Ordinary Love and Good Will (11 page)

Michael shrugs.

“Evil stepmother?” says Joe.

“Oh, no,” says Ellen. “She was nice enough. She was just a kid. She was always baking cookies and eating them. She couldn’t speak very good English, but she would bake these cookies, and then she and Daniel and I would sit at the kitchen table and just eat them and smile at one another. I think she felt sorry for us, because she knew she could leave Daddy but we couldn’t.”

“So?” says Joe.

Ellen sits back and looks out over the yard. “One day when we were in England, I got up real early and came down into the kitchen, and Daddy was sitting there all dressed up in a suit, drinking a cup of coffee. It was still dark, so it must have been winter. I asked him why he was all dressed up, and he said that he had to rush over to Amsterdam to get Jenny, did I remember Jenny, and bring her back to take care of us, would I like that? Well, I didn’t know, but I knew Holland was across the ocean and farther away than a single day’s trip, so I asked if we were going along, and he said no, Mrs. Frith, the daily woman, was going to look after us during the day. And I said, ‘Well, who’s going to look after us at night?’ and he said, ‘It will only be one night, and this is England, and you are nearly eleven, and Daniel is a big boy, and so I think, if you lock
the doors and draw the curtains, everything will be fine.’ Pretty soon he finished his coffee and got up and gave me a kiss and left, and I don’t know what he was thinking. What if I hadn’t gotten up so early? What if I had just missed him completely?”

“He wasn’t thinking,” says Joe. “He was following his dick to Holland. That’s what Father used to do.”

“Anyway,” Ellen continues, “pretty soon Annie got up, and I got her dressed and then Daniel and you guys, and I thought that Mrs. Frith would come to take us to our school. We were all ready, dressed and fed, and we sort of sat by the door, waiting, for a long time. But Mrs. Frith didn’t get there until about noon, and so by that time everyone was doing other things, and I didn’t say anything to her about it. She was a very cheery woman, Mrs. Frith, but maybe she drank or thought we were odd because we were Americans, because she never asked anything about it, and at one point I said, ‘Did my father say he was going on a trip?’ and she said, ‘Why no, luv,’ and so I just didn’t say another word. She left about five.

“Well, she had made us something to eat—that was one thing she did when she came—and at six o’clock I dished it up, exactly at six o’clock, because Daddy always liked that kind of precision and I had this sense that if I did everything right he would get back quicker—early enough the next day to take us to school. The funny thing was that no one asked where he was, at least none of the younger kids. But Michael and Joe fought like crazy, yelling and pushing each other and crying, from after dinner until about nine-thirty, when I decided it was bedtime. I did just what Daddy said—I pulled the curtains and locked the door and refused to be afraid. Daniel started reading through his entire comicbook collection that he’d brought with him from the States, for about the tenth time, and Annie kept looking at me, but she didn’t say much and I didn’t volunteer anything.

“The next day I let everybody sleep late, but I was looking for him from about dawn. Mrs. Frith came and we were all still in our pyjamas, but she didn’t say anything. She did ask where Daddy was, and I said that he had gone to the hospital very early, and left word that we didn’t have to go to school. I was just very embarrassed that he hadn’t come back. She made us put on our clothes, though. By Friday she was more suspicious, but I made up this long story about how he was coming home right after work to take us to Ireland for a week, and I even said that she could call him at the hospital and ask him if she liked, but I knew she wouldn’t because she was very suspicious of the telephone and hated to call anyone up, especially Daddy, who hated to hear from anyone when he was at work.

“Well, I remember that on Friday I became convinced that he wasn’t coming back, and that I was going to have to figure out a way to take care of everyone and pay for everything—Mrs. Frith, for one. I thought all day about how she got paid on Monday, and that when Monday rolled around I wasn’t going to have anything to pay her, much less pay the rent or buy food, and all Friday I was kind of rigid with fear. Michael and Joe were terrible again—fighting and running around and I thought really hurting each other—and Daniel kept saying that everybody had to get outside and go to the park. Annie was very subdued, for which I was grateful, but I was afraid that she would start crying.

