FEBRUARY 1, 2001
Dear Franklin,
For some reason I imagine it will reassure you that I still get the Times. But I seem to have misplaced the grid I once imposed on it to determine what parts were worth reading. Famines and Hollywood divorces appear equally vital and equally trifling. Arbitrarily, I either devour the paper soup to nuts, or I toss it smooth and cool on the stack by the door. How right I was, in those days; how easily the United States can get on without me. For the last two weeks I’ve tossed them unread, for if memory serves, the earnest pomp of presidential inaugurations left me cold even when I had clear enthusiasms and aversions. Capriciously, this morning I read everything, including an article about American workers’ excessive overtime—and perhaps it is interesting, though I couldn’t say, that the Land of the Free prefers work to play. I read about a young electrical lineman who would soon have been married, and who in his eagerness to salt away funds for his family-to-be had slept only five hours in two and a half days. He had been climbing up and down poles for twenty-four hours straight:Taking a break for breakfast on Sunday morning, he got yet another call. At about noon, he climbed a 30-foot pole, hooked on his safety straps and reached for a 7,200-volt cable without first putting on his insulating gloves. There was a flash, and Mr. Churchill was hanging motionless by his straps. His father, arriving before the ladder-truck did and thinking his son might still be alive, stood at the foot of the pole for more than an hour begging for somebody to bring his boy down.
I have no strong feelings about overtime; I’m acquainted with no electrical linemen. I only know that this image—of a father pleading with onlookers themselves as powerless as he, while his hardworking son creaked in the breeze like a hanged man—made me cry. Fathers and sons? Grief and misspent diligence? There are connections. But I also wept for that young man’s real father. You see, it was drilled into me since I could talk that 1.5 million of my people were slaughtered by Turks; my own father was killed in a war against the worst of ourselves, and in the very month I was born, we were driven to use the worst of ourselves to defeat it. Since Thursday was the slimy garnish on this feast of snakes, I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself hard of heart. Instead, I’m easily moved, even mawkish. Maybe my expectations of my fellows have been reduced to so base a level that the smallest kindness overwhelms me for being, like Thursday itself, so unnecessary. Holocausts do not amaze me. Rapes and child slavery do not amaze me. And Franklin, I know you feel otherwise, but Kevin does not amaze me. I am amazed when I drop a glove in the street and a teenager runs two blocks to return it. I am amazed when a checkout girl flashes me a wide smile with my change, though my own face had been a mask of expedience. Lost wallets posted to their owners, strangers who furnish meticulous directions, neighbors who water each other’s houseplants—these things amaze me. Celia amazed me.
As you instructed, I never raised the matter again. And I took no relish in deceiving you. But the eerie certainty that descended in August never lifted, and you’d left me no choice. Kevin’s cast had been removed two weeks earlier, but it was as of Trent Corley’s bike accident that I stopped feeling guilty. Just like that. There was no equivalence between what I had done and what I would do—it was totally irrational—but still I seemed to have arrived at the perfect antidote or penance. I would put myself to the test. I was not at all sure that I would pass a second sitting. You did notice I’d become “a horny little beastie,” and you seemed glad of a desire that, though we never alluded to the abatement outright, had sadly ebbed. With one or the other of us yawning theatrically before bed “a little beat,” we had slid from having sex almost nightly to the American average of once a week. My rekindled passion was no contrivance. I did want you, more urgently than in years, and the more we made love the more insatiable I felt during the day, unable to sit still, rubbing my inside thigh with a pencil at my desk. I, too, was glad of evidence that we had not yet sunk irretrievably into the mechanical bedtime rut that drives so many spouses to the arms of strangers at lunch. For ever since we’d had a little boy sleeping down the hall, you’d so turned down the volume in bed that I had often to interrupt, “What?... Sorry?” Talking dirty by semaphore was too much effort, and at length we’d both withdrawn to private sexual Imax. Unembellished by your improvisations—and you had a gift for depravity; what a shame to let such talent lie fallow—my own fantasies had come to bore me, and I’d given over to floating pictures instead, rarely erotic in any literal sense, and always dominated by a certain texture and hue. But over time the visions had grown corrosive, like close-ups of a scab or geological illustrations of dried magma. Other nights I’d been afflicted by flashes of filthy diapers and taut, undescended testicles, so you can understand why I might have contributed to reducing our schedule to once a week. Perhaps worst of all, the vibrant scarlets and ceruleans that once permeated my head when we made love in our childless days had gradually muddied and lost their luster, until the miasma on the inside of my eyelids churned with the furious pitch and umber of the drawings on our refrigerator door. Once I started leaving my diaphragm in its sky-blue case, the vista in my mind during sex went light. Where my visual perimeters had once closed in, now I saw great distances, as if gazing from Mt. Ararat or skimming the Pacific in a glider. I peered down long hallways that shimmered endlessly to the vanishing point, their marble parquet blazing, sunlight pouring in windows from either side. Everything I envisioned was bright: wedding dresses, cloudscapes, fields of edelweiss. Please don’t laugh at me—I know what I’m describing sounds like a tampon commercial. But it was beautiful. I felt, at last, transported. My mind opened up, where before my head had seemed to be spelunking into an ever narrower, more dimly lit hole. These wide-screen projections weren’t mushy soft-focus, either, but sharp and vivid and I remembered them when we were through. I slept like a baby. Rather, like some babies, as I was soon to discover. I