The Age of Hope (22 page)

After Charlotte’s phone call the ties were quickly broken, and the visits with Rudi and Ilke became secretive. One Saturday, a month after the Barbie incident, while Rudi and Ilke were watching TV and Conner was sitting and having coffee with Roy, Charlotte phoned again.

“Are they there?” she asked.

Hope innocently asked, “Who?”

“Rudi and Ilke. Has Conner brought them to you?”

She lied. She said that she had not seen the children. But if they showed up, she would tell Conner that Charlotte was looking for them. When she hung up her hands were shaking and her shoulders as well, because she knew she had been deceitful. She had taken the call in the bedroom, and she walked out through the living room to the kitchen, and on her way she touched her grandchildren’s heads, and then she went and sat next to Roy and took his hand.

When she looked lovingly at her grandchildren, Hope had always imagined that she saw parts of her or Roy in them. Certainly she saw Conner in their eyes, the shape of their feet, even the way they walked. She often noted that Rudi had Grandpa K’s hairline. And so when she learned to her horror that Rudi and Ilke were not Conner’s children, and therefore not Hope or Roy’s grandchildren, she did not know what to do with this information. She at first tried denial. Conner was on the phone, and he had broken the news to her in a quiet steady voice, though she sensed that he might be on the verge of crying, and she said, “That’s nonsense. Rudi’s the spitting image of you.”

“It’s true, Mom. Charlotte wouldn’t say this if it weren’t true.”

“How long has she known this?” And having asked this question, she saw how foolish it was. Charlotte had known from the exact moment of conception. Rudi was four, and so for five years she had known. And said nothing. “Who are the fathers?” she asked.

“A man she met on a business trip. And one of the lawyers from her firm. That was Ilke.”

She was quiet. Then she said, “Oh, Conner.”

“Why didn’t she just leave me after Rudi was born?”

It turned out that
now
she would be leaving Conner. She wanted a divorce. She would keep the children, who were hers, though she would allow him the occasional visit. She didn’t want the children to be too confused and upset. She planned, after the divorce, to marry Ilke’s father, the man who had had no contact with his daughter up till now, save for the infrequent weekend visit, during which he had been introduced to Rudi and Ilke as a friend. A friend.

And what about the grandparents? Would this duplicitous man’s parents just jump in and become the new grandparents? Hope felt rage and bewilderment and jealousy and terrible grief. Over the next months, as the court system decided in its cold-hearted way the path her son must walk, she wondered if she was ultimately to blame, if she had spoiled Conner as a child, if he had gathered up her own propensity for failure (though she had never really attempted anything other than motherhood) and was now paying the price. Might there be some sin in her past, some flaw that had trickled down like a poison into Conner’s life? She should have stopped the marriage from the get-go. The girl had been haughty and puffed-up. And highly anxious. Her blue eyes had darted here and there fearfully, like those of a snared rabbit. And then she had taken up cycling, long treks down the California coast with a bevy of other cyclists, leaving Conner with the children for a week at a time. She had always been overly fond of her body, wearing short skirts in summer, prancing about on the dock of the cottage (when they still had the cottage) in her bikini, commanding Conner to fetch her another drink. “Okay, sweetie?” The marriage had been doomed from the start, and Hope had done nothing, said nothing.

One night, eating dinner with Roy, she declared Charlotte evil.

Roy raised his eyebrows. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing,” he said. “Like Conner, she’s spoiled and selfish. When I look at the two of them I think they deserve each other.”

“Oh, Roy. Don’t.”

“The thing is, Hope, it takes two to tangle.”

“She was the one doing the tangling,” Hope cried. She missed the little children. She had not felt such helplessness since the failure of Roy’s business, and she found herself for the first time criticizing her husband, who seemed to her now as powerless and ineffectual as their son.

A good lawyer was needed, but it turned out that Charlotte, being a lawyer herself, had access to the best counsel, and Conner was stranded with a mousy family lawyer in ill-fitted suits who mumbled his way through the proceedings. In the end, the court, wise and detached, ruled that Conner had acted in good faith and was, in every definition save the biological, the father, and so would be allowed time with the children every other weekend. Hope despaired. It was a pittance.

