"Mothers smother. Fathers urge farther."

∼  Amaurón, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium

    In the beginning, he was a porky little fella lying in a hospital bassinet. He arrived on a Monday morning, Michaelmas as it happened, the same day of the year that William Shakespeare and others of that ilk normally stepped upon the stage. Naturally, he had what all his teachers would call "tremendous potential," which was just their way of confirming what his parents often suspected: he could try harder. They were correct when they told him that he had a good many talents, but so did lots and lots of other people.

    In order to excel (and please his parents) and gain distinction (and delight himself), he would hone a personal brand of "blind ambition." No, it wouldn't be the crass variety that made people blind to the important things in life, but a more subtle one, the type that others would be too blind to see in him. If they detected his ambition, they'd resent him, so he would need to learn how to disguise it with something universally admirable, a Calvinist work ethic, or rather the appearance of one, which made him something of a fraud like lots and lots of other people.

    It would also help if he were humble. Fortune smiled on him in this regard—sort of. He was inclined to be self-effacing on the outside, which proved to be effective, but again it meant he would go through life as something of a fraud like . . .

    His mother disdained such duplicity. She recognized his ambition, and she detected his arrogance, although she invoked her maternal prerogative and characterized the latter as a self-confidence that needed occasional tempering.

    "You can acquire love through humility," she told him.

    "Possibly," he thought, yet it didn't surprise him that he did quite the opposite when, as a spouse and a parent himself, he acquired humility through love. Not a lot, but some, certainly less than he gave himself credit for.

    His first day on earth found him not only chubby but marred by small pink patches on his upper lip and neck. "Stork bites," Dr. Sturkaz told Fran. "Clusters of veins that will soon fade away." He said nothing about the bruises caused by the forceps during delivery, which made the baby look as though he'd been bounced a couple of times. He handed Fran the bulging blue blanket and left. Just her, mind you. Eric was at work, explaining to a persnickety quality-control inspector that a pallet of voltage meters met the minimum standards even if he, the inspector, did not.

    In his absence, Fran took the boy beneath the sheets for an inspection of her own. She unwrapped the bunting and took physical inventory: ten fingers, a like number of toes, two ears, and a pair of legs with a little worm of a thing between them. Excellent! —no further assembly required. She began to search, lifted his legs, and saw his bum. It was no place for batteries, she chuckled, but an occasional mild slap was inevitable! She looked some more. No luck. As she suspected, her third child had also arrived without instructions. Indeed, she didn't find any documents, so once again the terms of delivery would be strictly DNA, or in contractual terms "as is," meaning that he came without guarantees or warranties either written or implied. His only paperwork would arrive later, a bill stating that all transactions were final.

    She noticed that he was wireless, so she fully expected that one day he would stand alongside his brother and sister and crow, "There are no strings on me!"

    One day, when he was just such a little tyke, she discovered that he'd come with a remote control! Not surprisingly, it worked best in line-of-sight situations. By the time he finished high school, she wondered if it worked at all. Had she asked him, he could have told her that it did, and most effectively when she didn't push its buttons so hard or quite so often.

    Fran lifted one of his hands and marveled at the tiny fingernails. She turned it over and paid no attention whatsoever to the indecipherable expiration date etched in his fingerprints. As she wrapped him up warm and snug, her son Kevin came to mind. He had been asking for a puppy. A little brother with a mind of his own would be better, she thought, a mind with the capacity for wisdom and the ability to connect words, a mind that would learn to recognize beauty, fall in love, and give thanks to God for life itself. She gazed at his small, round face. His pink lips quivered briefly. His eyes opened slightly. She tried to peer into the smithy of his soul, to catch a glimpse of the uncreated conscience behind his face—he was primarily of Irish descent, you know—to peek at what might be forged from the ore within, but his eyelids drooped and closed. She turned her attention to his wispy blond hair, his tiny eyelashes, and the making of what looked like Eric's nose. Her intuition told her that he was a child of the sure and prouded brow, a male who'd begun life in an utter daze, when summer suns were fading. She smiled with satisfaction, kissed his soft head, and agreed with the poet that her beautiful and content son was one of those that to look upon and be with was enough.

    His father thought otherwise.

    Or rather, his dad had entirely different thoughts while he stood amidst the gang of fathers, trying to see his son in the maternity ward. It was difficult, in large part because the window kept casting his own reflection into his eyes. Someone up front departed, so Eric managed to shuffle his feet along the rigid pattern of black-and-white tiles and stand closer. He saw his son dozing with all his would-be friends in a collective unconscious. As for himself, he was completely unaware of what he was about to do.

    Or rather, what was about to happen to him.

    He didn't see or hear the axe swinging through the ages. He didn't know the identity of his ethereal assailant. Anesthetized with wonder and awe by his newborn son, he didn't feel any pain—he wouldn't for years—as the axe cleaved his skull. The sanctuary of his mind split open, revealing what years of gestation had produced.

 

    He had his fair share of pride, so Eric bristled slightly at the intuitive sense he felt that one day his son might become more powerful than himself. "Not more powerful," he appeased himself, "but better off, more comfortable."

    He believed that was his son's fate because he would erect him on bedrock, an ethos of New Hampshire granite and Connemara marble, the equals of rocky, sun-bleached Hellas.

    He had no desire to see his son forever young—puer aeternus—but a man respected by men.

    He would see him Spartan strong and Athenian wise.

    He understood the importance of properly preparing his son, but he also recognized that ultimately the child is the father of the man.

    He remembered Gloucester—the conception by the sea—and considered it an omen that his son would be protean as well as chameleon.

    He saw a day when his young man would, as all heroes do, journey forth into an exciting world to seek adventure (possibly), to test his manhood (surely), and to reap rewards that enriched both himself and others (hopefully).

    He would be proud to see his son search for whatever in life is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, and just as importantly recognize whatever was excellent or worthy of praise.

    He started to leave and felt compelled to reach out, but his hand hit the glass. He trailed his digitus paternae dexterae along its smooth surface and felt his touch interrupted—excruciatingly incomplete—for the first time.

    He accepted that they would spend their lives looking for one another: Telemachus and Odysseus, drifting with the fog through urban Nighttown, wandering beneath the pastoral canopy of fresh green New England leaves that would rage red, fade to orange, turn brown and fall, revealing a skeleton of branches shrouded with cold, white snow.

 

    Or rather, because Eric was a man of his own time his thoughts would have been considerably less pretentious. He was a young and white working-class American father of the early 1950s, a decent man from an unremarkable family, with aspirations moderated by the deprivations of the Great Depression, the sacrifices occasioned by world war, and the humbleness of faith in God. Yet he was a far more serious and complicated man than the father-knows-best figure that later generations might imagine. He knew who he was, and he couldn't give a damn what anyone might think about his dreams that night in the maternity ward, about the son he hoped to create who, if things worked out, might claim the Earth and everything that's in it, who might play in the park with his friends, do his homework at the kitchen table, hit a homerun, leave Boy Scout jamborees behind for dates with girls, who might just possibly go off to college like his uncle Paul, but at a minimum would learn a good trade, before settling down with someone like his mother and having kids of his own some day.

    Wouldn't that be great—hold the question mark.

    Nope. He couldn't give a damn what anyone thought of his dreams.

NEXT SECTION: Chapter 6 - The Baptism