A WEEK BEFORE I became a father, which now seems like the long ago and far away fairy tales happen in, I read a father-child story that went straight at the surprise one truth between children and parents is. It was called “Mirrors,” and had an end, to the twenty-three-year-old would-be know-it-all I was, that literally threw me back in my chair—an end, sad somehow and wise, which held that it is now and then necessary for the child, in ways mysterious with love, to forgive the parent.
In “Mirrors” the child was a girl, though it could have been a boy just as easily, whose father—a decent man, we have to believe—takes her to the sideshow tent at a one-horse and one-elephant circus in the flatlands of Iowa or Nebraska or Kansas. She’s seven or eight at this time, and—as we have all begged for toys or experiences it can be, I see now, our misfortune to receive—she begs and begs to see the snake charmer and the tattooed lady, the giant and the dwarf. He gives in, the girl decides much later, because of his decency; or he gives in, as my own father might say, because he’s too much a milk-and-cookies sort of fool to understand that in that smelly, ill-lit tent is knowledge it is a parent’s duty often to deny or to avoid. It is a good moment, I tell you, this moment when they pay their quarters and go in, one person full of pride, the other sucking on cotton candy, the sad end of them still pages and pages away.
In that tent—a whole hour, I think—walking from little stage to little stage, the girl is awestruck and puzzled and, well, breath-taken, full of questions about where these people, these creatures, live and what they do when they’re not standing in front of a bunch of hayseeds and would it be possible to get a face, a tattoo, printed on her knee. “Can I touch?” she asks. “Do they talk?” A spotlight comes on, blue and harsh, and nearby, in a swirl of cigarette smoke and field dust, are two little people, Mr. and Mrs. Tiny, gussied up like a commodore and his society bride; another light snaps on, yellow this time and ten paces away, and there stands a man—“A boy,” the barker tells us, “only eighteen and still growing!”—who’s already nine feet tall, his arms long as shovels, nothing in his face about his own parents or what he wants to be at twenty-five. These are clichés, my smart wife, Ellen Kay, tells me (“Sounds too artsy-fartsy,” her exact words were when I read the thing to her), but in the story I remember, these are the exhibitions girl and man pass by—the girl Christmas-Eve impatient, the man nervous—before they come to the main display, which is, in “Mirrors,” a young woman, beautiful and smooth as china, who has no arms and no legs.
The father, complaining that he’s grubby-feeling and hot, wants to get out, but his daughter, her heart hammering in her ears, can’t move. As never before, she’s conscious of her own hands and feet, the wonders they are. She’s aware of smells—breath and oil and two-dollar cologne—and of sounds, a gasp here, a whisper there, exclamations that have in them ache and horror and fear. “C’mon,” the father says, taking her elbow. But onstage, business-like as a banker, the woman—“The Human Torso,” the barker announces, “smart like the dickens”—is drinking water, the glass clamped against her neck by her shoulder; is putting on lipstick; is writing her name with a brush between her teeth; is, Lordy, about to type—with her chin maybe—a letter to a Spec 4 with the Army in Korea, her boyfriend.
Outside, the midway glittering and crowded with Iowans going crosswise, the girl, more fascinated than frightened (though the fright is coming), asks how that was done. The father has an Old Gold out now, and the narrator—seven or eight but on the verge of learning that will stay with her until seventy or eighty—realizes he’s stalling. He’s embarrassed, maybe sick. He says “Howdy” to a deadbeat he’d never otherwise talk to. He says he’s hungry, how about a hot dog, some buttered popcorn? He’s cold, he says, too cold for September. “How?” she says again, pulling at his sleeve a little and watching his face go stiff and loose in a way that has her saying to herself, “I am not scared. No, I am not.” And then he says what the narrator realizes will be his answer—sometimes comic, often not—for all thereafter that astounds or baffles and will not be known: “Mirrors, it’s done with mirrors.”
There’s a pause here, I remember, six sentences that tell what the weather is like and how, here and there, light bulbs are missing and what the girl’s favorite subjects are in school. What? she thinks to ask, but doesn’t. “It’s an illusion,” he says, his voice squeaky the way it gets when he talks about money they don’t have much of. “A trick, like magic.” Part of her—the part that can say the sum of two plus two, and that A is for Apple, B is for Boy—knows that mirrors have nothing to do with what she’s seen; another part—this the half of her that will remember this incident forever and ever—knows that her father, now as strange to her as the giant and the dwarf, is lying.
