Paternity--a story (i)

When, one Easter, I went out to the back of the barn to feed the rabbits, a job that supposedly belonged to my children, what was immediately noticeable was that the two babies were gone, just gone. I went back into the house, got ready for church, as did my wife and children, and simply couldn't bring myself to tell our kids--who were maybe eight and six--that the two bunnies the mom had were somehow not there. Couldn't do it. 

It was an Easter service I've forgotten completely because I was obsessed with those baby rabbits and what their deaths would mean to our kids, especially our daughter. 

When the service was over, I went home immediately and started to look around the neighborhood. They were tiny little things that couldn't have hopped off very far. They had to be close, if they were still alive and not somebody's Easter breakfast.

Amazingly, I found them beneath the deck of an old rotary lawn mower that stood behind a neighbor's garage. The lost had been found.

We'd had a sermon sometime earlier with a comparison that I remembered painfully--how the loss of a bald eagle in our society had become more tragic, in some ways, than an aborted child. 

I'm no pro-life fanatic, but something about that comparison stuck. And it's what is at the heart of this story, perhaps the most re-copied story of any I ever wrote. It appeared initially in the Reformed Journal, but got into school curriculums all over the nation. 

It's called "Paternity," and it's flush with autobiography. But no, I didn't get some high school girl pregnant. 

John Updike's famous story "A & P" features flat-landers absolutely flummoxed by young vacationing girls coming into a grocery store in bikinis. Something of that I understood, having grown up a mile or so from Lake Michigan. We called the foreigners "lake people" because they lived in a different world, a world far more "worldly" with ample bucks to support their leisurely way of life. They were exotic among the small-town Dutch Calvinists--you'll find that created here, too, in "Paternity."

Paternity

Somewhere today a woman named Cassandra Something-or-other is telling a little different story, I’m sure, because she was rich and likely still is.

What do I remember of her? Her hair--the way she turned her face up into the brisk, beach sun and swept the long bronzed bangs across her cheeks. The way she laughed, always hard and full, embarrassingly sometimes--for me, not her--and the way she never giggled, even though she was only sixteen. The sharp fortitude of her eyes confronting yours and never once backing down. I remember her body very well--and her tan, both where it was and where it wasn’t. Her face, really--the exact shape of her nose and the thickness of her eyebrows, even her lips--has gone from my memory, but a part of her will never go, the ever-urging boldness that knew no fear.

The fall of her sophomore year she and her mother moved, all year round, into her parents’ cottage on the lake. She was what we called “lake people.” I was a townie. Her father owned a Chicago company that turned out fifty fiberglass boats per day. My father milked thirty-five cows. Twice she’d been to Europe. I’d been to Indiana three times to Bible Camp. She was going to college in Vermont, she said, because she hated Chicago, where she’d lived for her first fifteen years.

We were both sixteen. I was an athlete, tall and muscular from years of farm work, and blond, like a beach bum, from the burning sun and long hours in the alfalfa fields that still lie like storybook meadows between Easton and the woods that belt the lakeshore. I wanted her all right, but she just wanted. That was the difference between Cassie and normal Easton girls. They never really wanted. Cassie did--sincerely and truly.

Once I told her how--when I was a boy--we’d seen a train flatten a penny we’d laid on the track. A half hour later she stood, holding a handful of unruly hair to keep it out of her face, while only ten feet away a huge freight exploded by. The miniature football I’d hung on a chain from my rearview mirror swayed in the lurches of the coal cars across those ties, and I was in the car fifty feet away; but she never raised her eye s from the spot on the steel where she’d planted a nickel herself.

I wasn’t really Gary Dirks to her. I was merely the boy she wanted. Eight times we made love. I could probably still list them, by place and degree of success, in order. And we really didn’t quit each other, at least not until the next summer, when she became pregnant and went back to Chicago to have our baby.

She had no desire to marry me, the son of an Easton Hollander, a small dairyman. So she finished high school in Chicago, I suppose, and I never heard from her again, just as she had promised. When I say she left Easton, I don’t mean that her parents forced her to return to Chicago. She simply determined herself that she would leave, then told her mother of her plans. Back then I thought of Cassie’s having free will in the theological sense my father talked about “free will”--as the opposite of being predestined for salvation, almost as sin.

Yesterday, I sat on a crowded curb in my hometown as a Dutch Festival parade marched up from the memory of my sixteenth summer in Easton, one float after another, the Lions Club’s old black and gold, papier-maché feline still mounted on the same crepe-papered hayrack, First Presbyterian’s same black Bible open to the same John 3:16. Only the faces of the queen and her court had changed; even their Dutch costumes seemed handsewn replicas of what I remembered. My children were off on the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel because a silly, small-town parade doesn’t entertain ten-year-olds who have been brought up on cartoon excesses. So I sat there alone and watched another parade too: a score of Easton high school kids dressed down for the sun, performing for each other. And I remembered who I was back then, sixteen years ago.

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Tomorrow: