The Children's Crusade (10 page)

I couldn’t recall my father complaining—ever. His burden was the burden of loneliness, his marriage having given him a houseful of people but no one his own age to talk to. His conversations with my mother revolved around whatever had taken hold of her mind most recently, whatever it was she wanted, and while on occasion she may have sat still as he presented a thought, a feeling, a dilemma, she was not genuinely interested in him. In truth, they seemed closest when she was ill and he was more doctor than husband. How all of this didn’t sap something essential from him, I don’t know. Perhaps it did. Perhaps, with his wife’s love, he would have been even more than he was.

When he said good night to me, he always sat on the edge of my bed. He stroked my face, and his fingers smelled of the peppermint antacids he chewed after meals. He said he loved me. He said the oak tree would stand guard all night, and that a new day was scheduled to arrive first thing in the morning. Sometimes, to delay his departure, I asked about his day, what patients he’d seen, how sick they were; I would want to know if any of them had barfed on
him, and he would say no, but come to think of it there had been a Charles on the ceiling (an upchuck). He never talked about the actual children he treated. This was long before HIPAA; he simply didn’t think it was right. And I think he knew it would make me jealous. His close friend and colleague Marvin Miller sometimes used phrases like “my boys and girls.” My father said “my patients.”

His family had not owned a car until he was ten years old. This was fantastic to me—he might as well have said they lived in a cave. The strangest thing about it was that they hadn’t needed one. They lived in a small town. They walked everywhere. And yet the first time I went there—on a visit we all took in the summer of 1969—it wasn’t the size of the place, the four short blocks that encompassed the downtown, that amazed me. It was the humidity. I didn’t see how he could have told us about his early life without mentioning it. Every moment coated your skin; to go from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned restaurant was to traverse a tiny hell. On our first afternoon in town, when it was 95 degrees out with 88 percent humidity, we knocked on the door of his childhood home, and the current owners invited us to come in and look around. The relief from the heat was minor, and there was an unpleasant cooked-meat smell. I wondered how you went about visiting people you didn’t know, but our father was very good at this kind of interaction, and after a compliment and an anecdote he beckoned us to the dark, narrow passageway that ran from the entry hall to the kitchen. “Come stand here, children,” he said. “Do you feel that little breeze? This is where I played on days like this.” And we stood in the passageway, the six of us making quite a crowd, and I thought that my father’s ability to make the best of a situation was something I would acquire one day, like underarm hair or a deeper voice.

California enchanted him. He loved the dry air and the gold hills, the particular dust-and-tree-bark scent of our land. Long after
everyone was gone—we kids and our mother—he stayed in the house, expanding his territory into the empty rooms so that, at the time of his death, he was using my bedroom for the TV, Rebecca’s for a guest room, and the one shared by Ryan and James for a snug library lined with bookcases, in the center of which sat a leather armchair and a lamp. When he had us all to dinner, he set the table with linens and the silver candlesticks our mother had rejected as too conservative and, with an unnecessary apology, served us undercooked broccoli and bland meat loaf procured at the prepared-foods department of the local supermarket.

A few months after his seventy-fourth birthday, he had a bout of pneumonia that put him in the hospital for several days, and not long after that he suffered a stroke that was mild enough to leave him with deficits in no area other than confidence, though there it affected him deeply. He seemed to age overnight, to begin refusing invitations, pleading fatigue when we urged him to accompany us on weekend trips, even visits to the city. Then, on December 27, 2003, after two days of constipation, vomiting, and intense abdominal pain, he drove himself to the ER, not wanting to bother us for something that might turn out to be a simple case of overeating at Christmas dinner. This was not the problem. We were called in, and within an hour he was referred to surgery for an intestinal blockage, apologizing to us as they wheeled him away for being a burden yet again.

He had a laparoscopic colectomy with so much colon removed he was given a colostomy that was likely to be permanent. Four days later, with his pain manageable, I wanted him discharged; I thought he’d be better off at home with twenty-four-hour nursing and a bottle of antibacterial soap at the front door than in the breeding ground of infection known as the Stanford Hospital. Rebecca disagreed, and we argued about it in the corridor outside his room.

