Follow Me (40 page)

When he fled the city of R, he left behind his own reckless ways. He moved to Michigan and then Illinois and took on new responsibilities
that would distract him. While he worked at night as a bartender, he enrolled in education courses and earned his certification.
He ended up marrying a woman from Evanston, and he taught in a middle school. For years he stayed focused on his life in Illinois,
on his growing family and students and friends. But as he would eventually confide in me,
Penelope Bliss isn’t easy to forget
.

Long after he’d fled from my mother, he found himself reviving the same memories he’d tried to erase. He decided that he wasn’t
to blame for becoming entangled in a doomed love affair. And why was he the one who had to run away? He tried to remember
how he had met my mother in the first place, how one thing had led to another. He began writing to people he’d known in his
childhood, friends and relatives he hadn’t contacted for years. He’d been out of touch for so long that he had difficulty
tracking down addresses. The process was slow and often unproductive. Eventually he had some success, once he figured out
the right questions to ask. And among the people who responded to his queries were two women from the town of Tauntonville,
Pennsylvania, who had astonishing information to share.

After my grandmother’s death, he considered getting in touch with me directly, but he kept talking himself out of it. And
as he became increasingly active in local protests against the war, he hardly had time to think about personal matters. Then
one October day in 2005, he came away discouraged from a lunchtime peace rally. Nothing he’d said had an impact. He’d been
heckled and then ignored. The few students listening to his speech knew as well as he did that the war would go on regardless
of anyone’s attempt to stop it.

He taught his afternoon classes with extra vigor, as if to prove to the world that he had a purpose, but at the end of the
day he felt more dispirited than ever. He decided to skip the faculty meeting after school and instead shut himself in his
classroom. With nothing else to do, he pulled out the tape recorder he kept in his desk drawer and started talking to me.

I was thirty-one years old — old enough to be skeptical. I couldn’t help but assume, upon opening the box of cassettes, that
I’d been targeted for an elaborate hoax.

