Daddy Love (18 page)
He never did. And mostly, they forgave him.
She was one of the wealthy donors who helped subsidize WCYS-FM. Particularly, Whit Whitcomb’s
American Classics & New Age.
That is—she and her husband contributed.
At fund-raisers, the Proxmires were photographed in their gorgeous formal attire. These were occasions when Whit shook hands with Tracy Proxmire while his much-younger wife Hedy stood by smiling and beautiful.
She’d been saying to Whit that she understood, of course—he would
not ever
leave his wife.
And he’d said, You’re sure of that? Wow.
And she’d said, You know, Whit—you could say there’s a disadvantage to having had a personal catastrophe in your life.
And he’d said, Is there? Really? And what might that be?
And she’d said, Being unaware of the degree to which you’re an asshole, because people give you a free ride.
And he’d laughed. His face stung as if the woman had slapped him, but still he laughed.
Then he said, The actual disadvantage is that you attribute your subsequent life—every mood, every downturn—to that catastrophe. You can’t imagine an alternative life. There is only the
one life.
You have no perspective.
This was true. This was sad, banal, quasi-profound,
true
.
He thought, Is this the end for us? Maybe time.
With each of the women who was not Whit’s companion in bereavement there came such a time.
Sometimes early, after only a few surreptitious meetings. Sometimes later, when the eager sexual yearning began to subside into something more durable.
The women seemed never to be prepared. Whit was well prepared.
Though Whit was, at the outset, the more eager lover. Like a child ravenous for affection, the warmth of touch.
Now he was trying to be gallant. Trying not to notice the woman’s fingernails as she stroked his arm as if to comfort him.
Each time they’d been together the nails had been polished a different color: pale pink, pale peach, russet-red, dark lavender. Initially he’d expressed a jocular sort of admiration. Then, a subsequent time, bemusement. But more recently, a sort of embarrassment. (Were the fancy fingernails for
him
? The woman’s glamour calculated and assembled for
him
?) It made him smile to think, women have such ridiculous things done to them
on
purpose
!
(Except Dinah of course. Poor Dinah’s nails were short, broken, splintered. The protein seemed to have leached out of her body, her nails were papery-thin.)
Today, the nails were pearly. Opalescent.
But more significantly, the nails had been reshaped, and were no longer oval but square, like tiny shovels. Whit found himself staring at them wondering how Hedy could use her hands?—for instance, with a cell phone?
Carefully Hedy said, not wanting to offend her thin-skinned lover, The perspective you lose is not knowing how different your life would be, otherwise. I mean your inner, essential life …
Whit wasn’t sure he’d heard this correctly. He was still staring at the fingernails wondering now if something so artificial-looking could still be, in a way, natural; whether, if he tried to break off one of the nails, it wouldn’t break, because it was an actual outgrowth of the woman’s body.
If there was a problem in the marriage, Hedy said, unaware of Whit’s mounting rage, there would still be a problem. That’s
if
.
“If”—?
Well, I’m trying to make a point. Maybe it’s a point that isn’t viable.
That might be, Hedy.
What I’m saying is that it might be unreal, illogical, in a way unjust to blame your life on something that went terribly wrong in a point in time …
He left her to flounder on. He’d lost interest in the ridiculous nails if they were real or fake; or whether the woman’s feeling for him was real or fake or some incalculable admixture of the two.
Trace elements
—too small to measure.
It was their time together when abruptly Whit said he had to get back home. He’d never said such a thing to Mrs. Proxmire before but he said it now, with sudden urgency.
Why? Is something waiting for you back home?
Isn’t that what “home” is?—something waiting for you?
Well, you’ve never brought up the subject before, Whit.
So I won’t, again.
A forty-five-minute drive from Ann Arbor Hills and midway, on the state highway, he heard his cell phone ringing, those heart-tripping unmistakable notes, but he refrained from answering it for he’d had more than one near-accident driving this very highway and answering calls he shouldn’t have answered; and when he arrived home, there was Dinah standing on the lighted porch awaiting him.
Often, Whit didn’t arrive home until late. Yet, here was Dinah awaiting him.
