Erasure (26 page)

I must run now. I miss and love you.

Yours through eternity,

Fiona                     

12 November

Dear Ben,

You mean more to me than you can ever know. I’m sorry I have not written for a while now. And in an odd way, I’m thankful that you haven’t either. What I have to tell you is both wonderful and terribly anxiety-making. Ben, darling, I am pregnant. I don’t want anything from you and I want you to know that I will not seek to complicate your life. I am moving from this address and my mail will not be forwarded. Please, let this be our last communication. I love you far too much to hurt the family you love so dearly. And I do not wish to hurt you, though I know that this does. So, do not write for your letter might reach someone other than myself.

Love forever,

Fiona       

A postcard mailed from Chicago, dated 2 July 1956.

It is a girl. Her name is Gretchen.
     [unsigned]

Dear Gretchen,

Your mother is a kind, sweet, dear woman, but she was wrong to remove you and herself from my life. You must know that she did so believing it was the right and moral thing to do. She has strength which I can only pretend to fathom.

I want you to have this letter, but I do not know where you are. Your mother’s sister in New York will not take my calls and so there is no help there. The card notifying me of your birth was postmarked Chicago, but tells me nothing.

Wherever you are, I love you and wish I could be a father to you. You have two brothers and a sister. They know nothing of you, but I dare say that you would love them. They are fine people. Your mother is so fine that you have no choice but to be the same. I wish that I could hear your voice, see your face, a photograph, a sketch. I hope that you have your mother’s eyes. How I love those eyes.

I suppose I could be ashamed of the relationship between your mother and myself, but I am not. It pains me that I could not be with her, that it all remained so secret and, therefore, dismissed. I was married with two children when I met her and, truth be told, I should have left with her then, but I did not. But because I didn’t, I have your nearest-in-age brother, my son, Thelonious. I dare say of the three I love him best.

I wish that I had someplace to send this letter. So that you could know how much your father loves you, how much he misses you and how sorry he is that he does not know whether you are left or right handed, what color your hair is, or whether you can forgive him.

The letter was unsigned. That was all that was in the box. I had read a voice of my father’s that I had not heard directly in life, a tender voice, an open voice. I couldn’t imagine the man who had run off to New York to have an affair. I knew my mother had read the letters, but I didn’t know when. I knew she wanted me to read the letters. Knowledge of the affair gave me, oddly, more compassion for my father, more interest in him. Even when I considered my mother and her feelings I did not find myself angry with him, though I worried about her pain.

I had another sister.

I grew up an Ellison. I had Ellison looks. I had an Ellison way of speaking, showed Ellison promise, would have Ellison success. People I met on the street when I was a child would tell me that they had been delivered by my grandfather, that I looked like my father and his brother. Father’s older brother had also been a physician until he died at fifty. When very young I enjoyed being an Ellison, liked belonging to something larger than myself. As a teenager, I resented my family name and identification. Then I didn’t care. Then the world didn’t care. Washington got bigger and all the people my grandfather had delivered died. I knew Father’s father only through stories, but there were many. His nickname, one of them, was Superdoc, as he apparently had been able to start his battery-less car and drive it home from a house call.

My mother’s maiden name was Parker and they lived on the Chesapeake Bay, south of where we summered. A couple of Parkers were farmers, others worked in plants of one sort or another. Mother’s brothers and sisters were considerably older and were all dead before I was an adult, leaving me with a herd of cousins that I never saw, never heard anything about, but kind of knew existed out there somewhere with names like Janelle and Tyrell. Mother had become an Ellison. As a child, I saw some Parkers only once, visiting a farm house near the bay. They frightened me. Big-seeming people with big smells and big laughs. Had I known more of life then, I would have liked them, found them thriving and interesting, but as it was, I found them only startlingly different. Lisa, Bill and I stood around the house, which smelled of coal fire and stale quilts, like frozen carrots.

Mother seemed apologetic for her family. She seldom spoke of them, though I am sure that they did not summarily write her off. She was the only Parker to go to college and, as so often happens, education functioned as a wedge between them. Perhaps my mother understood better than I gave her credit my feelings of alienation and isolation. I believe that much of her life she felt self-conscious and somewhat inadequate. There was no particular event I recall that substantiates that belief, no habit or anything I heard her say that might serve as evidence. But maybe there was a look here or there, a physical attitude just this side of cowering that I noticed without knowing what I was noticing.

Mother and Father never seemed terribly close to me. They formed a unified front against which we kids collided and bounced off. They were not outwardly affectionate, though the three of us were evidence of some touching. Indeed, I thought they were decidedly distant, cool to one another. An attitude that would seriously impair my attempts at relationships later. I of course would be taking a convenient turn to have that alone cut as any kind of excuse for my interpersonal failures. My mother saw her life as a wife and mother as a service, a loving service, but a service nonetheless. My father saw his station rather as one defined by duty, and discharged said duty with military efficiency.

In the garage, I looked at my table that was now a stool, and not a very good stool, and considered my mother’s discovery that all those years of somehow feeling she was not quite enough were in a few minutes made valid. The wood of the piece of furniture I had mutilated to make safe was still beautiful, the touch of it, even the smell of it, but it was inadequate. I imagined that my mother discovered the letters just after Father’s death, when he’d asked her to burn and not read them. But he of course knew that she would read them. I found myself angry with him, a stupid enough feeling with a live person. Then I wondered which was more confidence-killing: believing that you should not have felt inadequate when in fact you were, or discovering that, all along, you were actually smart enough to see things clearly, that you were correct in your fears. This suddenly explained the newfound serenity and composure of Mother after Father’s death. Perhaps he knew that was what she needed. Now what she needed was to have her nerve fibers unlooped and her newly detected brain shrinkage stopped.

Yul was doing his level best to contain his glee, but doing a piss-poor job. He was paying lip service to my vexation and indignation at the completely nonironic acceptance of that so-called novel as literature, but I could hear him counting the money. I could also hear him telling me, without saying as much, to grow up. What he said was, “We’re talking about a lot of money here.”

“I appreciate that, Yul,” I said.

“The editor wants to discuss the manuscript with Mr. Leigh. What do I tell her?”

“Tell her I’ll call her.” After he said nothing, I went on. “Tell her Stagg R. Leigh lives alone in the nation’s capital. Tell her he’s just two years out of prison, say he said ‘joint,’ and that he still hasn’t adjusted to the outside. Tell her he’s afraid he might
go off.
Tell her that he will only talk about the book, that if she asks any personal questions, he’ll hang up.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay then. I don’t mind telling you this is weird.”

“Well, Mister Bossman, I’se so sorry dis seem so weird to ya’ll.”

“You’re a sick man, Monk.”

“Tell me about it.”

I was seven.

The drive to the beach took us along Route 50 which was the slowest straight shot on the planet. We would take two cars, my brother always riding with Father. My Mother drove slowly, Lorraine in the front seat with her, staring at the map, and so we always arrived twenty minutes later. Still, Father would wait for us all to be there before opening the house for the summer. He and Bill would have pulled the bags out of the Willys wagon my father loved so much and have them arranged neatly, ready to be taken inside.

It was June 16, a Saturday morning. I remember that so clearly. It was sunny, but not terribly hot. I was wearing long khaki trousers and a striped shirt that I always hated. It seemed no one had come to the beach yet. The only car parked in a drive was Professor Tilman’s. As soon as Howard let out, he was at the beach. He had no children and his wife had died years earlier, but still he seemed to be able to take or leave company. I couldn’t understand why he came at all since he never left his house except for groceries. Sometimes I would see him sitting at the corner of his porch taking in his sliver of a view of the bay.