She had to go see a patient, and I sat with my father again. For
an hour or so he’d been saying he felt dizzy, and he shivered once or twice. He was too tired to talk, and I cast about in my mind for something he might enjoy hearing, settling on a year-old story about Sammy that I’d probably already told him.

At four, Sammy had loved nothing better than the vast backyard of his preschool, where he and a few other little boys played with an abundant assortment of plastic trucks, sometimes zooming them around on the concrete patio, other times flooding parts of the yard to create appropriate terrain for the bulldozers and backhoes. All of this took place under the kind and watchful eye of a teacher named Gary, a huge linebacker of a guy with thick black sideburns. If the kids needed help diverting a stream of water through the giant sandbox, Gary would show them how to dig a trench to create a new riverbed. When it was time to clean up at the end of the morning, Gary would hold open the plastic storage bin where the trucks were kept overnight while the boys brought the vehicles over and, according to their personalities, placed, dropped, or threw them in. One morning Jen arrived in time for the last few minutes of play, and she watched as Gary and Sammy created a racetrack for two fire trucks, filling a dip with enough water to guarantee a big splashing finish. When it was time to go, Sammy waited for Gary’s hug before letting Jen take his hand. On the way to the car, he said, in his high, squeaky voice, “It might be good to be a teacher.” Jen asked why, and he said, “Because then you would have a really big sand area in your backyard.”

My father smiled. Age had given him pouches under his eyes and a gravelly voice. “I can just hear him,” he said. “Sammy.”

I said, “He thought the teacher lived at the school.”

“It’s all right, honey,” he said. “We don’t have to talk.”

He closed his eyes and after a short while seemed to drift off, his lips parting enough for a bead of drool to edge out of the corner of his mouth. His colostomy bag was covered by his sheet, but I could
see its outline and wondered for the hundredth time if he would be able to bear it. He’d been accepting, or maybe fatalistic. “Not ideal,” was how he’d termed it, “but better than the alternative.”

“I’m cold,” he said, startling to alertness, and I found a blanket and tucked it around him, noticing as I worked that there was a film of sweat on his forehead.

“Dad?”

He shook his head, and a shudder grabbed him, violent as a seizure. His forehead was hot. I grabbed his wrist, felt his pulse galloping, and hurried to the nurses’ station. When I got back, his respirations seemed faster. I counted breaths as the nurse pulled the blood pressure cuff up his thin, naked-looking arm. In old age, men become hairy as apes or smooth as children, and my father was firmly in the second category, though on his head his once-black hair had turned cloud-white but thinned only a little.

His temperature was 103, BP 70 over 40, respirations 24 per minute.

“He has an infection,” I said, and the nurse said she would page the doctor. “
I’ll
place the order,” I said, and then I turned from her and put my face in my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Thank you for your help. Thank you.”

When she was gone I leaned close to my father. “It’s okay,” I said.

“Lock the front door,” he whispered.

Half an hour later he was in the ICU, and Rebecca and Ryan were on their way.

With sepsis, toxins swarm the body, launching a series of inflammatory responses that can be fatal in combination, especially in the elderly. His BP did not respond to the initial bolus of fluids, and soon he was receiving norepinephrine along with the broad-spectrum antibiotic the attending had ordered right away.

He lasted until daybreak, unconscious. For most of that time,
except when the staff was working on him, I rested my hand on his leg: a weight to keep him down with us, the living. Rebecca and Ryan each held a foot. We were gowned, of course, and masked and gloved. I kept thinking it would scare him to see us that way, unless he could somehow find it funny. He’d been a great fan of Halloween, corralling us on the weekend before the holiday to drive to a farm south of San Jose to pick our own pumpkins. As I looked at my brother and sister with their voluminous robes and white muzzles and bright blue hands, I thought we could pass for aliens from a benign sci-fi movie, no blood and guts, just strange-looking creatures with fluid pooling in front of their eyes.

