December 27, 2000
Dear Franklin,
Having asked gently beforehand if I was up to it, tonight my mother had a little holiday hen party here, and I think she regretted her timing. As it happened, yesterday in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a very large, unhappy man—a software engineer named Michael McDermott, who the whole nation now knows is a science fiction fan, much as most men off the street are familiar with our son’s predilection for undersized clothing—walked into Edgewater Technology with a shotgun, an automatic, and a pistol and murdered seven of his coworkers. I gather Mr. McDermott was upset—and here I am, conversant with details of his financial life, down to the fact that his six-year-old car was on the verge of repossession—that his employers had garnished his wages for back taxes. I couldn’t help but think of your parents, since they don’t live far from Wakefield. Your father was always concerned that his top-of-theline appliances have a fine sense of proportion, a preoccupation that surely extends to behavioral ratios like grievance to redress. Your parents must imagine that the world of the physically preposterous, which doesn’t respect materials, is closing in on them. Having long since given up on the painful charade of inviting Sonya Khatchadourian for soirees in return and suffering the kind of fanciful excuses she always supplied me for why she could not attend opening night of my school play, these old birds had sampled my mother’s lahmajoon and sesame-topped ziloogs many times before and were disinclined to dwell on the finger food. Instead, with some diffidence, given the guest of honor, they were all dying to talk about Michael McDermott. One dowager commented sorrowfully that she could see how a young man might feel rejected with a nickname like “Mucko.” My crusty Aunt Aleen muttered that her own ongoing fight with the IRS—a $17 disputed underpayment in 1991 had over the years ballooned from interest and late fees to over $1,300—might soon move her to firearms herself. But they all subtly deferred to me, the resident expert with insight into the twitchy mind. I was finally forced to remind these women firmly that this friendless, overweight loner and I had never met. It seemed to register all at once that no one in this country specialized in plain old murder these days, any more than a lawyer would study plain old Law. There was Workplace Massacre, and there were School Shootings, quite another field of concentration altogether, and I sensed a collective embarrassment in the room, as if they’d all rung the Sales Department when they should have asked for Customer Relations. Since it’s still too dangerous to bring up “Florida” in company without being sure that everyone is on-side, someone prudently changed the subject back to the lahmajoon. Anyway, who says crime doesn’t pay? I doubt the IRS will ever see a dime of Mucko’s money now, and the forty-two-year-old tax cheat is bound to cost Uncle Sam a far prettier penny in prosecution costs than the IRS would ever have squeezed from his paycheck.
That’s the way I think now, of course, since the price of justice is no longer an abstract matter in my own life but a hard-nosed tally of dollars and cents. And I do often have little flashbacks of that trial—the civil trial. The criminal one is almost a blank. “Ms. Khatchadourian,” I will hear Harvey begin stentoriously on his re-direct. “The prosecution has made much of the fact that you ran a company in Manhattan while leaving your son to the care of strangers, and that when he turned four you were away in Africa.” “At the time I was unaware that having a life was illegal.” “But after your return from this trip you hired someone else to oversee the day-to-day business of your firm, in order to be a better mother to your child?” “That’s right.” “Didn’t you take over as his primary caregiver? In fact, aside from occasional baby-sitters, didn’t you cease to bring in outside help altogether?” “Frankly, we gave up on hiring a nanny because we couldn’t find anyone to put up with Kevin for more than a few weeks.” Harvey looked sour. His client was self-destructive. I imagined that this quality made me special, but my lawyer’s fatigued expression suggested that I was a set type. “But you were concerned that he needed continuity, and that’s why you terminated this revolving door of young girls. You no longer went into the office nine-to-five.” “Yes.” “Ms. Khatchadourian, you loved your work, correct? It gave you great personal satisfaction. So this decision was a considerable sacrifice, all for the sake of your child?” “The sacrifice was enormous,” I said. “It was also futile.” “No further questions, your honor.” We had rehearsed enormous, period; he shot me a glare.