“Finally, on Saturday, I let Daniel convince me to go to the park, and so we put on our clothes very neatly, so that no one would know that we didn’t have any parents, and we started walking in a line to the park. I held Annie’s hand, and Daniel had Michael and Joe, one on each side. It was incredibly far, and lots of people were out shopping, and at one point Daniel and Michael ran up and said that Joe had broken away and disappeared, and he really was gone,
for about three minutes I couldn’t see him anywhere, and I looked at Annie, and she was just taking it all in, sort of appalled. Then Joe appeared, he was looking at a store window, and we ran over and grabbed him. So Daniel said that we shouldn’t go to the park, it was too far, and he couldn’t handle Michael and Joe both, so we turned around and went home and ate biscuits.

“On Sunday I decided that I was going to empty the trash, and I was carrying the basket down the stairs of the apartment building when this woman came up to me that I’d seen in the lift once or twice, and she said, ‘You children are making a great deal of noise.’ So I apologized, and she said, ‘Your father should take you to the park and give the other residents some peace. Your father is that tall man, isn’t he?’ And then she paused and stared at me, and said, ‘I haven’t seen your father for days.’ And I said, just as cool as you please, ‘Well, really, he went to Holland and I don’t believe he’s coming back.’ And I walked away.”

She pauses, and there are things I could say, but I don’t know what they are. Where was I? Getting up in my barren apartment, walking into my clothes and out the door, writing Pat letters every day, begging him to bring home the children. By the end of winter he still hadn’t replied the first time.

“Monday morning she showed up at the door with a lady in a suit, who walked around the apartment and looked in the cupboards and the refrigerator and asked me some questions. I mean, I wasn’t an idiot. I had read
Oliver Twist
by that time, and I recognized a Mr. Bumble the Beadle when I saw her. I knew the boys would be in one building and Annie and I would be in another, and that our dolls and books would be taken away from us, and eventually we would be farmed out to gangs of street thieves.” She laughs suddenly, but she is the only one who does. “So all that day I cleaned, and made Daniel clean, too. In fact, we locked
Michael and Joe in their room for five hours so that we could get the place looking decent, in case that would persuade the authorities that we could take care of ourselves. I pulled all the food in the cupboards out and rearranged it so it would look like more than it was.

“About noon the next day, this car pulls up outside with ‘South Kensington Christian Children’s Home’ written on the side, and I got Daniel and we put a chair in front of the door and ran into one of the bedrooms and hid. We told Annie and Michael and Joe that some people were coming to take us away—which was the literal truth, wasn’t it?—and made them be quiet, and we just sat there. There was a knock on the door, then silence, then another knock on the door, and then a key in the lock! And I couldn’t believe they had a key. I really thought we were doomed. So I crawl to the bedroom door and open it a crack, and Michael and Joe wiggle under the bed, and I see the front door open against the chair, and then it slams open and the chair falls out of the way, and there’s Daddy, with Mrs. Beadle behind him, and is he ever in a rage, yelling about state interference in family life, and socialized medicine and entrepreneurship, one of those trains of thought association Daddy goes into. Something about the atrophy of private initiative and the moribund path of English medical research. I mean, he walked in like he always does, opening windows for fresh air, calling out for us, taking off his tie all at the same time, and what were they going to do? What did I want him to do? I was thrilled to see him.”

“I’m sure,” says Joe, “that he thinks he was only gone for a night or two. I’m sure he thought it then. I mean, remember how he used to smack us and then say that we had just run into his fist?”

“Mmm,” says Michael.

And I don’t say anything. Can she really remember so much detail? But that doesn’t matter, anyway, does it? I
don’t ask if that ten-year-old ever thought of her mother, was ever tempted to call me across the ocean on the phone. There is a perfect logic in her story, the practical acceptance of losing first one parent, then the other, of being handed a set of impossible tasks. It is fairy tale logic, the one sort of logic a ten-year-old understands perfectly. I don’t say, “Incredible! Unbelievable!” although I would never have thought it possible for Pat to leave them alone for six days in London. I do believe. I believe because Joe and Michael are so matter-of-fact. I believe, in fact, because Ellen’s story is so specific. I believe because this supplies a large, perfectly fitting piece in the puzzle of her adult life, the piece with the eyes on it, you might say, the eyes that keep a careful lookout for Diane and Tracy and Jerry and me. Vigilance is her full-time job. I believe because, although I am shocked, I am not surprised. Pat was always unrestrained, sudden, passionate, single-minded. The children could as easily be out of his focus as in it. And I am not surprised because my deepest fear is realized. The three-year-old stepping onto the wrong elevator, the wrong train, losing grip of your hand just for the moment when the doors slam shut. Watching the crowded train shoot off toward Saint Louis, Chicago, San Francisco. The six-year-old, even the ten-year-old, lost in the crowd, and the crowd parts and she has vanished. It is a fear greater than the fear of their deaths. An eagle dives down and sweeps the child from your arms, the water rises and wrenches her away. The lost, living child, bobbing on the waves of its own resourcefulness. I am punished indeed. The others go on talking, unsurprised by their father. I can’t speak. Ellen casts me a couple of looks, then says, “I think I’ll check on the girls, just to see if they’re sleeping yet.” She knows she has amply repaid me for my candor, but her expression is ruthless. I suspect there won’t be much comfort here for a while. Sometime later we go home.