His hand is working up and down, and his expression says, as lips and eyes and cheeks will, that he’s sorry, he didn’t mean for her to see that, she’s so young. Something is trembling inside her, a muscle or a bone. One-Mississippi, she says to herself. Two-Mississippi. Over there sits a hound dog wearing a hat and somewhere a shout is going up that says somebody won a Kewpie doll or a stuffed monkey, and up ahead, creaking and clanking, the Tilt-A-Whirl is full of people spinning around and around goggle-eyed. Her father has a smile not connected to his eyes—another lie—and his hand out to be held, and going by them is a fat lady who lives on Jefferson Street and a man with a limp who lives on Spruce. Her father seems too hairy to her now, and maybe not sharp-minded enough, with a nose too long and knobby. She tells herself what she is, which is a good dancer and smart about which side the fork goes on and who gets introduced first when strangers meet; and what she is not, which is strong enough to do pull-ups and watchful about who goes where and why. She is learning something, she thinks. There is being good, she thinks. And there is not. There is the truth, she thinks. And there is not.
And so, in the climax of what I read years and years ago, she says, her hands sticky and her dress white as Hollywood daylight, “Yes, mirrors, I thought so”—words that, years and years ago, said all I thought possible about lies and love and how forgiveness works.
In this story, which is true and only two days old and also about forgiveness, I am the father to be read about and the child is my son, Stuart Eliot Polk, Jr. (called “Pudge” in and out of the family); he’s a semi-fat golfer—“linksman,” he insists the proper term is—and an honor student who will at the end of this summer go off to college and so cease to be a citizen in the sideshow tent my house here in El Paso now clearly is. Yes, forgiveness—particularly ironic in that, since my graduation years ago from Perkins Seminary at SMU, it has been my job to say, day after day after day, the noises that are “It will get better” and “We all make mistakes” to a thousand Methodists who aim to be themselves forgiven and sent home happy. There is no “freak” here, except the ordinary one I am, and no storybook midway, except my modern kitchen and its odd come and go.
I am an adulterer—an old-fashioned word, sure, but the only one appropriate to the ancient sin it identifies; and my lover—a modern word not so full of terror and guilt and judgment as another—was, until two days ago, Terri Ann Mackey, a rich, three-times-married former Zeta Tau Alpha Texas girl who might one day make headlines for the dramatic hair she has or the way she can sing Conway Twitty tunes. In every way likable and loud and free-minded, she has, in the last four years, met me anywhere and everywhere—in the Marriott and Hilton hotels, in the Cavern of Music in Juarez, even at a preachers’ retreat at the Inn of the Mountain Gods in Ruidoso in southern New Mexico’s piney forests. Dressed up in this or that outfit she sent away for or got on a trip to Dallas, she has, to my delight and education, pretended to be naughty as what we imagine the Swedish are or nice as Snow White; she has pretended, in a hundred rented rooms, to be everything I thought my wife was not—daring and wicked, heedless as a tyrant. Shameful to say, it seems we have always been here, in this bright desert cow town, now far-flung and fifty percent ticky-tacky, drinking wine and fornicating and then hustling home to deceive people we were wed to. Shameful to say, it seems we have always been playing the eyes’ version of footsy—her in pink and cactus yellow in a pew in the middle of St. Paul’s, me in the pulpit sermonizing about parables and Jesus and what welfare we owe the lost and poor and beaten down.
“Yes,” my wife, Ellen Kay, would answer when I told her I was at the Stanton Street Racquet Club playing handball with a UTEP management professor named Pete Walker. “Go change,” she’d say, herself lovely and schoolgirl-trim as that woman I’d collapsed atop a half hour before. “I phoned,” she’d say, “Mrs. Denbo said you were out.” Yes, I’d tell her. I was in the choir room, hunting organ music that would inspire and not be hokey; I was in the library, looking up what the Puritan Mathers had written about witchcraft and gobbledygook we are better off without; I was taking a drive in my Mercedes, the better to clear my head so I could get to the drafting of a speech for the Rotarians, or the LULAC Club of Ysleta, or the Downtown Optimists. “You work too hard,” she’d say, “let’s go to Acapulco this year.” And I’d head to my big bedroom, the men I am, the public one amazed by his private self—the first absolutely in love with a blond continental-history major he’d courted at the University of Texas in 1967; the second still frazzled by what, in the afternoon, is made from deceit and bed noise and indecency. And until two days ago, it was possible to believe that I knew which was which, what what.
“Where were you?” Ellen Kay said, making (though too violently, I think now) the tuna casserole I like enough to eat twice a year. “I called everywhere,” she said. “It was as if you didn’t exist.”
Upset, her hair spilling out of the French roll she prefers, she said more, two or three paragraphs whose theme was my peculiar behavior and the sly way I had lately and what time I was supposed to be somewhere and yet was not; and suddenly, taking note of the thump-thump my heart made and how one cloud in the east looked like a bell, I stood at the sink, steadily drinking glass after glass of water, trying to put some miles between me and her suspicions. Terri Ann Mackey Cruz Robinson Cross was all over me, my hands and my thighs and my face; and, a giant step away, my wife was asking where I’d been.