Was I, back in 1987, already planning my defense? Though my openended leave from AWAP was on a grand, over-compensatory scale, it was cosmetic. I thought it looked good. I’d never conceived of myself as someone who dwelled upon what other people thought, but hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances. Hence, when you two met my plane at Kennedy I stooped to hug Kevin first. He was still in that disconcerting rag-doll phase, “ floppy”; he didn’t hug back. But the strength and duration of my own embrace paraded my born-again conversion in Harare. “I’ve missed you so much!” I said. “Mommy’s got two surprises, sweetheart! I brought you a present. But I’m also going to promise that Mommy’s never, ever going away for this long again!” Kevin just got floppier. I stood up and arranged his willful shocks of hair, embarrassed. I was playing my part, but onlookers might have deduced from my child’s unnatural lassitude that I kept him handcuffed to the water heater in the basement. I kissed you. Although I’d thought children liked to see their parents be affectionate with one another, Kevin stamped impatiently and mooed, dragging at your hand. Maybe I was mistaken. I never saw my mother kiss my father. I wish I had. You cut the kiss short and mumbled, “It may take a while, Eva. For kids this age, three months is a lifetime. They get mad. They think you’re never coming back.” I was about to josh that Kevin seemed more put out that I had come back, but I caught myself; one of our first sacrifices to family life was lightness of heart. “What’s this uherr, uherr! thing?” I asked as Kevin continued to tug at you and moo. “Cheese doodles,” you said brightly. “The latest must-have. Okay, buster! Let’s go find you a bag of glow-in-the-dark petrochemicals, kiddo!” And you tottered off down the terminal in tow, leaving me to wheel my luggage. In the pickup, I had to remove several viscous doodles from the passenger seat, in various stages of dissolve. Kevin’s dietary enthusiasm did not extend to eating the snacks; he sucked them, leeching off their neon coating and imbuing them with enough saliva to melt. “Most kids like sugar?” you explained zestfully. “Ours likes salt.” Apparently a sodium fetish was superior to a sweet tooth in every way. “The Japanese think they’re opposites,” I said, slipping my gooey collection out the window. Though there was a shallow back seat, Kevin’s child seat was fastened between us, and I was sorry that I couldn’t, as I used to, place a hand on your thigh. “Mommer farted,” said Kevin, now halving the difference between Mommy and Mother. (It was cute. It must have been.) “It stinks.” “That’s not the kind of thing you have to announce, Kevin,” I said tightly. I’d had that mashed beans and banana side dish at the Norfolk before catching the plane. “How about Junior’s?” you proposed. “It’s on the way, and they’re kid-friendly.” It wasn’t like you to fail to consider that I’d been in transit from Nairobi for fifteen hours, so I might be a little tired, bloated from the flight, overfed with airline Danishes and cheddar packets, and less than in the mood for a loud, camp, brightly lit hash house whose sole redeeming feature was cheesecake. I’d privately hoped that you’d have found a sitter and met my plane alone, to sweep me off to a quiet drink where I could bashfully reveal my turned maternal leaf. In other words, I wanted to get away from Kevin the better to confide to you how very much more time I planned to spend with him. “Fine,” I said faintly. “Kevin, either eat those cheese thingies or I’ll put them away. Don’t crumble them all over the truck.” “Kids are messy, Eva!” you said merrily. “Loosen up!” Kevin shot me a crafty orange smile and fisted a doodle into my lap.
At the restaurant, Kevin scorned the booster seat as for babies. Since clearly parenthood turns you overnight into an insufferable prig, I lectured, “ALL right, Kevin. But re mem ber: You on ly get to sit like an a dult if you act like one.” “NYEE nyee, nyeh nyeh. Nyeh nyeh- nyee -nyeh: Nyeh nyeh- nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh- nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyee nyeh nyeh.” With waltzing mockery, he had captured my stern cadence and preachy inflection with such perfect pitch that he might have a future singing covers as a lounge singer. “Cut it out, Kevin.” I tried to sound offhand. “Nye-nye nyee, nye nye!” I turned to you. “How long has this been going on?” “Nyeh nyeh nyeh NYEE nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh?” “A month? It’s a phase. He’ll grow out of it.” “Nyeh nyeh? Nyeh-nyeh nyeee. Nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh-nyeh.” “I can’t wait,” I said, increasingly loath to let anything out of my mouth, lest it come parroting back to me in nyeh-nyeh -speak. You wanted to order Kevin onion rings, and I objected that he must have been eating salty crap all afternoon. “Look,” you said. “Like you, I’m grateful when he eats anything. Maybe he’s craving some trace element, like iodine. Trust nature, I say.” “Translation: You like eaty-whizzes and curly-munchies, too, and you’ve been bonding over snack food. Order him a hamburger patty. He needs some protein.” When our waitress read back our order, Kevin nye-nye -ed throughout; “NYEE-nyeh nyeh-nyeh, nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh-nyeeeh” apparently translates “garden salad, house dressing on the side.” “What a cute little boy,” she said, glancing with desperation at the wall clock. When his patty came, Kevin retrieved the tall, faceted saltcellar with huge pour-holes and covered the beef with salt until it looked like Mount Kilimanjaro after a recent snow. Disgusted, I reached over with a table knife to scrape it off, but you held my arm. “Why can’t you let anything with this little guy be fun, or funny?” you chided quietly. “The salt thing is a phase too, and he’ll grow out of it too, and later we’ll tell him about it when he’s older and it’ll make him feel he had plenty of quirky personality even when he was a little kid. It’s life. It’s good life.” “I doubt Kevin’s going to have a hard time finding quirks.” Although the sense of maternal mission that had powered me through my last fortnight was fast abating, I had made myself a promise, Kevin a