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A Man with Sons
For David Batterham You come back with a heaped shopping-basket: a huge romaine, a wholemeal loaf, tomatoes. You put a big chipped saucepan on to boil, dip the tomatoes on a ladle. "What are you doing to them, Dad?" The 18-year-old looks up from his letter. "Taking off their skins." Nonfunctional, I straddle a wooden chair, watch you sieve the scalded, peeled pulp-globes into (you tell us) last night's fish-broth. My friend's just made her way here from the Tube, climbs from the lower room contentedly ungloving book-dust from her elbows, adds cadenza to the kitchen colloquy. My stomach calms an octave into speech. Stained mugs, newspapers, straggle off the table as the boys straggle in. One, fourteen, looking ten, overalled, leaves a postcard album on a cluttered shelf. Svelte in T-shirt as your bronze Florentine namesake, the questioning middle one makes room for his leather-jacketed, apricot-cheeked friend who lives here too. The twenty-year-old painter, slicked back damp from summer job lifeguarding, eye-sockets blackberry blotches: "T got in a fight. Really, I got fought on. Who wants," he slices, back to us, "some bread?" Now there is a salad on the table, green, orange, purple, frilling a wooden bowl. You plunk down odd plates, ceramic porringers your brother made. If an ailanthus tree strained through the splintery floorboards, it would be me, leaf-pores dilated toward you, perhaps because this is complete without me. Pouring water, you pose inadvertently, with the two younger boys bent toward your chair. The big window behind the table frames you with a bricked-in garden where a transplanted pet's five-fingered leaves stretch to the light. My friend, mother of sons, pours warm baritone laughter on the banter like burgundy. Milk, water, Coca-Cola gurgle in glasses. She roots me (boy-lover once, once your lover, a daughter's mother) to the other plot I garden weeding out nostalgia. Your soup is good as your boys' voices, bread shared on a board (as little or as much as we can share). I weigh the paradox of praising you for what, unpraised, daily, most women do, a praise, a paradox I can't afford. You heap my plate with salad, wedge of bread, after my friend's, before your youngest's; then the grown boys amicably seize the bowl. Made adversaries by tired ironies at midnight, failures of nerve, failures of charity, bad actors in humiliating roles: primeval woman, archetypal man who clutch, abandon, claim, betray, demand; friends in noon's grace we are forgiven, whole.