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I have a grown child my wife doesn't know about
by Glenn Schiffman

"I have a grown child my wife doesn't know about."

I wish… I’ve fantasized a young man knocking on my door and saying,
"You are my father. You broke my mother's heart. She taught me to
forgive. She made me promise not to find you until after she died."

It's always a young man at the door. It's always the son I never had.

Of course, I invite him in.

I was 6 months old when my father died on a torpedoed gunboat in the
Sulu Sea in 1944. With no marriage certificate or veteran's benefits to
legitimize her bastard son, mother left…for good. Rigid, grumpy grand-
parents raised me. I toed their line for eighteen years, was a virgin
for nineteen, but by twenty-five was one of those guys who tried to
spread his seed across a continent. I wanted every colt in the herd to
look like me.

I fathered four who never saw the light of day. I supported those decisions,
paid for those abortions. My mother didn't have that option. I didn’t want
those women to mirror her.

Nonetheless, everyone has someone… I was almost twenty; Jeannetta was seventeen.
She was not just Puerto Rican like her mother. Her father was African and a visiting
professor at the University of Chicago. They lived in the International Apartments
and I lived in the Delta Theta house. We met the summer before my junior year, the
summer I worked the swing shift at Central Steel & Wire on 28th near Halsted, and was
caretaker of the fraternity house.

One June Sunday at dusk I sat on the front steps strumming a Martin guitar I bought in
a pawnshop at State and Congress a week before. Jeannetta walked up, introduced herself,
and asked me to play a song.

"I can’t. I know, like, two chords," I said.

"May I?" She reached for the guitar, tested the tuning, made several adjustments.
"Would you like me to teach you?" she asked.
Jeannetta had long, soft, black curls, dark-gold skin, and the mild astigmatism in her
left eye made our eye contact palpable.

That summer we spent all our free time together. She was literate, artistic, and
athletic. Her body had tone, not heft, and though just seventeen, she was a woman, not
a girl. Her father was from Cote d'Ivoire as she called it. She was fluent in his
French as well as the Spanish of her mother, an elementary school teacher.

I had dinner with the three of them one night in late August. Dinner was oxtails, fried
bananas; something called yucca, and other weird stuff I've never tasted before or since.
I did my best with my portion. Then came a gooey coconut cake stuck with lit sparklers.
It was her eighteenth birthday. I was embarrassed. I didn’t know, hadn’t asked,
and brought no gift.

Labor Day she closed the door to my narrow room in the DT house, stepped to where I
sat on a four legged bar stool, took the Martin from my hands, leaned it gently against my
desk, and then laid down on my mattress, and held out her arms. I slid into them,
beckoned by her wild eye.

I was her first, too. Even so, she was the teacher.

To my returning fraternity brothers a Black Puerto Rican "girlfriend" was not acceptable.
They told me to choose. "If you continue to date her," the president said, “the Delts
will reconsider your membership.”

I knew my "brothers" were jealous. Jeannetta was some kind of pretty, even with that
wild eye. She told me she loved me, truly loved me. I had no match for that love.
I was the steward; my job paid room and board; I couldn't afford UC without that. I
chose my "brothers in the bond" over her.

I don't have a child my wife doesn't know about. A young man won't knock on my door
and say, "You are my father. You broke my mother’s heart. She taught me to forgive,
and she made me promise not to find you until after she died."

It won't happen, it's wishful thinking, but, in my daydream, the son I never had looks
Puerto Rican … and, he has his mother's eyes.


 


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