was obviously not at my most fertile, and it did take a year. But when I finally missed a period the following fall, I started to sing. Not show tunes this time, but the Armenian folk songs with which my mother had serenaded Giles and me when she tucked us in for the night—like “Soode Soode” (“It’s a lie, it’s a lie, it’s a lie, everything’s a lie; in this world, everything’s a lie!”). When I discovered that I’d forgotten some of the words, I called her and asked if she might write them out. She was delighted to oblige, since as far as Mother knew, I was still the willful little girl who decried her Armenian lessons as burdensome extra homework, and she inscribed my favorites—Komitas Vardapet’s “Kele Kele,” “Kujn Ara,” and “Gna Gna”—inside greeting cards pen-and-inked with mountain village scenes and patterns from Armenian carpets. Kevin noticed my transformation, and while he mightn’t have savored his mother groveling about the house like a worm, he was no better pleased when she burst her cocoon as a butterfly. He hung back sullenly and carped, “You sing out of tune” or commanded, reciting a line he had picked up from his multiethnic primary school, “Why don’t you speak English. ” I told him lightly that Armenian folk songs were polyphonic, and when he pretended to understand, I asked if he knew what that meant. “It means stupid,” he said. I volunteered to teach him a song or two, reminding him, “You’re Armenian, too, you know,” but he differed. “I’m American,” he asserted, using the derisive tone of stating the obvious, like “I’m a person” and not an aardvark. Something was up. Mommer wasn’t slumping and shuffling and talking in a peewee voice anymore, yet even pre-broken-arm Mommer had not made a reappearance: the brisk, rather formal woman who marched through the paces of motherhood like a soldier on parade. No, this Mommer purled about her duties like a bubbling brook, and any number of stones hurled at her eddies sank with a harmless rattle to her bed. Apprised that her son thought all his second-grade classmates were “retards” and everything they studied he “knew already,” this Mommer didn’t remonstrate that he would soon find out he didn’t know everything; she didn’t abjure him not to say retard. She just laughed. Although an alarmist by nature, I didn’t even get bent out of shape about the escalating threats issuing from the State Department over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. “You’re usually so dramatic about these things,” you remarked in November. “Aren’t you worried?” No, I wasn’t worried. About anything. It was after I’d missed my third cycle that Kevin started accusing me of getting fat. He’d poke at my stomach and jeer, “You’re giant! ” Commonly vain about my figure, I concurred cheerfully, “That’s right, Mommer’s a big pig.” “You know, you may have gained just a bit around the waist,” you remarked finally one night in December. “Maybe we should take it easy on the spuds, huh? Could stand to drop a couple pounds myself.” “Mmm,” I hummed, and I practically had to put my fist in my mouth to keep from laughing. “I don’t mind a little extra weight. All the better for throwing it around.” “Jesus, what’s this, maturity? Usually if I suggest you’ve gained an ounce you go ape-shit!” You brushed your teeth, then joined me in bed. You picked up your mystery but only drummed the cover, sidling your other hand to a swollen breast. “Maybe you’re right,” you murmured. “A little more Eva is pretty sexy.” Slipping the book to the floor, you turned toward me and lifted an eyebrow. “Is it in?” “Mmm,” I hummed again, with an affirmative cast. “Your nipples are big,” you observed, nuzzling. “Time for your period? Seems like it’s been a while.” Your head stilled between my breasts. You pulled back. You looked me in the eye with the soberest of expressions. And then you turned white. My heart sank. I could tell that it would be worse than I’d led myself to believe. “When were you planning to tell me?” you asked stonily. “Soon. Weeks ago, really. It just never seemed the right time.” “I can see why it wouldn’t,” you said. “You expecting to palm this off as some kind of accident?” “No. It wasn’t an accident.” “I thought we discussed this.” “That’s what we didn’t do, discuss it. You went on a tirade. You wouldn’t listen.” “So you just go ahead and—a fait accompli—just—like some kind of mugging. As if it has nothing to do with me.” “It has everything to do with you. But I was right and you were wrong.” I faced you squarely. As you would say, there were two of us and one of you. “This is the most presumptuous... arrogant thing you’ve ever done.” “Yes. I guess it is.” “Now that it no longer matters what I think, you going to explain what this is about? I’m listening.” You didn’t look as if you were listening. “I have to find something out.” “What’s that? How far you can push me before I push back?” “About—,” I decided not to apologize for the word, “about my soul.” “Is there anyone else in your universe?” I bowed my head. “I’d like there to be.” “What about Kevin?” “What about him.” “It’s going to be hard for him.” “I read somewhere that other children have brothers and sisters.” “Don’t be snide, Eva. He’s used to undivided attention.” “Another way of saying he’s spoiled. Or could get that way. This is the best thing that could possibly happen to that boy.” “Little bird tells me that’s not the way he’s going to look at it.” I took a moment to reflect that in five minutes we were already dwelling on our son. “Maybe it will be good for you, too. For us.” “It’s an agony aunt standard. Stupidest thing you can ever do to cement a shaky marriage is to have a baby.” “Is our marriage shaky?” “You just shook it,” you fired back, and turned away from me on your side. I switched off the light and slid down on the pillow. We weren’t touching. I started to cry. Feeling your arms around me was such a relief that I cried harder still. “Hey,” you said. “Did you really think—? Did you wait so long to tell me so it would be too late? Did you really think I’d ask you to do that? With our own kid?” “Of course not,” I snuffled. But when I’d calmed down you grew sterner. “Look, I’ll come around to this if only because I have to. But you’re forty-five, Eva. Promise me you’ll get that test.” There was a purpose to “that test” only if we were prepared to act on a discouraging outcome. With our own kid. Little wonder that I put off telling you for as long as possible.