promise on arrival, implicitly you one as well. I took a breath. “Franklin, I made a major decision while I was gone.” With the classic timing of dining out, our waitress arrived with my salad and your cheesecake. Her feet gritted on the lino. Kevin had emptied the saltcellar onto the floor. “That lady has poop on her face.” Kevin was pointing at the birthmark on our waitress’s left cheek, three inches across and roughly the shape of Angola. She’d slathered beige concealer over the big brown blotch, but most of the makeup had worn off. Like most disguises, the cover-up was worse than honest flaw, a lesson I had yet to register on my own account. Before I could stop him, Kevin asked her directly, “Why don’t you clean your face? It’s poopy.” I apologized profusely to the girl, who couldn’t have been much more than eighteen and had no doubt suffered from that blemish her whole life. She managed a dismal smile and promised to bring my dressing. I wheeled to our son. “You knew that spot wasn’t ‘poop,’ didn’t you?” “Nyeh NYEE nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyee, nyeh-nyeh nyeh?” Kevin skulked in the booth, his eyes at half-mast and glittering. He’d placed his fingers on the table and his nose against its rim, but I could tell from that telltale sparky squint that below the table lurked a grin: wide, tight-lipped, and strangely forced. “Kevin, you know that hurt her feelings, didn’t you?” I said. “How would you like it if I told you your face was ‘poopy’?” “Eva, kids don’t understand that grown-ups can be touchy about their looks.” “Are you sure they don’t understand that? You read this somewhere?” “Can we not ruin our first afternoon out together?” you implored. “Why do you always have to think the worst of him?” “Where did that come from?” I asked, looking perplexed. “It sounds more as if you always think the worst of me. ” Innocent mystification would remain my tack for the next three years. Meantime, the mood had gone all wrong for my announcement, so I got it over with as unceremoniously as I could. I’m afraid my intentions came out as defiant: Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, if you think I’m such a rotten mother. “Wow,” you said. “ Are you sure? That’s a big step.” “I remembered what you said about Kevin and talking, that maybe he didn’t for so long because he wanted to do it right. Well, I’m a perfectionist, too. And I’m not doing AWAP or motherhood right. At the office, I’m continually taking days off with no warning, and publications get behind schedule. Meanwhile, Kevin wakes up and has no idea who’s taking care of him today, his mother or some hopeless hireling who’ll hightail it by the end of the week. I’m thinking mostly until Kevin is in primary school. Hey, it might even be good for W&P. Bring in a new perspective, fresh ideas. The series may be overly dominated by my voice.” “ You,” shock-horror, “domineering?” “ NYEEEEEEE? Nyeh-nyeh nyeeeeh nyeh?” “Kevin, stop it! That’s enough. Let Mommer and Daddy talk—” “NYEH-nyeh, NYEEEE nyeh—! Nyeh nyeh-NYEEH—!” “I mean it, Kevin, quit the nyeh-nyeh or we’re leaving.” “Nyeh NYEE nyeh, nyeh nyeh, nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh NYEE-NYEH!” I don’t know why I threatened him with departure, lacking any evidence that he wanted to stay. This was my first taste of what would become a chronic conundrum: how to punish a boy with an almost Zen-like indifference to whatever you might deny him. “Eva, you’re just making everything worse—” “How do you propose to get him to shut up?” “Nyeh nyeh NYEEE nyeh- nyeeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeeeeeeenyeeeeeeee?” I slapped him. It wasn’t very hard. He looked happy. “Where’d you learn that trick?” you asked darkly. And it was a trick: This was the first sentence of mealtime conversation that did not get translated into nyeh-nyeh. “Franklin, he was getting louder. People were starting to look over.” Now Kevin started to wail. His tears were a bit late, in my view. I wasn’t moved. I left him to it. “They’re looking over because you hit him,” you said sotto voce, lifting our son and cuddling him into your lap as his weeping escalated to a shriek. “It’s not done anymore, Eva. Not here. I think they’ve passed a law or something. Or they might as well have. It’s considered assault.” “I smack my own kid, and I get arrested?” “There’s a consensus—that violence is no way to get your point across. Which it sure as heck isn’t. I don’t want you to do that again, Eva. Ever. ” So: I slap Kevin. You slap me. I got the picture. “Can we please get out of here?” I proposed coldly. Kevin was winding down to lurching sobs, but he could easily milk the decrescendo another good ten minutes. Christ, it was practically a love pat. What a little performer. You signaled for the bill. “This is hardly the context in which I wanted to make my announcement,” you said, wiping Kevin’s nose with a napkin. “But I have some news, too. I bought us a house.” I did a double take. “You bought us a house. You didn’t find one for me to look at. It’s a done deal.” “If I didn’t pounce it was going to be snapped up by somebody else. Besides, you weren’t interested. I thought you’d be pleased, glad it’s over.” “Well. There’s only so pleased I’m going to get over something that wasn’t my idea in the first place.” “That’s it, isn’t it? You can’t get behind anything that isn’t your own pet project. If you didn’t personally cook up SUBURBAWAP then you’re all disaffected. Good luck doing all that delegating at the office. It doesn’t come naturally.” You left a generous tip. The extra three bucks, I inferred, was to cover those poopy face cracks. Your motions were mechanical. I could see you were hurt. You’d searched far and wide for this house, you’d been looking forward to delivering your big news, and you must have been excited about the property or you wouldn’t have bought it. “I’m sorry,” I whispered as we walked out, and other patrons peered furtively at our party. “I’m just tired. I am pleased. I can’t wait to see it.” “Nyeh nyeh- nyeh. Nyeh-nyeh nyeh. Nyeh nyeh nyeh... ” I thought, Everyone in this restaurant is relieved we’re leaving. I thought, I’ve become one of those people I used to feel sorry for. I thought, And I still feel sorry for them, too. More than ever.
