"What are you doing to him?" she will demand, with tears forming and spilling from the corners of her eyes. "Why can't you leave him alone?"
She does not yield so readily to emotion when my fight is with her. When my fight is with her, she tries (with fortitude, perversity, with face-saving spite) not to let me make her cry (not to give me the satisfaction of seeing I can affect her even remotely. I am a matter of "supreme indifference" to her), as though that is what I want to do. (It often is.) I always desist as soon as I see I can, curbing my own spiteful intentions and drawing back from her mercifully.
(Nothing is suppressed in our family.) (In our family, everything is suppressed.) On the other hand, my daughter can be cruel to my boy when she is with her friends and feels no need to show him off, shutting him out rudely, discouraging especially those slouching, mumbling teen-age boys from kidding with him or tossing a ball or paying any attention to him at all. She does not want him around when she is with her friends. (She does not like to share.) She will separate them and chase him away, snapping:
"Don't bother with him. Don't let him bother you. Go back to your room."
He does not know what is happening to him when this does. He does not know what is happening to him now. He wants to be like other boys he thinks, mistakenly, we want him to be like. He thinks he is not now the person anyone wants him to be. We don't want him to be like everybody else. We want him to be like we want him to be (but we haven't spelled that out yet even to ourselves. So how could he know?). We want him to be different, and superior. (But we also want him to be not much different. Frankly, I don't know what I want him to be — except no trouble. He does not know yet what he's supposed to want to be when he grows up, except that he now knows he is not supposed to want to work in a filling station. And I can't guide him. A doctor? He has no idols. A lawyer? I wouldn't want that. I have no models to give him. James Pierpont Morgan II? August Belmont, Jr. III? Clara Bow? At least I had people like Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Joe Louis, and Cordell Hull I could want to be when I grew up, although I'm glad now that I didn't grow up to be any of them. But I still don't know yet what I want to be when I do grow up. Or even what I should want to be. I'd like to be rich. I know this much: I don't want to be President of the United States. They have bad reputations, and ruin neighborhoods.)
So he struggles manfully (childishly), doggedly, dazedly to change himself into everybody else his age. He wishes to be able to conform successfully without effort or thought. He wants to wear, at nine years old, what other boys of nine or ten are wearing (even though he might not like what they are wearing) and experience the same enthusiasms and frustrations. (He really doesn't care about baseball anymore, I feel, and also feel he doesn't know that yet. One time when I was very young and had doubts, probably, that I would ever grow larger or older — there must have been a time, I think I recall, when I was unable to believe I would ever be any different from the lonely, isolated little boy I was then — I wanted to be a jockey in a cerise and white cap and ride race horses, even though I had never been on a horse and was too frightened even to step near the ponderous, spiritless ones that delivered ice or milk or laundry or dropped dead in the street, like people — I never could feel friendly with my brother's wife after he died and never see her now, am not clear in my mind anymore just where in New Jersey or Long Island she and her two children, my niece and my nephew, live — and soon attracted dense, buzzing clouds of green and blue pot-bellied flies. As a jockey in a red and white cap astride a huge, speeding, lunging thoroughbred, I think I felt I could trick everyone into believing I was a tiny man instead of a little boy. I'm glad I never became a jockey. I would be too heavy now and would not win many races.) And this is unfortunate in many ways (not for me, but for him) because there is so much about him entirely his own that is profoundly endearing (there is also much about him that he would be better off without, and maybe he will be able to shed that all someday, although I doubt by now that he will be able to shed any of it. By now I feel we remain pretty much the same. We grow scar tissue instead, or corns and callouses in our soul that cover, and we forget, when we can, what's there. Until occasions remind us); and what there is about him that is good, I'm afraid, we all (not my daughter, but me, my wife, Forgione, the world, and even those dusty, ghostly rocks and craters familiar to us on the moon now, connoting dark times and transparent specters) collaborate to destroy. (Even Derek exerts a haunting effect upon him, and tall buildings. If we were stones instead of people we would have an effect upon him, perhaps that same one. Everything does. Perhaps we are stones to him. I do not know how he thinks of us. I know I do not always think of my children as children. I know I remember my father now and other dim adult males from my early childhood, and even my big brother then when he was alive and I was small, as figures of voiceless stone capable of swift, unobservable journeys from one locale to another and communicating always obscure intimations of awful, indefinable things about to occur.) He has a lively, imaginative taste for the comic, some courage, and a warm heart; and even the colored maid we have now, who pads about on tiptoe in my presence and is rarely valiant enough to talk in anything louder than a faltering mumble, will grin at something unpredictably funny he has said or done and blurt out impulsively:
"That boy. Oh, that boy of yours. He is really something."
We think so too (we are somewhat vain and braggarty about those precocious intuitions and idiosyncracies of his in which we can take proprietary delight) and (like rigid, high-powered machines not really in charge of ourselves) operate automatically to change him — to harden him, soften him, smarten him, desensitize him — lying to him and to ourselves (as I lied, and knew I was lying, when I filed my mother away into that repulsive nursing home that I described to her and others with false energy as being beautiful, new, and comfortable as a modern hotel) that it is for his own good. (And not for ours.)