The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [57]
Trevor's sadness and his silence have seemed to me nearly mythic at times. Never to learn a coherent narrative of his life before he came to live with us, I piece it together through the cold files of DYS, through witness and intuition, this combination of sources creating a tremendous need to try to protect him, act as his advocate and interpreter with the world, with school officials who have written him off, the probation officer who dispassionately checks off the date and enters another appointment, even the court-mandated therapist who comes to the house.
His approach is to try to be Trev's “pal,” an affectation I could tell him will never work with this boy. Still, he persists, his “Hey, fellas” and his mixed metaphors and sports jargon booming throughout our rooms.
“The ball's in your court, man. Now it's up to you. You're a lucky fella, dude. Go for it. Whaddya say?”
Silence.
And yet more often now Trevor's beautiful deep baritone resonates as, alone in his room, he sings songs he has composed, his hands light on his drum. Other times Stephen creates back beats and mixes on his synthesizer over which Trevor freestyles.
Say that it's late. The backpacks full of schoolbooks sit unopened by the door. But I resist interrupting them, dragging them back to tasks and assignments that make them both feel like failures. Listening at the top of the basement stairs, I dwell in the heartbeat rhythms and the sweet sadness of the voice that gives them life.
Since Trev came to live with us I've thought about the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son. I dig out my Bible to reread the story. But it's unsatisfying. In no way do I imagine that our house is like the house of the father. Nor is Trevor's fate like the Prodigal Son's. Trev's inheritance is one of longing. Can such an inheritance be squandered?
And where is the mother in the story? Doesn't she have a place in the house of God? How would her presence change things? Is she implicit in the psyche of the father who so generously calls his son home? When was she lost in the translation? I want to ask the translator. I want to touch the words in which she lived.
An old impertinence rises up in me, a frustration at text and culture. The scaffolds that surround the boys and me—the scaffolds of history, myth—show our fatherless household to be without a roof, or built on sand. The parable of the Prodigal Son erases the feminine without impunity. The mother in the story is at best assumed, insignificant to the outcome.
Or is God the father intended to be single? I am acquainted with a few single fathers in Amherst. With what sympathy they are treated in the community. The assumption inherent in such sympathy condemns the absent mother as bad. How could she leave her husband and children? She is unnatural. Look at the hero the father. How can the community help?
On the other hand the same community is wary of a single-mothering household. Whether it be school officials, teachers, the march of probation officers, neighbors—each looks at our home and sees something missing. I've heard it over and over from the factions who have entered our lives since Trevor moved in—that our household lacks “structure, discipline.”
“What Trevor needs,” a neighbor once chastises Stephen, “is strict monitoring, a rigorous schedule. Your mother doesn't seem to understand this …”
What she means is that there is no father here, no man to “complete” the picture. We are judged as not whole, as wrong or crippled. All too often we are dealt with accordingly—that is to say dismissed, unsavable for our lack, doomed in our pursuits.
But where are the fathers? Not here on Christmas night. Why aren't they here? They have new lives, new wives, they have responsibilities. Believe them, they would be here if they could. For this plea culture forgives them. Soon, they say on the phone long distance. Say a week this summer.