Manhood for Amateurs. Michael Chabon

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       William and I

      The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low. One day a few years back I took my youngest son to the market around the corner from our house in Berkeley, California, a town where, in my estimation, fathers generally do a passable job, with some fathers having been known to go a little overboard. I was holding my twenty-month-old in one arm and unloading the shopping cart onto the checkout counter with the other. I don’t remember what I was thinking about at the time, but it is as likely to have been the original 1979 jingle for Honey Nut Cheerios or nothing at all as it was the needs, demands, or ineffable wonder of my son. I wasn’t quite sure why the woman in line behind us – when I became aware of her – kept beaming so fondly in our direction. She had on rainbow leggings, and I thought she might be a little bit crazy and therefore fond of everyone.

      “You are such a good dad,” she said finally. “I can tell.”

      I looked at my son. He was chewing on the paper coating of a wire twist tie. A choking hazard, without a doubt; the wire could have pierced his lip or tongue. His hairstyle tended to the cartoonier pole of the Woodstock-Einstein continuum. His face was probably a tad on the smudgy side. Dirty, even. One might have been tempted to employ the word crust.

      “Oh, this isn’t my child,” I told her. “I found him in the back.”

      Actually, I thanked her. I went off with my boy in one arm and a bag of groceries in the other, and when we got home I put a plastic bowl filled with Honey Nut Cheerios in front of him and checked my e-mail. I was a really good dad.

      I don’t know what a woman needs to do to impel a perfect stranger to inform her in the grocery store that she is a really good mom. Perhaps perform an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic pen on her eldest child while simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks’ worth of healthy but appealing break-time snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr. In a grocery store, no mother is good or bad; she is just a mother, shopping for her family. If she wipes her kid’s nose or tear-stained cheeks, if she holds her kid tight, entertains her kid’s nonsensical claims, buys her kid the organic non-GMO whole-grain version of Honey Nut Cheerios, it adds no useful data to our assessment of her. Such an act is statistically insignificant. Good mothering is not measurable in a discrete instant, in an hour spent rubbing a baby’s gassy belly, in the braiding of a tangled mass of morning hair. Good mothering is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself. We do not judge mothers by snapshots but by years of images painstakingly accumulated from the orbiting satellite of memory. Once a year, maybe, and on certain fatal birthdays, and at our weddings or her funeral, we might collate all the available data, analyze it, and offer our irrefutable judgment: good mother.

      In the intervals – just ask my wife – all mothers are (in their own view) bad. Because the paradoxical thing, or one of the paradoxical things, about the low standard to which fathers are held (with the concomitant minimal effort required to exceed the standard and win the sobriquet of “good dad”) is that your basic garden-variety mother, not only working hard at her own end of the child-rearing enterprise (not to mention at her actual job) but so often taxed with the slack from the paternal side of things, tends in my experience to see her career as one of perennial insufficiency and self-doubt. This is partly because mothers are attuned, in a way that most fathers have a hard time managing, to the specter of calamity that haunts their children. Fathers are popularly supposed to serve as protectors of their children, but in fact men lack the capacity for identifying danger except in the most narrow spectrum of the band. It is women – mothers – whose organs of anxiety can detect the vast invisible flow of peril through which their children are obliged daily to make their way. The father on a camping trip who manages to beat a rattlesnake to death with a can of Dinty Moore in a tube sock may rest for decades on the ensuing laurels yet somehow snore peacefully every night beside his sleepless wife, even though he knows perfectly well that the Polly Pocket toys may be tainted with lead-based paint, and the Rite-Aid was out of test kits, and somebody had better go order them online, overnight delivery, even though it is four in the morning. It is in part the monumental open-endedness of the job, with its infinite number of infinitely small pieces, that routinely leads mothers to see themselves as inadequate, therefore making the task of recognizing their goodness, at any given moment, so hard.

      I know there’s a double standard at work; I suppose if I’m honest, I would have to acknowledge that in my worst moments, I’m grateful for it, for the easy credit that people – mothers, for God’s sake – are willing to extend to me for doing very little at all. It’s like pulling into a parking space with a nickel in your pocket to find that somebody left you an hour’s worth of quarters in the meter. This double standard has been in place for a long time now, though over the past few decades a handful of items – generally having to do with cooking and caring for babies – have been added to the list of minimum expectations for a good father. My father, more or less like all the men of his era, class, and cultural background, went for a certain amount of spasmodically enthusiastic fathering, parachuting in from time to time with some new pursuit or project, engaging like an overweening superpower in a program of parental nation-building in the far-off land of his children before losing interest or running out of emotional capital and leaving us once more to the regime of our mother, a kind of ancient, all-pervasive folkway, a source of attention and control and structure so reliable as to be imperceptible, like the air. My father educated me in appreciating the things he appreciated, and in ridiculing those he found laughable, and in disbelieving the things he found dubious. When I was a small boy, tractable and respectful and preternaturally adult, with my big black glasses and careful phraseology, he would take me on house calls and at-home insurance physicals along with his stethoscope and Taylor hammer. When he was done being a father for the time being, he would leave me in my corner of his life, tucked into the black bag of his affections. At night sometimes, if he made it home from the hospital, he would come in and lean down and brush my soft cheek with his scratchy one.

      If the lady in the rainbow tights had seen us walking down a street in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1966, with me swinging my plastic doctor bag full of candy pills and deneedled hypos and trying to match my stride to his, she probably would have told him that he was a good dad, too. And she would not have been saying very much less or more than she was saying to me.

      My father, born in the gray-and-silver Movietone year of 1938, was part of the generation of Americans who, in their twenties and thirties, approached the concepts of intimacy, of authenticity and open emotion, with a certain tentative abruptness, like people used to automatic transmission learning how to drive a stick shift. They wanted intimacy, but they were not sure how far they could trust it to take them. My father didn’t hug me a lot or kiss me. I don’t remember holding his hand past the age of three or four. When I got older and took an interest in the art of becoming a grown-up, it proved hard to find other, nonphysical kinds of intimacy with him. He didn’t like to share his anxieties about his work, relationships, or life, rarely took me into his confidence, never dared to admit the deepest intimacy of all – that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

      In 1974 I saw a musical cartoon called “William’s Doll.” It was a segment in that echt-seventies, ungrammatically titled children’s television special created by Marlo Thomas, Free to Be You and Me. The segment, based on a book by Charlotte Zolotow, was about a boy who begs his bemused parents to buy him a baby doll, a request to which they are nonplussed if not, in the case of William’s father, outright hostile. William is mocked, scolded, and bullied for his desire, and his parents try to bribe him out of it. But William persists, and in the end his wise grandmother overrules his father and buys him a doll.

      Even as a boy of ten, I could feel the radical nature СКАЧАТЬ