The Book of Baby Names Read online

  * * *

  Emily

  In the Best Stories…

  Halfway through, Russell started to suspect he hadn't made the best choice for Emily's bedtime story.

  He'd decided on Prosper Mérimée's “Mateo Falcone,” a nineteenth-century short story from an anthology he'd held onto since his college days. The story was four pages of double-column type—the perfect length for a bedtime read. Russell first encountered the story about fifteen years ago, and had a vague recollection that it was a good adventure, with some nice elements of suspense.

  Reading it aloud was going well. He was able to smooth over some of the older language by improvising quickly, and there were nice opportunities to speak in different voices: the gruff father, his boastful son, and the frenzied outlaw seeking sanctuary in the Falcone household. Russell was no expert with dramatic voices, but he exaggerated each of them just enough so that Emily could distinguish the characters easily.

  The child in the story, Fortunato, is home alone when a hunted felon rushes in and demands a hiding place. At first the young boy refuses to help, but after the outlaw pays him a five-franc coin Fortunato hides him in a pile of hay outside the house.

  It was a happy accident that Fortunato was ten years old, just a year older than Russell’s daughter. Having a protagonist so close to her own age definitely seemed to increase Emily’s interest in the story. She sat up straight in bed, watching him carefully as he continued reading.

  Next, the search party arrives. Their commander, the Adjutant, notices that the criminal's trail ends mysteriously near the Falcone's porch. He suspects Fortunato is not telling the truth when he denies having seen the criminal, so he tempts the child by offering a silver pocket watch if he will reveal the man's whereabouts.

  Russell now remembered that this part of the story had made a big impression on him in school, so he got more involved as he read it. He mimed holding the watch on the chain, bringing his hand close to Emily's face and swinging his wrist back and forth. Emily was transfixed.

  “The child's face,” Russell read aloud, “plainly showed the struggle that was going on in his soul between covetousness and respect for hospitality.”

  Emily's brow furrowed—an expression that reminded him of her mother. “What's that mean?”

  “Well,” he explained, “covetousness is when you want something really badly—that's the pocket watch. Respect for hospitality, well, that's a little trickier. When he took the man's money and offered to hide him, that was a kind of promise. The thief was really like a guest in his house. Since he'd promised to protect the man, it would be wrong to betray him to the Adjutant. Do you understand?”

  Emily nodded.

  Russell thought of another reason why he'd chosen this story. He'd always liked stories where a character faces some kind of moral dilemma. Especially here, where it presented a test to Fortunato—and maybe a lesson for his daughter.

  If his wife could see him now, she would be proud. Patricia always had the better parenting skills; now that she was gone, he had to take over with hardly any practice. Here he was reading a bedtime story for the first time, and it was working. Emily was being good and, from what he could gather, was even understanding the story.

  He continued reading aloud and reached the moment when Fortunato succumbs to temptation and takes the offered pocket watch, pointing to the felon's hiding place inside the haystack.

  That was when Russell started to feel uneasy.

  This kind of betrayal doesn't go unpunished in stories, he thought.

  And if a kid has an ironic name like Fortunato, it’s a pretty clear sign that something bad will happen to him. How could he have missed the obvious foreshadowing?

  Russell then remembered that the real focus of the story was on the father, and the family honor.

  He remembered how the story ends.

  When Mateo Falcone returns home and learns what his son has done, he's deeply ashamed at the public humiliation. He walks Fortunato into the field beside their house, shoots him, and buries him.

  And Russell started to feel like an idiot, like the worst parent of all time.

  There was too much upsetting in the world, in his life. He was supposed to shield Emily from it all; that was what Patricia had wanted. But here he was reading Emily a story in which the father kills his only son.

  He thought about changing the ending, somehow improvising a quick solution to the problem. The mother's arguments could win over the father, despite his strong principles about loyalty and family honor. But he was pretty sure Emily was smart enough to figure out if he changed too much in the story.

  He should give her the direct, difficult truth—just as he’d had to do before, to explain why her mother wouldn’t be coming home from the hospital.

  So he read the story through to the end, as written.

  As he expected, Emily objected. “Why did the father do such a bad thing?”

  Russell explained that the father in the story wasn’t a bad man. “We’re supposed to feel sorry for him, really,” he said. “He doesn’t want to do this to his son. Sometimes things happen a certain way, head along a certain path, and you don’t have a choice.”

  She shook her head. “If he didn’t want to, he didn’t have to.”

  These concepts were above her. And if she didn't understand it all, how could she expect the boy in the story to understand it? And why should Fortunato be punished for something he didn't understand?

  Why? The same thing crossed his mind about Emily's mother, and her slow battle with cancer. There’s always suffering, and you just can’t understand it all. Her last week in the hospital, Patricia hadn’t wanted Emily to visit. It had been so tough to shield his daughter from what was going on. All those questions—ones that he couldn't answer himself.

  And now it was supposed to be a comfort that he could look at Emily's face and be reminded of his wife. Instead, it just made everything much more painful. Her mother should be here, offering guidance. Look at him, for God's sake, with this ridiculous choice of a bedtime story. Patricia would never have allowed this.

