The first time it happened he talked about Jingle, his childhood dog, a story that was new to her. One day his father had walked into town with Jingle and returned without him. “Where’s Jingle?” Dick asked. His father tipped his head and looked quizzically into space. “I don’t know. Let me think.” His father frowned. “I must have left him tied out in front of the post office.” Dick pictured Jingle there, alone, waiting, trusting, faithful, innocent. Perhaps Jingle had watched his father walk right past but had been so trusting that he hadn’t even jumped or pawed, just sat as he’d been told to. Instead he waited. Maybe. What if someone stole him? Dick felt ill, thinking of it. He asked his father to go right back to get Jingle. His father said he’d go after lunch. Dick spent a torturous hour imagining Jingle’s confusion and feeling of betrayal. He pictured people shoving him into a car and driving off. They wouldn’t know what Jingle ate. Would they even get a bed for him? Would they kick him? Finally his father walked back into town. Dick waited on the front porch and tore down the sidewalk when he saw his father and Jingle coming toward home. “See? No harm done,” his father said. Oh, but there was harm! By Dick’s reckoning his father’s oversight revealed all of human carelessness, and lack of seriousness. He knew who his father was after that. Serious people didn’t make such mistakes.
“I’m serious,” he said to Polly, or to the gray room. “I’d never do that.”
Dick’s dentures floated in a glass on the bedside table. He gummed his words.
“I know,” she assured him.
Sometimes he sang, always the same song, “Old Man River.”
Old man river
Dat old man river
He must know somethin’
But don’t say nothin’
Dat old man river
He just keep rollin’ along
Dick could sing. He had a beautiful baritone. He told her one shadowy morning—this was a story she already knew—that he’d considered learning how to sing opera, but his father forbade it. Dick thought he could have been successful to some degree, but he would never have been Paul Robeson. He admired Paul Robeson above all men. He, too, was a pacifist. He, too, fought for his principles. He, too, had lost his career for his beliefs. He was ruined by McCarthy. Had his passport taken away.
Dick saw Paul Robeson once. It was after he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dick defended Robeson to anyone who would listen. Robeson was a fellow victim of intolerance toward pacifism. What was that song he wrote? Something about springtime, and war. Ironic lyrics, Dick remembered. I wonder if there will be a war next spring? Something like that. He’d bought the record, must still have it somewhere.
“It’s in Haverford,” Polly offered.
“Oh good.”
Dick was invited to the only concert Robeson booked after his denunciation. In Peekskill. It was in August, though, so Dick was at Meadowlea, and it didn’t make sense to drive down. As it turned out, there was a huge riot, and it was doubtful he could have even greeted Robeson. He regretted not going for a long time.
“I’m glad you didn’t go,” Polly said.
“But I’ve never done a thing to act on my beliefs.”
“Not true. You wrote the book on pacifism. Anyone can learn what it is because of you.”
“It’s hopelessly out of print.”
“Not for long. Your new foreword.”
She stroked his forehead, arranging his silver hair becomingly. His cheek rested on both his hands, like a child.
His father wanted Dick to be a businessman, but Dick had no mind for numbers or for sales. He’d always been attracted to Quaker philosophy and at college found he was good—the best in his class at Harvard—at formal logic. Polly asked if he’d made the right decision becoming a philosopher. This was the magic of these morning talks—she could ask questions that would make him impatient in the light of day.
He said he studied and practiced philosophy because the world was a confusing place and he wanted to further what understanding humans had come to and why, and how things might be better. The deeper in he waded, however, the more he suspected that he might be seeking an answer to a question he had about an indentation in his own being, as palpable to him as if a meteor had hit. He had a hole inside him like a deep black pool surrounded by rock. For a while he assumed everyone did—wasn’t that original sin, or the other way around?—but during late-night dorm confabs he discovered other men felt whole. They had no suspicion, as he had, that they might implode into their own depths one day. He was always teetering and exhausted from keeping himself upright.
Polly couldn’t have been more shocked. She dared not respond at all—dared not remind him she was his audience. He wouldn’t want her to know any of this. She sat absolutely locked into a stillness akin to invisibility until he dozed. When he woke up, she’d pulled the curtains open, and he talked mildly about the weather. But she pondered what he said when she went upstairs after breakfast to take her nap. It seemed to her he’d spent his whole life hiding this central motivation. Whether that was good or bad, right or wrong was beside the point now. What was left was to add pieces to the puzzle of him. Maybe this was what Agnes meant when she said Dick had a classic narcissistic wound. Poor Dick. The word wound was so sad. How did such a thing happen? Dick’s parents had been like everyone’s as far as she knew.
A few mornings later he spoke about an afternoon in the fall when he was about ten. His mother collected him at school, and they walked home through the city in their companionable way. He looked at dogs and people and things on the sidewalk, waiting for her to ask, What was the most interesting thing that happened today? She always asked, and knowing the question was coming encouraged him to sort through dozens of little happenings for what might be most entertaining to her. His brother Peter, too old by then to be met at school, interpreted his day through a prism of wit, and noticed moments of hypocrisy and treachery, sneakiness and subterfuge, that he told about hilariously, causing their mother to laugh. Her laughter changed the world; to be able to make her laugh was the most desirable talent a person could have. Dick couldn’t do it. He wasn’t funny or witty. Yet his mother met Dick’s choices of what was important with astonished admiration that made him feel brilliant. “You must be the only little boy in Philadelphia who cares about…” whatever it was he had said interested him. Cicadas. Past imperfect tense. The formation of river deltas. It was all extraordinary!
On the particular day in his memory his mother had seemed on the verge of asking him the question, when instead she stopped abruptly and turned to face the house at their side. She was in general a sanguine person, calm and unflappable, so it riveted him to see a shock ripple through her body. Mummy? But he had receded and was part of the background. She stepped closer to the house, looking up into the window and raising her hand, her five fingers splayed, pressing them forward as if they might meet a reciprocating hand. He shifted his gaze and to his shock saw a hand pressed back against the window from the inside. Between the hands, one inside, one out, rolled waves of feeling, sluicing and churning. He couldn’t see it, but he saw it. The rolling feeling transcended what was naturally possible. His mother began weeping. He looked up at the face in the window and the face was weeping, too. The face of another lady. His mother’s hands folded, fingers curling in toward the palm. She bowed her head and stepped backward again and walked into a man who made a fuss of apologies, and then they chatted while Dick waited in worry to have her back to himself.