Notable American Women Read Free

routine self-examination on his part—while brushing his teeth or soaping his face before a mirror—has not yet led him to quietly end his own life down at the river, with a rope or gun or razor, and give everyone concerned a needed breather from the exhausting obligation of his existence.
    Certainly you would, at the least (if you do not agree that he makes a good candidate for a respectably necessary suicide), have to then agree that he cuts a poor form—he is stooped and bald and sad, his gait is a slouching apology against motion, his pockets are empty, the poor fellow has lost his mother, and I would guess that no pretty creature has handled his penis in months. His body is not exactly the makings of a hero, and I warrant it emits much disagreeable waste.
    Naturally, a son who is crippled or ill, weak and sad, or palsied with fear at the thought of life without his father— who may or may not have been
brought to ground
by a group that calls itself the Silentists—incites a degree of sympathy in the father. The father remembers those early moments of the Marcus life project, when Benjamin was just a small measure of flesh called a child—the size of his father’s hand, but in no way as interesting to look at—when he labored on palms and knees to ascend the ever-dashing body of his father, who moved through the fields with supremacy. At the time, Benjamin enjoyed seeking information within the father’s imposing beard, or his soundproof wig, which certainly must have appeared as a nest of treasures, within which something knowable might be discovered. He sought carriage now and again in a swing set built and anchored to the turf by the father, who stood behind the swing to ensure that it traversed an agreeable arc, containing the disastrous body of the son. Often the father strapped Ben into his seat and sent him “Around the World,” over the top bar of the swing, and over again, until Ben was panting fast and crazy in the eyes, a bit wobbly on his feet after he climbed back down to earth, but always sweetly smiling, trusting the man who ruled him even when the sensations of that rulership were not entirely agreeable or were beyond the boy’s comprehension.
    The young Ben was a collector: flowers, buttons, stones, and any scrap of equipment that littered the compound. Everything small that he could remove from the world and bring to his parents’ attention. He carried his stuff in wagons and could thrill himself with the littlest achievements, often fancying himself a key figure in the important job of shuttling junk from here to there. It was a sobering but necessary task each time to remind the little fellow that he had not invented these special things—the buttons and stones and sticks, the disposable hearing cups and seared swatches of cotton—that all the world’s beauty existed before him, and did not require him for survival. He was just a person, and everything he thought and did had already been thought and done. Perhaps he should seek to discover something that wasn’t so obvious and abundant in nature, it was suggested. To say something new, to do something startling. That he has not proved himself capable of even a single original act, discovery, or statement is nearly as damning as his frequent weeping and his neurotically induced deafness.
    And while my son’s illness, if such it is—the apparent onset of “motion fear” and his supposed deafness to certain words, as spoken by certain people—provides a partial excuse for his failure to come forth as a creature of distinction, a man who might soldier over every difficulty to slaughter his life opponents with great ferocity, either with weapons or through the sheer verbal power that runs deeply in his family (on his father’s side), he is, in fact, short of any kind of battle plan, lacks the coordination to even flee from a predator, and is weakly stocked with