Eva
JANUARY 1, 2001
Dear Franklin,
Call it a New Year’s resolution, since for years I’ve been busting to tell you: I hated that house. On sight. It never grew on me, either. Every morning I woke to its glib surfaces, its smart design features, its sleek horizontal contours, and actively hated it. I grant that the Nyack area, woodsy and right on the Hudson, was a good choice. You had kindly opted for Rockland County in New York rather than somewhere in New Jersey, a state in which I’m sure there are many lovely places to live but that had a sound to it that would have slain me. Nyack itself was racially integrated and, to meet the eye, down-market, with the same slight dishevelment of Chatham—though unlike Chatham, its shabby, unassuming quality was an illusion, since pretty much all the new arrivals for decades had been stinking rich. Main Street eternally backed up with Audis and BMWs, its overpriced fajita joints and wine bars bursting, its dumpy outlying two-bedroom clapboards listing for 700 grand, Nyack’s one pretension was its lack of pretension. In contrast to Gladstone itself, I’m afraid, a relatively new bedroom community to the north, whose tiny town center—with fake gas street lamps, split-rail fencing, and commercial enterprises like “Ye Olde Sandwich Shoppe”—epitomized what the British call “twee.” In fact, my heart sank when you first plowed the pickup proudly up the long, pompous drive off Palisades Parade. You’d told me nothing about the property, the better to “surprise” me. Well. I was surprised. A flat-roofed, single-storied expanse of glass and sandy brick, at a glance it resembled the headquarters of some slick, do-gooding conflict-resolution outfit with more money than it knew what to do with, where they’d give “peace prizes” to Mary Robinson and Nelson Mandela. Had we never discussed what I envisioned? You must have had some idea. My fantasy house would be old, Victorian. If it had to be big it would be high, three stories and an attic, full of nooks and crannies whose original purpose had grown obsolete—slave quarters and tackle rooms, root cellars and smokehouses, dumbwaiters and widow’s walks. A house that was falling to bits, that dripped history as it dropped slates, that cried out for fiddly Saturday repairs to its rickety balustrade, while the fragrant waft of pies cooling on counters drifted upstairs. I’d furnish it with secondhand sofas whose floral upholstery was faded and frayed, garage-sale drapes with tasseled tiebacks, ornate mahogany sideboards with speckled looking glass. Beside the porch swing, struggling geraniums would spindle out of an old tin milking pail. No one would frame our ragged quilts or auction them off as rare early American patterns worth thousands; we’d throw them on the bed and wear them out. Like wool gathering lint, the house would seem to accumulate junk of its own accord: a bicycle with worn brake shoes and a flat tire; straight-backs whose dowel rods need regluing; an old corner cabinet of good wood but painted a hideous bright blue, which I keep saying I’m going to strip down and never do. I won’t go on, because you know exactly what I’m talking about. I know they’re hard to heat, I know they’re drafty. I know the septic tank would leak, the electric bills run high. I know you’d anguish that the old well in the backyard was a dangerous draw for neighborhood urchins, for I can picture this home so vividly in my mind that I can walk across its overgrown yard with my eyes closed and fall in that well myself. Curling out of the truck onto the semicircular concrete turnaround in front of our new abode, I thought, abode, isn’t that the word. My ideal home was cozy and closed the world out; looking out onto the Hudson (admittedly, the view was smashing), these wide plate glass windows advertised an eternal open house. Pink pebble-fill with flagstone paths skirted its splay like one big welcome mat. The facade and central walkway were lined with stunted shrubs. No black walnut trees, no uncultivated riot of goldenrod and moss, but shrubs. Surrounding them? A lawn. Not even the sweet cool sort, whose fine bright shoots tempt a laze with lemonade and bees, but that springy, scratchy kind, like those green abrasive scrub pads for washing dishes. You flung open the entrance. The foyer dribbled into a living room the size of a basketball court, and then up a couple of low stairs and there was the dining “room,” partially segmented from the kitchen with a divider to pass food through—some concoction with sun-dried tomatoes, no doubt. I had yet to lay eyes on one door. I panicked, thinking, There’s nowhere to hide. “Tell me this isn’t dramatic,” you said. I said honestly, “I’m dumbstruck.” I’d have thought that a small child, let loose in a vast, unfurnished expanse of glossy wooden floors blazing in insipid sunshine would go dashing about, sliding down halls in socks, giggling and rampaging, utterly unfazed by the antiseptic wasteland— wasteland, Franklin—into which he had been dropped. Instead, Kevin slackened on your hand into dead weight and had to be urged to “go explore.” He plodded to the middle of the living room and sat. I’d suffered more than a few moments of alienation from my son, but just then—his eyes Little Orphan Annie O’s and dulled over like wax buildup, hands plopping on the floorboards like fish on a dock—I couldn’t have felt more akin. “You’ve got to see the master bedroom,” you said, grabbing my hand. “The skylights are spectacular.” “Skylights!” I said brightly. All the angles in our massive bedroom were askew, its ceiling slanted. The effect was jangled, and the evident distrust of standard parallels and perpendiculars, like the whole building’s uneasiness with the concept of rooms, felt insecure. “Something else, huh?” “Something else!” At some indeterminate point in the nineties, expanses of teak would become passé. We weren’t there yet, but I had a premonition of the juncture. You demonstrated our built-in teak laundry hamper, cleverly doubling as a bench, a cushion of smiley-face yellow strapped to its lid. You rolled back the doors of the closet on their gliding wheelies. The moving parts of the house were all silent, its surfaces smooth. The closet doors had no handles. None of the woodwork had fixtures. Drawers had gentle indents. The kitchen cabinets pushed open and shut with a click. Franklin, the whole house was on Zoloft. You led me out the glass sliding doors to the deck. I thought, I have a deck. I will never shout, “I’m on the porch!” but “I’m on the deck. ” I told myself it was only a word. Still, the platform cried out for barbecues with neighbors I did not much like. The swordfish steaks would be raw one