I miss holding Timmy in the dark. I miss “Row, Row”—enough to feel acutely what is missing. This sensation, whatever it is, reminds me a bit of what I’d once experienced in Vietnam after a firefight ended, when something that was so excruciatingly present became so shockingly absent.
I had been afraid my son would die.
I am still afraid. I will always be afraid.
It occurs to me that one day, when he is a senior in college, or maybe when he receives his doctorate from Stanford, I’ll have to let him take his chances out in the killer world. At that point—or maybe when he is elected to his second term as President—I’ll probably allow him to apply for a driver’s license and (if he’s very careful) use the family car to go out on his first dangerous date, though I’ll be singing “Row, Row” in the back seat.
Timmy is an infant. He is on my lap. My nose is pressed to the top of his head. My eyes are closed. I am smelling his skin. And the smell of skin—a baby’s skin—becomes, in the instant of smelling, the one and only thing in the universe. Nothing else exists. There is no yesterday and no tomorrow, only the smell of skin, no murder, no turpitude, no unhappy endings, only the smell of skin, for everything else is elsewhere, and the smell of an infant’s skin is the smell of light obliterating darkness.
Timmy’s first fifteen months mostly evaporated for me. What I have in my head, when I have anything at all, is a jumble of diapers and bottles and strollers and car seats and two or three near-death experiences. Timmy eats, or at least tries to eat, live electrical cords. He enjoys dirt for dessert. Last month I swatted a cockroach from his lips. I am not kidding.
But then an event occurs which I need to capture here, for Timmy’s sake, as a small record of his early days on our planet. Sometimes I chuckle at what happened; other times I get angry.
In July of this year, not long after Timmy’s first birthday, our family attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference up in the mountains of Tennessee, where I had been tasked with providing advice to people who sought to become better writers. Most often in such circumstances I can think of almost nothing to say: read widely, toughen up your psyche, ration the booze, and don’t forget to write a little. I want to be helpful, of course, but I don’t know how. I feel like an imposter. Occasionally, in my courageous or whimsical moods, I’ll offer to my students the tentative suggestion that fiction writers might do well to trust their own stories. Above all, I’ll mumble, to trust a story means to tell it—not to creep up on it, not to postpone the “good” parts, not to hint at it or cleverly foreshadow it or offer the reader periodic promises that a glorious tale will soon be coming. To trust a story is to conquer the fear of plunging headfirst into the surprises and contradictions of being human.
So one afternoon last summer I took the plunge. I’d been asked to deliver a public lecture. Meredith and Timmy were in the audience, which revved up my jitters, and for several seconds I went through a catalog of excuses for getting the hell out of there: I’d contracted encephalitis, I’d eaten cockroaches. But then I did it—I plunged. I explained that Meredith and I had been eagerly awaiting our son’s first utterance. One of us had been betting on “Mommy,” the other on “Daddy.”
Yesterday morning, I told the audience, Timmy finally delivered.
He looked up from a toy rattlesnake (we live in Texas) and said, with hair-raising clarity, “’Tis a tale told by an idiot.”
Meredith and I were astonished. We were frightened. Immediately we packed the boy up and hauled him down to the Sewanee health facility. A kindly young nurse was on duty. She enthroned Timmy on an examining table and said, “Okay, what’s the trouble, little guy?” Timmy stared at her—suspiciously, I thought—and said, “’Tis a tale told by an idiot.” The nurse, like Meredith and I, was taken aback. She checked the boy’s vitals, excused herself, and went to a telephone. Apparently a doctor was on call. Over the next several minutes, we overheard bits and pieces of the nurse’s end of the conversation, a phrase here, a phrase there, the general tone of which was alarm. I’m quite certain I heard the nurse whisper, “These goddamned writers’ conferences.” Only minutes later, no doubt sped by curiosity, the doctor himself soon appeared, a white-haired, courtly, convivial gentleman dressed for a game of golf. The man smiled and clapped his hands and said, “So what’s the story here?” Timmy muttered, “’Tis a tale told by an idiot.” The boy seemed pleased with himself.
Medical procedures ensued, tentative probings of the ear and tongue, but, in the end, the physician seemed as puzzled as any of us. He scratched his head. Our son, he finally told us, was not ill. He explained that one-year-olds were well known to have as their first decipherable bit of language not just a single word, such as “Daddy,” but in fact two or three words, such as “Hi there, Daddy,” or “Bye-bye, Daddy,” or other such simple constructions. “Your son,” the doctor said, “has merely tacked on a few additional syllables.”
“Well, yes,” said Meredith, “but those are famous syllables. Those syllables make sense.”
The physician pooh-poohed this. He assured us that the abnormality, if one wished to call it that, was far from life-threatening. It was not cancer. It was not polio. And thus, after he’d prescribed a sedative for Meredith and me, we departed the dispensary.
That evening, as any parent can well imagine, Meredith and I shot a good many oblique glances at our son—proudly, yes, but also with a measure of anxiety. It was clear that from this point on we would be wise to watch our tongues. If the boy could pick up on a phrase from Shakespeare, he could certainly master the word “cocksucker.” Moreover, I must now admit to something infantile in my own character. As the evening wore on, I found myself increasingly disappointed, then outright irritated, that my son’s first utterance had originated in the imagination of a competing writer. At one point, while Meredith set up our video camera, I knelt down beside young Timmy and whispered to him, “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.”
At that point in my Sewanee lecture, I glanced over at Timmy, who squirmed and fussed in Meredith’s arms. People stared at him. People were laughing. Though the boy was barely a year old, and though his vocabulary was therefore severely cramped, he nonetheless seemed annoyed at the airing of his intimate personal life in a public setting. He emitted what I took to be heckling sounds.
For twenty minutes or so, although now flustered, I did my best—ineptly, I’m sure—to point out that I was making no claims about the literary merit of my little story. In fact, I admitted, it wasn’t even a story, certainly not in the sense of richness or depth. It was a trifling anecdote, nothing more. But even so, I said, it was possible that in certain sympathetic hands, perhaps those of a Donald Barthelme or a Woody Allen or any other writer with a sensibility suited to the comically grotesque, an interesting piece of prose might be forthcoming with the application of much time and imaginative energy. In fact, I myself might one day wish to pick up the tale, adding and subtracting, taking what is now a mere sketch off into the world of a full story. What I surely would not do is play much longer