And too, there was the unexpected shame she felt. During the court case, Ilke’s father had been present, flanked by his own parents. They had made quite the trio, finely dressed, smelling of money, and against her will, Hope had found herself sneaking glances at them, even admiring the new grandmother’s clothes, her hair, the cashmere wrap around her shoulders. She realized that Rudi and Ilke would be very fortunate. They would want for nothing.

Penny had taken time off work at the hospital to join her parents in the courtroom. She sat beside Hope and took notes in a little beige book. Hope wondered what the point was. What would she do with all this useless information? Penny, it turned out, had little empathy for Conner, who she felt had always been sloppy in life and probably knew subconsciously what mischief Charlotte had been up to. And if he hadn’t? Well, that was idiocy in itself. Penny felt sorry for the children. Adults, she liked to say, tended towards greed and disorder. Children were inclined towards health. Somewhere, perhaps at the age of nineteen or twenty, the curiosity and life force of the child was tossed aside for a mind-numbing existence of acquisition and complacency. She knew this because she herself was an adult.

Penny would not have children. She had married a man named Ted, a biophysicist who claimed that the world was nearing a sixth extinction. He announced this with perverse glee. Well, thought Hope, of course he didn’t mind that the world was ending. He had no progeny. He was fifteen years older than Penny, which made him almost closer in age to mother than to daughter. He was solid and faithful and boring. This was Penny’s description, and she took great delight in it. She found no significance in beauty or wealth or age. The opinions of others carried little weight. She liked Ted because he had no expectations of her.

Hope felt that she was disappearing. Rudi and Ilke represented her lineage. And now, how would she be remembered? This was not a new feeling. Her whole life had been one of disappearance, of slipping silently through the world, unnoticed. She told this to Penny one afternoon in the middle of the winter, after they had left the courtroom and stopped for coffee at a nearby café on Broadway. They were alone. Penny, on that day, appeared to be quite curious about her mother’s feelings. She had her beige notebook, and her pen, and she opened it occasionally and jotted something down. Hope said, “When you were little, we had to tear your notebooks away from you. Otherwise, you would have forgotten to eat and sleep. What are you doing?”

“Oh, just keeping track.”

“Of what?”

“Of you.”

“Oh, why ever?”

The previous summer Penny had taken a month off to fly to a writers’ colony in Italy, where she worked at a collection of short stories that, she explained to her mother later, were quite bad. Full of artifice and dead ends and characters who spoke in paragraphs. Paragraphs. She had worked with an older American writer who one night after a late dinner said that he would like to sleep with Penny. He found her very attractive.

“Is it my breasts you like then? Or perhaps my ass? Or is it my crooked bicuspid? Put a bag over my head and the bicuspid would no longer exist. And would you still want to sleep with me? I prefer older men.”

“But I
am
older.”

“Not old enough.” And she kissed the writer on the cheek and said good night.

She called Ted that night in Canada and told him about the writer, and together they had a good laugh. She came away from the conversation thinking that Ted wouldn’t have minded if she had slept with the writer.

She told Hope that the following day she sat in the shade of a lemon tree, and all in a three-hour rush, she wrote a story about a plastic surgeon who attaches the heads of horses to young female bodies and keeps the women in a stable. The American writer loved it. “You can publish this,” he announced, and she did.

When Hope read the story, printed in a small magazine out of Boston, she was mystified. Why didn’t her daughter just stick to ears and noses and throats? She was a doctor, not a writer.

The routine was for Conner to drop by on the Saturdays when he had the children, and the family would go out to the planetarium or the zoo and then return to the apartment for dinner. Hope would cook hot dogs or Kraft Dinner or she might make French toast. One Saturday, the family sat around the table and Rudi announced that he had two fathers. He said this in a matter-of-fact manner, his small mouth working around the word “fathers.” Conner lifted his head sharply and asked, “Who’s your favourite father?”

