Chapter Fifteen

Ihadn’t told my parents that I was coming home, so when I pulled into the driveway, my mother pushed open the front door and was understandably alarmed.

Wiping her hands on her apron, her gray hair shorter than I remembered, her face more lined, her faded blue eyes more watery . . . She looked to be ten years older since I last saw her just five months before. I guess the older you get, the faster you get old.

“Who are you?” she shouted in a shrill voice I had never heard from her before. “What do you want?”

It’s a wonder she didn’t have a rolling pin or a cleaver in her hand.

But when I extricated myself from the car, she melted. “Elliot! It’s you!”

Rushing forward, she gripped me in a mother-bear hug and slathered my face with kisses. “Oh, what a surprise! It’s you!”

Then she pulled herself away.

“For the last week, there’s been TV cameras and reporters ringing the doorbell, clustering on the lawn, ruining my rose bed, and asking about where are you. Elliot, you can tell me the truth. I’m your mother and I love you no matter whatever you did.”

“It’s nothing, Mama. Just that I made a decision to quit school and become a professional basketball player.”

With her hand on my elbow, she led me into the house.

“I don’t understand, Elliot. You quit school? And they said you were going to get drafted? Into some part of the army called the MBA? Your father, he wouldn’t explain to me what happened, and those reporters, they all talk so fast.”

“Don’t worry, Ma. It’s all good. I’ll explain it all to both of you.”

He was waiting for us as we entered the living room.

“Well, well,” he sneered. “If it isn’t the prodigal son returning with the posse at his heels.”

My mother scurried off into the kitchen “to make some tea that will calm everybody down.”

He plopped into his favorite chair and I sat down at the near end of the couch.

“So,” he said. “You’re abandoning a life of the mind to run around in shorts, playing silly games in the company of schvarztes. And in public?”

“You don’t understand. It’s—”

“No, no. It’s you who doesn’t understand. There’s no excuse for quitting school. None.”

My mother returned, placing a large silver tray containing a teapot, three cups, small saucers and spoons, as well as sugar and cream, plus three neatly folded linen napkins on the long, mahogany coffee table that was within easy reach of him and me. But neither my father nor I reached out, to the tea or to each other.

Then she sat down beside me on the couch, smiled tightly, and rested a hand lightly on my knee.

“It’s a great opportunity,” I said. “I’ll be competing with the best athletes in the world and getting paid more than a million dollars a year.”

“Ha. Thirty pieces of silver or a million dollars. The situation is the same. Betraying something transcendent for something dross. Turning your back on all the beauty and wisdom that civilization has produced.”

“Can’t we talk this out? Have a rational conversation?”

“There’s nothing to talk about. One can’t have a rational conversation with someone who’s totally irrational. You’ve always been a mindless boob.”

“Jonathan! You—”

“Silence from you, Sarah!”

“This is ridiculous,” I said.

“To badly paraphrase Alexander Pope, all is ridiculous to the ridiculous eye.”

“You’re impossible to deal with,” I said with all the calm dignity I could muster. “You oversimplify everything to suit what you believe. What you want to believe. You’re trapped, imprisoned, in your ivory tower. Being a teacher is the perfect job for you. It lets you pontificate to a captive audience who copy down everything you say, then regurgitate it all back to you on exams.”

“You’re only proving my point. It’s your arrogance and egotism that have prevented you from learning and appreciating ideas and principles that are beyond your own limited understanding. The world of the knower and those who aspire to knowledge is a sacred one.”

“Maybe so, but there are other worlds out there, Father. Worlds just as real as the one you live in. I want to live in my world, not yours. Or at least find a world that—”

“Stuff and nonsense. You don’t know what’s real and what’s just a glittering counterfeit of reality. You don’t know what the truth really is.”

“Just because you don’t understand something, doesn’t mean—”

“Oh, I understand more than you think I do. I understand that you’re a mental and moral weakling.”

“Jonathan, don’t—”

“Be quiet,” he said. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“What happens to my son, my only child, doesn’t concern me? Jonathan, what are you saying?”

He leaned forward and slammed his hand on the edge of the table. “Sha!” he shouted. For a moment, the only other sound was the rattling of the cups, saucers, and spoons. And we watched dumbly as the cream spilled onto the tray.

Then I stood up and said this: “You’re nothing but a bully, and that’s what you’ve always been. You can bully her and bully your students, but I won’t let you bully me anymore.”

He, too, climbed to his feet. “So, this is what we’ve come to, eh? The foolish boy has grown to be a foolish man-child… So, go, Elliot. Be on your way. Go find your foolish world. Go. I hereby disown you. You are no longer my son. And I never want to see hide nor hair of you forever more.”

With that, he stalked into his office. Before he could slam the door shut, she followed him in.

While she loudly cried and pleaded, I took a large black garbage bag from beneath the kitchen sink, went up to what used to be my room, and stuffed all my clothes, shoes, and sneakers into the bag.

Then I left, once again without saying good-bye.