Chapter One
There were no photographs of the boy’s father in the house upstate. He had been
persona non grata since Christmas 1964, six months before the boy was born.
There were plenty of pictures of his mom. There she was with short blond hair,
her eyes so white against her tan. And that was her also, with black hair, not
even a sister to the blonde girl, although maybe they shared a kind of bright
attention.
She was an actress like her grandma, it was said. She could change herself into
anyone. The boy had no reason to disbelieve this, not having seen his mother
since the age of two. She was the prodigal daughter, the damaged saint, like the
icon that Grandpa once brought back from Athens-shining silver, musky
incense-although no one had ever told the boy how his mother smelled.
Then, when the boy was almost eight, a woman stepped out of the elevator into
the apartment on East Sixty-second Street and he recognized her straightaway. No
one had told him to expect it.
That was pretty typical of growing up with Grandma Selkirk. You were some kind
of lovely insect, expected to know things through your feelers, by the
kaleidoscope patterns in the others’ eyes. No one would dream of saying, Here is
your mother returned to you. Instead his grandma told him to put on his sweater.
She collected her purse, found her keys and then all three of them walked down
to Bloomingdale’s as if it were a deli. This was normal life. Across Park, down
Lex. The boy stood close beside the splendid stranger with the lumpy khaki pack
strapped onto her back. That was her blood, he could hear it now, pounding in
his ears. He had imagined her a wound-up spring, light, bright, blonde, like
Grandma in full whir. She was completely different; she was just the same. By
the time they were in Bloomingdale’s she was arguing about his name.
What did you just call Che? she asked the grandma.
His name, replied Grandma Selkirk, ruffling the boy’s darkening summer hair.
That’s what I called him. She gave the mother a bright white smile. The boy
thought, Oh, oh!
It sounded like Jay, the mother said.
The grandma turned sharply to the shopgirl who was busy staring at the hippie
mother.
Let me try the Artemis.
Grandma Selkirk was what they call an Upper East Side woman-cheekbones, tailored
gray hair-but that was not what she called herself. I am the last bohemian, she
liked to say, to the boy, particularly, meaning that no one told her what to do,
at least not since Pa Selkirk had thrown the Buddha out the window and gone to
live with the Poison Dwarf.
Grandpa had done a whole heap of other things besides, like giving up his board
seat, like going spiritual. When Grandpa moved out, Grandma moved out too. The
Park Avenue apartment was hers, always had been, but now they used it maybe once
a month. Instead they spent their time on Kenoza Lake near Jeffersonville, New
York, a town of 400 where “no one” lived. Grandma made raku pots and rowed a
heavy clinker boat. The boy hardly saw his grandpa after that, except sometimes
there were postcards with very small handwriting. Buster Selkirk could fit a
whole ball game on a single card.
For these last five years it had been just Grandma and the boy together and she
threaded the squirming live bait to hook the largemouth bass and, also, called
him Jay instead of Che. There were no kids to play with. There were no pets
because Grandma was allergic. But in fall there were Cox’s pippins, wild storms,
bare feet, warm mud and the crushed-glass stars spilling across the cooling sky.
You can’t learn these things anywhere, the grandma said. She said she planned to
bring him up Victorian. It was better than “all this.”
He was christened Che, right?
Grandma’s wrist was pale and smooth as a flounder’s belly. The sunny side of her
arm was brown but she had dabbed the perfume on the white side-blue blood,
that’s what he thought, looking at the veins.
Christened? His father is a Jew, the grandma said. This fragrance is too old for
her, she told the Bloomingdale’s woman who raised a cautious eyebrow at the
mother. The mother shrugged as if to say, What are you going to do? Too floral,
Grandma Selkirk said without doubting she would know.
So it’s Jay?
Grandma spun around and the boy’s stomach gave a squishy sort of lurch. Why are
you arguing with me? she whispered. Are you emotionally tone-deaf?
The salesgirl pursed her lips in violent sympathy.
Give me the Chanel, said Grandma Selkirk. While the salesgirl wrapped the
perfume, Grandma Selkirk wrote a check. Then she took her pale kid gloves from
the glass countertop. The boy watched as she drew them onto each finger, thick
as eel skin. He could taste it in his mouth.
You want me to call him Che in Bloomingdale’s, his grandma hissed, finally
presenting the gift to the mother.
Shush, the mother said.
The grandma raised her eyebrows violently.
Go with the flow, said the mother. The boy petted her on the hip and found her
soft, uncorseted.
The flow? The grandma had a bright, fright smile and angry light blue eyes. Go
with the flow!
Thank you, the girl said, for shopping at Bloomingdale’s.
The grandma’s attention was all on the mother. Is that what Communists believe?
Che, she cried, waving her gloved hand as in charades.
I’m not a Communist. OK?
The boy wanted only peace. He followed up behind, his stomach churning.
Che, Che! Go with the flow! Look at you! Do you think you could make yourself a
tiny bit more ridiculous?
The boy considered his illegal mother. He knew who she was although no one would
say it outright. He knew her the way he was used to knowing everything
important, from hints and whispers, by hearing someone talking on the phone,
although this particular event was so much clearer, had been since the minute
she blew into the apartment, the way she held him in her arms and squeezed the
air from him and kissed his neck. He had thought of her so many nights and here
she was, exactly the same, completely different-honey-colored skin and tangled
hair in fifteen shades. She had Hindu necklaces, little silver bells around her
ankles, an angel sent by God.
