“For Pete’s sake, just a minute!” He returns his eyes to the boy. “Honestly, I don’t know what she’s going to do without you to worry about. That woman’s going to drive me crazy.”
A joke, the boy understands, but in his father’s voice he detects an undertone of seriousness. For the first time he considers the full emotional dimensions of the day. His life is changing, but his parents’ lives are changing, too. Like a habitat abruptly deprived of a major species, the household will be wrenched into realignment by his departure. Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are; for eighteen years he has experienced their existence only insofar as it has related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he’s not around? What secrets do they hold from each other, what aspirations have been left to languish? What private grievances, held in check by the shared project of child rearing, will now, in his absence, lurch into the light? They love him, but do they love each other? Not as parents or even husband and wife but simply as people—as surely they must have loved each other at one time? He hasn’t the foggiest; he can no more grasp these matters than he can imagine the world before he was alive.
Compounding the difficulty is the fact that the boy has never been in love himself. Though the social patterns of Mercy, Ohio, are such that even a modestly attractive person can find opportunities in the sexual marketplace, and the boy, although a virgin, has been from time to time its beneficiary, what he has experienced is merely love’s painless presage, the expression without the soul. He wonders if this is a lack within himself. Is there a part of the brain from which love comes that in his case has drastically malfunctioned? The world is awash in love—on the radio, in movies, in the pages of novels. Romantic love is the common cultural narrative, yet he seems immune to it. Thus, though he has yet to taste the pain that comes with love, he has experienced pain of a different, related sort: the fear of facing a life without it.
They meet the boy’s mother in the kitchen. He expects to find her dressed and ready to go, but she is wearing her flowered housecoat and terry-cloth slippers. Through some unspoken agreement it has been determined that his father alone will accompany him to the station.
“I packed you a lunch,” she declares.
She thrusts a paper sack into his hands. The boy unfolds the crinkled top: a peanut butter sandwich in waxed paper, cut carrots in a baggie, a pint of milk, a box of Barnum’s Animal Crackers. He is eighteen: he could devour the contents of ten such bags and still be hungry. It’s a meal for a child, yet he finds himself absurdly grateful for this small present. Who knows when his mother will make him lunch again?
“Do you have enough money? Harold, did you give him any cash?”
“I’m fine, Mom. I have plenty from the summer.”
His mother’s eyes have begun to pool with tears. “Oh, I said I wouldn’t do this.” She waves her hands in front of her face. “Lorraine, I said, don’t you dare cry.”
He steps into her warm embrace. She is a substantial woman, good to hug. He breathes in the smell of her—a dusty, fruit-sweet aroma, tinged with the chemical scent of hair spray and the off-gassing nicotine of her breakfast cigarette.
“You can let him go now, Lori. We’re going to be late.”
“Harvard. My Timothy is going to Harvard. I just can’t believe it.”
The ride to the bus station, in a neighboring town, takes thirty minutes along rural highways. The car, a late-model Buick LeSabre with a soft suspension and seats of crushed velour, makes the roadway beneath them seem vague, as if they are levitating. It is his father’s one self-indulgence: every two years a new LeSabre appears in the driveway, all but indistinguishable from the last. They pass the last houses and ease into the countryside. The fields are fat with corn; birds wheel over the windbreaks. Here and there a farmhouse, some pristinely kept, others in disrepair—paint flaking, foundations tipping, upholstered furniture on the porches and abandoned toys in the yards. Everything the boy sees touches his heart with fondness.
“Listen,” his father says, as they are approaching the station, “there’s something I wanted to say to you.”
Here it comes, the boy thinks. This impending announcement, whatever it is, is the reason they’ve left their mother behind. What will it be? Not girls or sex; apart from one awkward conversation when he was thirteen, the subject has never been raised. Study hard? Keep your nose to the grindstone? But these things, too, have already been said.
His father clears his throat. “I didn’t want to say this before. Well, maybe I did. I probably should have. What I’m trying to say is that you’re destined for big things, son. Great things. I’ve always known that about you.”
“I’ll do my best, I promise.”