H
ello from outer space. This is Abraham Boyle attempting to establish contact. Wait, don’t throw this tape away yet, please
keep listening, for I think that what I have to say will interest you. You don’t even know me, not yet. But you will if you
keep listening. So, um, what can I offer by way of introduction? Let’s see. I teach science in a middle school. I was married
for twenty-two years. My wife and I divorced in 1999. The kids shuttled between our homes, but now the kids are grown. What
else? I would be a vegetarian but can’t resist a cheeseburger from time to time. Uh, I like to read, yeah, I’d read more if
I had more free time, but what with preparing lesson plans and grading tests, well, you know, when I do open a book I like
to return to old favorites. I’ve read
Great Expectations
twice all the way through. Have you read it? Play for me, Pip, play. Another favorite of mine is
The Descent of Man.
Now have you ever read that cover to cover? All animals feel wonder, and some feel curiosity, that’s what Darwin said, that’s
what excited him. To prove it, to prove that animals feel wonder and curiosity, he put a stuffed snake in the monkey house
at the zoo. What a mind he had, always turning… the way I see it, he turned by the force of logic toward the unexpected. Gee,
well, it would be nice to sit and talk with you about books. Or about the weather. Or about this goddamn war and the shits
who duped us into it. Oh, don’t get me started. I spent my lunch break at a rally and, you know, huh, hardly anyone showed
up. My students baked cookies and painted peace signs on them with icing. Listen, I’m taking a bite… of peace. Mmm. You must
think I’m a kook. I
am
a kook. But you wouldn’t exist if I didn’t exist and that’s a fact. So anyway, why am I contacting you out of the blue? Maybe
I haven’t contacted you. Maybe you’ll never receive these tapes. I found an address for you in the phone book, but for all
I know I’m contacting another Sally Bliss who is not my daughter. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that some kind soul will forward
your mail. Or maybe not. Maybe you don’t ever want to hear from me. I don’t blame you. But if you’ll just be patient, I might
convince you to change your mind about me. Are you listening? Here I am: Abraham Boyle, your delinquent dad. How do you do?
I understand why you wouldn’t be ready to meet me in person. I wanted to pick up the phone and call, but I was worried you’d
hang up on me. I could have sent an e-mail or a letter, I know, but I wanted to talk to you. So this is a way of talking to
you. What? Okay, just sign it out, hey, sign it out, please! That was one of my students borrowing a calculator. Between you
and me, I’m skipping a faculty meeting right now. Any excuse, you know. What was I saying? Um, I apologize for my mistakes.
I’m a bungler by nature. Earlier today, I was demonstrating an experiment, I was using a carrot, a cork, and a sugar solution,
and I knocked over the beaker, knocked it right over, of course it broke. You’d think I’d be more careful than that, seeing
as I’ve done the same demonstration for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years plus five. In that time you grew up, went to
college, and then what? I don’t know. Maybe you’ll tell me about yourself someday. You were still cooking inside your mother
when I left town. I’m sorry you had to spend your childhood without me. You have every right to blame me for all that’s wrong
in the world. But, ah, let me take this opportunity to explain why I did what I did. It’s hard to decide where to begin. Well,
no it’s not. A story should begin at the beginning, so that’s where I’ll begin. It will take some time to get to the point,
but bear with me. I have a lot of material to cover. Here we go, then. I’m fifty-eight, or thereabouts. It could be that I’m
fifty-seven, depending on the month of my birth. As you can see, I don’t really know much about my beginning. I don’t have
my original birth certificate. I don’t… I don’t know my precise birthday, though for most of my life I’ve celebrated it on
the ninth of September, that’s what I put down on forms. September 9, 1947, a good date, as it turned out, because during
Vietnam, men with this birthday were issued a draft number that was never called. So even though I don’t know the exact day
when I was born, it’s a good thing I always put September 9 on forms instead of, say, September 5. September 5 was not a lucky
day to be born when it came to the draft. Of course, maybe I really was born on September 5. Or not. Maybe I was born in August,
for all I know. What do I know? Um… as you can see, I’m not very good with words. They’re like, like, like flies just sitting
on the counter, and then they take off before I can swat them. Well, it’s later than I thought. The overhead light above my
desk is flickering. The orbital electrons, as we say, are in an excited state. By the way, I teach at Vergonia Middle School
in Vergonia, Illinois, in case you’re interested. I have two daughters, Marcia and Tracy. Plus you. I’m going to explain everything,
I promise. Believe me, I have lots to say about how you came about, but it’s late, I have to go, I have a stack of papers
to grade. I hope what you’ve heard so far serves as an, um, adequate introduction and that you keep listening. And you’d better
not tell your mother that I’ve contacted you just yet. She wouldn’t approve. Maybe later, when I’m done with my story, maybe
then you can say something to your mother about me. But not yet.