Grandma Selkirk plucked at the Hindu beads. What is this? This is what the
working class is wearing now?
I am the working class, she said. By definition.
The boy squeezed the grandma’s hand but she snatched it free. Where’s his
father? They keep showing his face on television. Is he going with the flow as
well?
The boy burped quietly in his hand. No one could have heard him but Grandma
brushed at the air, as if grabbing at a fly. I called him Jay because I was
worried for you, she said at last. Maybe it should have been John Doe. God help
me, she cried, and the crowds parted before her. Now I understand I was an idiot
to worry.
The mother raised her eyebrows at the boy and, finally, reached to take his
hand. He was pleased by how it folded around his, soothing, comfortable. She
tickled his palm in secret. He smiled up. She smiled down. All around them
Grandma raged.
For this, we paid for Harvard. She sighed. Some Rosenbergs.
The boy was deaf, in love. By now they were out on Lexington Avenue and his
grandma was looking for a taxi. The first cab would be theirs, always was.
Except that now his hand was inside his true mother’s hand and they were
marsupials running down into the subway, laughing.
In Bloomingdale’s everything had been so white and bright with glistening brass.
Now they raced down the steps. He could have flown.
At the turnstiles she released his hand and pushed him under. She slipped off
her pack. He was giddy, giggling. She was laughing too. They had entered another
planet, and as they pushed down to the platform the ceiling was slimed with
alien rust and the floor was flecked and speckled with black gum-so this was the
real world that had been crying to him from beneath the grating up on Lex.
They ran together to the local, and his heart was pounding and his stomach was
filled with bubbles like an ice-cream float. She took his hand once more and
kissed it, stumbling.
The 6 train carried him through the dark, wire skeins unraveling, his entire
life changing all at once. He burped again. The cars swayed and screeched, thick
teams of brutal cables showing in the windowed dark. And then he was in Grand
Central first time ever and they set off underground again, hand in hand,
slippery together as newborn goats.
Men lived in cardboard boxes. A blind boy rattled dimes and quarters in a tin.
The S train waited, painted like a warrior, and they jumped together and the
doors closed as cruel as traps, chop, chop, chop, and his face was pushed
against his mother’s jasmine dress. Her hand held the back of his head. He was
underground, as Cameron in 5D had predicted. They will come for you, man.
They’ll break you out of here.
In the tunnels between Times Square and Port Authority a passing freak raised
his fist. Right On! he called.
He knew you, right?
She made a face.
He’s SDS?
She could not have expected that-he had been studying politics with Cameron.
PL? he asked.
She sort of laughed. Listen to you, she said. Do you know what SDS stands for?
Students for a Democratic Society, he said. PL is Progressive Labor. They’re the
Maoist fraction. See, you’re famous. I know all about you.
I don’t think so.
You’re sort of like the Weathermen.
I’m what?
I’m pretty sure.
Wrong fraction, baby.
She was teasing him. She shouldn’t. He had thought about her every day, forever,
lying on the dock beside the lake, where she was burnished, angel sunlight. He
knew his daddy was famous too, his face on television, a soldier in the fight.
David has changed history.
They waited in line. There was a man with a suitcase tied with bright green
rope. He had never been anyplace like this before.
Where are we going? There was a man whose face was cut by lines like string
through Grandma’s beeswax. He said, This bus going to Philly, little man.
The boy did not know what Philly was.
Stay here, the mother said, and walked away. He was by himself. He did not like
that. The mother was across the hallway talking to a tall thin woman with an
unhappy face. He went to see what was happening and she grabbed his arm and
squeezed it hard. He cried out. He did not know what he had done.
You hurt me.
Shut up, Jay. She might as well have slapped his legs. She was a stranger, with
big dark eyebrows twisted across her face.
You called me Jay, he cried.
Shut up. Just don’t talk.
You’re not allowed to say shut up.
Her eyes got big as saucers. She dragged him from the ticket line and when she
released her hold he was still mad at her. He could have run away but he
followed her through a beat-up swing door and into a long passage with white
cinder blocks and the smell of pee everywhere and when she came to a doorway
marked facility, she turned and squatted in front of him.
You’ve got to be a big boy, she said.
I’m only seven.
I won’t call you Che. Don’t you call me anything.
Don’t you say shut up.
OK.
Can I call you Mom?
She paused, her mouth open, searching in his eyes for something.
You can call me Dial, she said at last, her color gone all high.
Dial?
Yes.
What sort of name is that. It’s a nickname, baby. Now come along. She held him
tight against her and he once more smelled her lovely smell. He was exhausted, a
little sick feeling.
What is a nickname?
A secret name people use because they like you.
I like you, Dial. Call me by my nickname too.
I like you, Jay, she said. They bought the tickets and found the bus and soon
they were crawling through the Lincoln Tunnel and out into the terrible misery
of the New Jersey Turnpike. It was the first time he actually remembered being
with his mother. He carried the Bloomingdale’s bag cuddled on his lap, not
thinking, just startled and unsettled to be given what he had wanted most of
all.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from His Illegal Self
by Peter Carey
Copyright © 2008 by Peter Carey.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2008
Peter Carey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26372-8