4

THE CRUSADE

J
ames started kindergarten on the hottest September day in recorded history. At seven-thirty in the morning it was already 92 degrees outside. “I stay inside when it’s hot,” he said at breakfast, attempting to bolster the case he’d been making for several days, that he shouldn’t go to school this year after all. At bedtime the night before, his father had told him that on his own first day of school, back in 1934, he had been so reluctant that his sister had been forced to take him by the hand and pull him along. The heels of his new shoes were worn down, he’d dragged his feet so hard. James usually liked stories about his father’s childhood mistakes, but this one didn’t help.

His teacher, a Miss McKinley, was new to the school. When the bell rang, she waved off the mothers and invited her charges to sit cross-legged at the front of the room, on a large square of indoor/outdoor carpeting strewn with paper cutouts of the letters of the alphabet. James sat on the letter F and felt it crinkle under his bottom. He stood up, sat down, and felt it crinkle again. He got to his feet and said in a loud voice, “My fuh is wrinkling.”

The teacher’s back was turned, and she didn’t respond.

“Teacher! My fuh is wrinkled!”

The other boys and girls were sitting with their hands in their laps, as the teacher had asked. She turned and looked down at James. He had a paper name tag hanging from a piece of yarn around his
neck, and she peered at it and said, “James, that is not a fuh, that is an eff. And we’re big boys and girls now. We stay seated until we are told we may get up.” Then she smiled a dazzling smile, her teeth bright as Chiclets, and in that instant he fell in love.

At home that evening, all four Blair children were hot and tired. Their father had made his special first-day-of-school dinner, barbecued spare ribs and corn on the cob, but the children only poked at their food. At her end of the table, their mother gazed off into the distance and took occasional sips of her iced tea.

“I guess,” their father said, “we may have some spare ribs this evening.”

“Ha,” Rebecca said. “I get it.”

Robert got it, too, but he wasn’t going to say so and be second. Instead, he drained his lemonade and said, “I’m not that hungry, but I’m incredibly thirsty.”

Rebecca gave him a long look.

“What?”

“Let’s hope you’re not dehydrated.”

“Why would I be dehydrated?”

“You’ve probably been sweating a lot from the heat.”

Bill pressed his napkin to his lips. He’d been on call the night before, and a febrile infant had necessitated a trip to the hospital. He was very tired, no longer able to recover from sleep deprivation as easily as he had in the past.

He said, “Do you children know how to tell if you’re dehydrated?”

They were silent for a moment. “Your urine is very concentrated,” Rebecca said decisively. “It’s dark yellow.”

“Look, here’s a trick.” He held out his arm and pinched the skin on the back of his hand. “If your skin holds the pinch, you need fluids.”

All four children pinched themselves and then repeated the test
to be sure.

“I’m not dehydrated,” Rebecca said.

“I’m not, either,” Ryan said.

“We’re all healthy,” their father said. “Hot but healthy. Now, I want to hear about school. How was the first day?”

At the sound of this question, their mother returned her attention to the table. “Heaven,” she said. Their father held her gaze, unblinking and keeping everything in reserve. She glanced at him and then looked away.

Robert and Rebecca were accustomed to this kind of muted confrontation and coped by briefly suspending their feelings, as if feelings were objects unruled by gravity, capable of floating in the air until they were claimed again. James was not yet aware of his parents’ difficulties. It was hardest for Ryan.

“Dad,” he said.

“Yes, Ryan?”

“I didn’t have school. I don’t start till next week.”

“I know that, honey. I should have said I wanted to hear about school or not-school, as the case may be.”

“I think it’s funny,” Rebecca said, “when you say ‘as the case may be.’ Because ‘case,’ get it? You’re a doctor, you have cases.”

“So do lawyers,” Robert said.

“I have patients,” Bill said. “I try not to think of them as cases.”

Penny looked at her husband, sitting at the opposite end of the table so straight and tall. This kind of comment generally annoyed her: Bill the paragon, Bill the saint. But because the day
had
been heaven, her objection occurred at a lower register than usual and faded away. Since James’s birth she’d been overwhelmed by the children—by James, really—but today had been lovely, and once Ryan started back to school, her time would be her own. She was almost
forty, ready to start a new chapter of her life. During the family’s recent week at Sea Ranch she’d gathered dozens of shells from the beach and was planning to decorate something with them. And she had a new five-pound bag of clay and some colored wax for making sand candles. She could hardly wait to get started.