minute, overcooked the next, and I would care. Darling, I know I sound ungrateful. You’d searched very hard, taking on the job of finding us a home with all the seriousness of location scouting for Gillette. I’m better familiar with the real estate scarcity in the area now, so I trust that every other available property you looked at was plain hideous. Which this place was not. The builders had spared no expense. (Woe to those who spare no expense. I should know, since these are the travelers who scorn AWAP for holidays in “foreign” countries so comfortable that they qualify as near-death experiences.) The woods were precious—if in more than one sense—the taps gold-plated. The previous owners had commissioned it to their own exacting specifications. You had bought us some other family’s Dream Home. I could see it. Our industrious couple works their way up from shoddy rentals to a series of nothing-special split-levels, until at last: an inheritance, a market upswing, a promotion. Finally they can afford to construct from the ground up the house of their heart’s desire. The couple pores over blueprints, weighing where to hide every closet, how to segue gracefully between the living area and the den (“With a DOOR!” I want to scream, but it is too late for my stodgy advice). All those innovative angles look so dynamic on paper. Even shrubs are rather adorable a quarter of an inch high. But I have a theory about Dream Homes. Not for nothing does “folly” mean both foolhardy mistake and costly ornamental building. Because I’ve never seen a Dream Home that works. Like ours, some of them almost work, though unqualified disasters are equally common. Part of the problem is that regardless of how much money you lavish on oak baseboards, an unhistoried house is invariably cheap in another dimension. Otherwise, the trouble seems rooted in the nature of beauty itself, a surprisingly elusive quality and rarely one you can buy outright. It flees in the face of too much effort. It rewards casualness, and most of all it deigns to arrive by whim, by accident. On my travels, I became a devotee of found art: a shaft of light on a dilapidated 1914 gun factory, an abandoned billboard whose layers have worn into a beguiling pentimento collage of Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, and Burma Shave, cut-rate pensions whose faded cushions perfectly match, in that unplanned way, the fluttering sun-blanched curtains. Confoundingly then, this Gladstone Xanadu, beam by beam, would have materialized into a soul-destroying disappointment. Had the builders cut corners, an arrogant architect taken liberties with those painstaking plans? No, no. Down to the torturously blank kitchen cabinets, the visionary designs had been followed to the letter. That mausoleum on Palisades Parade came out precisely as its creators intended, and that’s what made it so depressing. To be fair, the gap between most people’s capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it when they see it is the width of the Atlantic Ocean. So all evidence to the contrary, the original owners may have had pretty good taste; more’s the pity if they did. Certainly the fact that those two built a horror show was no proof against my theory that they knew very well that they’d constructed a horror show, too. I was further convinced that neither husband nor wife ever let on to the other what a downer this vapid atrocity turned out to be, that they each braved out the pretense that it was the house of their prayers, while at the same time separately scheming, from the day they moved in, to get out. You said yourself the place was only three years old. Three years old? It would have taken that long to build! Who goes to that much trouble only to leave? Maybe Mr. Homeowner was transferred to Cincinnati, though in that case he accepted the job. What else would drive him out that clunky front door besides revulsion for his own creation? Who could live day after day with the deficiency of his own imagination made solid as brick? “Why is it,” I asked as you led me around the sculpted backyard, “that the folks who built this place sold it so soon? After constructing a house that’s clearly so—ambitious?” “I got the impression they were sort of, going in different directions.” “Getting a divorce.” “Well, it’s not as if that makes the property cursed or something.” I looked at you with curiosity. “I didn’t say it did.” “If houses passed that sort of thing along,” you blustered, “there wouldn’t be a shack in the country safe for a happy marriage.” Cursed? You obviously intuited that, sensible as the suburban recourse seemed on its face—big parks, fresh air, good schools—we had drifted alarmingly astray. Yet what strikes me now is not your foreboding, but your capacity to ignore it. As for me, I had no premonitions. I was simply bewildered how I had landed, after Latvia and Equatorial Guinea, in Gladstone, New York. As if standing in the surf at Far Rockaway during a tide of raw sewage, I could barely keep my balance as our new acquisition exuded wave after wave of stark physical ugliness. Why couldn’t you see it? Maybe because you’ve always had a proclivity for rounding up. In restaurants, if 15 percent came to $17, you’d tip with a twenty. Should we have spent a tiresome evening with new acquaintances, I’d write them off; you’d want to give them a second chance. When that Italian girl I barely knew, Marina, turned up at the loft for two nights and then your watch disappeared, I was fuming; you grew only the more convinced that you must have left it at the gym. Lunch with Brian and Louise ought to have been fun? It was fun. You seemed to be able to squint and blur off the rough edges. As you gave me the grand tour of our new property, your camp counselor hard sell contrasted with a soulful look in your eyes, a pleading to play along. You talked nonstop, as if strung out on speed, and a lacing of hysteria fatally betrayed your own suspicion that 12 Palisades Parade was no formidable architectural exploit but an ostentatious flop. Still, through a complex combination of optimism and longing and bravado, you would round it up. While a cruder name for this process is lying, one could make a case that delusion is a variant of generosity. After all, you practiced rounding up on Kevin from the day he was born. Me, I’m a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus. At the risk of tautology, I like people only as much as I like them. I lead an emotional life of such arithmetic precision, carried to two or three digits after the decimal, that I am even willing to allow for degrees of agreeableness in my own son. In other words, Franklin: I leave the $17.