  “I just don't see why it had to end that way,” Emily said. “Why does the father do that?”

  All he could think to say was, “Because that's the way it has to be. In the best stories, the child always dies in the end.”

  He hadn't really meant to say it, and the confused look on Emily's face made him sorry. So he smiled at her, then winked. At that, Emily laughed.

  But he thought it was mainly a nervous laugh. Her breathing seemed a bit anxious, which didn't bode well for getting her to fall asleep easily.

  “The watch,” he asked her, changing the subject. “Would you have taken the watch?”

  Emily shook her head back and forth. Maybe she actually had understood the story.

  “Even if it had been pretty? Prettier silver than you had ever seen?”

  “Well, if it were really pretty…”

  Russell decided that he wasn't a very good teacher.

  There wasn’t much more he could say. He dimmed the lamp on her end table, leaving just enough light to keep her from getting scared.

  “Don't forget to fluff my pillow,” she said.

  He rubbed the top of her head, kissed her, then took the pillow from her, patting it several times. Once it was fluffed, he positioned it carefully, then listened patiently for her slow, agitated breathing to calm down.

  * * *

  Tommy

  The Well-Adjusted Child

  Christopher let the two police officers wait on the front porch. He would only be a minute, just long enough to find the right picture.

  Perhaps he was rude not to invite them inside. But he was a distraught parent, whatever they might think, and he wasn’t in the best frame of mind to act the courteous host.

  Alabama’s finest. Except they hadn’t been fine to him at Tommy’s school.

  Raised eyebrows, bemused glances
. An obvious “And you are…?” skepticism, as if he had no rights at all. Tommy’s mother had essentially kidnapped the boy from his third grade class room, yet the officers acted like Chris was the criminal.

  He’d explained it again and again. No, he wasn’t listed on the school’s paperwork as a parent—just a family friend. They’d won the custody battle, but not without a stern lecture from the town’s conservative judge, who suggested they downplay Chris’s relationship with Tommy’s biological father. Supposedly this suggestion meant to spare Tommy from being teased by other students, but it was a typical example of small town prejudice.

  He wished he hadn’t let Mark convince him to follow the judge’s “advice.” In the school’s main office, he could barely keep himself from crying or screaming. He kept thinking about Mark, about how horrible it would be to break this news to him.

  The police wasted so much time. He’d repeated: Mark isn’t available right now. He’s on his way back from California; his plane is in the air. I’m Tommy’s father, too. Let’s do something before Mark gets home. Let’s find Tommy before that woman takes him too far away.

  And they had to have known all along. You couldn’t live in a town this small without knowing about the gay couple with the kid.

  Be strong, he reminded himself. Be strong. You can’t fix society all at once.

  Some idiot receptionist hadn’t checked the file, just let Linda take Tommy straight out of his third grade classroom. An hour later the assistant principal noticed the mistake and called Chris at work. By the time Chris got to the elementary school, convinced them to call the police, then persuaded the officers he had some authority in this situation, Linda had about a two-hour head start out of town.

  The officers insisted on a recent photo of Tommy before they would begin the search. Chris carried a money clip, without a photo sleeve, and they him a skeptical look when he didn’t instantly produce a wallet snapshot: Don’t have a picture of your kid? What kind of a father are you?

  To speed things up, they reluctantly agreed to follow him home from Tommy’s school.

  As Chris moved to the bookshelf in their living room, he heard the click of the officers’ footsteps on the tile floor. They’d invited themselves inside, apparently, and waited in the foyer.

  He picked up the beige shoebox from the bottom shelf. They didn’t take a lot of pictures, certainly not enough to organize formally in a photo album. Mark said that memories were the best; he loved Tommy enough that he didn’t need too many glossy souvenirs.

  Chris was ready to shout “Here it is!” and carry the box unexamined to the officers. But he couldn’t trust them to find the best likeness. Chris knew his son.

  He took off the lid. The loose photographs rustled in the box: a mixed chronology, a jigsaw puzzle of their life together. He slid pictures of himself and Mark to the side, tried to find the most recent image of Tommy.

  He found a picture of a third-grade boy who sat on stone steps between Chris and Mark, his smile caught by the automatic timer of their flash camera.

  The boy in the photograph wasn’t Tommy.

  * * *

  Children can be cruel. That’s a fact, and we need to accept it.

  These days, it’s hard enough to be a kid with “normal” parents.

  Growing boys need a mother’s influence.

  Such were the arguments they faced in the courtroom, all based on the same assumption: it was harmful for a child to be raised by two openly gay men.

  The whole time, Chris wanted to shout down the arguments. Other people were the problem. The rest of the world needed to get right. Teach them not to be so stereotypical with male and female parenting roles. And how about: don’t allow kids to bully each other at school, regardless of their family situation.

  Mark sided with their lawyer, who advised them to be quiet and calm, to insist that they were aware of these so-called problems, and would take steps to minimize their impact on Tommy.