“James,” Bill said. “You first. How was it?”

Bill and James had already had two or three brief but charged conversations about James’s morning, during which Bill had gotten bursts of story, but it was his practice to make sure everyone had a few uninterrupted minutes at the dinner table, to talk about the day or anything else, and he waited for James to begin.

“Her name,” James said, “is Miss McKinley.”

Robert snorted and then tried to cover it up with a cough. He wasn’t worried about James’s feelings so much as his own reputation as a teenager, which he was half a year away from becoming. A teenager would have better things to do than make fun of his little brother. His little five-year-old kindergarten brother. He had to remember who he really was.

“You liked her,” Bill said.

“My letter wrinkled,” James said. “I sat on it and it wrinkled. I got a eff.”

“
An
eff,” Robert said. “And I highly doubt you got a grade for your first day of kindergarten.”

“No,” James said, “eff like A, B, C, D, E, F, G—” He began singing the alphabet song.

“Okay, okay,” Robert said. “We get it.”

“Let’s let James finish,” Bill said.

“I painted at the easel,” James said. “I went on the slide and got burned.”

“I’ll bet that metal slide was hot,” Bill said.

“We had juice,” James said. “One cup. Miss McKinley said there
was water if we wanted more.”

“Is she nice?” Ryan asked, wanting for his brother all the sweetness of his own school life.

James had been holding a spare rib, and he set it down. His hands were covered with barbecue sauce, and he flung them wide and said, “She is my queen.”

Rebecca was directly across from him, and she looked down at her plate and bit the inside of her lip to keep from laughing. She could feel Robert next to her, revving, and she bit harder. The urge to giggle overcame the tiny pain, and heat flooded her face. Moisture formed on her upper lip and forehead. If her shoulders started shaking, all would be lost. She pressed her thighs together, afraid she’d wet her pants. And slowly, gradually, the laugh subsided. She wiped the sweat from her face. She had won, but just barely.

“I’m hot,” James said, sticking out his lower lip.

“It is very hot,” Bill said.

In fact, it was 101 degrees outside, at six o’clock. The kitchen felt like the desert at noon, an expression the children had learned from their maternal grandfather. The living room was even hotter, with its windows that faced the setting sun.

James pushed his plate away. “I’m done.” He got down from his chair and went to his father, cupping his hands around Bill’s ear and whispering something.

“Fuh is the sound it makes,” Bill said, “but eff is what it’s called. Just like muh is the sound made by the letter emm.”

“And wuh is the sound made by the letter double you!” James cried with the excessive enthusiasm he often used in moments of confusion.

“Like that,” Bill said. “You’ve got it.”

James returned to his chair.

“James,” Penny exclaimed. “Look what you did!”

Everyone looked. Bill’s shirt was stained with barbecue sauce, paw prints on the white. There was sauce on his face, too. “No harm,” he said, dabbing at his shirt with his napkin. “It’s an old one.”

“Easy for you to say,” Penny said. “You don’t have to wash it.”

“I mean it’s about worn out. I should get some new ones.
Please
don’t worry about it right now,” he added as she pushed away from the table.

“I’m getting more iced tea.” But as she went to the refrigerator, she fumed. There were times when he reminded her of someone, though she couldn’t figure out whom—it was someone she’d never actually known. Someone unbending. Though that wasn’t exactly it. He was too bending, really, folding over on himself like the rubbery green Gumby figures the children collected. Head to his toes and then spring right back as if nothing had ever happened. It was possible to provoke him, but she never knew what would and what wouldn’t. When provoked, he turned pink and went silent. She also never knew, in advance, how she would feel about it. Sometimes she hated it. She wanted to throw herself at his feet.

Bill looked around the table at the children. “Let’s see, where were we? Ryan?”

