Read Online Shadow Baby by Alison McGhee - Free Book Online Page B

all the way in to the old man’s trailer. She liked me to walk out to the entrance and meet her there. It’s good for you, Clara, she used to say, the fresh air.
    “Good,” he said, after I wrote it in the air with my nose. “You’re getting the hang of it.”
    “What did it say?” I said. “Did you really figure it out?”
    “I did.”
    “But could you tell I was writing
bye
?”
    “I could.”
    Nay sir, I think not
.
    I tested him again.
    I wrote him a note and put it under his coffee cup when I brought it over to the table.
    “What’s this?” he said.
    He pulled it out and looked at it.
    “What do you think?” I said.
    “Very good.”
    Why did I have to test him again? There wasn’t any need to. How I wish I hadn’t written what I wrote on that note:
I know you can’t read
.
    • • •
     
    T he old man remembered things in colors and sounds, not letters. Shapes he could hold in his head, and ideas, and memory was locked in him tighter than you can imagine. He had learned to form the words of his name. I watched him do it on the check he used to get every month. He made the letters by putting slashes here and slashes there: Georg Kominsky. You could tell he didn’t know how to make real letters. Letters to the old man were only shapes and sticks and curves, actors strutting and fretting on a stage, signifying nothing.
    Picture all that came into the old man’s life that he never knew the meaning of: words and sentences and paragraphs and pages. Pages and pages and pages.
    How many letters came to his trailer, and to all the places he may have lived before the trailer? How many people in this world sat down once late at night, lit a candle or turned on a lamp, and took pen in hand to write to the old man?
    Dear Georg
.
    Dearest Georg
.
    My beloved Georg
.
    And nothing, nothing in return.
    Picture the old man opening an envelope. Picture him recognizing the shapes of the writing, the twists and turns. Picture him looking at the lines and curves of the words. He could not make sense of the shapes. He could not turn lines and curves into meaning.
    People who loved the old man may have thought he died. They may have thought, no news from America is not good news. Our Georg surely would have written by now. Some thing unimaginably awful must have befallen him.
    The old man never let anyone know he couldn’t read. He was too proud. I knew this about him. I could tell. I can always tell. It’s one of my skills.
    They almost didn’t let him into Ellis Island because of his nose. The air-writing. Retardation, they thought, because of his nose going around and around and the look on his face because of his concentration. They almost chalked his coat with a white X, which meant they were going to send him back. It was only at the last minute that the old man realized why they were looking at him that way and he stopped tracing the flag in front of the Ellis Island building with his nose. He stood perfectly still and put a very intelligent look on his face. This is how I picture him, in his olden-days coat with the round collar and a dark hat, and boots that laced up high and were wearing through at the bottom, and one small satchel. That’s what they called duffels back then:
satchels
. He stood straight. He looked intelligent. He willed them with all his might to let him in.
    I’ve come this far
, he willed them.
Let me in
.
    The old man didn’t speak English yet. He would have willed them in his own, lost language, without seeing the image of the words in his mind. Everything in his body would have been bent into the willing.
Let me in, let me in, let me in
.
    T he old man’s little brother had known how to read. I know this because the old man told me.
    “Eli was very good in school,” he said to me once during the oral history.
    Eli knew that his brother could not read, so Eli would do the reading for the both of them while Georg, the old man,would go out and get a job and support them both. That