  Mark’s sister testified she would be a regular presence in the child’s life and would provide some of the mothering that the boy would not get from his two fathers.

  They decided to stress the phrase “well-adjusted child,” to shift emphasis away from the labels “normal” and “abnormal.” To Chris, the hyphenated adjective seemed all the more offensive. The idea that what Tommy needed was an adjustment—like something you’d get from a tailor who fixes the cuff of your trousers, a chiropractor who realigns your spine. A child, apparently, could be manipulated like a department-store manikin.

  Chris and Mark themselves had to testify, in all seriousness, that they would work very hard not to force their lifestyle on Tommy as he matured.

  As if you could train someone to be gay. As if being gay would be a problem.

  For school, they agreed not to advertise their family situation. Mark would be the primary parent, and his life partner would be downgraded to “friend.” It wouldn’t hurt to mention the ex-wife sometimes, to remind everyone that Mark was once part of a legally-sanctioned marriage. A farce—but it was worth it to keep the boy, to raise him away from an unstable and self-hating woman.

  * * *

  He shuffled through the photographs, and found none of Tommy.

  But the other child—he was there in all of them. He wore the same clothes as Tommy, posed in the same positions (a caught softball, a high arc on the swing set), mimicked the same expressions (a glow of wonder at Tommy’s birthday cake, a hearty smile as the neighbor’s puppy squirmed in his arms). It was as if his face were pasted over Tommy’s in each image. Aside from the obvious differences in hair and eye color, sharper nose, thinner lips, it was the face of a slightly older child. Squinting closer at a few of the snapshots, Chris decided the body was a bit less pudgy than Tommy’s, held a stiff posture that almost seemed to hint at tense, adolescent muscles.

  He imagined a series of quick, then quickly rejected, explanations: a mix-up at the photo labs; a strange anomaly in the picture stock that altered the images over time; an elaborate (and out of character!) practical joke that Mark decided to play on him, unaware how badly they’d need an accurate photo of their boy; a cruel trick from Mark’s ex-wife, as if she had the time and skill to break into their home and alter all their photographs before she headed to the school to kidnap Tommy.

  Mark was a website designer, knew how to use a scanner and image manipulation software. But what would be the point? And where were the original pictures?

  A throat cleared. The older of the two police officers had stepped right behind him. The second man stayed outside the room, framed in the doorway.

  Chris fumbled with the shoebox, almost dropped it. “I thought there would be a recent photo in here.” He closed the lid and returned the box to the bottom shelf, even as the officer attempted to take it from him.

  “You say you’re the boy’s father. Excuse me, one of the boy’s fathers. And you can’t locate a recent photo?” Stocky and in his mid-fifties, this was the senior officer—the one who would most likely be in charge of the search for Tommy. Conservative, by-the-book, and from a world where homosexuality was never an open issue. Clearly, he’d like to keep it that way.

  “It’s here somewhere. Mark usually took care of this kind of thing.”

  The other officer moved into the room. This younger man was handsome, in a way that made him seem imposing. Chris worried that the policeman would interpret his flustered motions as flirtation—then got angry with himself for having the idea.

  The young officer took a card from his front pocket. He extended the business card away from his body, held it by the edge to avoid any brush against Chris’s fingertips when he accepted the card. “Call us when you have a photograph.” The officer’s voice was deep, an exaggeration of masculinity. “It might be quicker to bring it to the station, or fax it.”

  “Yes. Thank you. I know you’ll do what you can.” He hated that he had to ingratiate himself to them. A wife could cry a
bout a missing son; the officers would speak gently to her, possibly hug and comfort her. Instead, Chris tried not to appear too weak or too effeminate.

  He waited until they left, until the door shut behind them, until he heard their squad car back out of the driveway. He waited until then to slide to the floor and give himself over to tears.

  Then he remembered the DVD-R. When they first moved into the house, eight months after being awarded full custody of their child, Chris decided they should film Tommy playing in his new back yard. They documented the occasion with a borrowed Flip camera, and Mark burned the digital file to a recordable disk. The jewel case was tucked in among their CDs, Tommy’s name written over the plain disk. Perfect: they could freeze an image on the video, then save it as a .jpg photo the police could use.

  He should make those officers watch the whole video. They’d see Tommy’s smiling face, realize what good parents Chris and Mark were. They’d have to acknowledge the validity of his and Mark’s relationship—a relationship that was deep and meaningful, even from their first meeting…

  * * *

  “There’s one thing more I haven’t told you.”

  Until that moment, it was the perfect first date. All the more surprising in a small college town in Alabama where a decent date, even a not-horrific date, was too much to hope for.

  He’d been skeptical when one of his colleagues, a history teacher, suggested he should meet her brother. Susan didn’t supply many details—just that Mark planned to move back to Alabama and she thought the two of them would get along well. He was visiting with Susan for a week while he scouted a local apartment.

  To Christopher’s astonishment, he was attracted to Mark almost immediately. They met at the town’s one good restaurant, a new French café run by a former Graysonville University student.