The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [98]
FOLLOWING MY SON Aaron’s last call, I had decided not to interfere again with the misconstrued ironies of his life. I would not bother him with my fatherly intentions. I would not call to ask for his news. What news he had always tended toward the apocalyptic. Let him call me. This was my plan.
I failed to carry it through. Afternoons, I worked in the garden, planting snapdragons and petunias, or weeding, and while I did so, I thought about my son. These thoughts were tormenting, buzzing gnatlike around my head, because they had no content except by way of the images they presented. I added fertilizer to the soil. Aaron on a swing set, Aaron playing touch football, Aaron slouched in a chair reading Churchill’s ghostwritten history of World War Two. I remembered his shy tokens of affection toward his mother and me, pen-and-pencil sets he had bought us, homemade birthday cards, school projects from the elementary grades we had never had the heart to throw out.
I remembered how he got the scar on his forehead and the scar on his knee. I remembered his face as a Bar Mitzvah boy.
I tried to think of my new project, the book about Kierkegaard and his admirer Wittgenstein, but my attention continued to turn in the direction of my son.
At last, giving in to my own myopic affections one Thursday around dinnertime, I called his apartment in Los Angeles. From the phone came the mechanical message that that particular number had been disconnected and was no longer in service. I dialed information and asked for Aaron Ginsberg on Ambrose Street. There was no longer such a person at that address. I obtained the numbers of all the Aaron Ginsbergs without street addresses, the new listings, but none of them were him.
I called the florist in Los Angeles where he had worked intermittently as a delivery person. He had quit, they said. He had moved. To where? He hadn’t told them. He had been soaked into the ethers, and there he was dispersed.
That evening at dinner I broke the news to Esther.
Aaron has disappeared, I said. I tried calling him but his number’s dismembered. Disconnected, I mean.
Oh, honey. No one disappears. What do you mean?
I explained. Maybe no one disappears. But he has, not to the world of course, but to us. I told you: his phone’s disconnected. He’s not working at the florist anymore.
Esther put down her fork. He’s just moved, Harry. He’ll tell us where he has moved to as soon as he can. We have to be patient with Aaron. His maturing is taking its time.
Maturing! He is one of these never-never land Americans who will never grow up. Intellectually he is still in diapers. I feel like calling Los Angeles missing persons. I feel like calling the Martian embassy.
Don’t do that yet, she said. He’s not missing.
I could hardly look at her face.
He’s not missing, she repeated, to succor me. He is somewhere. He is always somewhere.
But he was missing. The police could find no trace of him. They recommended a private detective who at great expense to us found a few sniffs and scents of him in the Pacific Northwest but not the person himself, not Aaron, our son.
America, as everyone knows, is large enough to lose a child in. The tendency of the country to absorb its inhabitants and to render them anonymous and invisible had gone to work. He was now a runaway, a runaway from us, and was effectively erased.
My vice is the comfort of abstractions. Concrete events as a rule disable me. When my son disappeared from the face of this earth, I was willing to try out sociology, I was willing to commit a social science the better to know the patterns of mislaid children in a post-industrial economy. I was willing to try out religion: Judaism, Christianity if need be. An exceptionally developed capacity for abstract thought does not preclude a consideration of the soul, a word I do not surround with fussy quotation marks. But I did not know how to look for him, and