“You were going to call,” Ellen Kay said. “You had an appointment, a meeting.” I had one thought, which was about the bricked-up middle of me, and another, which was about how like TV this situation was. “I talked to Bill Watson at the bank,” she said. “He hasn’t seen you for a week, ten days. I called—“
Her wayward husband had a moment then, familiar to all cheaters and sorry folks, when he thought he’d tell the truth; a moment, before fear hit him and he got a 3-D vision of the cheap world he’d have to live in, when he thought to make plain the creature he was and the no-account stage he stood upon.
“I was at the golf course,” I said, “watching Pudge. They have a match tomorrow.”
The oven was closed, the refrigerator opened.
“Which course?” she said.
Forks and knives had been brought out, made a pile of.
“Coronado Hills,” I said. “Pudge is hitting the ball pretty good.”
She went past me a dozen times, carrying the plates and the bread and the fruit bowl, and I tried to meet her eyes and so not give away the corrupt inside of me. I thought of several Latin words—bellum and versus and fatum—and the Highland Park classroom I learned them in.
“All right,” she said, though by the dark notes in her voice it was clear she was going to ask Pudge if he’d seen me there, by the green I’d claimed to have stood next to, applauding the expert wedge shot I’d seen with my very own eyes.
As in the former story of illusions and the mess they make crashing down, there is a pause here, one of two; and you are to imagine now how herky-jerky time moved in our house when Pudge drove up and came in and said howdy and washed his hands as he’d been a million times told. You are to imagine, too, the dinner we picked at and our small talk about school and American government and what money does. While time went up and down, I thought about Pudge the way evil comic book Martians are said to think about us: I was curious to know how I’d be affected by what, in a minute or an hour, would come from the mouth of an earthling who, so far as I knew, had never looked much beyond himself to see the insignificant dust ball he stood upon. I saw him as his own girlfriend, Traci Dixon, must: polite, fussy as a nun, soft-spoken about everything except golf and how it is, truly, a full-fledged sport.
Part of me—that eye and ear which would make an excellent witness at an auto wreck or similar calamity—flew up to one high corner of the room, like a ghost or an angel, and wondered what could be said about these three people who sat there and there and there. They were Democrats who, in a blue moon, liked what Bush did; they had Allstate insurance and bankbooks and stacks of paper that said where they were in the world and what business they conducted with it; they played Scrabble and Clue and chose to watch the news Dan Rather read. The wife, who once upon a time could run fast enough to be useful in flag football, now used all her energy to keep mostly white-collar rednecks from using the words nigger and spic in her company; the son, who had once wanted to be an astronaut or a Houston brain surgeon, now aimed to be the only Ph.D. in computer science to win the Masters at Augusta, Georgia; and the father—well, what was there to say about a supposedly learned man for whom the spitting image of God, Who was up and yonder and everywhere, was his own father, a bent-over and gin-soaked cattle rancher in Midland, Texas?
I hovered in that corner, distant and disinterested, and then Ellen Kay spoke to Pudge, and I came rushing back, dumb and helpless as anything human that falls from a great height.
“Daddy says you had a good round this afternoon,” Ellen Kay began. “You had an especially nice wedge shot, he says.”
She was being sneaky, which my own sneaky self admired, and Pudge quit the work his chewing was, a little confusion in his round, smart face. He was processing, that machine between his ears crunching data that in no way could ever be, and for the fifteen seconds we made eye contact I wanted him to put aside reason and logic and algebra and see me with his guts and heart. On his lip he had a crumb that, if you didn’t tell him, would stay until kingdom come; I wanted him to stop blinking and wrinkling his forehead like a first-year theater student. The air was heavy in that room, the light coming from eight directions at once, and I wanted to remind him of our trip last January to the Phoenix Open and that too-scholarly talk we’d had about the often mixed-up relations between men and women. I had an image of me throwing a ball to him, and of him catching it. I had an image of him learning to drive a stick shift, and of him so carefully mowing our lawn. Oddly, I thought about fishing, which I hate, and bowling, which I am silly at, and then Ellen Kay, putting detergent in the dishwasher, asked him again about events that had never happened, and I took a deep breath I expected to hold until the horror stopped.
Here is that second pause I spoke of—that moment, before time lurches forward again, when the eye needs to look elsewhere to see what is ruined, what not. Pudge now knew I was lying. His eyes went here and there, to the clock above my shoulder, to his mother’s overwatered geranium on the windowsill, to his mostly empty plate. He was learning something about me—and about himself, too. Like his made-up counterpart in “Mirrors,” he was seeing that I, his father, was afraid and weak and damaged; and like the invented daddy in that story I read, a daddy whose interior life we were not permitted to see, I wanted my own child, however numbed or shocked, to forgive me for the tilt the world now stood at, to say I was not responsible for the sad magic trick our common back-and-forth really is.
“Tell her,” I said. I had in mind a story he could confirm—the Coke we shared in the clubhouse, a corny joke that was heard, and the help I tried to be with his short game—a story that had nowhere in it, two days ago, a father cold and alone and small.