I hope I persuaded you that I thought the house was lovely. It was the first big decision you’d ever made independently on our behalf, and I wasn’t about to pee all over it just because the prospect of living there made me want to slit my wrists. Privately I concluded that the explanation wasn’t so much your different aesthetic, or lack of one; it’s just that you were very suggestible. I hadn’t been there, whispering in your ear about dumbwaiters. In my absence, you reverted to the taste of your parents. Or an updated version of same. Palisades Parade was trying lethally to be “with it”; the house your parents built in Gloucester, Mass., was a traditional New England saltbox. But the spare-no-expense workmanship, the innocent faith in Niceness, was unmistakable. My enjoyment of your father’s motto, “Materials are everything,” was not entirely at his expense. Up to a point, I saw the value of people who made things, and to the highest standard: Herb and Gladys built their own house, smoked their own salmon, brewed their own beer. But I had never met two people who existed so exclusively in three dimensions. The only times I saw your father excited were over a curly maple mantle or a creamy-headed stout, and I think it was over static physical perfection that he exalted; sitting before the fire, drinking the beer, were afterthoughts. Your mother cooked with the precision of a chemist, and we ate well on visits. Her meringue-topped raspberry pies that might have been clipped out of magazines, though again I would have the strong impression that it was pie-as-object that was the goal, and eating the pie, gouging into her creation, was a kind of vandalism. (How telling that your cadaverously thin mother is a marvelous cook but has no appetite.) If the assembly-line production of goods sounds mechanical, it felt mechanical. I was always a little relieved to get out of your parents’ house, and they were so kind to me, if materially kind, that I felt churlish. Still, everything in their house was buffed to a high, flat shine, so much reflection to protect the fact that there was nothing underneath. They didn’t read; there were a few books, a set of encyclopedias (the wine-colored spines warmed up the den), but the only well-leafed volumes were instruction manuals, do-it-yourself how-to’s, cookbooks, and a haggard set of The Way Things Work, volumes one and two. They had no comprehension why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn’t pretty. They owned a top-shelf stereo with speakers worth $1,000 apiece, but only a handful of easy-listening and best-of CDs: Opera Stoppers; Classical Greatest Hits. That sounds lazy, but I think it was more helpless: They didn’t know what music was for. You could say that about all of life, with your family: They don’t know what it’s for. They’re big on life’s mechanics; they know how to get its cogs to interlock, but they suspect that they’re building a widget for its own sake, like one of those coffee-table knickknacks whose silver metal balls click fruitlessly back and forth until friction tires them. Your father was profoundly dissatisfied when their house was finished, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because there wasn’t. Its highpressure shower head and hermetic glass stall were impeccably installed, and just as he trooped out for a generic who-cares selection of best-of CDs to feed his magisterial stereo, I could easily envision your father running out to roll in the dirt to provide that shower a daily raison d’être. For that matter, their house is so neat, glossy, and pristine, so fitted out with gizmos that knead and julienne, that defrost and slice your bagels, that it doesn’t seem to need its occupants. In fact, its puking, shitting, coffeesloshing tenants are the only blights of untidiness in an otherwise immaculate, self-sustaining biosphere. We’ve talked about all this on visits of course—exhaustively, since, overfed and forty minutes from the nearest cinema, we’d resort to dissecting your parents for entertainment. The point is, when Kevin— Thursday —well, they weren’t prepared. They hadn’t bought the right machine, like their German-made raspberry de-seeder, that would process this turn of events and make sense of it. What Kevin did wasn’t rational. It didn’t make a motor run more quietly, a pulley more efficient; it didn’t brew beer or smoke salmon. It did not compute; it was physically idiotic. The irony is, though your parents always deplored his absence of Protestant industry, those two have more in common with Kevin than anyone I know. If they don’t know what life is for, what to do with it, Kevin doesn’t, either; interestingly, both your parents and your firstborn abhor leisure time. Your son always attacked this antipathy head-on, which involves a certain bravery if you think about it; he was never one to deceive himself that, by merely filling it, he was putting his time to productive use. Oh, no—you’ll remember he would sit by the hour stewing and glowering and doing nothing but reviling every second of every minute of his Saturday afternoon. For your parents, of course, the prospect of being unoccupied is frightening. They don’t have the character, like Kevin, to face the void. Your father was forever puttering, greasing the machinery of daily life, although the additional convenience, once he was finished, burdened him with only more odious leisure time. What’s more, by installing a water softener or a garden irrigation system he had no idea whatsoever what it was he was trying to improve. Hard water had offered the happy prospect of regular, industrious de-lime-scaling of the drain board by the kitchen sink, and he rather liked sprinkling the garden by hand. The difference is that your father would wittingly install the water softener for no good reason and Kevin would not. Pointlessness has never bothered your father. Life is a collection of cells and electrical pulses to him, it is material, which is why materials are everything. And this prosaic vision contents him—or it did. So herein lies the contrast: Kevin, too, suspects that materials are everything. He just doesn’t happen to care about materials. I’ll never forget the first time I visited your parents after Thursday. I confess I’d put it off, and that was