“It’s all right,” Dr. Shapiro replied. Then he was aware of the throbbing of his cheek where the book had hit him, a triangular pain over the bone. “It was an accident.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Nathan said. “It was an accident.”
The boy smiled at him with his wild teeth, and his bright eyes behind the heavy eyeglasses looked false, a little out of kilter, as though his son were a doll of humble workmanship. Like those of his patients, Nathan’s was an almost heartbreakingly plain face, and in it he thought he could read the same short narrative of rage and confusion. He had resolved a hundred times not to be a doctor to his sons, not to listen for and study the messages coded in their sudden misbehaviors, and to allow his children to disarm and to perplex him, but as he looked at Nathan he saw quite clearly that the boy was cognizant, however dimly, of the fear and shame and failure his father could not bring himself to express, and had already begun — accidentally— to retaliate. Dr. Shapiro’s information was suddenly an unbearable weight upon him, an iron belt around his chest.
“Ask me anything,” he said, too loudly, taking his foot off the accelerator pedal. The car slowed and then drifted to a halt in the middle of Old Rolling Road, five hundred yards from the next intersection. “Isn’t there anything you’d like me to explain?”
Nathan looked over his shoulder, out the rear window, then turned back to face Dr. Shapiro. He bit his lip and at the same time smiled the anxious, sober smile of someone confronted with the folly, the minor act of vandalism, of a friend on a drunken spree. The few drivers lined up behind them honked their horns, then swerved brusquely around, shaking their fists as though in encouragement. “Do it!” they exhorted him. “Let the kid have it!” For a moment they sat all alone in their car, in the empty roadway, as Nathan seemed to search for the name of some thing he didn’t know or had until now never quite grasped.
“If I was a mutant,” the boy said at last, his gaze falling on the gaudy cover of one of the paperbacks, a novel called More Than Human, “would you and Mom ever tell me?”
Dr. Shapiro gave a sigh that was like a laugh, weary and slight. “No,” he said. He had turned his damp face toward the window, ashamed, unable to preserve his son any longer. “I think we would just have to let you find out for yourself.” He braced himself for the sentence he was about to utter and pushed down on the gas. The car gathered speed and drew relentlessly toward the intersection. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, opened it once more.
“Then I guess I already know,” said Nathan, from whom he had failed to conceal, failed to deflect, failed to ward off all the hazardous radiations of adulthood, of knowledge, of failure itself.
On the day his father moved out, Nathan’s parents sent him and Ricky to the mall with his friend Edward, a decision of which, on the whole, Nathan approved. Although a part of him was curious simply to see what it looked like when one’s father carried his things, his books and records and pipes, out the door — he loved those rare occasions, when Dr. Shapiro, puffing out his bearded cheeks, engaged in some heavy labor — he had caught a glimpse that morning of a liquor box, full of hats, on the floor of his parents’ bedroom, and the sight of a black Russian hat made of fur that was swirled like a brain, which Nathan remembered his father wearing on some black-and-white winter day before Ricky was ever born, had filled him with such longing and anger that he was glad to spend the afternoon eating pizza and wishing for toys in the Huxley Mall, whose air was sweet with candles and soap, and bitter with the chlorine from the fountains.
By the time they got home their father had already gone. Mrs. Shapiro sat alone at the kitchen table. As the boys came in, she stood quickly and, before she hugged them, swept two coffee cups and a plate of crumbs off the table and into the sink, blushing strangely. In their mother’s wet embrace Nathan felt all at once smothered, blind, panicked, as he sometimes did when play required that he climb into a refrigerator carton or a crawl space. He squirmed wildly out of her arms and drew back.
“If you two are just going to cry all day,” he announced, “I don’t want to be around.” He felt very wicked as he said this, and retreated from the kitchen in confusion. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom but was drawn inexorably to his parents’ door. It was ajar and he pushed at it with the tip of his big toe, as though he might startle some animal asleep on the bed. There were indentations in the carpet, he saw, from his father’s dresser, his desk, his creaking armoire, a pattern of twelve little circles like the spots on a domino. It hadn’t occurred to Nathan that Dr. Shapiro would take the furniture, and its absence, curiously, made him feel sorry for his father, who was going to have to make do with so little now. Would there be a bed in this unimaginable apartment? Would there be a soft leather chair that reclined?
He stood in the middle of the half-empty room for a minute or so, until his glance fell on a wastebasket that stood beside the space where his father’s desk had been. It was mostly full of shirt cardboard and the white wrappers of coat hangers, but at the bottom he spied a crumpled yellow ball of legal paper, which he fished out and spread flat on the floor. It was some kind of a list, made by his father, and Nathan knew at once that it was a secret list, and that after he had finished reading it he would probably wish he hadn’t, as he was continually pained by the memory of a love letter he had found in a box in the basement, written to his father by a girl who had once been Nathan’s favorite baby-sitter. He lay on his stomach in the space where there was no longer a great, oaken desk and read what his father had set down. The handwriting was neat and restrained, as though Dr. Shapiro had been angry while he wrote.
“RESOLUTIONS,” Nathan read: “1. I will never again raise my voice with my children, or threaten them with the back of my hand. 2. I will not think ill of any man or woman, for no one could possibly be motivated by more trivial or more venal concerns than I. 3. I will cease calling my father and mother by their first names, and will strive to regain what I lost when they became Milton and Flo to me. That is, I will love my parents. 4. I will not claim to have read books that I have not read, or to have been borne out in predictions that I never made. 5. I will cease to infect Nathan with a debilitating love of facts, nor will I pursue them myself with greed and possessiveness, as I have heretofore. 6. I will be a better father. 7. I will listen to Bartók every morning, and to Mozart before I sleep. 8. I will lay aside all ambitions save the one I have cherished since the age of nineteen, when I made my first list of ten resolutions — to love and understand art, sport, science, literature, and music, and to become, someday, a true Renaissance Man. 9. I will not throw away this list.”
In the midst of feeling sick to his stomach, and faintly horrified as by the glimpses given in his father’s medical texts of the inner human body, the thought that Dr. Shapiro had already broken number nine was of some small comfort to Nathan. He gathered up the paper in his hands and himself crushed it, bit it, tore it in two. The telephone rang, and from the soft, interrogative sound of Ricky’s voice in the kitchen he guessed that it was Dr. Shapiro calling. In a minute he would have to tell his father something, something his father would never forget because it would be the first thing Nathan said to him under these new and remarkable circumstances. Nathan hoped, he prayed very quickly to God, rocking back and forth on his knees, that his father would break all eight of the others as well, that he would continue to spank his sons, fall asleep with the radio playing Harry Belafonte and Doris Day, memorize the altitudes of the mountains of the world. None of these things seemed to Nathan to be of the slightest importance, and yet they had caused Dr. Shapiro to drive himself from the house where he had dwelt for so many years as a kind of adored, only occasionally dangerous giant, an intelligent, dexterous bear with a vast repertoire of tricks. Nathan could see from the list that Dr. Shapiro didn’t know of the constant delight that his sons had taken in him or of the legends and fables that had grown up around his name. How impossible was the life of a father! thought Nathan. The best man in the world could fill a thousand pages with fine resolutions and still feel forced to leave his home in shame.