She was holding something in her arms, that stirred—their next-door neighbor’s ginger cat. Whit waved to her as he turned into the driveway, though he felt dread. Was it Dinah who’d tried to call him? They spoke often during the day though they had
no news.
He wished, from his wife, no more news, ever.
As he opened the car door, Dinah stumbled down the porch steps. Her scarred face was quickened, her eyes alight.
“Whit! They’ve found Robbie.”
Where
was
he?
They were waiting for him in the first-floor atrium of the tinted-glass Washtenaw Building in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
After fifty minutes with Dr. Kozdoi the parents had left the therapist’s office on the third floor of the building, and Robbie remained for another fifty minutes for a private session with her.
This had been their practice for the past several months, since they’d initiated counseling sessions for their son.
It was 12:12
P.M.
Robbie’s session with Dr. Kozdoi would have ended at about 12:00 noon.
“Do you want to go look for him? Or …”
“He might be in the restroom upstairs.”
“We could wait a few more minutes. We shouldn’t make Robbie feel that we’re—
waiting
—so obviously.”
Whit took Dinah’s hand, and stroked it. Gently.
Dinah turned her hand, as she always did, to grasp Whit’s fingers from beneath. She could feel the strength coursing through the man, her husband. She thought
We are perfect now. We are a family now.
They decided to wait for Robbie, a few minutes longer. He was eleven years old and might like a little privacy, after his session with Dr. Kozdoi.
Your son is making
enormous progress,
Dr. Kozdoi told them.
After his unspeakable ordeal, he is doing
remarkably well.
Robbie did not talk to his parents of his private sessions with the therapist; nor did Dr. Kozdoi tell them anything that would violate the boy’s confidentiality—of course.
The Whitcombs knew that at times, unable or unwilling to speak, Robbie was given a charcoal stick to draw for Dr. Kozdoi on sheets of construction paper. But this “art” remained in Dr. Kozdoi’s office and Dinah and Whit hadn’t yet seen any of it.
Dinah had called Dr. Kozdoi to ask her: Has he told you anything—much—about
that man?
(
That man
was Dinah’s way of alluding to the abductor and sexual predator known to police as “Chester Cash.”)
Dr. Kozdoi had replied that she could not discuss this with Dinah, just yet. If—when—the subject came up during the meeting with the three of them, that would be different.
Dinah had said, But I don’t want you to tell me anything that my son has actually
said,
Dr. Kozdoi. But only if—if—he has brought up
that man
…
Politely Dr. Kozdoi repeated that she was very sorry, she couldn’t discuss Robbie with Dinah, just yet.
Of course, the Whitcombs understood that Robbie must be speaking of
that man
to the therapist. As he’d spoken, if briefly and not always coherently, to law enforcement officials.
And eventually, he would speak of
that man
to his parents. When the time was right.
Dr. Kozdoi had told them: In such sensitive child-therapy, nothing should be hurried. Premature disclosures are counter-productive. The interrogative model is forbidden. The young patient must never feel that he is being examined, queried, doubted, “attacked” …
In her cheerful way Dinah had asked Robbie if he liked Dr. Kozdoi—as she did—and Robbie murmured what sounded like
Yeh she’s OK.
Whit had asked Robbie if he thought Dr. Kozdoi was helping him and Robbie murmured what sounded like
Yeh guess so.
Robbie was not the chattering child of six years ago. This eleven-year-old Robbie was a very different boy altogether.
Difficult to encourage Robbie to
look them in the eyes.
This Robbie was shy, soft-spoken. His reaction time, when spoken to, seemed just perceptibly delayed.
He did not smile spontaneously. His smiles were also just perceptibly delayed.
Oh, Dinah hated to remind the boy—she hated herself as a mother, in such a role—to try to stand up straight, not to slouch his shoulders, hold his head high.
She could not bring herself to say
You must not slouch and cringe. You are safe with your loving parents now.
Yet, it was a fact: the five-year-old Robbie was not so evident in the eleven-year-old’s face.
The eyes were not a child’s eyes. The eyes were dark, wary and watchful.