Dear Sally, hello again, it’s your favorite Martian. How are you? I’m sorry I’m not even giving you a chance to respond. I
admit I’m nervous that you wouldn’t want to respond. So I’ll just keep talking to you, if that’s all right. Talking and talking.
Anyway, I promised to tell you my story from the beginning. I apologize if I get sidetracked. I wonder if it would help to
start over. Yes, I’ll do that. All right, here goes. There was my birth, and… and there were two years I can’t account for.
I was sent to live with the Boyles around the time of my second birthday. The Boyles were an older couple from Pittsburgh.
They had one son, Philip, and since his birth they’d tried and failed to have another child. All my parents ever told me was
that I’d been adopted through the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. My adoptive mother’s name was June Henrietta McAllister
Boyle. My father had been named Redding in honor of his maternal grandfather. He was called Red Boyle, and, you know, that’s
a problem, to be called Red Boyle. So when he was still young he changed his name to his initials, RB. But you say RB aloud,
of course you think of rhythm and blues, and that’s what some of his friends called him. Blues for short. He grew up in Pittsburgh
and went to the university there. He’d risen up in the ranks of the accounting department for WESCO. Shortly after I joined
the family, RB was transferred to the New York office. We lived across the Hudson River, there in Jersey City, for a year.
Then, then we moved to Long Island because that’s where the executives in the office lived. My parents took out a big mortgage
to purchase a fancy house, it was a modern house, floor-to-ceiling glass walls, out there in Oyster Bay. They joined a country
club and also the local Episcopalian church, though they’d both been raised Catholic, actually. They sent my brother to a
boarding school, I can’t recall the name of it, and then he went to Dartmouth. They sent me to a private day school. Those
were flush times, with June and RB thinking that the way to get ahead was to act like they were stinking rich. But they weren’t
stinking rich enough to afford the monthly payments on the loans they’d taken out to cover their expenses. They fell behind
on payments. And they lost money, they lost a ton on bad investments. When the plate glass in the kitchen was shattered by
a tree during a storm, they replaced it with plywood. They couldn’t afford my brother’s college tuition, so he dropped out,
he never finished his degree. Just when they thought it couldn’t get worse, RB lost his job over a fellow accountant’s embezzlement,
or I guess it was an attempted embezzlement thing. Though RB swore he wasn’t involved in anything illegal, the company blamed
him for failing to expose the scheme and fired him. So there he was, fifty-six years old, broke and unemployed and without
the references, you know, that would have helped him land another job. He’d take the train into New York each day to look
for work. I’d go with my mother to pick him up at the station in the evening, and I’d watch him follow the other men, the
other commuters, off the train. He wore a suit and carried a briefcase like, oh, I don’t know, like he was just a normal businessman,
but I tell you, he looked more worn out than the others. When he got into the car he wouldn’t say a word about how he’d fared
that day, and my mother wouldn’t ask. Those were tough times, sure. But you know, it wasn’t all bad from my perspective. I
liked the public school I went to much better than the private school, where I’d had to wear a tie every day. We always had
plenty to eat at home. And RB and June stuck it out together. They really shored each other up. They’d nuzzle on the couch
in front of the TV at night, ha, and sometimes they’d go shut themselves in their bedroom even before the TV show was over.
We didn’t hear much from my brother, Phil, in that time. All my parents knew was that he was up in Buffalo, living with friends
and working for, I think it was a roofing company at first. Phil got the short end, really. Anyway, the bank was threatening
my parents with foreclosure, so they had to put the house up for sale. It took nearly a year to sell and only then for, what,
a lot less than what they’d paid for it because it was in such poor condition. We moved into a two-bedroom bungalow in Roslyn,
behind the YMCA. My mother got a job waiting tables at the IHOP in Roslyn, and my father kept on taking the train to New York
and looking for work. I guess we were strapped for cash, yeah, we must have been, but I thought we were managing just fine.
I’d spend my afternoons shooting baskets with friends at the Y. My mom would bring home sausages wrapped in pancakes, the
IHOP special, pigs in blankets. I named my dog Pig in honor of that dish. I found him one day on my way home from school,
or I guess I should say he found me. He came out of nowhere and began bouncing on his hind legs and licking my hand until
I gave him the rest of the roll I was eating. He was some kind of terrier mix, a scrawny mutt, he hardly looked like a dog
at all, more like a wet rodent. I brought him home and wrapped him in an old blanket. He stopped shivering, and I named him
Pig. My mother let him stick around. You see, there wasn’t too much unusual going on, the way I saw it. I was a kid like other
kids. Then what happened was one day, uh, we went to pick up my father at the station, and, well, he didn’t get off the train.
We waited for the next train, but he wasn’t on it. We waited in the car until long past dark, I remember I was so bored and
kept complaining and June told me to shut up. Finally we went home and waited for him to call. I fell asleep waiting, and
when I woke up it was morning, I was on the couch, and Pig, uh, Pig was barking at a sheriff’s deputy, who for some reason
was knocking on the back door instead of the front. Yeah… well.… Listen, I’m going to stop here. You can fast-forward over
the pause. Good-bye for now, dear Sally.