“Oh, Conner, don’t,” Hope said. Her son seemed tired and worn out. He was losing his hair, which surprised her. She didn’t recognize him at times. She wondered if this happened to other mothers—that they arrived at a point in their lives where their children had become strangers.

“Don’t,” Ilke repeated. She had discovered imitation as the route to learning a language.

Later, alone in the kitchen, Conner told Hope that Charlotte was thinking of moving to Toronto. The kids would go along.

“Can she do that?” she asked.

Conner shrugged. “I’m not sure I care anymore.”

“Yes, you do.”

And it appeared he did, because two weeks later, Conner took the children and ran, driving west through the mountains to Vancouver. Hope learned of this on Sunday night when Charlotte called to ask if she’d seen him. The children had been dropped off at a friend’s house and Conner had picked them up without telling her. She was frantic, on the verge of hysteria.

“I hope you’re not colluding with him, Hope.”

“How or why would I collude? I haven’t seen them. You should know, Charlotte, that he was terrified you were going to take the children to another city.”

“I’m not moving. Anyway, they’re my children, not his. Your son has gone crazy, Hope. He threatened to kill me. And the other day someone burned down my shed. I’m sure it was him.”

“I don’t think so. That’s not Conner.”

“Then you don’t know your own son, Hope.”

Conner phoned Hope and Roy on Monday evening and said that he was staying in a motel on Vancouver Island. His voice was muted, the sound of the television in the background.

“The police are looking for you, Conner. And the children. You won’t hurt them, will you? This is what Charlotte thinks. And everyone else.”

“The only person I want to hurt is Charlotte. I could kill her.”

“Yes, well. She said you threatened her. And burned her shed. Surely you didn’t.”

When he did not answer Hope said, “That won’t do. You must go to the police there on the island and give your name and explain the situation. Perhaps they will be lenient.”

“I doubt that.”

“Think of Rudi and Ilke. They must be terrified.”

“Not at all. They think it’s great. Out of the clutches of their dragon mother.”

“You’re angry, Conner. Tell me where you are.”

“Why, Mom? You’re not going to call the police.”

“No. Give me your address. I’m going to come and get you. You stay put. I don’t want you to move. Wait for me, do you promise?”

Years later, when she thought back on her trip to Victoria, she recalled the sushi she ate on the flight from Calgary to Vancouver, something she had never touched before. And the young mother with a baby who sat beside her on the short hop over to Victoria—the baby was a squalling fat thing who repulsed Hope, even though she smiled and cooed and said, “Watchanamelittlefella?” as she chucked its ugly chin. And the light scattering across the snow of the Rockies, which reflected the shadow far below of her own airplane, a fleeting indication of her own existence.

She found Conner and the children huddled before a small television in a questionable motel at the edge of Victoria. The children clung to her and she thought, These are frightened things. That night she took everyone out for pizza. She had brought the children gifts—a puzzle for Ilke and Duplo for Rudi—and as they played she told Conner that she planned to phone Charlotte that night. He did not argue. He was out of money, had not shaved, and his clothes were dirty. “You foolish boy,” she said, and she turned back to the children.

Driving back alone with Conner’s car through the Rockies and across the Prairies, she imagined herself as a migrating animal that, while emancipated for the moment, was actually guided by some homing instinct that overpowered any notion of free will. She played Conner’s music, much of which she did not like, and then found under the seat a cassette of Kris Kristofferson, and she grew very fond of it. She dawdled. She drank coffee in truck stops where the drivers sat alone and ate beef. She took rooms along the highway, in motels with names such as The Flamingo and Hark Back Inn. She talked to Roy every night and gave him an update on her progress. She napped by the roadside and woke with a start and drove on, along a thin black ribbon. She wondered how she had never managed to do this before, to drive alone and with complete freedom on the Number One Highway that crossed Canada.

Charlotte had flown out to the coast and then flown with the children back to Winnipeg. The police had arrested Conner, and Hope had made sure that Rudi and Ilke did not witness this. After the mayhem had subsided, Hope sat in Conner’s car and cried briefly, and this had surprised her, because ever since her time in Winkler, she had lost her ability to cry. But now she cried. And then stopped.