I didn’t get the test. Oh, I told you I did, and the new gynecologist I found—who was lovely—offered, but unlike Dr. Rhinestein, she did not seem to regard all pregnant women as public property and didn’t unduly press the point. She did say that she hoped I was prepared to love and care for whoever—she meant, whatever—came out. I said that I didn’t think I was romantic about the rewards of raising a disabled child. But I was probably too strict about what—and whom—I chose to love. So I wanted to trust. For once, I said. To have blind faith in—I chose not to say life or fate or God —myself. There was never any doubt that our second child was mine. Accordingly, you exhibited none of the proprietary bossiness that tyrannized my pregnancy with Kevin. I carried my own groceries. I drew no scowls over a glass of red wine, which I continued to pour myself in small, sensible amounts. I actually stepped up my exercise regime, including running and calisthenics and even a little squash. Our understanding was no less clear for being tacit: What I did with this bump was my business. I liked it that way. Kevin had already sensed the presence of perfidy. He hung back from me more than ever, glaring from corners, sipping at a glass of juice as if tasting for arsenic, and poking so warily at anything I left him to eat, often dissecting it into its constituent parts spread equidistant around his plate; he might have been searching for shards of glass. He was secretive about his homework, which he protected like a prisoner encrypting his correspondence with details of savage abuse at the hands of his captors that he would smuggle to Amnesty International. Someone had to tell him, and soon; I was starting to show. So I suggested that we take this opportunity to explain generally about sex. You were reluctant. Just say you’re pregnant, you suggested. He doesn’t have to know how it got there. He’s only seven. Shouldn’t we preserve his innocence a little longer? It’s a pretty backward definition of innocence, I objected, that equates sexual ignorance with freedom from sin. And underestimating your kid’s sexual intelligence is the oldest mistake in the book. Indeed. I had barely introduced the subject while making dinner when Kevin interrupted impatiently, “Is this about fucking?” It was true: They didn’t make second-graders the way they used to. “Better to call it sex, Kevin. That other word is going to offend some people.” “It’s what everybody else calls it.” “Do you know what it means?” Rolling his eyes, Kevin recited, “The boy puts his peepee in the girl’s doodoo.” I went through the stilted nonsense about “seeds” and “eggs” that had persuaded me as a child that making love was something between planting potatoes and raising chickens. Kevin was no more than tolerant. “I knew all that.” “What a surprise,” I muttered. “Do you have any questions?” “No.” “Not any? Because you can always ask me or Dad anything about boys and girls, or sex, or your own body that you don’t understand.” “I thought you were going to tell me something new,” he said darkly, and left the room. I felt strangely ashamed. I’d raised his expectations, then dashed them. When you asked how the talk had gone I said okay, I guess; and you asked if he’d seemed frightened or uncomfortable or confused, and I said actually he seemed unimpressed. You laughed, while I said dolefully, what’s ever going to impress him if that doesn’t? Yet phase two of the Facts of Life was bound to be the more difficult installment. “Kevin,” I began the following evening. “Remember what we talked about last night? Sex? Well, Mommer and Daddy do that sometimes, too.” “What for.” “For one thing, so you could keep us company. But it might be nice for you to have some company, too. Haven’t you ever wished you had someone right around the house to play with?” “No.” I stooped to the play table where Kevin was systematically snapping each crayon of his Crayola 64 set into pieces. “Well, you are going to have some company. A little baby brother or sister. And you might find out that you like it.” He glared at me a long, sulky beat, though he didn’t look especially surprised. “What if I don’t like it.” “Then you’ll get used to it.” “Just cause you get used to something doesn’t mean you like it.” He added, snapping the magenta, “You’re used to me.” “Yes!” I said. “And in a few months we’ll all get used to someone new!” As a crayon piece gets shorter it’s more difficult to break, and Kevin’s fingers were now straining against one such obdurate stump. “You’re going to be sorry.” Finally, it broke.
I tried to draw you into a discussion about names, but you were indifferent; by then the Gulf War had started, and it was impossible to distract you from CNN. When Kevin slumped alongside you in the den, I noted that the boy stuff of generals and fighter pilots didn’t captivate him any more than the ABC song, though he did show a precocious appreciation for the nature of a “nuclar bomb.” Impatient with the slow pace of madefor-TV combat, he grumbled, “I don’t see why Cone Power bothers with all that little junk, Dad. Nuke ’em. That’d teach the Raqis who’s boss.” You thought it was adorable. In the spirit of fair play, I reminded you of our old pact, offering to christen our second child a Plaskett. Don’t be ridiculous, you dismissed, not taking your eyes off an incoming Patriot missile. Two kids, different last names? People would think one was adopted. As for Christian names, you were equally apathetic. Whatever you want, Eva, you said with a flap of your hand, is fine with me. So for a boy I proposed Frank. For a girl, I deliberately rejected Karru or Sophia from my mother’s vanquished clan and reached for the vanquished in yours. The death of your Aunt Celia, your mother’s childless younger sister, had hit you hard when you were twelve. A frequent visitor, zany Aunt Celia had a playful taste for the occult; she gave you a magic eight ball that told fortunes and led you and your sister in darkened séances, the more delicious for your parents’ disapproval. I’d seen her picture, and she’d been heartbreakingly not-quite-pretty, with a wide mouth and thin lips but piercing, clairvoyant eyes, at once brave and a little frightened. Like me, she was adventurous, and she died young and unmarried after climbing Mt. Washington with a dashing young climber for whom she had high hopes, succumbing to hypothermia after their party was hit by a freak snowstorm. But you shrugged off the tribute with irritation, as if I were seeking to ensnare you by your Aunt Celia’s own supernatural means. My second confinement felt vastly less restrictive than the first, and with Kevin in second grade, I could involve myself more fully in AWAP. Yet with child I also felt less lonely, and when I spoke aloud with you scouting and Kevin in school, I did not feel that I was talking to myself. Of course, the second time around is always easier. I knew enough to opt for anesthesia, though