The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked.
I nodded.
“What kind of name is Tomm? I mean, when you first called, I thought of
Billy Bob, or Becky Sue, or something like that.” I laughed and nodded: I had
heard this before, and everyone asked about the name. “I don’t mean to pry,”
she said, tilting her head to the side and pulling her hair back from her face.
That was unfair, I thought; I’d tell state secrets to see that gesture again.
“My grandfather, my father’s father, he came to Brooklyn from Poland.
Only he was supposed to go to Liverpool, because that’s where his brother
went, and that’s where he thought his boat was going. He couldn’t read or
write, and I guess he just figured he’d hop on the first boat with an Englishspeaking
crew. So on the way west, he decides he has to anglicize his name.
Anyway, he turns to one of the shipmates—”
“The first mate?”
“The boatswain? The keelhauler? Who knows; I’ve been on one boat in
my life, and that’s the Staten Island Ferry. So he asks this guy, ‘What’s the most
English name you can think of ?’ The guy says, ‘Tom.’ So that became his last
name. How the extra m got thrown in, I don’t know, but that, believe it or not,
is the story of my last name. What about you? Rowe? You a Mayflower baby?”
She laughed, accidentally spitting a little beer back in her pint glass.
“Right. My father likes to think so. My mother, though, she’s your basic
generic midwestern girl. Scandinavian, Scots-Irish. Probably a bit of something
else, too. It’s the kind of ethnic background that doesn’t really count as
ethnic background.”
“Close family?”
“I’m very close to my mother. She lives on her own just outside Chicago.
Schaumburg, if it means anything to you.” I shook my head. “But that’s
about it. My father I see every so often, as infrequently as possible. He ran
away with someone else when I was about six, then ditched her a while later.
There’ve been lots of someone elses. Anyway, he lives down in Florida now,
in a silly little bungalow right on a golf course where he can drink 7-and-7s
and stay vain. He hates the cold, so he never comes up here. An added advantage
to living in Lincoln.”
126