Ryan hesitated. He didn’t want to start if his mother was upset. He also wasn’t sure what to say because his day had been very strange, entirely different from any day he could remember. His school was on a different schedule from the public school, so he was accustomed to being home on some days when Robert and Rebecca were not, but he had never been home without James. It had been only two and a half hours, but it had seemed far longer. Like a day in a book—a child in a faraway land. He tried out most of his favorite places to sit, and then he drew for a while, and then he went outside and walked around the house with his hand out, his fingertips brushing against
the wood all the way around. After that, it felt good to soak his hand in cold water. Just before it was time to get James, his mother brought out some old photo albums, and they sat together and paged through them, his mother pointing at his face each time it appeared. “There you are,” she said. “And there you are. And there you are.” At the end of one album was a picture of James holding Dog very tightly, his eyes squeezed shut, and his mother said, “Was that real love, do you think?” And Ryan didn’t respond because the answer—that it was real but not wide and deep, like his love for Badger—seemed disloyal.

His mother returned to the dinner table, and he told the family about coloring a picture of the sky. He had taken great care with it, and it was beautifully, unvaryingly blue—a giant piece of paper, almost as big as a pillowcase, all blue. He had used his characteristic soft, light strokes, and as he fetched the picture and held it up for everyone to see, he realized he had made a window to hang above his bed. When he went to sleep at night, it would be like looking at the daytime sky.

For her turn, Rebecca named the girls who were in her class, starting with her three best friends, going down the list through the girls she liked and the girls she didn’t mind, and finishing with the two girls who bothered her, Leanne Mack and Edith Ketler, the one who smelled bad and the other who was as big as a teenager.

“Why don’t you like Leanne and Edith?” Robert said.

“It’s not that I don’t like them,” Rebecca said. “I just don’t know them that well.” This made her uncomfortable, and she hurried on to the desk she’d been assigned (second row, far left) and the number of pencils she’d been given for her pencil tray (three) and the games she’d played at recess (foursquare and then Chinese jump rope, which she had gotten really bad at over the summer). Finally she spent a couple of minutes talking about her teacher, Mrs. House, and saved the best detail till last: her daughter was a pediatrician!

“Well, I’ll be,” Bill said.

“Why shouldn’t she be a pediatrician?” Penny said.

“She should be. By all means.”

“You mean she shouldn’t not be,” Rebecca said.

“Yes, that’s what I mean.” Bill kept his eyes off Penny, who seemed cross about something. He turned to Robert. “And the first day of seventh grade?”

Robert should have been ready to launch, but he was annoyed that Rebecca’s teacher’s daughter was a pediatrician: now Rebecca would have something extra with their father for a whole year. “It was boring.”

“Really?” Bill said. “A new school boring? There must have been something of interest. Something new, something different.”

Robert glanced at Rebecca. “Well, I change classes now. I have seven teachers.”

“And I have one!” James shouted.

“James, it’s not your turn,” Robert snapped. “Not that I have anything else to say. Forget it, I’m done.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Bill said. “I believe we have met our match in this heat. What say we go out for ice cream?”

The three younger children clamored their approval, leaping to take their plates to the sink, asserting their choice of flavor as if only one of them could have any one type of ice cream. After a moment Robert followed, silently so no one would think he was finished being mad.

Penny waited to see if anyone wanted her to go. She thought she’d say yes, but only if someone asked. She looked from child to child, settling at last on Ryan, who was likeliest to care. Did Bill care? Why didn’t he ask? She imagined the two of them walking hand in hand from the car to the ice cream parlor, the children either so far up ahead or so quiet that it would be possible to pretend
she and her husband were alone together. She couldn’t remember the last time that had happened, and it wouldn’t happen if she went along for ice cream, not even for a few moments, and it probably wouldn’t happen in bed tonight, either—they’d be alone together but they probably wouldn’t touch; they didn’t much these days. She remembered being five years old, eight, ten, and her mother telling her not to cut off her nose to spite her face, and she thought all she needed was one smile, from any one of them; and then, somehow, they were all on the move, and Bill was giving her a look that said he’d expected her to stay behind, to opt out, to
fail as a mother
—and they were at the front door without her.