when the time came, Celia would prove so tiny that I probably could have managed without. I also knew better than to expect a blinding Vulcan mind-meld at her birth. A baby is a baby, each miraculous in its way, but to demand transformation on the instant of delivery was to place too great a burden on a small confused bundle and an exhausted middle-aged mother both. All the same, when she begged to arrive two weeks early on June 14, I couldn’t resist inferring an eagerness on her part, as I had once inferred a corresponding reluctance from Kevin’s foot-dragging fortnight’s delay. Do babies have feelings, even at zero hour? From my modest study of two, I believe they do. They don’t have names for feelings yet, and without separating labels probably experience emotion in a goulash that easily accommodates opposites; I am likely to pin myself to feeling anxious, while an infant might have no trouble feeling simultaneously apprehensive and relaxed. Still, on the birth of both my children, I could immediately discern a dominant emotional tone, like the top note of a chord or the foreground color of a canvas. In Kevin, the note was the shrill high pitch of a rape whistle, the color was a pulsing, aortal red, and the feeling was fury. The shriek and pump of all that rage was unsustainable, so as he grew older the note would descend to the uninflected blare of a leaned-on car horn; the paint in his foreground would gradually thicken, its hue coagulating to the sluggish black-purple of liver, and his prevailing emotion would subside from fitful wrath to steady, unabating resentment. Yet when Celia slid to hand, she may have been visually beet-faced and bloody, but her aural color was light blue. I was overcome by the same clearskied azure that had visited me when we made love. She didn’t cry when she was born, and if she emitted a figurative sound it was the quiet, meandering tune of a rambler far from home who is enjoying the walk and doesn’t think anyone is listening. As for the ascendant emotion that exuded from this blind creature—her hands not grasping at the air but wandering, wondering at it, her mouth, once led to the nipple, suckling right away—it was gratitude. I’m not sure if you could tell the difference instantly, though once Celia was fed, tied off, swabbed, and handed over to her father, you did return her rather quickly. Maybe you were still irked at my presumption, and maybe your new daughter’s perfection dismayed you further, as living evidence that my deception had been righteous. In any case, the years ahead would later confirm my initial intuition: that you could tell the difference, and that the difference made you angry. I imagine you bristling with a similar resistance if, after living for years in our fatally middlebrow Dream Home, you walked into the Victorian one with the porch swing, dumbwaiter, and mahogany balustrade and learned it was for sale. You’d wish you’d never seen it, and something in you would hate it a bit. On tramping back into our hackneyed cathedral of teak, the scales would fall from your eyes, and you’d see only a slag heap of pretensions, your brave capacity for rounding up crippled for life. That’s my only explanation for your coolness, since you seemed so leery of picking her up and anxious to avoid looking at her with those long soulful gazes during which Brian claimed that a parent falls in love. I think she frightened you. I think you regarded your attraction to your daughter as a betrayal. The birth went so smoothly that I only spent the one night, and you brought Kevin with you to retrieve us from Nyack Hospital. I was nervous, having every appreciation for how infuriating it must be for a firstborn child to contemplate the invasion of his patch by a speechless weakling. But when Kevin trailed into the hospital room behind you, he hardly leaped onto the bed to smother my suckling daughter with a pillow. Wearing an “I’m the Big Brother” T-shirt with a smiley face in the O—its fresh squared creases and price tag in the neck betokening your purchase of a last-minute prop from the lobby’s gift shop—he slouched around the foot, sauntered to the other side, dragged a zinnia from your bedside bouquet, and set about denuding the flower of petals. Perhaps the safest outcome was that Celia should simply bore him. “Kevin,” I said. “Would you like to meet your sister?” “Why should I meet it,” he said wearily. “It’s coming home with us, isn’t it. That means I’ll meet it every day.” “So you should at least know her name, shouldn’t you?” I gently pulled the baby away from the breast in which Kevin himself had once shown such resolute disinterest, though she’d just started feeding. In that event, most infants would squall, but from the start Celia took deprivation as her due, receiving whatever trifle she was offered with wide-eyed abashment. I tugged up the sheet and held out the baby for inspection. “This is Celia, Kevin. I know she’s not a lot of fun yet, but when she gets a little bigger I bet she’ll be your best friend.” I wondered if he knew what one was. He’d yet to bring a classmate home from school. “You mean she’ll tag along after me and stuff. I’ve seen it. It’s a pain.” You clapped your hands on Kevin’s shoulders from behind and rocked him in a pally motion. Kevin’s face twitched. “Yeah, well that’s all part of being a big brother!” you said. “I should know, because I had a little sister, too. They never leave you alone! You want to play with trucks, and they’re always pestering you to play with doll babies!” “I played with trucks,” I objected, shooting you a look; we would have to talk about this retrograde sex-role crap when we got home. It was a shame that, born back-to-back, you and your sister Valerie—a prissy girl grown officious woman, consumed by the cut of her drapes, and on our brief visits to Philadelphia determined to organize “outings” to historical homes—were never very close. “There’s no telling what Celia will like to do, any more than you can tell if Kevin may like to play with dolls.” “In a pig’s eye!” you cried fraternally. