Fathers

Chapter 14 – Fathers

When Delilah told him she was pregnant, Giambone greeted the news as if a Frangelican angel had delivered it. The joy he felt – what for him was an unsophisticated and maudlin emotion – was sprung in his breast with giddy, brilliant colors, as though the torrent of love coursing through him were really meant for himself instead of Delilah. Her announcement seemed to be the necessary vindication of his very existence, the balm and denouement of a lifelong odyssey and quest in which he trudged on and on from one defeat to another.

“Of course,” he said, as if his quiver were always full, “I’ve always seen myself as a father. Being the oldest of eight siblings makes me a natural. You can see it in my demeanor. People have often commented on it. I never took them seriously. What did I know? We’re often the last ones to realize our true métier.”

 After so many disappointments in life and in love, it now seemed simplistically obvious. The best way to surround himself with the perfect attentive audience, one that would remain on call forever, was to make his own. With him at the center, idolized by an adoring wife and children, he was ready to give and receive love, and poised to let them appreciate the wisdom he believed it was his gift to impart. He believed there was no greater sense of feeling needed in the world than that which is elicited by one’s own children. Now he would be essential to something, to the lives of others.

He didn’t even trouble to ask how or when it happened.

“It was an accident,” Delilah falsely insisted.

Giambone interpreted it differently. Giambone, with his inclination to see the world as vast labyrinth of psychological and metaphysical symbols, was certain it was no accident.

“There’s no such thing as random occurrences,” he told her.

There was a reason that no woman had ever become pregnant by him. Relying on his faith in signs, the first woman to accept and grow his seed was clear enough indication of the universe’s profound intention that it be so.

With his proclivity for mystic explanations, he was prepared to ascribe the workings of deep unconscious forces at the base of all human action, even on the level of his sperm swimming assiduously upstream toward Delilah’s eggs. His tiny spermatozoa were imbued with a higher purpose, not just the mere procreation of human cells. They were sent out to perpetuate a mythic idea, the idea of himself, of Giambone. Delilah and the molecular life she was harboring were conjoined as one living vessel, the incarnation and sapient new manifestation of Giambone, his latest and most solemn transformation as an enlightened being. The microscopic messengers of protein and DNA were extensions of himself, the living embodiment of new knowledge come from the mystical unknown, making itself understood through Delilah and the fetus. They were the means by which he inferred what he now had become, not merely a father but a progenitor of himself. He embraced the idea with all the passion of an acolyte who has had a brief glimpse of the divine and takes from his revelation the grand design for his life’s new purpose. It was no accident of biology. It was the Force of Creation speaking directly to and through him. Meeting Delilah, getting her pregnant, were the instruments of his soul’s progression. He saw each event as having come into existence to further his own. He felt his connection to the great divine to be unique, as though everything he encountered had as its purpose the reinforcement of his own. His life was the central fact of all life. People may be more successful in terms of political influence or material wealth, but Giambone was convinced that the deprivations he endured on the material plane were the price he had to pay for his occult knowledge and his gift for penetrating to the metaphysical heart of Being.

“The signs are unmistakable,” he told Delilah.

The role and responsibility of father was being laid upon him from a higher power. He was absolved from all other concerns. His entire life had been leading up to this reckoning. His destiny had been fatherhood all along, only now had the unconscious been revealed. He felt humbled by the majesty of the workings of the great universal powers that directed all life. When Delilah told him, he wept. Now he knew what his struggle had been about. He wept as the prodigal son weeps upon being welcomed home again by the father, weeping with the joy of being forgiven for not having understood what the father has known all along. The son is greatly relieved when he arrives at that place where he knows what he must do. His life is prescribed and he is relieved from the burden of searching any longer. The heart aches to know, and when it comes to knowledge it sighs and lays down its burden, for it is welcomed back into the fold of the known, the circle of duty, the land of the law. Searching is over and it is now the time to act with the authority of tradition. There is a great joy that wells up in people upon returning to the known, a great comfort, for the shadows are cast out by the lights that come from the hearts of the familiar, the warm hearts of the familiar. Soon enough death will return them all to the dark and unknown, but for now the familiar will carry them through.

Giambone assumed his new role as father immediately. He had often thought about what kind of father he would make, as though the instances in which his imagination had deliberated on the topic were but numerous rehearsals for the real event, the one he would stage when the right woman came along, one who had the nerve to complete his dream. The place he always started when he surveyed the fathers he knew among friends or relatives was his own father, a man Giambone loved and whose judgment he feared. His father had raised a family of eight children and he had done it well, or well enough. This was in itself an accomplishment that intimidated Giambone.

