Guy Tiphane
February 4, 2004

There Was Your Son

No one could have foreseen Harry Ferguson’s suicide. The quiet High School kid had never shown signs of distress or depression, and his academic records had been very good until this year. But there had been a problem, his mother discovered while going through his things in the room he shared with his brother Ted. As if she might have found the key, the secret he had taken with him, she stared at the computer-generated score report showing poor grades in his first two months in the ninth grade. What had gone on? She wondered how he had managed to intercept the letter addressed to his parents in order to avoid that question. She wondered if she would have been able to save him, had she received the letter and talked about it. She imagined her asking:

“What’s going on? Anything bothering you? You used to have good grades!”

She imagined his answer would have been “I don’t know” accompanied with vague and dismissive arm gestures. He would have gone to his room and stayed there, as if ordered to. She could not imagine how else she could have addressed the issue with him. But she felt guilty, as if she needed more kindling in the fire slowly consuming her, about the fact that he had been so afraid of his parents’ reaction to his poor performance at school. What could have bothered him so much at school that his scores had plummeted? What was it that was so serious that he would suddenly feel hopeless, so hopeless to jump in front of a truck on a rainy day?

Her husband had not been of much help, spending longer hours at work and coming back home with a mixed smell of beer and mouthwash. How could she complain? She helped herself with gin to get to sleep too, and they wanted to avoid each other, avoid the possibility that another son could ever be born of them. Who knows if he had already taken a lover, one of those women at his office waiting like vultures for the next wounded man? She had talked to the Parish Priest but had felt more distressed at the idea that she needed to help redeem the lost soul of her son, for he had mistakenly died in sin. Apparently it would have been better for her son to kill someone else rather than himself. He would have gone through a lot of trouble but his soul would still be savable. She had revolted, and she no longer went to church. The other women of the parish probably thought she had turned crazy after the accident. They were probably relieved that she would not show up on Sunday and stare at their happy families.

The school director had kept quiet over the event. He had gone to his classroom, announced the disappearance, recommended to pray for their schoolmate and to go on with their schoolwork as if nothing had happened. But the circumstances had been debated among the students, for there had been witnesses. There were those who believed it could only have been an accident, while most of the students speculated, sometimes wildly, about his motives. Some twelfth graders had discussed his case as an existentialist question. He was no longer ignored.

The mother decided to go to the school to meet with the English teacher, the subject her son had been the best at until this year. She had only spoken on the phone with the director, who had not shown any interest beyond the usual formalities. She ignored the chaos the school experienced every day at lunch time and easily found the teachers’ lounge, one of the few clearly marked doors, but closed. She obtained no answer to her knocking, suspecting the teachers wanted to avoid any intrusion from students wanting favors. She waited until a woman came to the door with a key in her hand.

“Would you know where I could find Mr. Mitchell?” she asked the woman.

“Sure, he is in here. Please, come in.”

The woman showed her a balding man in a white shirt and tie who was eating a sandwich while reading a book.

“Mr. Mitchell?” she interrupted.

“Yes?” he said, putting his book down as if he had been caught reading prohibited material.

“I am Mrs. Ferguson,” she said, “Harry’s mother?”

The man looked down and said he was sorry for her loss. But he looked sincere.

“I wondered if you could tell me about my son, you see,” she pulled out the report from her purse, “I had no knowledge of his poor performance…”

He raised his eyebrows, as if surprised, and thought for a moment.

“I had wondered about that, myself,” he said, “I could not understand how Harry,” he paused as in respect for his memory, “how he seemed to make so many obvious mistakes. His homework had become pitiful. I remember once he claimed I had lost his composition, but I had an inkling he might be hiding something…”

The teacher looked sorry to be revealing this to the poor mother at such a moment. The mother became even more puzzled: Harry had been spending long hours in the study, often missing popular TV programs. What could he be doing in the study? Mr. Mitchell seemed eager to help, but what else could he say?

“Kids often have a hard time in ninth grade. They seem to be going through rapid changes, and some have a harder time than others. At first, Harry had seemed eager to learn, but I often caught him daydreaming. I looked at his file from last year and his other teachers had called him withdrawn even when his scores were excellent.”

Mr. Mitchell looked like he cared about his students, but he had not found the answer to Harry’s falling grades.

“I’m really sorry,” he said, genuinely.

She thanked him and got up, putting the paper back in her purse.

“Mrs. Ferguson?” the teacher asked.

“Yes?”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

She lowered her eyes, not knowing what to answer. For what should she say, “No, it was mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa?” Guilt had been established and she knew everybody believed it was just: she was to live the rest of her life in terrestrial Purgatory. Yet, there was some relief in Mr. Mitchell’s affirmation, as if he believed that she was not really the monstrous mother who had let her son die.

She returned to her son’s bedroom and looked around. A flashlight near the bed, probably to read under the covers. The old stuffed dog, Fido, so worn out she had begged him to throw it away because he was old enough now to sleep by himself. The Dinky toy Mercedes limo, with windshield wipers that moved. The Meccano building set. There were no traces of what she wanted him to do, play Hockey or Baseball. She leafed through some of his books, The Green Idol, The Black Orchid, The Illustrated Adventures of Tintin the Reporter, none of which she knew or had ever paid attention to.

She went downstairs to the study and sat at the desk he had used, his own desk. She opened the drawers, in search of unlikely clues. A photo of his friend Gary’s dog. A photo of Gary himself, taken a bit crooked, a bit awkward. She had not seen Gary in a long time, she thought. They were good friends, although Gary had peculiar hobbies, such as knitting. His mother was really a saint, with her eight children. In the drawer, underneath the school papers, underneath the photos, she found newspaper clips, all about marching bands. She had no idea he liked them. Maybe he wanted to be in one but never said anything about it. Instead she had tried to push him in directions he had no interest in. He had a complex mind, she thought.

The phone rang upstairs. She quickly put the marching bands, the photos, the school papers back in the drawer and closed it. As she ran upstairs to answer the phone, she started to forget the unknown side of her son. She didn’t want to imagine him. From then on, he was to remain the nice kid on the photo in the frame in the living room, and everyone would always be very proper and never ask who he was, just accept him as he was.