Winslow

 

“My earliest memory is feeling alone,” he wrote all those years later. He was anything but alone. Walter and Yvonne were exactly those stereotypical post-war parents of 1950s America. She was at home every day, and Walter arrived home reliably, with the cat, each day at 545. Yes, the cat – Buddy – somehow met Walter at the bus stop at Wayne and Manchester and walked home with him. Buddy never scratched infant Winslow, it should be noted. Unthreatened by poverty or danger or housecat, neither abused nor seriously neglected, the armature of his soul grew not around those banal and comforting facts but around the loneliness of that first memory. That became the frame and template. Note the paradox that adding Eunice made Winslow feel subtracted

Eunice was so named because it meant ‘good victory.’ Yvonne was rather pretentious, having only finished high school and aspiring for more. She wore her hair in a chignon, smoked cigarettes dramatically, listened to jazz and Bach on the record player, all while vacuuming and washing. Those who met Yvonne remembered her as the mother who wore green satin dresses under her apron. She wanted a classy name for her daughter, which Eunice was, but also to signify the miscarriage after Winslow and before Eunice. Amid the furor over abortion in our times, few consider that God may be the greatest abortionist, sloughing off at least a ten percent of all fertilized eggs, likely more. And no, they are not all genetic freaks who would have suffered. God is a wastrel, if one believes in a providential God, who created trees that shed ten thousand seeds every year. Fish lay thousands of eggs at once, termites and ants the same. Most do not survive, becoming food for others, or we would be up to our thighs in bugs. Should we be surprised that human fecundity is less than optimal?

Thus, her children all had unusual names reflecting her self-made sophistication, which came from Yvonne’s fawning admiration for intellectuals and artists. Hence Winslow, for Winslow Homer, and Albrecht for Albrecht Durer. Eunice, she discovered in a book of Greek mythology, and again as the sister of John F. Kennedy, who was a rising star in politics. Her third child, Sebastian, came from paintings of St. Sebastian which were part of an art history lecture she attended. She simply liked the name and found it dignified. No child of the 1950s would agree with that, of course. All three Merryman children fended off abundant mockery for their peculiar names.

Winslow’s was a crowded world, but he felt alone because he was odd even in this unusual family. There was the fact of his ugliness. That sounds harsh, but both Walter and Yvonne were strikingly attractive, and while babies as a species are considered at least cute, Winslow’s tufted black hair and different colored eyes caused more than one adult to pause before smiling. Adults know they have to smile for a baby, do it automatically, but not when they saw Winslow. While Eunice and Sebastian favored their parents in appearance, should you have seen family photos from those childhood years you could have been forgiven for thinking Winslow adopted.

Yvonne sometimes wondered where this child came from, though there was no medical doubt. She went into the delivery room pregnant and came out not. Through the haze of what was called ‘twilight sleep,’ a mixture of morphine and scopolamine that was in decline by then but Dr. Kretchmer, being German trained, was still using, she had very fuzzy memories of childbirth, which was the point. Maybe that was why, when she met her first born, she was less than head over heels. Hormones are wonderful things, and one of their tricks is to make post-partum mothers fall in love with their ruddy wrinkled blobs. But ‘twilight sleep’ papered over the first moment with amnesia. Then there were those eyes.

“Is that normal?” she asked the nurse when she brought baby Winslow to be nursed. Yvonne was determined to nurse her baby, something not as universally obvious as it is now.

“It is unusual,” the nurse said casually, without looking hard, as though she had seen it before. “You may have to teach him to latch on,” the nurse said. Yvonne was not quite sure what that meant.

Some days later, after they were back in their upstairs apartment on Flower Drive, an official letter came from the obstetrician’s office. “Hmm,” Walter wondered, as he opened it; they paid the bill already. “Post Partum Pathology Report,” it said. “Evidence of initial diploid pregnancy; fetal resorption likely,” Walter read aloud.