When the nurse called after our amniocentesis and told me that Kate was free of defects, I was so relieved. Then she asked, “Do you want to know the gender?”
(Wait a minute! Damn. This piece of the story has no suspense! We already know that Kate is a girl. Right then, soldier on, make the most of a bad job. Can’t resist: when we were in Delaware, we were friends with an English couple. They had settled in America because of the energy and optimism. In England, they said, people were just satisfied to “make the best of a bad job.”)
I gripped the back of the chair behind which I was standing. At one of the ultrasounds, one of the techs thought she had found a male reproductive organ. OK, a penis. I see you in the back sniggering. “Yes?” I said.
“It’s a girl,” she said.
“Really?” I was bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet with joy. “Are you sure?” Either she was incompetent or lying.
My joy must have been evident, because she said, “I’ve got the chromosome.”
I was so relieved not to have a little boy. My concerns were that, at 48, I was just too old to coach a little boy in all of the activities in which I would be called upon: baseball, my sport, of course; basketball, of which I played some; football, no problem, he wouldn’t be permitted; tennis and golf, I was a competent player but I’d just buy him lessons anyway. Skiing? Please no.
And I was dimly aware of what would increasingly alarm me later, that little boys mainly needed to beat up on other little boys. I had a replaced hip, arthritis in my hands, and was all around creaky. I couldn’t handle a little boy.
OK, that’s all sexist, right up front. But I will stand my ground on this point: get four little girls together, they form a circle and do something social and fun and clever. Find four little boys, and they immediately start crashing trash can lids on each other’s head. No exceptions.
But there were other, starker reasons too. Jarecki men, on the whole, should not be allowed out into the world. In my generation, anyway, we are prone to schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism, paralyzing anxiety, general malaise, and a complete dread of encountering our fellow human.
A little history: my grandfather Josef Yaretski arrived here sometime in the late 19th century. (Genealogy courtesy of Nancy K. Plant.) He came from Poland, though in those days there was no Poland, having been partitioned by Prussia and Russia, and he was considered a Prussian. (How convenient for poets of a certain genre.) My grandmother Anna came over more or less at the same time from a little town east of Krakow, chiefly known now for the manufacture of automobile tires. That part of Poland was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and she was considered a citizen.
This sad accident of history prevents me from obtaining an EU passport; had Poland been Poland then, and as my grandparents were born there, I would be entitled to one. Thus no Italian villa.
(A favorite joke, though no one I know understands it, including the nice Polish guy who oversaw Kate’s and my trip to Eastern Europe two years ago this week: You’re Polish, and you’re invaded by Russians and Germans simultaneously. Whom do you shoot first? Depends on whether it’s business or pleasure. Anyone who can explain to me why and how this is funny contact me immediately.)
Josef and Anna met, love bloomed, yada yada yada, seven kids, including my father. Also in the gang were Stanislaus, Ludowicz, Victoria (huh?), John, the inevitable Mary, and Josephine. As luck would have it, the influenza of 1918 found its way to the little Polish coal mining town in east central Pennsylvania (Glen Lyon), and Josef was duly felled. Stan went into the mines to support the family.
Met later in life, the Jarecki men (as they spelled it) were an odd group, a self-made bunch of retired STEMmers. They had good wars, as the British used to say. Stan worked on radar, John worked on the Manhattan Project, and my dad fought in France where he was wounded. There’s little evidence of what Lou did, oddly enough, though one of my cousins thought he was a machinist in New Jersey. Presumably Stan, Lou, and John were too old to be drafted.
The not-so-large extended family would reunite in Glen Lyon once a year. Stan had no progeny, Lou only one, Victoria was a nun, John had two sons, Mary had none, my dad three, and Jo had about 25, but she and her Air Force pilot never came to these reunions. I haven’t seen those cousins since they came to my wedding, invited by my mother but not me. (The boy, with unmerited confidence, made a pass at my cousin on my mom’s side.)
The Poconos summers were bearable; this was 60 years ago and the world was a little cooler, and we were in the mountains. The cousins all played at this and that, while the older men sat in lawn chairs and read the paper.
I have a vivid memory of Grandma, well into her 80’s, taking a bite of a hot dog bereft of condiments, her eyes wide as she bit into the inferior sausage of her not so new country. When each of us kids was presented to her, she would put her hands up to her cheeks and rock back and forth in surprise and delight, mouthing Polish sounds in a high voice. Later, staring intently at a baseball game on TV, she pointed at a Mets right fielder and laughed and pronounced his name as it would have been in Poland: “Svoboda!”
The men may as well have recently immigrated. They seemed perfectly self-confident, but not as Americans but as Europeans. They swaggered slightly in their pressed grey slacks, and, poker-faced, seldom spoke. They should have had cigarettes held between their thumbs and forefingers, but, oddly, no one smoked. If asked about some issue that may have engaged them, all made the same gesture, one I have never seen again: they bent their elbows to raise their hands up near their faces, and, fingers bent, whipped their hands past their faces; an Italian New Yorker’s fuggetabouddit, but with cold Polish disdain: such that concerns you is beneath me.
Once, on a Sunday, we kids were all whipping about, racing, playing ball. Uncle Stanley asked if when I went into the house would I please bring him the comics. I promised to and then, about seven years old, of course forgot. When I had banged into the house and then sprinted out again, Uncle Stanley said not a word but rose magisterially (the head of the family) from his lawn chair and retrieved it himself. This memory is at least 60 years old, and, because he was so kindly, I’ve always felt bad that I let him down. I can still see him rising from his lawn chair and not meeting my eye.
The main thing about the Jarecki men is that they raised themselves without a father (my dad was seven when Josef died), found some way to make their ways in the world, succeeded, and died, uncomplainingly, generally of heart disease, in chronological order, having served the country, their families, and the Church.
They had sons. Oh, their sons. One of us has a Ph.D. in physics and is a schizophrenic. The most distinguished was literally a rocket scientist and during the Cold War was forbidden from talking about his work. One son I barely knew but I believe he flew helicopters and may have been gay, which one didn’t talk about in those years, certainly not among Polish Roman Catholics. The few rest of us, sigh. On the whole we’re reclusive, don’t like people, and, if I have read them right and am not simply projecting, have been disappointed by their lives.
Have we not lived up to our dads? Certainly not.
Do I, as a privileged white boy who’s never really had to fight for anything, unlike my dad, who fought for everything, feel I’ve let him down? Sure.
And I hate rhetorical questions.
I feel sick every time I think of him and what he must think of me. I both hope there’s an afterlife where I can see him and hope there’s not so I don’t encounter his disappointed look, which he gave so, so very seldomly.
He encountered nothing but adversity: growing up poor, getting to college on scholarship by playing four sports, working through the Depression, having to fight a war and being wounded, and getting a doctorate in record time, all with the backdrop of disapproving WASP in-laws.
And then always struggling with his particular Jarecki demons: people are either with me or against me, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know how to handle the conflict, I have to be better than everyone. Jarecki men suffer. I didn’t want to bring along another one just to have him punish himself. It would be too intentionally cruel.
Next time: The son I never had.
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