The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [113]
He sits on a stone bench. He puts his head in his hands, a gesture that he knows is almost too symbolic, almost a parody. Yet he can’t resist it: the symbolic seems the only possible posture for the impossible things that he feels now must be said.
“That’s not the whole of my life as the father of children. There is Lucy. But then there is Raphael, my son by Beverly. My son who doesn’t want to know me, my son who lives a life I find so foreign, so horrifying. A life that has brought harm to the world. My son and I are, to each other, entirely unknowable.”
“I don’t know anything about your son.”
“You know the circumstances of his birth.”
There is nothing for her to say: of course it is a thing she knows.
“From the moment of his birth, his life was swaddled in unhappiness. Unhappiness seeped into the cracks of every place we lived. The months in the apartment in Beacon Hill. And then, almost immediately, Henry Levi found me the job teaching music at Grenham. Which I have never left. But every house we lived in there … the air was poisoned with unhappiness. The houses were never ours and never had what Beverly believed was the only kind of light that could make her happy. It was in one of those faculty houses that she killed herself. Her note said, ‘Sorry, it’s too dark for me. Here.’ ”
Miranda doesn’t know what to do with her eyes or her hands. Touch him? Not touch him? Meet his eyes or look away?
“So the school moved Raphael and me to another house, but Raphael had breathed in all that sadness. Sadness and loss. And I saw him grow into a boy who enjoyed doing harm. I had to know that my son was a bully. He enjoyed humiliation. He enjoyed humiliating me. He thought I was weak. He despised music. He left home as soon as he could. Enlisted in the army at eighteen. He didn’t tell me; the only one he told was my father. Somehow he responded to my father’s kindness … perhaps he understood that my father was sympathetic to Beverly. But my father was sympathetic to everyone, and I think that endless unquestioning kindness was important to Raphael. Certainly, he didn’t get it from me. He must have known that his aggressiveness was something I judged, and judged harshly. I don’t know why my father didn’t; he was the least aggressive man I’ve ever known.
“Anyway, Raphael joined the army, and he was very successful: he was always good at languages, and during the first Gulf War they sent him to school to learn Arabic; he was soon fluent, and apparently that led to a series of rapid promotions. I don’t know quite what his rank is, I don’t know even what he does, but it’s something important. We rarely speak. Now he’s become involved in an Evangelical church, and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me or Clare or Lucy. His wife wrote me a letter to say that they thought our ‘permissive lifestyle was a danger to their children.’ When I asked what she meant—our lifestyle couldn’t be more circumscribed—she said it was that we had a lot of homosexual friends. I have grandchildren I have never seen. I know their names and ages, but Raphael has never even sent a picture. The last time he called, he mentioned that he was ‘involved in some things in Iraq.’ He said, ‘I bet you have a problem with Abu Ghraib.’
“I said I did. I asked if he had anything to do with it.
“He went silent, then he laughed. His laugh was terrible to me. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Call me up, Dad, when you have any idea how the world really works.’
“And so it is impossible for me to be spared regret. Every time I see films of Abu Ghraib I ask the question: Would it have been better if my son had not been born?”
“But you don’t know that he was involved in torture.”
“But I can’t say with any certainty that he wasn’t. It was part of his desire to humiliate me not to tell me either way. I had to understand that his saying that one word ‘maybe’ was a special kind of sadism. So that if I imagine he was involved, I have the guilt of thinking the