There was more to the “job thing” than Rebecca mentioned at that point, because she had promised not to bring it up again. A few years earlier I had backed away from an excellent position when I was at the top of the short list. For all its attractions it opened too many doors of involvement, the necessity of publishing, the expectation of selling myself for tenure and promotion, of selling something to students, in fact. So I turned it down. Rebecca called that “a form of acrophobia,” fear of ascending those stairs.
I was not an intellectual, I told her, and I was smart enough to know that. I was a dilettante, a piddler, my head filled with bits and pieces, no grand overview. All I wanted was to make available to whoever might be paying attention the chance of being captured by just one piece of literature by just one worthy author, which just might be a call to a lifetime of reading. That struck me as idealistic enough.
Soon after that she expressed her “wishes,” putting it the same way she might have told me she’d rather go to Maine next summer instead of the Cape. It took me several minutes of silent processing to be sure I had gotten it straight, and then I said, “If that’s the way you want it.” She nodded, as if she’d known what to expect. “Quick release,” she said. I said, “That’s right,” and walked away. I never raised it again. To question, explore, object, protest, defend, maintain, shout, plead, weep, throw, smash—that was a dark pathless forest that led to nowhere.
Now, at my desk in Antigua, Guatemala, on this rainy night, with sounds from the television in the parlor below drifting up to me—some old Western (High Noon? Yes. “Do not forsake me, O my darlin’,” Tex Ritter’s rugged baritone)—I knew what I could have told Rebecca. A moratorium is a place apart, where maybe you can get your head on straight. Thoreau, for instance, went to the woods alone because he “wished to live deliberately,” to deal “only with the essential facts of life.” I was looking for a few essential facts of my own.
No good. The truth was much more simple. I was here to re-access my Spanish, so I could translate my father’s letter, which might or might not contain a single essential fact. But that was no good either, because it embodied its own contradiction. I could study Spanish anywhere, as Catherine noted. In fact, why not just find someone to translate the letter for me there in Boston?
At least I knew the answer to that. I had no idea what it might reveal, and whatever it was I wanted my eyes to see it first. Except, I was not at all sure even I ought to see it. In the two months since I’d found it, I hadn’t opened it again, not so much because it was written in Spanish, a language I had been careful to forget, but because of the one fragment in English, the P.S. Let’s keep all this from Teddy. I’ll explain it to him myself when he is old enough and ready. That bit of accidental poetry recorded itself in my brain, in my father’s voice.
When I ran home from school that January day, my first day of school in Rhode Island, my mother praised me, not for soiling my clothes, of course, but for refusing to talk. We don’t answer questions, she said, even when the teacher asks. We don’t talk about our lives “down there.” We live “up here” now. This is where we belong. And we don’t speak Spanish or Mam. English is our language.
She didn’t mention my father, and hadn’t since the three months before when she came for me alone, picking me up at the boarding school in Florida where they had enrolled me. Where’s Dad? I asked her then. Not coming. Not coming? Why? Because he died, she said, he got very sick and he died, back there in the village. She was not being cruel. She held me tight as she said it and whispered something about being brave and accepting God’s will. But why? I asked. I asked it over and over, pounding her with the same question—why, why?—like small hard fists. Never mind about God and all that stuff. Why did my father—my father— do that inconceivable thing, get sick and die back home in Guatemala, when I wasn’t even there?
I’d known he was sick. For months, whenever he was with us in the village, I would wake up in the morning to sounds of vomiting coming from the outside toilet. It happened to everybody now and then. Our name for it was the “both-ends-bends.” You got over it sooner or later or you lived with it. I had never heard of it causing a death, and it would certainly not cause his. He would never let that happen.
I convinced myself that my mother was wrong, that he was really alive and well. I sent him telepathic messages. Why not? If God could hear me, why couldn’t he? When I faced a problem, I’d ask him to help me. “You’re supposed to, you know,” I’d say. “You’re my father.”
In time I dropped all that, confused by my mother’s silence. Whenever I mentioned him she grew quiet, in body language as well as speech. If I persisted, she hushed me, her long forefinger tapping her closed lips. If I asked her what was wrong, she shook her head, with a look that ended conversation. There was something I couldn’t be told.
I figured it was a grown-up thing, beyond my understanding. I began to fear the unspeakable. My father had done something bad. Was still doing it, back in Guatemala. Like Aladdin, I might find out that he was the leader of a crime ring, or worse. Maybe he’d killed somebody, accidentally of course, and he was hiding from the law. Hiding would be the only reason he didn’t contact me, because if he was alive and didn’t let me know it, that was worse than being dead.
I stopped asking my mother questions. The answer could be too scary. Anyway, in time life itself, new life, new friends and interests, took over and erased the questions, or wore them down to footnotes. I got used to it, being a person with a secret, one unknown to me and probably better unknown. But whenever the secret seemed jeopardized, as it did by Miss Heifferston’s best intentions that day in first grade, it was as if an alarm went off in my brain. Bells rang, lights flashed, red alert, something like a fire alarm in school.
Downstairs in the Ávila parlor the television was silent. The bad guy was dead, and Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly had left on the train, on their way to another life, their love consummated somewhere far off the screen. I got up and paced the little room. Three steps to the bed, five to the bureau, four back to the desk. I didn’t really want to know what my father meant in the letter—whatever he thought I was too young to be told. Maybe I still wasn’t “old enough,” not yet “ready Teddy.” Maybe I’d never be. Whatever my father intended to explain, I had become who I was by not knowing it for thirty-three years. Who would I become if I knew?
So what did I know, what facts, essential, probable, beyond reasonable doubt? My father was dead. He had died here in this country and was presumably buried here. Then why not find his grave? What could be more concrete and specific, more grown up, if you looked at it that way? Go find it, if it was findable.
Yes, but. I heard it in my head as “Yahbut,” my pronunciation as a kid, like a word from yet another language. Yes...but, my parents would say, correcting patiently. Yes, but, if I go looking for his grave what I might find out is that there is no grave. Because that possibility is always there, always returning with the old stab of longing. That’s what I really wanted. Of course. To find him alive. Time to say it, in so many words. Say it out loud: Find him alive. How old would he be? Mid-sixties. Not old. I pictured him as tall as ever, straight, not stooped, blond hair now gray. Find him. How hard would it be?
On the other hand, the very idea made me distinctly uncomfortable—the search for the father, that Freudian cliché. And there was always the other terrible possibility, as well, that he might not want to be found, and I might even endanger him by looking.
So why was I here? I was left with only one essential fact, one beyond any doubt. I said that out loud, too. I am here. I had no reason to be, nothing I could defend, but I was here, and only one “agenda” was valid right now, to drown myself in Spanish for these next three weeks and do virtually nothing else. I was committed to that, signed in and paid for. It set up its own contract and promised its own brand of sanity.