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Spiderman? Action figures are dolls. ” “Great, Eva,” you muttered. “Give the little guy a complex.” Meantime, Kevin had sidled closer to the bed and dipped his hand into the glass of water on the bedside table. Eyeing the baby askance, he held his wet hand over her face and let drops of water drip, drip onto her face. Celia twisted, disconcerted, but the baptism didn’t seem to be upsetting her, though I would later learn to regard the fact that my daughter hadn’t complained or cried out as meaningless. His face stirring with a rare if clinical curiosity, Kevin wet his hand again and spattered his sister’s nose and mouth. I wasn’t sure what to do. Kevin’s christening reminded me of fairy tales in which an aggrieved relative arrives to curse the princess in her crib. Yet he wasn’t really hurting her, and I didn’t want to taint this introduction with a reprimand. So when he dipped his hand a third time, I resettled myself on the pillow and, dabbing her face with the sheet, discreetly withdrew the baby out of his reach. “Hey, Kev!” You rubbed your hands. “Your mother has to get dressed, so let’s go find something really greasy and really salty in those machines down the hall!” When we left the hospital together, you said I must be shot after being up and down all night with a newborn and volunteered to baby-sit while I got some sleep. “No, it’s the oddest thing,” I whispered. “I did get up a couple of times for feeding, but I had to set an alarm. Franklin—she doesn’t cry.” “Huh. Well, don’t expect that to last.” “You never know—they’re all different.” “Babies ought to cry,” you said vigorously. “Kid just lolls in bed and sleeps all day, you’re raising a doormat.” When we came home, I noticed that the framed photo of me in my late twenties that we kept on the little table in the foyer was missing, and I asked you if you’d moved it. You said no, shrugging, and I declined to pursue the matter, assuming it would turn up. It didn’t. I was a little perturbed; I no longer looked nearly that pretty, and these verifications that we were once lineless and lovely do grow precious. The shot had been snapped on an Amsterdam houseboat with whose captain I had a brief, uncomplicated affair. I treasured the expression he’d captured—expansive, relaxed, warm; it fixed a simple glorying in all that I then required of life: light on water, bright white wine, a handsome man. The portrait had softened the severity that marked most of my pictures, with that shelved brow of mine, my deep-set eyes in shadow. The houseboat captain had mailed me the photo, and I didn’t have the negative. Oh, well. Presumably, while I was in the hospital Kevin had snatched the print to poke pins in. Anyway, I was in no mood to get exercised over one silly snapshot. In fact, though I fear that my martial metaphor may seem provocative, when I carried Celia over our threshold I had the exhilarating impression of having reset our troop strengths at a healthy par. Little could I know that, as a military ally, a trusting young girl is worse than nothing, an open left flank.
Eva
FEBRUARY 18, 2001
Dear Franklin,
You know, I was just thinking that I might have been able to handle everything— Thursday, the trials, even our separation—if only I’d been allowed to keep Celia. Nevertheless (and this may surprise you), I like picturing her with you, imagining the two of you together. I’m glad if, at last, you may be getting to know one another better. You were a good father to her—I don’t mean to criticize—but you were always so sensitive about slighting Kevin that you may have overdone it, the reassurance that you were still on his side. You kept her a little at arm’s length. And as she got older, she got so pretty, didn’t she? In a tentative, bashful way, with that fine gold hair fluttering forever in her face. I think you resented it, on Kevin’s behalf—how other people found her so enchanting, whereas with Kevin they tended to be wary and so overly hearty or false and sometimes visibly relieved when we showed up at their house and hadn’t brought him along. It wasn’t fair, you thought. I suppose, in that big universal way, it wasn’t. Maybe my love for Celia was too easy. Maybe in my own terms she was a kind of cheating, since my whole life I had striven to surmount difficulty, to overcome terrors. Celia was plainly lovable. I can’t recall anyone who didn’t find her sweet, though I wonder if she stuck in the mind. Neighbors rarely liked Kevin, even if they were too polite to say so outright, but they remembered him. Both our families copped attitudes. Your sister Valerie was always edgy about leaving Kevin unattended anywhere in her fastidiously decorated house and, just to check up on him, kept bringing our son sandwiches he didn’t want; whenever he picked up a candy dish or fiddled with the tassel of a tieback, she’d jump up and take it away. Well before Kevin’s deficiencies became national news, whenever Giles asked after our son my brother seemed to be fishing for mean little stories to confirm a private prejudice. Kevin was hard to like, much less to love, but in this way he should have been perfectly fashioned for the likes of his mother. Kevin was hard to love in the same manner that it was hard to eat well in Moscow, find a cheap place to stay in London, or locate a commercial Laundromat in Bangkok. But I had moved back to the United States, grown soft. As I would sometimes cave to expedience and order takeout curries with a side of naan instead of simmering chicken in turmeric for hours on my stove, I chose the easy comfort of a compliant, ready-made child rather than break down the stringy fibers of a tough kid with long low heat. I had been rising to challenges for most of my life. I was tired, and, latterly, flabby; in a spiritual sense, I was out of shape. But it is only natural for the current of emotion to follow the path of least resistance. To my amazement, when I put Celia down she slept; I guess we were indeed raising “a doormat.” Whereas Kevin had screeched with every conceivable need met, Celia would submit to all manner of material deprivations with barely a mewl or stir, and she could pickle for hours in a wet diaper unless I remembered to check. She never wept out of hunger yet always took the breast, so I was obliged to feed her according to a fixed schedule. I may have been the first mother in history to despair that her baby didn’t cry enough. Kevin’s disconsolate infancy had segued to wholesale boredom; Celia was entranced by the least bauble. Every bit as delighted with a scrap of colored tissue paper as with that expensive mother-of-pearl mobile over her crib, she displayed an indiscriminate fascination with the tactile universe that would have driven your Madison Avenue masters to distraction. Ironically for a girl so easy to please, it would grow difficult to buy her presents because she was so infatuated with the toys she had. As she got older she formed such passionate loyalties to tattered stuffed animals that the gift of plush, fresh-furred creatures seemed to throw her into turmoil—as if, like her second-time father, she feared that to enlarge her little family was to imperil previous, more primitive commitments. The newer animals were only allowed in her bedtime embrace once they had proved themselves by losing an ear or had joined the fallible, mortal world with a baptismal stain of strained broccoli. Once she could speak, she confided to me that she was careful to play with each member of the menagerie every day, lest one feel neglected or jealous. Her favorite, most fiercely defended toys were the ones that (thanks to Kevin) were broken. It’s possible that she was too much of a girl-girl for you, and her feminine diffidence and delicacy were foreign to me as well. You might have preferred