Читать книгу From the Dark Domain - Keith Potter - Страница 13

The worst of it started in San Francisco when you were three. San Francisco Theological Seminary glowered heavily over San Anselmo like a castle above an English village. Since I’d not personally experienced the transcendent God, the old buildings sufficed in a priestly way to represent the Aged One like the sanctuary of my childhood once did. Just strolling among the ghosts of so many learned theologians who’d staked their pursuit of the Divine in those hallowed halls granted to me a borrowed confidence to take my place in the grand procession.

And I felt closer to you, Donnie, than at any other time in our shared life.

You loved “the castle on the mountain.” You’d pick up sticks and vanquish monsters, musketeers, marauders and any old villain that your fertile mind could conjure. I lacked the imagination or playfulness to join in. As a swordsman, I looked rather like a “pencil-necked geek,” which was one of your Mommy’s less hurtful descriptors—less so because it was true in the changeless way that assaulted only my exterior and not my character, which I struggled to prop up against every onslaught of her fury.

Still, you didn’t need me to join in the swashbuckling. I watched and smiled as you climbed hills and walls crying, “Take that, you knave,” before you knew what a knave was.

A woman in my systematic theology class had full, wavy hair and a full, wavy body. Both shook well and often, and I missed much of the body of Professor Stark’s lectures wondering how it might feel to ebb and flow in the midst of my classmate’s waves. Her name was Andrea.

And she noticed me.

How strange. Perhaps a lurid past pushed her toward safe, strait-laced men. Or had she tired of mindless muscle and motorcycles? Or did I invent this fantastical sense for her shared curiosity? Either way, her raging beauty figures into our story.

Mommy worked some evenings at a restaurant at the foot of the hill. I’d take you with me to the library, where you’d be utterly content with a few gadgets and books. You were an early reader and an avid one, and the quiet of the library suited you well.

On our way to the library, you were conquering assailing Vikings with a stick longer than your full height by a foot. Andrea the Tempter crossed our path. Entranced by your bright face and at least generous in her interest toward me, we broke into a long conversation about pre-, post- or amillenialism, or some other matter that theologians used to comb through in those days. Hers was a passionate post position and I listened to her views with ears almost as rapt as my eyes, which followed her voluptuous lips and slightly distended tongue as it posited itself fluidly around her teeth like a nightclub dancer smothering a pole.

After a half hour, she noticed your absence. “Where’s your son?”

I chilled all over with fright, partly for you and still more for the marital consequence of any missteps involved in your care. In other words, I was terrified that Mommy would, shall we say, flip out.

Four hours later, we found you. And, yes, someone had felt it necessary to call Alice into the hunt. She poured her soul into finding you. When a cafeteria employee discovered your sleeping outline in a culvert not one hundred yards from where I’d lost sight of you, Mommy swept you into her arms and cradled you back to our apartment in student housing.

When I returned minutes later after releasing all the searchers from their efforts, she hissed at me, “You horrible man! You inept father! You stupid, pitiful fool!”

I began to explain and defend myself, but I had no grounds.

She hit me with a balled fist directly on the nose, drawing blood. Then she slapped and scratched and clawed and spit and swore at me for bloodying our carpet. She cornered me for nearly five minutes.

I didn’t stop her beyond the ordinary instincts to protect my eyes and cover my privates. I’m not even sure I was much stronger than her, especially in my state of self-hatred. So, I let her pummel me until she grew tired of the exercise.

Then she pointed an index finger into my eye. “I’ll never trust you with that boy again.”

From that day on, she had her way with me; that is to say, the way of the tigress who has tasted blood. She knew I wouldn’t leave; I was too weak to walk away and much too enamored with our son to walk out on you. She trusted me never to fight back; I was too polite. And she assumed I’d never tell a soul, or else I’d lose my reputation and standing as an upwardly mobile scholar.

She also hated herself, I now realize, and hated even more the thought of exposure, humiliation and scandal—so she’d lure me back into our affectionless marriage with partial apologies and chance glimpses of her in her underwear, as if to hint at some promise of intimacy. And then we’d fall back into cold, tense reality until the next blowup. It always came.

Years later, I understand better the affects of her early sufferings at the hands of others. And I also know the power of hormonal imbalance and menstrual cycles. If she was able to stomach my proximity for three weeks out of each month, I’ll swear under oath that she wanted to tear the Adam’s apple from my throat on each of the other seven days. “Hell hath no wrath like a woman scorned?” Hell hath no wrath like the woman I lived with during every period in those days that might have held so much promise.

You were relatively safe. She gave you grace, I suppose, because you weren’t able to hurt her yet. You were still so soft and un-male-like and your occasional disobedience flowed out of curiosity and innocence more than insolence.

But the day you learned that trick, she turned on you. I’d seen the early signs of her bubbling rage when you’d test your boundaries like any toddler by dropping a morsel from your highchair, or when you’d stain the couch with soiled fingers. She’d recoil and then pout and slam cupboards. I hoped that Mommy’s violence would never visit you and I convinced myself that her own flesh and blood would earn safe haven.

I was wrong, Donnie.

She was wrong, too, and I’ll not absolve her too quickly.

Still, Donnie, a man does something. A man does anything. Your Daddy was not a man. Not yet, anyway.

Oh, Donnie.