weak. I’m sure it would have been colossally difficult even if you’d been able to come with me, but of course irretrievable breakdown prevented that. Alone, without the cartilage of their son, I was presented with the stark fact that we were no longer organically joined, and I think they both felt the same disconnect. When your mother opened the door, her face turned ashen, but when she asked me to come in she might have been politely ushering in a salesman for Hoover uprights. To call your mother stiff would be unjust, but she is a great one for social form. She likes to know what to do now and what comes next. That’s why she’s such a fan of elaborate meals. She finds repose in set courses, the soup before the fish, and she doesn’t resist, as I would have done, the numbing way in which preparing, serving, and cleaning up after three meals a day can stitch up a cook’s time from morning to night. She does not, as I do, struggle against convention as a constraint; she is a hazily well-meaning but unimaginative person, and she is grateful for rules. Alas, there doesn’t appear to be recorded—yet—an etiquette for afternoon tea with your former daughter-in-law after your grandson has committed mass murder. She seated me in the formal sitting room instead of the den, which was a mistake; the rigidity of the high-backed wing chairs only served to emphasize that by contrast The Rules were in free fall. The colors of the velveteen, sea green and dusty rose, were at such variance with the glistening, livid subtext of my visit as to seem musty or faintly nauseous; these were the colors of mold. Your mother fled to the kitchen. I was about to cry after her not to bother because I really couldn’t eat a thing when I realized that to deny her this one busywork delay for which she was so thankful would be cruel. I even forced myself to eat one of her Gruyère twists later, though it made me a little sick. Gladys is such a nervous, high-strung woman that her brittleness—and I don’t mean she couldn’t be warm or kind—her bodily brittleness had kept her looking much the same. True, the lines in her forehead had rippled into an expression of permanent perplexity; her eyes darted every which way even more frenetically than usual, and there was, especially when she wasn’t aware I was watching, a quality of lostness in her face that reminded me what she must have looked like as a little girl. The overall effect was of a woman who was stricken, but the contributing elements of this effect were so subtle that a camera might not have captured it on film. When your father came up from the basement (I could hear his tread on the stairs, and fought dread; though seventy-five, he’d always been a vigorous man, and the steps were too slow and heavy), the change wasn’t subtle at all. His cotton work clothes sloughed off him in great drooping folds. It had only been six weeks, a period during which I was shocked that it was possible to lose so much weight. All the flesh in his weathered face had dropped: the lower eyelids sagged to expose a red rim; his cheeks slung loose like a bloodhound’s. I felt guilty, infected by Mary Woolford’s consuming conviction that someone must be to blame. Then, that was your father’s conviction as well. He is not a vengeful person, but a retired electronics machinetoolmaker (too perfect, that he’d made machines that made machines) took matters of corporate responsibility and better business practices with the utmost seriousness. Kevin had proven defective, and I was the manufacturer. Rattling my fluted teacup in its gilt saucer, I felt clumsy. I asked your father how his garden was doing. He looked confused, as if he’d forgotten he had a garden. “The blueberry bushes,” he remembered mournfully, “are just beginning to bear.” The word bear hung in the air. Bushes maybe, but your father had not begun to bear anything. “And the peas? You’ve always grown such lovely sugar snaps.” He blinked. The chimes struck four. He never explained about the peas, and there was a horrible nakedness in our silence. We had exposed that all those other times I’d asked I hadn’t cared about his peas, and that all those other times he’d answered he hadn’t cared about telling me. I lowered my eyes. I apologized for not visiting sooner. They didn’t make any noises about that’s all right we understand. They didn’t make any noises, like say something, so I just kept talking. I said that I had wanted to go to all the funerals if I was welcome. Your parents didn’t look baffled at the non sequitur; we had been effectively talking about Thursday from the moment your mother opened the door. I said that I hadn’t wanted to be insensitive, so I rang the parents beforehand; a couple of them had simply hung up. Others implored me to stay away; my presence would be indecent, said Mary Woolford. Then I told them about Thelma Corbitt—you remember, her son Denny was the lanky red-haired boy, the budding thespian—who was so gracious that I was abashed. I hazarded to your mother that tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected qualities in people. I said it was as if some folks (I was thinking of Mary) got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected them from the slings and arrows of other people’s outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger’s ill wind became an agony, an aching slog through this man’s fresh divorce and that woman’s terminal throat cancer. They were in hell, too, but it was everybody’s hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste. I doubt I put it as fancily as that, but I did say that Thelma Corbitt was the kind of woman whose private suffering had become a conduit for other people’s. And I didn’t regale your parents with the whole phone call of course, but the full conversation did come flooding back to me: Thelma immediately admiring the “courage” it must have taken for me to pick up the phone, inviting me right away to Denny’s funeral, but only if it wasn’t too painful for me to go. I allowed to Thelma that it might help me to express my own sorrow for her son’s passing, and for once I realized that I wasn’t simply going through the motions, saying what I was supposed to. Apropos of not much, Thelma explained that Denny had been named after the chain restaurant where she