a boisterous, fearless tomboy who made you proud by conquering the summits of jungle gyms, arm-wrestling boys, and declaring to visitors that she planned to be an astronaut—a rough-and-tumble hellion who sauntered about the house in cowboy chaps covered in motor oil. I might have enjoyed that kind of girl, too, but that was not the daughter we got. Instead, Celia loved to don lacy frocks and dab on the lipstick I rarely wore. But her girlishness wasn’t limited to captivation with jewelry on my dresser, to wobbles in my high-heeled shoes. It expressed itself in a larger weakness, dependency, and trust. She had so many lovely qualities, but she didn’t have guts. She was full of terrors, and not only of the dark, but of the vacuum cleaner, the basement, and the drain. Eager to please, she began to use the potty well before the age of two but into kindergarten was still mortified by venturing into the bathroom by herself. She watched me open and throw out a moldy Columbo container once and for weeks thereafter would not come near the refrigerator, nor touch any substance, like vanilla pudding or even white poster paint, that resembled yogurt. Like many children, she was supersensitive to texture; though tolerant of mud, she reviled what she called “drydirt,” pronounced as one word: fine silty soil, dust on linoleum, even plain flour. The first time I taught her to roll a pie crust, she stood stricken in the middle of the kitchen with her floured hands held out from her side, fingers spread, eyes popped wide. Celia always expressed horror in silence. As for food, it took me a while to discern what turned out to be fierce aversions. Loath to seem choosy, she would force herself to choke down whatever she was offered, unless I attended to her indrawn shoulders and stifled little gags. She was revulsed by anything with “lumps” (tapioca, pumpernickel with raisins), “slime” (okra, tomatoes, sauces thickened with cornstarch), or “skin” (a rubbery bottom on Jell-O, the cooled brown surface on hot cocoa, even an unpeeled peach). While I was relieved to have a child with tastes at all—I might have fashioned Kevin’s meals from colored wax—quaking before these comestibles, she grew so pale and moist that the food might have been poised to eat her. For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul. I know it was frustrating, always having to remember to leave the hall light on or getting up in the middle of the night to accompany her to the toilet. More than once you accused me of coddling her, since to indulge a fear was to feed it. But what was I to do on discovering a four-year-old trembling in the hall at 3 A.M., chilled in her nightie and clutching between her legs, but beg her to always, always wake one of us up if she needed to pee? Besides, Celia was frightened of so many different things that it’s possible she was, in her own terms, courageous. Of what a variety of dreadful textures or murky corners might she have been terrified and quietly faced down by herself? But I drew the line when you despaired that Celia was “clingy.” It’s an ugly word, isn’t it, that describes the honey of the heart as a sticky, pestersome substance that won’t brush off. And to whatever degree clinginess is not simply a mean appellation for the most precious thing on earth, it involves an unacceptably incessant demand for attention, approbation, ardor in return. But Celia beseeched us for nothing. She didn’t nag us to come see what she’d built in the playroom or paw and tug at us while we tried to read. Whenever I hugged her unbidden, she returned my embrace with a thankful ferocity that implied unworthiness. After I went back to working at AWAP, she never complained at my absence, though her face would turn ashen with grief when I dropped her at preschool and would light like Christmas when I came home. Celia was not clingy. She was simply affectionate. She did sometimes wrap her arms around my leg in the kitchen, press her cheek to my knee, and exclaim with amazement, “You’re my friend!” Yet whatever difficulty you may have had with her arrival, you were never so hard a man as to find such demonstrations anything but touching. Indeed, confirmation that we were her friends seemed to entrance her far more than broad, rather abstract protestations of parental love. Although I know you thought Kevin the far smarter of the two, Kevin entered this world utterly stymied by what it was for and what to do with it, where Celia arrived with unshakable certainty about what she wanted and what made life worth living: that goo that wouldn’t brush off. Surely that constitutes intelligence of a kind. All right, she didn’t do well in school. But that’s because she tried too hard. She became so caught up in wanting to get things right, so seized by the prospect of failing her parents and teachers, that she couldn’t get down to the task itself. At least she didn’t hold everything they tried to teach her in contempt. I tried to drill into her: You just memorize that the capital of Florida is Tallahassee, period. As great a believer in mystery as her namesake, Celia couldn’t imagine it was that simple, that there wasn’t a magic trick, and she doubted herself, so that taking the state capitals test she would immediately question “Tallahassee” for the very reason that it popped into her head. Kevin never had any trouble with mystery. He ascribed to the whole world the same terrifying plainness, and the question was never whether he was able to learn something, but whether to bother. Celia’s faith, as emphatic in relation to others as it was deficient in relation to herself, assured her that no one would ever insist that she study the manifestly useless. Kevin’s cynicism equally assured him that a malign, sadistic pedagogy would pitch him nothing but chaff. I don’t mean that Celia couldn’t exasperate me as well. Like Kevin, she was impossible to punish, though there was rarely reason to punish her aside for something that, as it turned out, she didn’t actually do. Still, she took the least admonition to heart, so that any remonstrance was like killing a fly with a sledgehammer. At the least suggestion that she had disappointed us, she was inconsolable, pouring out apologies before she was quite sure what we’d like her to regret. A single sharp word would send her into a tailspin, and I admit it would have been a relief once in a while to be able to bark out, “Celia, I told you to set the table!” (she was rarely disobedient, but she was absent-minded) and not have my daughter melt into a time-consuming puddle of remorse. But my primary exasperation was otherwise. Judiciously applied, fear is a useful tool of self-protection. While the drain would hardly leap out and bite her, Celia was sufficiently replete with dread to have plenty left over for dangers that could. There was one thing in our house of which she might have been justifiably afraid, and she adored him. On this point I’m brooking no