice, though he knew his father would never notice a thing like that.
“Yes, fine, thank you, we’re fine,” Lucius said.
“Capital,” his father said. “And money-wise? Everything okay on that end? You know we don’t mind helping out. Don’t mind at all.”
“No, we’re fine, no need for that. But thank you. We do appreciate the offer. You’ve done more than enough already. We are really so grateful.”
“Happy to, our pleasure, you know. We wish we could be there more, in the flesh as it were, but, well, with your mother, it’s hard to make the trip, you understand.”
“Yes, of course, I understand.”
“And Madeline, she understands?”
“Yes, she understands.”
As his father paused, Lucius could make out the sound of his ragged breathing. He could almost smell it – cocktail onions and Benson & Hedges.
“Well, I won’t keep you. I’m sure you’ve got your hands full,” his father said.
“Yes, well, it was nice talking to you.”
“Likewise. And remember…”
Lucius waited.
“Memorial Day.”
“Memorial Day,” Lucius repeated.
“Yes. Invitation’s open. If you’d like to come see us. We understand if you’re too busy of course. But just wanted to remind you.”
“Ok. I’ll remember. Memorial Day.”
“Memorial Day. Goodnight, son.”
“Goodnight, father.”
Lucius held the phone to his ear for a few seconds after the line clicked dead, as if straining to hear something through the dial tone. But there was nothing, so he went inside, closing the door behind him.
The foyer was cold and dim. The door to the nursery, behind the wooden railing on the second floor, was left slightly ajar so that Madeline could hear if the baby stirred or whimpered. She was in the living room reading a book and humming a tune that he didn’t recognize when Lucius entered. He approached the credenza they inherited from his parents, which clashed with the rest of the furniture but was too old and expensive to give away. He opened one of the drawers and withdrew a record. He placed it on the turntable and set the needle, adjusting the volume so that the soft classical music that issued from the speakers wouldn’t reach his son’s room. He turned to see her looking at him, not angrily, as he hoped, but inquisitively, with her head cocked.
“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t realize you were reading.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
“I can turn it off if you like.”
“I said that’s okay,” she said, “Besides, it’s not very good.”
“Why are you still reading it then?” he asked.
She sighed. “Because I’ve started it.”
Lucius sat down beside his wife on the sofa. Together, they stared into the scarred black interior of the fireplace. The seconds ticked away on the grandfather clock in the hall. When the record’s side was over, Lucius went and flipped it.
“We should take a walk tomorrow,” Madeline suggested.
“Where?” Lucius asked.
“Anywhere,” she said, “I don’t care. It’s just nice to do things together, you know. All together.”
“I think it’s supposed to rain,” he said.
“Where’d you see that?” she asked.
“Farmer’s Almanac,” he lied.
“I see. Well then how about the museum? That’s indoors.”
Lucius pictured himself walking up and down the halls of curios and artifacts, pretending to notice them, when all he could notice was his own behavior. He imagined his whole sad family, out for a stroll; how they would look to other, equally sad families. His wife, dressed casually and yet still more radiant than everyone else in the crowd, pushing the stroller in which his son reclined fussily, and himself, walking two steps behind, sort of loping behind them like a bodyguard would. He found himself practicing the faces he would make to appear happy, but not too happy, to be out at the museum with his wife and child. The realization that he had to practice these faces brought a lump to his throat, which he hastily swallowed.
“We’ll see,” he said. “I mean, of course, that would be lovely, but Thomas is really riding me so I may have to go in.”
“Oh please,” she said, “It’s a Saturday. And Thomas has kids. He’ll understand. Spend the day with us. It’ll do you some good to get out.” She put her hand on his arm and the gift of her contact was almost enough to make him tell the truth. He could tell her everything. All the gory details: How his son didn’t look like a son to him, but just any other baby. How, on his worst days, he wished they could just leave, let the baby cry forever and head for someplace, anyplace else. And if she asked him how long he had felt this way, he wouldn’t have an answer.
“We’ll see,” he repeated.
Madeline rose from the sofa. She was off to bed. And though they had had this exact conversation dozens of times before, and he had always been thankful to see her go on those occasions, he now felt the sudden and uncontrollable urge to get her to stay.
“I mean,” he said, his voice shaking, “do you think it’d be alright for him? All those people, you know? Could be too much, don’t you think? I’m just thinking of him, is all.”
She stopped. Her shoulders rose and fell as she took a huge stabilizing breath.
Her voice low, barely above a whisper, she said, “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
And that was it. She was gone and he was left alone in their living room. He changed out the record for another—from Beethoven to Bach—but failed to clock the change in tempo or tone. It was all just noise. Meaningless, artless noise. Like the noise of his son’s laughter, he thought. The carbonated laughter that issued forth from his baby’s gooey mouth. The laughter never failed to bring an effortless smile to Madeline’s lips. But he had to force the smile. This artificial smile resembled his father’s, which he only remembered seeing once, when his mother cajoled them into sitting for a portrait.
