His Illegal Self

27

She lay beside him in the blue light listening to the metallic explosions of possum droppings on the roof. With his moon-black lips, he seemed even more a foundling. To continue to deceive him seemed too cruel, but to tell the truth was even worse. In the humid darkness, Dial screwed up her face imagining how it would feel to have the whole foundation pulled from underneath your life. His real mother had been a star child too, so blessed that when you saw her do the simplest thing, pull on a sweater or break into a jog, for instance, you were aware of a perfectly symmetrical being, each foot the same, each blue eye identical, her even white teeth beyond the reach of orthodontics. She came to Radcliffe at sixteen, summa cum laude from Dalton, fluent in three languages. When she returned to the Belvedere at Christmas 1964 this child was in her womb, a fish with gills, a tadpole heart.

It was the sixties, but years before Radcliffe girls were on the Pill and boys slept over Friday nights. This was a teenage pregnancy with fifties shame and shadows, linocut illustrations in a women’s magazine.

Did she even know she was pregnant. She confessed nothing, but it did not take a great deal for Phoebe Selkirk to make the diagnosis. It was Christmas morning when things came to a head, the news giving Buster Selkirk all the reason he needed for a vodka. The day sort of went from there, filled with shouting and wailing and the caterer’s trays and boxes were abandoned and Susan retreated to a locked bedroom, alone with a tray of garlic mashed potatoes.

By midnight, lying awake listening to her daughter vomiting in the bathroom, Phoebe Selkirk still had no clear idea of who the father was or what her daughter imagined her life would be from here, only that the subject of “tidying up” her “condition” was not acceptable. That suicide had not been threatened seemed an encouraging sign, in the circumstances.

Mrs. Selkirk had until now proclaimed she had too much energy to sit still on an airplane, but on the following day, which she insisted on calling Boxing Day, she took a single Valium and traveled from Idlewild to Boston and from there to Harvard where her father had endowed a library and a chair. She consulted with no one about this trip, neither daughter nor husband, the latter having, in any case, gone off to sleep at the Harvard Club which was half empty for the holiday. She left her daughter sleeping and called in Gladys from vacation to clean up the mess and keep her company. In Quigley House she met with the dean of students and the president and persuaded them that they were capable of dealing with this little “bump,” which she thought of as a kind of hiccup but which was not understood that way by the two men. If the father had been a Harvard man there was no curiosity expressed and in the years when she drank her first martini at exactly six o’clock, Mrs. Selkirk would wryly comment on the three wise men come to discuss the virgin birth.

Mrs. Selkirk made no gift immediately, but she did encourage the dean and president to consider what it was that the School of Arts might have on its Christmas wish list. At the time she could not imagine she would ever blame Harvard for anything.

Phoebe Selkirk was, to put it very mildly indeed, curious about who the baby’s father was, but each time the question was asked the girl withdrew further, and her room, normally so bright and orderly, took on a dark dank tangle more suitable to an adolescent boy than the girl who had announced, on her twelfth birthday, her plan to be the American ambassador to France.

So you have no plans for marriage? she asked.

The girl’s laughter shocked her to such a degree that she began to wonder if schizophrenia more than pregnancy might be the problem.

In a very small way this disaster was a gift for Phoebe Selkirk, energizing her at a time when she was beginning to cause major trouble on the co-op board. While the boy’s cartilage was changing into bone, his grandmother found the house two hours from New York City, Kenoza Lake, Sullivan County, a million miles from anyone she knew.

She announced this to her daughter, who did not comment, and to her husband, who smiled and lifted both arms in the air, a very irritating habit that seemed to absolve him of all responsibility for anything, even his art purchases which he always sold too early or too late. He was kind of famous, although she wished he would shut up about it, for “getting out of” Pollock.

Tomorrow, we’re going, she said.

Later everyone would hear that Susan had been too young for Radcliffe and so was going to the Sorbonne for a year, a story her mother later amended when she learned the Kelvin and the Goldstein girls would be doing just the same and wanted to share an apartment in the Sixth.

She took the Peugeot and left her husband the ridiculous Alfa Romeo Spider with the midlife-crisis soft top. It was sunny and clear on the Palisades Parkway but once they crossed Bear Mountain the weather changed and they drove the last miles along 17B in freezing rain. On 52 they slid off the road, but it was close enough to walk. All through this the strange creature, her daughter, once talkative and happy, would not speak. She fell on the ice and bloodied up her knees.

You want to kill my baby, she said.

When Che was slow to talk, his grandma said it was because the mother would not speak to her all through her pregnancy.

