The Proof by Toi Derricotte

The Proof

 

After thirty years, I was done

with talking. I had told him

 

I was leaving, but still we’d sit

at the dinner table—me, to his right—& I’d watch him. He’d

 

put the forkfuls in his mouth & chew,

a calm look on his face. How I wanted him

 

to suffer, to see that there was some

 

register where it

mattered. If he would just turn

 

his eye, like a great

planet, slowly, as if over

 

epochs. I wouldn’t have left

 

if he had

looked at me with

 

sorrow or, perhaps, not even

sorrow, but to turn to me with sudden

 

awareness. Why were tears

 

pouring down my

cheeks? It wasn’t that he was angry,

 

that would have been

a kind of recognition. If anything confirmed

 

my going, it was that ab-

sence—not even cool—as if there was nothing

 

between us that couldn’t be dissolved

by will; nothing that could be

 

altered by desire.

 

He would often tell me about a tree

in his childhood that was right in the middle of a

 

baseball field, a huge old tree

where the kids played ball, so that they had to

 

run around it to hit second base, how the coaches

wanted to take it down . . . but there was one old man who fought

 

for the tree &, though he didn’t win & the tree was cut, whenever

Bruce went home, years later, there was a perfect

 

field but nobody ever played

there. Is the mystery that no matter what I felt

 

was missing, there is something

that remains? But he went on, the meat

 

chewed, the water in the glass

swallowed. Perhaps what I had put on the table tasted

 

good, perhaps he was appreciating

my efforts, that I had called him, that, as usual, I had

 

made dinner for us. Perhaps he was concentrating

on something that I couldn’t see—me, so determined

 

to affect him, to make him pay. Wasn’t there a right

 

& a wrong here? I remember the time I decided

 

to move to Pittsburgh

for the job, to stay married but to live

 

apart. We had gone out to

the Frank Lloyd Wright house, Falling Water,

 

& we sat by the stream. He confessed

that something in him had been missing

 

all those years. He talked about his

childhood—the fears, of him being

 

the only black

boy in that town, & how his mother brought the news

 

of lynchings fifty miles away

in Indiana & taught him not to touch

the white girls

who flirted. He didn’t present it

 

to change anything, not for

 

sympathy but, as it happened, sometimes—if rarely

in our 30 years together—that

 

we showed ourselves without even a scintilla

of the will

 

to make things better. & that’s what made it so

 

terrible & blinding, so

true.