He remembered posing beneath his father’s large muscular frame. The photographer’s cooing words.—Just a little to the left: now, put your hand on his shoulder. There, that’s it. Hold it.—The unfamiliar weight of his father’s stationary hand on his body. He remembered the flash and rubbing his eyes afterwards to remove the spots. The sudden brightness had been painless and yet, when it faded, Lucius felt as though he had lost something essential. The picture still hung in the hallway of his parents’ house. It was, to his knowledge, the only photo that he and his father had taken together, the only evidence besides his birth certificate and the way that he answered the phone that they were anything more than two people who had known each other for a long time.
Lucius had dozens of photos with his own son. Whole volumes had been dedicated to the child’s first few months, lovingly assembled by Madeline and chronologically organized on the bookshelf beside the credenza. If he were to take one of them out, he could find evidence of himself holding, touching, swinging, and loving his son. But the evidence would always be circumstantial, and perhaps, when his son grew older and Lucius’ lack of affection became something he knew rather than just something he felt, those photos would remind his son of all the ways that his father had failed him.
A sudden chill passed through the room. Likely, his wife had opened a window and now a stream of cold air was funneling through the house and out the doggy door in the mudroom. It was late. He wanted to be upstairs in bed with Madeline, but he couldn’t go up there yet. He couldn’t stand the silence, the way that it filled their bedroom. This silence that had found its way into their love took up too much space, too much oxygen. It gave new meaning to the phrase “take your breath away.” He remembered using this phrase when he proposed, back when they were twenty-five and attractive and sure that nothing would ever come between them. She had laughed then and still did when talking about the proposal. It was his bumbling self-consciousness, which she found endearing. For the first few years, he would laugh at himself when she told the story. But now, ever since the birth of their child, it stung with the same intensity as the jeers and taunts of playground bullies. His wife was no bully, but there was something in the way that they interacted that made him feel like a child.
Even now, as he knelt alone before the fireplace in the house he bought for the family he started, he felt childish. He gathered a sheet of newspaper into a loose mushroom in his hands. He crossed a few sticks of kindling over the crumpled paper and lit it with a lighter. He watched as his hands carefully laid larger pieces of wood on the growing flame.
His father’s hands had shown him how to make fire. They had been used, in lieu of words, to show Lucius what was expected of him as a man: A man’s hands were a Swiss Army Knife. They should be able to do anything. They should speak for the man. Because a man shouldn’t speak.
The fire now lit, Lucius returned to the sofa, sinking back into the velvet folds. He leaned his weary head back against the gentle rise, rolling it to the left. He caught his reflection in the floor-length mirror that obscured the radiator. He saw himself, and his father, and, shuddering, he saw the man that his son would one day grow up to be. All three men, containing one another like Russian nesting dolls. Each son giving birth to each father, for what is a father before a son emerges? He is a man. And that is all he was ever asked to be.
Lucius remembered the noise and the blood of his son’s delivery. The sweat that caked Madeline’s head as she pushed and screamed. How he held her hand and stared deep into her clenched eyelids, whispering meaningless words that she would never hear. The smell of antiseptic and feces. His own exhaustion, fear, and doubt. How it had felt, oddly, as if he were the one emerging into some vast and terrible world. As if it had been him clawing to remain in the womb and not his son.
And then, he had a son—a red, wet ball of nerves and pain that trusted only her. He could feel it immediately, that bond between mother and son. He could feel it because he too felt helpless and cold and dependent on this brave and beautiful woman to save him. Tears welled in his eyes as he remembered those twin instincts when he first held his son—to surround him in a loving embrace or reach for the scalpel. The only logical reactions to meeting yourself.
Holding his son in that hospital room, he knew that affection between them had to be reciprocally earned. The disappointment of that epiphany struck him like his father’s fist, at which point, the anger and the fear came flooding into him, displacing whatever sort of immediate love he had felt.
But the love had been there, hadn’t it? He asked himself as he stared into the fire before him. He had loved his son, if only for an instant. And if he had felt it once, then he could feel it again, he was sure. He just had to try. To finish what he started. To bear the pain as a sacrifice, until he outgrew the shape of his father and finally found the courage to tell his son about his love.
The glowing embers cast a small halation through the tears welling in Lucius’ eyes. Somewhere deep in the bed of twinkling embers, he saw his son’s face. The face was too far away for him to touch. But it was there – his personal Polaris. And he decided then that chasing that face and the love that it would one day bring was worth all the exhaustion and the pain he would ever feel. Even if it killed him, it was the one thing worth dying for.
The music stopped and the record continued to turn, making pointless scratchy rounds on the turntable. It was a sound he associated with the end of things. But this wasn’t the end of something. This was the beginning of something. The clock on the wall chimed one time. He lumbered up from the couch, headed for bed. In the foyer, he removed his son’s shoes from the closet and placed them beside his own on the rack by the door. The black oxfords were impractical for such a young child, comical even, but Madeline would want them all dressed to the nines for a trip to museum. Next to his own, larger oxfords, which were beaten and scuffed, his son’s tiny shoes looked pristine. He would buy a new pair for himself tomorrow and throw the old ones away. But his son’s shoes would never be thrown away. Even after they no longer fit his feet, Madeline would keep them in a box in the garage, because she kept everything. Someday in twenty or thirty years, Lucius would find the box while looking for something else, like nails or an old can of paint. He would remember how perfect his son once was and how much he had grown.
JMWW 