Joe drives, Michael rides in front, I sit deep in the back seat, out of the glare of passing streetlights. They talk about Pat, and I listen. Joe says, “Do you think Jenny was the one with the breasts? Remember that, when we were all sitting around the breakfast table, and he started kissing that girl, and then he took off her blouse and kissed her breasts, with us sitting right there?”

“And you dumped your oatmeal on his pants?” They laugh. Michael says, “That was later, I think. We were at least seven for that. I can’t remember if that was when you were living with us or just visiting.”

“Well, it all sort of melts together in a merciful blur, thank God.”

They drive in silence.

Michael says, soberly, “Well, he was the worst to Daniel, that’s for sure.”

“Remember that time I went to the Grand Canyon with you? How long was that for, a month? And everything that went wrong he blamed on Daniel. I mean, even when he had some kind of fight with Tatty, the next morning he said over breakfast that Daniel had talked in his sleep and wakened her up, and that the real problem was that she couldn’t stand to be with Daniel and she took it out on Daddy, and why was Daniel so disagreeable and hard to get along with, was he intent on breaking up Daddy’s second marriage, too? I remember that distinctly.”

“I remember thinking, So that’s what happened with Mom, Daniel did it.”

“Me, too.”

“Daniel, too, I’ll bet.” They sigh. But their tones are matter-of-fact, as if they have plowed this ground before. And another thing is true—they have forgotten about me in that twinlike way.

What they say creates a vast and complicated but vividly articulated new object in my mind, the history of my children
in my absence, at the mercy of their father. Didn’t I know he was like this, unrestrained and blind to the potential consequences of his own actions? Before we got married, he would make love to me anywhere—in the kitchen, against the refrigerator, with the possibility that his roommate would walk in at any time, often in his car, sometimes right beside the highway, where he had pulled over in the middle of the trip, more than once on the floor of his lab, with the door unlocked. He was passionate. I didn’t protest. I thought I was irresistible. After we had children, I said over and over, always laughing, “Come on. People don’t make love when the children are around.” I still thought I was irresistible, though. Angry, his language was always unrestrained, eloquent, a rococo tirade against the object of his anger (even a child, even a secretary) and everything it represented, appalling, astonishing, frightening, delicious. His fists clenched, but until the end he never hit me.

I can say, Well, he did it, not me. What I thought about was that when they were with me, their lives were orderly and low-key. I hardly ever got mad at them as I had when we were all a family. Most of what they did was fine with me. Away from Pat, I was without anger, without that grating supervision, the constant call for my attention and response. I was no longer the pivot between the boss and the peons, responsible to everyone, the miraculous fragmenting woman, pulled apart every day only to be knitted together every night so that she could be pulled apart again in the morning.

I never really probed into how he treated them, or even imagined it, beyond remembering how he had been. That was the realistic course of action, wasn’t it?

But when I stepped out from between father and children, not knowing, but not not knowing, either, I left them to their own devices, didn’t I? Whoever did it, they were damaged, weren’t they? Here is something I remember about
Ed. A year went by, and I fell out of love with him, and another year went by, and another, and finally he moved away. In those three years I saw him from time to time, and every time I saw him I became nothing again. Even after I realized that he had intended none of this, that his cruelty was compounded of fear and shame, not disapproval and antagonism, his presence negated me. Damaged, he damaged me. A small thing. Smaller, by far, than the damage I did to Pat, than the damage we did to our children. “Is that a sigh?” says Joe from the front seat.