argument, and I intend to take ruthless advantage of the fact that this is my account, to whose perspective you have no choice but to submit. I don’t pretend to know the whole story, because I don’t think that’s a story that you or I will ever fully know. I remember uneasily from my own childhood that on Enderby Avenue, where the alliance between my brother and me was far more fickle, Giles and I conducted the main of our lives below our mother’s line of sight. One of us might run to her to argue our side (frowned upon as cheating), but for the most part our collusions, battles, and mutually inflicted tortures took place, if not out of view, in code. So total was my own immersion in the world of other short people that my memories before about the age of twelve are largely depopulated of adults. Maybe it was different for you and Valerie, since you didn’t like each other much. But many, perhaps most siblings share a private universe tropical with benevolence, betrayal, vendetta, reconciliation, and the use and abuse of power of which their parents know practically nothing. Still, I wasn’t blind, and a measure of parental innocence is stark disinterest. If I walked into a playroom to find my daughter curled on her side, ankles tied with knee socks, hands bound behind her back with her hair ribbon, mouth duct-taped shut, and my son nowhere in evidence, I could work out for myself what her whimpered explanation of “playing kidnapping” amounted to. I might not have been privy to the Masonic passwords of my children’s secretive sect, but I did know my daughter well enough to be confident that, despite her claims to the contrary, she would never hold the head of her favorite plastic horsey over the flame of the stove. And if she was alarmingly compliant about forcing down foodstuffs I hadn’t realized she couldn’t abide, she was not an outright masochist. Thus when I discovered her strapped into her booster chair at the dining table covered in vomit, I could reasonably assume that the bowl before her of mayonnaise, strawberry jam, Thai curry paste, Vaseline petroleum jelly, and lumps of balled up bread had not followed a recipe of her personal concoction. You would assert, of course—since you did at the time—that older siblings traditionally torment younger ones, and Kevin’s petty persecution remained within the range of the perfectly normal. You might now object that I can only find incidents of typical childhood cruelty in any way forbidding with benefit of hindsight. Meanwhile, millions of children survive families rife with roughhouse bullying, often profitably the wiser about the Darwinian pecking orders they will negotiate as adults. Many of these onetime tyrants develop into sensitive husbands who remember anniversaries, while their onetime victims grow into confident young women with high-flying careers and aggressive views on a woman’s right to choose. Yet my present position offers few enough perquisites, and I do have the benefit of hindsight, Franklin, if benefit is the word. As I shuttled to Chatham last weekend, I considered that I might also benefit from our shy, fragile daughter’s example of Christian forgiveness. But Celia’s baffling incapacity to hold a grudge from age zip seems to suggest that the ability to forgive is a gift of temperament, not necessarily a trick for old dogs. Besides, on my own account, I am not sure what “forgiving” Kevin entails. Surely it doesn’t involve sweeping Thursday artificially under the carpet or ceasing to hold him accountable, which couldn’t be in his larger moral interests. I can’t imagine that I’m supposed to get over it, like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense. I can’t pretend he didn’t do it, I can’t pretend I don’t wish he hadn’t, and if I have abandoned that felicitous parallel universe to which my white confederates in Claverack’s waiting room are prone to cling, the relinquishment of my private if-only derives more from a depleted imagination than any healthy reconcilement that what’s done is done. Honestly, when Carol Reeves formally “forgave” our son on CNN for murdering her boy, Jeffrey, who was already precocious enough at the classical guitar to be courted by Juilliard, I had no idea what she talking about. Had she built a box around Kevin in her head, knowing that only rage dwelled there; was our son now simply a place her mind refused to go? At best, I reasoned that she had successfully depersonalized him into a regrettable natural phenomenon that had descended on her family like a hurricane or opened a maw in their living room like an earthquake, concluding that there was nothing to be gained from railing at the likes of weather or tectonic plate shifts. Then, there is nothing to be gained by railing in virtually every circumstance, and that doesn’t stop most of us. Celia, though. I can’t imagine that Celia successfully boxed up or demoted to cloudburst the day that Kevin, with the delicacy of a budding entomologist, removed a nest of bagworms from our white oak in the backyard and left them to hatch in her backpack. Subsequently, she reached for her spelling book in her first-grade class, withdrawing it covered in striped caterpillars—the kind that Kevin squished to green goo on our deck—several of which crawled onto her hand and up her rigored arm. Unfortunately, Celia wasn’t given to screaming, which might have brought rescue more quickly. Instead I gather she seized up—breath whiffing, nostrils flaring, pupils dilating to saucers—and her teacher kept explaining the “hard C” in candy on the blackboard. Finally, the girls in adjacent desks began to shriek, and pandemonium ensued. Yet however fresh the memory of those bagworms, the recollection simply didn’t feature two weeks later when Kevin offered her a “ride” on his back as he climbed the white oak, and she clasped his neck. No doubt she was surprised when Kevin urged her off to perch tremulously on an upper branch, after which he climbed calmly to the ground. In fact, when she puled, “Kewin? Kewin, I can gedown!” she must have sincerely believed that, even after abandoning her twenty feet high and waltzing inside for a sandwich, he would return to help her out of the tree. Is that forgiveness? Like Charlie Brown taking one more running lunge at Lucy’s football, no matter how many stuffed animals he eviscerated and Tinkertoy cathedrals he felled, Celia never lost faith that deep down inside her big brother was a nice guy. You can call it innocence or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: She assumed that everyone else was just like her. Evidence to the contrary found nowhere to lodge, like a book on chaos theory in a library that didn’t have a physics section. Meanwhile, she never told tales, and without a testimonial it was often impossible to pin her misfortunes on her brother. As a consequence, from the moment his sister was born, Kevin Khatchadourian, figuratively at least, got away with murder.