and her husband had their first date. I almost stopped her from going on because it seemed easier for me to know as little as possible about her boy, but she clearly believed that we would both be better off if I knew just who my son had murdered. She said Denny had been rehearsing for the school’s spring play, Woody Allen’s Don’t Drink the Water, and she’d been helping him with his lines. “He had us in stitches,” she offered. I said that I’d seen him in Streetcar the year before and that (stretching the truth) he’d been terrific. She seemed so pleased, if only that her boy wasn’t just a statistic to me, a name in the newspaper, or a torture. Then she said she wondered whether I didn’t have it harder than any of them. I backed off. I said, that couldn’t be fair; after all, at least I still had my son, and the next thing she said impressed me. She said, “Do you? Do you really?” I didn’t answer that, but thanked her for her kindness, and then we both got lost in such a tumble of mutual gratitude—an almost impersonal gratitude, that everyone in the world wasn’t simply horrid—that we both began to cry. So, as I told your parents, I went to Denny’s funeral. I sat in the back. I wore black, though in funerals these days that is old-fashioned. And then in the receiving line to convey my condolences, I offered Thelma my hand and said, “I’m so sorry for my loss.” That’s what I said, a miscue, a gaffe, but I thought it would be worse to correct myself—“ your loss, I mean.” To your parents, I was blithering. They stared. Finally I took refuge in logistics. The legal system is itself a machine, and I could describe its workings, as your father had once explained to me, with poetic lucidity, the workings of a catalytic converter. I said that Kevin had been arraigned and was being held without bail, and I was hopeful that the terminology, so familiar from TV, would comfort; it failed to. (How vital, the hard glass interface of that screen. Viewers don’t want those shows spilling willy-nilly into their homes, any more than they want other people’s sewage to overflow from their toilets.) I said I’d hired the best lawyer I could find—meaning, of course, the most expensive. I thought your father would approve; he himself always bought top-shelf. I was mistaken. He intruded dully, “What for?” I had never heard him ask that question of anything in his life. I admired the leap. You and I had always pilloried them behind their backs as being spiritually arid. “I’m not sure, though it seemed expected... To get Kevin off as lightly as possible, I guess.” I frowned. “Is that what you want?” asked your mother. “No... What I want is to turn back the clock. What I want is to never have been born myself, if that’s what it took. I can’t have what I want.” “But would you like to see him punished?” your father pressed. Mind, he didn’t sound wrathful; he hadn’t the energy. I’m afraid I laughed. Just a dejected huh! Still, it wasn’t appropriate. “I’m sorry,” I explained. “But good luck to them. I tried for the better part of sixteen years to punish Kevin. Nothing I took away mattered to him in the first place. What’s the New York state juvenile justice system going to do? Send him to his room? I tried that. He didn’t have much use for anything outside his room, or in it; what’s the difference? And they’re hardly going to shame him. You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.” “He could at least be kept from hurting anyone else,” your father submitted. A defective product is recalled, and withdrawn from the market. I said defiantly, “Well, there is a campaign on, to try him as an adult and give him the death penalty.” “How do you feel about that?” asked your mother. Good grief, your parents had asked me if Wing and a Prayer would ever go public; they had asked if I thought those steam gadgets pressed trousers as well as ironing. They had never asked what I felt. “Kevin is no adult. But will he be any different when he is one?” (They may be technically different specialties, but Workplace Massacre is really just School Shooting Grows Up.) “Honestly, there are some days,” I looked balefully out their bay window, “I wish they would give him the death penalty. Get it all over with. But that might be letting myself off the hook.” “Surely you don’t blame yourself, my dear!” your mother chimed, though with a nervousness; if I did, she didn’t want to hear about it. “I never liked him very much, Gladys.” I met her eyes squarely, mother-to-mother. “I realize it’s commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, ‘I love you, but I don’t always like you.’ But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, ‘I’m not oblivious to you—that is, you can still hurt my feelings—but I can’t stand having you around.’ Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if I wouldn’t have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, ‘I like you.’ I wonder if just enjoying your kid’s company isn’t more important.” I had embarrassed them. Moreover, I’d done precisely what Harvey had already warned me against. Later they were both deposed, and snippets of this deadly little speech would be quoted back verbatim. I don’t think your parents had it in for me, but they were honest New Englanders, and I’d given them no reason to protect me. I guess I didn’t want them to. When I rustled with leave-taking motions, setting down my stonecold tea, the two of them looked relieved yet frantic, locking eyes. They must have recognized that these cozy teatime chats of ours would prove limited in number, and maybe late at night, unable to sleep, they’d think of questions they might have asked. They were cordial, of course, inviting me to visit any time. Your mother assured me that, despite everything, they still considered me part of the family. Their inclusivity seemed less kind than it might have six weeks before. At that time, the prospect of being enveloped into any family had all the appeal of getting stuck in an elevator between floors. “One last thing.” Your father touched my arm at the door, and once again asked the kind of question he’d evaded most of his life. “Do you understand why?” I fear my response will only have helped to cure him of such inquiries, for the answers are often so unsatisfying.
Happy New Year, my dear,
Eva
