I heard my own plea in her voice. I was my father using my tongue as the strap. The receiver in my hand was her arm all twisted and mangled.
“Would that be okay, Mom? If he did that to you like he did to Briggs and me. Would you have stood quiet and forgiven him?”
I expected her to hang up on me this time. The susurrous sounds made by some soft friction on her end made me think that she was quivering with rage and sorrow. I had said everything I had ever wanted to. I was ready to give up on my mother.
“You never understood your father, Ben. He had a hard life, a scary life. Nobody ever showed him the slightest bit of love after he was seven and his parents and sisters died in the fire. He loved you and Briggs more than anything, and all he ever wanted was to make you boys into men.”
What she said was no doubt true. Rage stoked the fires of his love, but it was still love. He worked twelve-hour days and never bowed down under the weight of his responsibilities. He never abandoned his family. The beatings were filled with his passion for us. I could see that.
“I have to go now, Mom,” I said.
“You must forgive him, Ben.”
“Would you forgive him if he beat you like that?”
“I would have rather he did it to me than you, Ben. I would have taken your punishment if I could, because seeing your pain was the worst thing in my life. I stood by because the only other thing I could have done was to take you away. And if I did that, your father would have died.”
It was the truth. I knew it. My father, who loved me as much as nuns love God, had to beat me in order to stave off the demons that bedeviled him. And my mother had to watch or to kill him. The only other answer would be that I was never born, that some other child had taken my place in my father’s torture chamber of love.
There on the east side of Midtown I sat with the phone pressed to my ear. Thousands of miles away my mother sat in the same pose. Both of us were silent, both of us grieved for the love we did know.
Time passed effortlessly in the face of that shared, silent misery. I realized that I had no notion of what my mother felt. I understood that I could have gone to my father’s funeral. I could have gotten on a plane and said good-bye.
I had never been to his grave site, never sent flowers or even asked what was written on his stone. Maybe my name was there... Derek Dibbuk survived by Briggs and Ben. I didn’t even know if my father had a middle name.
They say we live in the most advanced culture in the history of the world. But there I was, more ignorant than any lump of coal.
“Ben?” my mother said.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“You have to let it go, baby.”
“But, Mom,” I said. “It’s all I have. I’ve hated Dad every day since I can remember. I never think about it. But all he ever was to me was a beating waiting to happen. He broke Briggs. That’s why I used to call you, to try to explain why I drank and ran around so much.”
“But you cleaned up,” my mother said. “You got a good job and gave us a grandchild. Your father was very happy about that.”
“I didn’t clean up, Mom. I gave up. I stopped feeling. At least when I was drunk I was feeling something.”
“I feel sorry for you then, baby,” she said.
I hung up.
On Dr. Shriver’s couch I continued thinking about my dead father.
“...he would tell us stories about when he was a tough down in Texas,” I was saying, “but when we asked him how life was when he was a child like us, he got all broody and quiet. If we pushed too much, one of us would have ended up getting a whipping.”
“Did you love your father?” Adrian Shriver asked.
“Not in the way I wanted to.”
“What does that mean?”
“I loved him because I needed him... for my survival,” I said. “I needed him to save me and at the same time not to beat me. I needed him for food and shelter and protection against the outside world. But I never loved him for who he was. He scared me. He came from a world that I never wanted to see. He was angry and drunk and smelled like cigarettes.”
“You smell like tobacco now,” Dr. Shriver said.
“These cigarettes are more important than therapy,” I said. “If I didn’t have them, I’d go mad.”
“How would that look?”
“I’d get violent. I’d, I’d holler and shout. I’d go out and kill Harvard Rollins for sleeping with my wife. I’d kill her too...just for good measure.”
“Would you really?” he asked.
I sat up on the sob, clasping my hands tightly. I looked at the gentle doctor. My reflection in the lenses of his glasses hid his eyes from me. I stared at myself, my hands grasping at each other.
“That is the central question of my entire life, Adrian,” I said, his first name unfamiliar on my tongue. “Would I actually lose control? Could I? Have I?”
The therapist shifted his head and his eyes came into view. There was sympathy in that gaze, real concern.
“And the answer is,” I said in my imitation of a game show host, “I don’t have the slightest idea.”
“And so when Barbara Knowland suggested that you committed some heinous crime, you believed that it might be true.”
“It echoed with something deep inside of me,” I said. “My mother said to me just today that my father beat me because he loved me. What kind of lesson is that?”
“Your mother is still alive?”
“Yeah. Didn’t I ever tell you that?”
“No.”
“Did I tell you that my father died seven years ago and that I didn’t go to his funeral because I had too much work?”
“Mr. Dibbuk,” a serious and masculine voice announced.
“Yes?”
I was coming out the front door of the therapy office. This door was a few feet below the sidewalk. The men were waiting for me at the top of the stairs.
“Officer Bandell,” the white man who called to me said, identifying himself. He was showing me a badge and an ID card in an open wallet. “I’m sorry but you’ll have to come with us.”
Mona had heard me on the phone. That was the only way they could have known I’d be there that afternoon.
There were two cops with Bandelclass="underline" one black, the other Asian. The Asian man put handcuffs on me. The black officer took me by the arm. I was in the custody of the military arm of the Rainbow Coalition. Soon I’d be thrown at the feet of Jesse Jackson and asked to repent my antisocial ways.
They locked me in a cell with a middle-aged man like myself, only he was white and short, silent as a stump, and almost without affect. He sat on the corner of his cot, across from me, staring off into space — less like a thinker and more like a coma victim or maybe even an open-eyed corpse.
The officers said very little to me on the way to the precinct. They told me before taking my belongings that I was being held for up to seventy-two hours while someone higher up was considering my case.
“What case?” I asked them.
“I have no idea,” Officer Bandell replied.
They took my fingerprints and my shoelaces. They itemized the contents of my pockets and took down my name, social security number, date of birth, and home address.
There were no bars on our cell. The door was metal, painted green, and solid. There was only a slit that I could look out through. If my roommate wanted to kill me or I wanted him dead, there was no one to stop us.
I didn’t find out the squat white man’s name. He never even spoke a proper sentence to me.
“How you doin’?” I said to him upon entering the cell.
“Huh,” he replied with a nod.
“Dibbuk?” a man said.
I woke up out of a completely dreamless sleep. My summoner wore a gray uniform with a hat that you’d expect to see on someone who worked for the railroad.