I confess that during Celia’s early years, Kevin receded for me, taking two giant steps backward like Simon Says. Small children are absorbing, and he had meanwhile assumed a militant independence. And you were so good about taking him to ball games and museums in your spare time that I may have handed him off a bit. That put me in your debt, which is why I feel especially awkward about observing what, from those two giant steps away, became only more striking. Franklin, our son was developing the personality equivalent of the black-and-white cookie. It started back in kindergarten if not before, but it kept getting worse. Exasperatingly, we’re all pretty much restricted to learning what people are like with the permanent confound of our own presence, which is why those chance glimpses of someone you love just walking down the street can seem so precious. So you’ll just have to take my word for it—I know you won’t—that when you weren’t home, Kevin was sour, secretive, and sarcastic. Not just once in a while, on a bad day. Every day was a bad day. This laconic, supercilious, unforthcoming persona of his did seem real. Maybe it wasn’t the only thing that was real, but it didn’t come across as completely confected. In contrast to—Franklin, I feel so lousy about this, as if I’m trying to take something away from you that you cherish—Kevin’s behavior around you. When you walked in, his face changed. His eyebrows shot up, his head cocked, and he put on a closed-mouth smile high up on his chin, his lips meeting at his upper gum. Altogether, his features assumed the permanent expression of startled happiness that you see on aging starlets who have had too much plastic surgery. Hi Dad! he’d cry. How was work today, Dad? Did you take any pictures of some real cool stuff? Any more cows, Dad? Any more fields or big buildings or really loaded-people’s houses? You’d light into an enthusiastic description of the sections of roadway you’d shot, and he’d enthuse, Gosh, that’s great! Another car ad! I’m gonna tell everybody at school that my dad takes pictures for Oldsmobile! One night you brought home a copy of the new Atlantic Monthly, flipping proudly to the Colgate advertisement that sponsored our very own pink-marbled master bath. Gee, Dad! Kevin exclaimed. Since our bathroom is in a toothpaste ad, does that make us famous? “Just a little famous,” you allowed, and I swear I remember wising off, “To be really famous in this country, you’ve got to kill somebody.” Oh, you were by no means uniquely credulous; Kevin pulled the wool over his teachers’ eyes for years. I still have, thanks to you, stacks of his schoolwork. An amateur student of American history, you were the family chronicler, the photographer, the scrapbook paster, while I was more apt to regard experience itself as my souvenir. So I’m not quite sure what possessed me to rescue, from among the Stairmasters and egg slicers I abandoned en masse when I moved, the file folders of Kevin’s essays. Did I save the files just for your tight, slanted cursive, “First Grade”? For once, I think not. I have been through two trials, if what preceded them is not to be considered a third, and I have learned to think in terms of evidence. Why, I’ve become so accustomed to abdicating ownership of my life to other people—to journalists, judges, web-site writers; to the parents of dead children and to Kevin himself—that even now I’m reluctant to fold or deface my son’s essays lest it constitute actionable tampering. Anyway, it’s a Sunday afternoon, and I have been forcing myself to read a few. (Do you realize that I could sell these? I don’t mean for spare change, either. Apparently this is just the kind of ephemera that gets auctioned on eBay for thousands, along with the passably competent landscapes of Adolph Hitler.) Their innocent physical manifestation is disarming: the fat, characterless printing, the fragile yellowed paper. How prosaic, I thought at first; I’ll learn nothing but that, like a good boy, he did his homework. But as I read on, I grew more compelled, drawn in with the nervous fascination that leads one to poke and squeeze at an emerging cyst or a burrowing ingrown hair. I’ve concluded that Kevin was prone to snow his schoolmasters less with that scrubbed-behind-the-ears Partridge-family buoyancy with which he greeted your return from work than with an eerie lack of affect. Kevin’s papers always follow the assignment excessively to the letter; he adds nothing, and whenever they are marked down, it is usually for being too short. There is nothing wrong with them. They are factually correct. Their spelling is accurate. On those rare occasions his teachers jot vague notes about how he might “take a more personal approach to the material,” they are unable to pinpoint anything in his essays that is precisely lacking:Abraham Lincoln was president. Abraham Lincoln had a beard. Abraham Lincoln freed the African-American slaves. In school we study great African-American Americans for a whole month. There are many great African-American Americans. Last year we studied the same African-American Americans during African-American History Month. Next year we will study the same African-American Americans during African-American History Month. Abraham Lincoln was shot.
