muffled longings after desired objects themselves muffled in vagueness. Except there was an additional need for secrecy that added to the usual furtiveness about more life-affirming matters. When I was 14, my father told
me that he’d contracted the HIV virus through an accident at the clinic he supervised, near Harlem. He had, he said, between months and five years to live, and neither my mother nor I were supposed to tell anyone about it: not our friends, not my teachers, or my mother’s musician colleagues, many of whom knew people suffering from the disease. And so it was that I came to live under a double regime of secrecy. I was quiet about my knowledge of my father’s impending death while at the New York school for tomorrow’s leaders (motto “We go forth unafraid”). At home I was anxious that any signs of life I gave would be inappropriate to the atmosphere in which our leap ahead into mourning was covered up by my father’s fluent discussions of the latest advances in medical technology and AIDS drugs, and my mother’s efforts to
you learn to keep it; it shapes you to its purpose even when it no longer serves any purpose”
make sure he was comfortable and undisturbed. In later years, the content of the
secret mattered less than the ways my mother and I both became habituated to a practice of indirection, woolly thinking, evasion. When I first decided to try to write about living with my father and his many secrets – of which the disease was the most visible – my first conscious step was to enroll myself in a PhD program in Comparative Literature, where any evidence of literary ambition would be taken as a symptom of one’s unfitness for the work of professional academic scholarship. What I wanted to do had to be done discreetly. At the same time, I started sleeping with the close friend of a girl I was in love with. It happened, I told myself, “by accident”. A secret doesn’t just keep you as you learn to keep it; it shapes you to its
“A secret doesn't just keep you as
purpose even when it no longer serves any purpose. Now that the story is out, my mother calls me up occasionally and says, for example, “I ran into Maury Silverberg on the subway today coming out of Lincoln Center.” I won’t remember Maury Silverberg, even though my mother insists he’s a wonderful man and lists his accomplishments known to her New York music scene. “He told me he was really enjoying your book,” she continues. I want to ask her why she’s telling me this. Does it make her proud? Ashamed? Angry? Does she find the man’s use of ‘enjoy’ offensive? Did she tell him, “I’m so glad you can enjoy the worst years of my life?” Instead, there’s a silence in which, maybe, she waits for me to ask, and I wait for her to frame the story for me, to give it some kind of narrative meaning that we can share. Even now, we’re still waiting to talk to each other openly, in the clearer light of who we know ourselves to be, out of the undergrowth.
Te Scientists: A Family Romance by Marco Roth Union Books HB Out now