The crudely dyed hair—bleached-blond, dirty-blond, brown—had mostly grown out. Whit had taken the boy to have the last of the dyed hair trimmed away and now dark-haired Robbie more resembled, Whit thought with satisfaction, a boy who might be
his son.
As a little boy Robbie had called them
Mommy, Daddy. Mommy! Dad-dy!
Countless times a day the delightful child-voice
Mom-my! Dad-dy!
With some prompting, Robbie now called his parents
Mom, Dad.
Such intimate words didn’t come naturally to him. Not just yet.
Dinah had more than once seen a look of panic in the boy’s eyes, as in the eyes of a stutterer as he approaches a particularly treacherous patch of sound.
Mom. Dad.
They hugged him often. He was so tall—for a little boy …
In fact, Robbie was of average height for an eleven-year-old. But he was still very thin.
His white-blood count was improving. His anemia had nearly vanished.
When Robbie was hugged he stood limp, unresisting. His thin arms at his sides.
As if he is being held captive. He will not try to escape.
His breathing quickened at such times. Heat lifted from his skin. Dinah might have imagined it, his little heart pounded.
It was somewhat hurtful to her, when Robbie was hugged by his grandmother, Geraldine, he reacted in much the same way. When he was kissed on the cheek, his eyelids fluttered.
He did not—yet—kiss in return.
Lately, encouraged by Dinah, and (perhaps) by Dr. Kozdoi, Robbie was making a gesture at hugging his parents when they hugged him, if awkwardly.
Yet, Dinah was convinced that Robbie liked being hugged, and even kissed, as he seemed to like, unexpectedly for an eleven-year-old, being assigned household tasks: when he finished one, he asked for another. Even clearing the table, rinsing dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. Even laundry. Vacuuming!
He seemed to like being praised for these tasks. If Robbie was to smile, it was at such times.
That man
had treated him like a slave, the Whitcombs had learned. Among the other horrors to which he’d subjected their son for six years of his childhood.
Yet, he is our son. He is our Robbie.
We would know him anywhere.
* * *
It was nearly four months since the call had come to Dinah. Four months since the Whitcombs were summoned to New Jersey, to be reunited with their son.
They’d flown to Newark. Hired a car and driven to New Brunswick, to the Robert Wood Johnson Memorial children’s hospital where Robbie was being treated for malnourishment, anemia, and exhaustion following an estimated forty-eight hours when he’d been lost in the foothills of the Kittatinny Mountains, east of the Delaware Water Gap.
It was two months now since the Whitcombs had moved out of their Ypsilanti house to live in Ann Arbor, at 608 Third Street, in a handsome old Victorian house leased from a University of Michigan biology professor on sabbatical abroad.
What a relief, to live in the small university town and no longer in Ypsilanti, where the Whitcombs’ neighbors were overly solicitous of them—overly
interested
in them—and where they’d accumulated too many bad memories.
Ann Arbor was the most cosmopolitan university community in Michigan, if not in the Midwest. Whit joked that of the faces one saw on the streets, at least one out of three was Asian.
It was just three months since the Whitcombs began seeing Dr. Miriam Kozdoi, a highly regarded local therapist whose training in psychology was in child- and family-counseling and whose degrees were from the University of Michigan.
Dinah liked Dr. Kozdoi, very much. Whit liked her too, though with some reservations.
In the roles in which their marriage seemed to have placed them, Dinah was the optimist; Whit, the one who
doubts
.
Both the Whitcombs liked it that Dr. Kozdoi was frank, funny, unaffected, obviously very intelligent. They liked it that her conversation was filled with cultural references—books, movies, music, opera, art, TV, Internet, sports. (Dr. Kozdoi allowed it to be known that, at least until recently, she’d been an avid hiker and skier.) They admired her office which was quirkily furnished: a young patient could sit, if he wished, in a large soft chair shaped like a baseball catcher’s mitt; older patients had the option of sitting in more conventional chairs. On the walls were reproductions of classic black-and-white American photography by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Bruce Davidson. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were crammed with books, magazines, professional journals that had the look of materials frequently consulted.