‘This is my son, he’s a professor at NYU,’ my mother said, and I was forced to meet the woman from Vermont although she did not introduce herself and promised she would not sit next to us on the train, ‘just in case you’re afraid you can’t get rid of me,’ she laughed, and I was, somewhat to my shame, grateful to her for saying that as the track was announced and we waved our printed tickets to the Amtrak employee before descending the escalator and hurrying along the dark platform towards the middle of the train, where I helped my mother into one of the seats at the front of a row so she could stretch her legs, as was her preference, and look out the window onto the Hudson River while the train chugged in its occasionally unreliable way northward to the town where I have made my investment in long-term stability.
After leaving Penn Station, entering and exiting tunnels that took us in and out of darkness, offering glimpses of Riverside Park and then more distant views of the Palisades across the river, a man I thought I recognized from the back passed through our car. There was a familiar quality about him — a certain agitation in his walk — without my being certain that he was who I thought he might be, and for a moment, without this thought registering fully in my consciousness, I became convinced of the possibility that it was Michael Ramsey.
There are people who are not instantly recognizable once you have met them, so if you glimpse the person from behind, or see only a small part of his or her profile, their identity remains uncertain. I had only met Ramsey twice at that point, and on that day after Thanksgiving when much of America was hurtling towards shopping malls to buy quantities of unnecessary gifts and my mother and I were sitting in a train car, bad capitalists failing to participate fully in the life of our economy, it was conceivable to me, at some proximate remove from full consciousness, that Michael Ramsey was with us on that train.
Because my mother had been tired the previous night, and I was not in the best of moods that morning, I did not speak to her about the three boxes of material that seemed to betray the disturbingly close examination of my life, at least my life insofar as it is lived through the internet and over the phone, nor did I mention my encounters with Michael Ramsey, or the presence of that young man at Meredith and Peter’s party, an appearance which had, in retrospect, ruined the holiday that means more to me than any other. All I wanted on that first Thanksgiving back in America was the comfort of sheltering with my family as autumn closes in, fog settling in the hollows of the Berkshires and Catskills and Adirondacks, those hunchbacked mountains of the northeast that, in October and November, seem more American to me than anywhere else. But there, in the season’s final hours, my interloper had appeared, as if to send the message that I was no longer secure in the country of my birth, suggesting I was right to feel paranoid, because my period outside of America had left me vulnerable to questions about my loyalty and habits, even my patriotism, as though treason could be caught like a virus, acquired by removal from home, a disease transmitted by long-term exposure to the unfamiliar.
In the first year I was at Oxford, as America coiled for war, I found myself falling into arguments over email, insisting to friends back home that they did not understand the way the rest of the world saw our country, how we were squandering the sympathy and goodwill of the international community, that my time in Oxford — then only a scant few months — had already ‘radicalized me.’ I used the phrase without knowing how ‘radicalize’ would become a keyword in the grammar of America’s War on Terror, how the media and politicians would describe terror suspects as having been ‘radicalized,’ and as these thoughts came back to me on the train heading north along the Hudson, the trees around us having lost nearly all their leaves, ice forming in the shallows of the river’s wide expanse, so unlike anything in Britain, I wondered whether, in the box of internet addresses sitting in my apartment, there was a link to the email in which I described myself, more than a decade earlier, as ‘radicalized,’ and whether that self-description was the first flag I might have raised, if that offhand remark alone stained me red and started the process of tracking all of my communications.
Was it possible, I wondered, feeling the rhythm of the train and looking at my mother reading her issue of The New Yorker, cackling at the cartoons, that Stephen Jahn was sent to find me in Oxford? I had assumed his presence in College pre-dated my arrival and that in my first year he had merely been absent, but I did not know this for certain, I never had a conversation about Stephen with any of the other Fellows. There was a sense in which he was never fully present in the life of the College, as though, if I had not known him and spoken to him and been befriended by him (however menacingly), his presence would not have been noticed by anyone else.
From the station in Rhinecliff my mother and I took a taxi to her house, where I had left my car the last time I was upstate, some weeks earlier, so she could use it if needed. In fact she now rarely drives, being close enough to the center of Rhinebeck that she can walk to see her friends or get groceries at the natural foods store she loves, only driving if she needs to see her doctor or one of her more distant acquaintances in Hyde Park, but I feel more secure knowing the car is not sitting in the garage of my empty house outside of town, down a quiet road and set back on the property, a tall hedge hiding the house itself, so it would be easy for a thief to get inside without being seen from the road and take whatever he found there. I had resolved that I was going to have an alarm system installed in the new year, and perhaps also a series of internal motion-activated surveillance cameras as Peter had recommended, which would allow me to monitor the house from Manhattan and, he claimed, receive a notification if the cameras were triggered to record. ‘They’ll even email you the video they’ve taken, so you can see if it’s nothing at all, or if there’s an intruder walking through your living room.’ It sounded like science fiction, but Peter insisted the technology was cheap, although there were some concerns about privacy, given that the email service meant the video would be sent through a third party and there were no guarantees, none that mattered at any rate, that ‘some asswipe in Bloomington isn’t looking at a live feed of your living room whenever he feels like it.’
My mother and I agreed to meet for lunch on Saturday. Though my preference would have been for a weekend to myself with no social commitments, my mother was still reveling in the novelty of my return. On Sunday I would drop off my car in the late afternoon and walk to the station, or if the weather turned out to be bad she would drive me. That Friday, she showed me the changes she had made since my last visit, although the house looked the same as it had for years, in good order if more cluttered, filled with calendars and greeting cards and tchotchkes given to her by friends and neighbors, and while her style was not my own it was gratifying to know she lived with a sense of community, people looking out for her, noticing if she failed to bring in the mail or newspaper, if her lights were on late at night or her curtains not open in the morning, stopping by to ask if she needed anything from the store or offering to take her to lunch. She lived within the eye of the town, at the center of its social life, very near its geographic center, and in its constant vision. I could return to Manhattan believing my mother would be fine because she was not ignored or forgotten.