His father Angelo was capable and stoical in the face of adversity. He never lost his composure. He struggled quietly and was self-effacing. Angelo spoke little but when he did his words had the force of gravity and conviction that had always eluded Giambone. Whenever he was in the company of his father he felt himself the object of the man’s silent censure for the little that Giambone had accomplished and the many opportunities he squandered. Angelo looked askance at his son because he was possessed of a mind that was given to dreamy vagaries and flighty equivocations, attributes that would have imperiled the family’s existence if Angelo had possessed them himself. Giambone’s father had been put to many tests and he had survived and prospered. Most of all he had endured. He had not succumbed to the seduction of art and literature and philosophy. Angelo was one of those men of a generation of men who seemed to have been born without doubts concerning their aims and obligations. They knew exactly what had to be done: work hard at a practical occupation and work at it every day without failure. Raise a family. Sustain the family. Imbue them with the faith of the Roman Catholic Church by sending them to parochial schools and mass every Sunday, where the nuns and the priests were left the task of explaining the mysteries of existence and inculcating lessons in moral rectitude. Send them to college from where their lives would naturally take the same course as his, working at a solid occupation and raising families of their own. These men had no doubts, or, if they had, they never spoke about them. They quashed them and dug in and persevered through hardships toward the goal, which was stability and comfort. This was life. To deviate from this path was foolish. Giambone had done nothing but to stray from it. And though his father was reluctant to criticize his eldest son, Giambone was ashamed in his presence. He knew that Angelo could not understand him and was dismayed that he had not turned out differently. He was sure that he was a fool in his father’s eyes, and it was in his company that Giambone most felt a fool, a failure in life. His father was a man. He, Giambone, was something unaccountable. Giambone knew that for men like Angelo it was important to be able to take the measure of a man and to be able to do it within ten seconds of meeting him. Within ten seconds of meeting him, you knew whether he was a man or a flake. Giambone knew that under the scrutiny of his father, he was a flake, a person who was a prevaricator, who lacked the stuff of masculinity to make it through and earn the admiration of society and the majority of other men. That is why much of Giambone’s joy at the news of Delilah’s pregnancy was attached to the hope he had of finally earning Angelo’s approval. He was becoming a father himself now, and he dreamed of his father’s embrace, the sign of his acceptance, instead of the man’s silent gaze, the look he leveled at his son when he heard of some development of which he disapproved. The look told him, “it’s your own life now. I’ve done my job, what was reasonably expected of me, my duty. Now you are free to fail. And you have failed.”

No judge in a court of law could have uttered more damning words than the gaze of silent condemnation flashed from the eyes of Giambone’s father. By becoming a father himself, Giambone hoped to salvage his father’s estimation of himself. He was still living for his Angelo’s approval, like every son who has had to live on a steady diet of censure, whether the quiet kind or the physically brutal.

But for now Giambone contented himself with his achievement and avoided the heartache of his father’s reproof. He had to be his own man. He struggled against the attraction of trumpeting his satisfaction to someone who would only sigh in response and ask him, “Tony, how can you raise a family? You’re not married. You got no profession. You don’t even have a steady job. What kinda work are you gonna do? How are you gonna support a family? You got no money. You still owe me five thousand bucks. What? Huh? You gonna make the mother work? Whatsa matter with that head of yours? Whatsa matter with you? Why don’t you talk to your brother? Why don’t you talk to Jack?”

 Those were the glum and pragmatic questions his father would ask, no-nonsense questions meant to detract from the occasion of Giambone’s happiness. And it was happiness that Giambone most felt and that he most wanted to sustain. He was sure that he had never been happier. He wanted his father to share in it, and so he would wait until he could satisfy the older man’s concerns before telling him. He would marry Delilah and he would find a job that he liked and work at it responsibly every day, situate himself first, make all the arrangements that would ensure his new family’s welfare so he might blunt his father’s oblique criticism.