She was in contact with the father, of course. Of that Phoebe Selkirk was positive, but how that happened she never could quite figure. Books came for the girl, books of an entirely new type, philosophy, economics, books that would never once have interested her. For years and years afterward she would upbraid herself for paying no attention to the poisonous content of the books-Marx, Sartre, Marcuse-when she spent so much time looking through the marginalia attempting to decipher a code. There was no code. They spoke on the telephone, but by the time the first bill came, quarterly in those years, the boy had grown a proper face and all his insides were working as they should. Then the two women drove down to the city and booked into the Gramercy Park Hotel where no one the Selkirks knew would ever stay.

It was from here, at the bottom of Lexington Avenue, that the mother got a cab to take her to Beth Israel where she gave birth to the boy whose name she registered as Che David Selkirk.

The name caused a huge upset at the hospital, but it was the David that really got the grandma going. Much later, when David Rubbo shook his fist at the secretary of state, the grandma recognized him straightaway.

Ha, she cried, that nose.

The mother had not been able to see the father from December 1964 until July 23, 1965, the night the boy was born. He had been discovered around dawn, his head on her milky breast, asleep. He had long fair curly hair, long lashes, a wide brow and a nose with a Roman hump. Beakish, Grandma would say later, which represented a softening of her opinion. It was a New England nose she now decided. The nurses who had already judged the father of a Che revised their opinions when they had seen him. They gathered in a semicircle, and when he woke they brought the baby for him. He was a baby still himself; they blew their noses.

The boy, the mother and the father would not be together again until freshman registration of 1966 when Miss Selkirk and the babysitter-a scholarship girl from Girls’ Latin-quietly took a floor of a triple-decker in Somerville, and the mother entered Radcliffe once again.

Dean Gilpin welcomed the returning student and her mother over tea. She left Che behind on that occasion, and although Dean Gilpin did not order her to hide her baby, this was what they meant when they used the word discretion.

So Che was kind of hiding from the start of his life. First at Kenoza Lake and then at Somerville and in both these places he was looked after by the girl from Southie.

The dean was preparing for bigger things than babies. There were fifteen thousand hippies living in Haight-Ashbury. The Beatles said they were more popular than Jesus Christ. Dave Rubbo burned his draft card on NBC. Everyone was ready for anything except, as Anna Xenos noted, Harvard “men” still “craved your bod” and clinked their glasses when a girl walked into the dining hall. They thought it was a whole new world, but they were the babies. Harvard was not ready for the first nursing mother to attend Ec 1.

Che also audited Gov 146. It is hard now to imagine how impossible this was. Harvard graduates with unfailing memories will tell you this could not have happened, but there was a picture in the Crimson the next day. Volume 23, issue 3. The father was often in the same pages, first because of the draft card, then because he was leader of SDS.

When Robert McNamara came to Harvard in September of 1966 it was SDS who led the protest. There were extreme left factions in SDS but it was still three years before the famous split that produced the Weathermen. Che’s dad did not have a gun in 1966. What he had was a list of ten questions for the secretary of defense.

The crowd was in good order but the Maoists were watching the back of Quincy House and one of them yelled, Back door.

The boy would remember none of this, of course. But the crowd broke, sprinting toward the back. The mother was in the front, Che in her arms, her wild hair streaming, the famous “fabulous” Tibetan shawl flying backward. The crowd bucked. The mother tripped. She plunged forward as the black Lincoln sped around the corner. There was so much criticism to come, but everyone who saw her said she fell like an athlete, rolling, landing on her back with the child safe against her stomach as she slid, not toward home base, but under the front bumper of the rocking car. The crowd went dead quiet then. This is known. A flashbulb popped, five times. That is all recorded. The mother lay still, headfirst, beneath the steaming radiator. Then the boy began to cry, and as the mother slowly raised her head, she saw a small man with a Hitler-like mustache. He was Bill Hicks of the Boston Globe and he had just taken the most famous photograph of 1966.

The mother’s long tanned back was all messed up and bleeding, but no one else was even scratched, certainly not Che. So it did not matter, you would think, his father thought, his mother thought, especially when looked at in the light of all the deaths in Vietnam.

Grandma Selkirk had a different opinion, and Bill Hicks’s famous photo made it comparatively easy to have herself appointed the boy’s sole guardian. After that, the boy did not see the mother.

The boy got some of this information from Cameron. But mostly what he had were scraps of paper and rubber bands. It was the babysitter, staring at him in the Queensland moonlight, who could have given him the rest. She kept her silence, imagining it would not help to know that your mother took pills to dry up her breast milk, that she had decided to harden her heart against you.