He strongly doubted whether he could do it. Marry Delilah, yes; working steadily at some gainful employment – the thought of it was more terrifying to him than the prospect of fatherhood might be to any other man. For Giambone, the idea of becoming a father was not an exercise in hunkering down for a long life of hard work and sacrifice for the benefit of his progeny. It was more like imagining the child as a miniature version of himself, a self that he, Giambone, would befriend and guide and amuse and protect and educate just as he himself had wished to be guided, befriended, amused and educated. It was an idealization without any necessary grounding in the reality of changing diapers, getting the child shots, taking him to the dentist, registering him for school, paying for his food and clothes, listening to him cry, scream, throw tantrums, or watching the little inchoate version hatched from his head develop in such a way that Giambone was incapable of understanding. He worked from the premise that the kid was a gene splice, an exact reproduction, a chip off the old block, or, the most empathetic companion he could hope for, someone who would endorse all that Giambone was and signified. He didn’t imagine that his child might grow a personality, a character that Giambone couldn’t help but dislike. That perhaps his child might be fiendish or retarded or homosexual or effeminate or bandy legged, or that he might enjoy torturing little animals, or have no desire to listen to his father’s exegesis of the texts of Swedenborg and the arcana of William Blake. He might develop a passion for baseball, a game that Giambone had failed execrably at as a boy and had run from in extreme aversion ever since. He would never throw the boy a baseball, and he feared that some day he would be asked to do just that.

Giambone was unwilling to imagine such outcomes. His son and he would be inseparable. His son would worship him. There would be nothing to ever come between them. It would be a love of deep and profound significance. Giambone would not admit failure in this, nor give himself over to serious reflection on the drudgery that must be a part of any consideration of parenthood. For now Giambone wished only to celebrate the spark of new life that he had engendered. There would be time enough for the serious business of figuring out how it was all going to work. In his increasingly besotted consciousness, fabricating the child was the major thrust of his program; everything else would be taken care of and provided for by the generous and provident universe. And Delilah would be there to help him.

But Delilah was busy at first trying to mask her ambivalence about being pregnant, and her uncertainty about the identity of the father. She wanted Giambone’s child because it would be a Giambone, but his paternity was in question.

Around the time she stopped taking her birth control, she had unprotected intercourse with a long-term client, within the same week that she’d had sex several times with Giambone. The client’s name was Harmon Vizard. He was a former Catholic priest in his mid-fifties. Through the writings of Thomas Merton, Vizard had become interested in Asian religions. After leaving the priesthood he became a practicing Buddhist, eventually opening his own meditation center in the heart of Santa Monica where he had a following of mostly white professionals. He had married and started a family. Vizard and Delilah had been seeing each other for over ten years. He had sought her out first. She was a dirty diversion from his bland wife, and from the prison of his chaste role as spiritual mentor to the irrepressibly discontented affluent class. She exchanged sex for his spiritual guidance and meditation instruction.

Normally, Delilah would have discounted any probability that Vizard could have impregnated her. Vizard practiced an ancient Chinese method of sperm retention, which staved off impotency and prolonged virility. He was a huge advocate of conserving his “chi,” the life force coiled in his testicles. The first few years Delilah visited him regularly at his meditation center, where they fucked in a small room off the main hall, next to the supply closet where the incense and prayer mats were stored. In the beginning she made him wear a condom. Eventually, she realized he was telling the truth. He never had sex with anyone other than Delilah and his wife. Gradually she stopped insisting he wear protection. He always ejaculated on her, never inside, wagging his penis above her like a prelate’s crosier, sprinkling his libations over her belly and breasts. Except this one time, when he lost control, which coincided with the moment Delilah was trying to get pregnant by Giambone.

It was an unusually intimate exchange between them that day. They meditated together before having sex. They had intercourse by assuming a number of Kama Sutra positions and intoning a variety of mantras that he prescribed for unblocking the chakras, which were clogged, he said, by too much modern living. She must have felt emotionally vulnerable that day. It was as though she wanted this holy man to ejaculate inside her, she wanted his preciously guarded semen. He was the only client with whom she ever felt anything resembling intimate tenderness, nurtured over the many years of their business association and spiritual transactions. She didn’t tell him to come inside her, but he seemed to know that’s what she wanted. She always found him to be extremely perceptive because of the years of religious training he had undergone. After an unusually voluble repetition of the sacred word Om, he gave a little spasm that tickled her uterus. She felt his semen drip out of her after he withdrew. She felt the wet discharge in her panties while she drove down Wilshire Blvd. on the way to her next appointment. Neither of them had said anything about this alteration of their usual practice. And then, two weeks later, Delilah discovered she was pregnant.