The Children's Crusade (20 page)

Walt reached for my face and began to kiss me. Next thing I knew, the heel of his hand was brushing my nipple. The couch was deep and
soft, and gradually we moved from upright to reclining. “Three times in four days?” I said, and he said, “I’m not sixty yet.” I suggested we go downstairs, but he kept touching and kissing, and I considered the cushions and wondered how much longer I would or could continue without asking him to pause so I could grab the throw draped over the back of the couch and arrange it beneath us to protect the cushions. Ah, Rebecca, I thought, you are such a wildcat. In the end it was Walt who paused for the throw, and then it all went very fast, and the last thing I thought was not that we should be careful or that I was always careful; it was that the stone house had come into view again, old stone in a snowy field with light shining from the windows.

• • •

James seemed hyped up when I got home the next afternoon, and I wondered if it was the weather—it had been raining all day and he’d been inside for hours. Then again, it might have been the fact that he’d spent the previous evening with Robert, who I was certain had not been easy company. He’d left me two voice mails that morning, one complaining about the prospect of James forcing a sale of the house and the other complaining about the prospect of James ruining the lives of two children.

“Vince wanted me to stop by the house,” James said as I took off my coat. “Can I borrow your car?”

“Why did he want you to stop by?”

“Well, it was more like I wanted to and he said okay. Give me your keys.”

“You can’t barge in again, James.”

“I’m thirty-eight, Rebecca, it’s not up to you. May I borrow your car?”

I ended up driving him, the phrase “damage control” in my mind though I didn’t know what damage I was anticipating. Lewis’s car
wasn’t there, just Lisa’s. It was raining hard now, and we hurried up the steps. Daphne opened the front door, and I realized that I hadn’t noticed how much she resembled her mother: less in her facial features or in the shape of her body than in her quickly moving eyes. Her thin blond hair hung past her shoulders, and she wore a T-shirt with sequined lips on the front.

Lisa came in from the kitchen. On Sunday she’d looked put together in the way of many mothers on the Peninsula, who wore the same kinds of jeans as their teenage daughters but with four-inch heels and thousand-dollar silk blouses. Today she was dressed in yoga clothes, her hair in a ponytail, and she was obviously irritated.

“Here you are, as promised. Lewis is running late. I’m not sure exactly what you wanted to do, but I’m elbow-deep in getting dinner ready, so if you don’t mind, I’ll just let you wander.”

“Mom, you’re not,” Daphne said.

“Not what?”

“Getting dinner ready.”

Lisa whirled around and went back to the kitchen.

“Awk-ward,” James said under his breath.

I wanted to ask what he’d expected, but Daphne was right there. “What did you want to see?” I said.

“Nothing in particular.”

“I can show you my room,” Daphne said. “It used to be Ryan’s.”

“And mine,” James told her.

“You shared a room?”

“Yes, in the old days people weren’t very nice to children.”

The two of them set off, and I stood still for a moment, wondering what would be the least intrusive thing for me to do. I settled on taking a few steps toward the living room but not going down into it.

It had been a while since I’d been in the house, and I thought of my father—not the aging solitary figure I’d last loved but the father
of my childhood. He’d commanded this house: like a ship captain, like a battalion leader whose mandate was not just victory but also, and more significantly, the well-being of his troops. He led us morally, empathically. He would be dismayed by the idea of James disturbing the lives of two children. Was I dismayed? I was trying not to be. I was trying to think interpretively. James couldn’t risk true intimacy, so he chose a woman who wasn’t really available. James couldn’t allow himself the pleasure of a happy relationship, so he was going to mitigate it with the pain of gratifying Penny. James couldn’t get past the suffering he’d experienced as a child, so he felt compelled to create similar distress in others.

He returned, followed by Daphne. Looking at her slight frame and darting eyes, I recalled that she had trouble with sleeping and school and wondered what her parents’ other concerns were.

“Everyone,” she was saying to James, “has one special thing that they’re great at. My dad is great at business. My mom is great at riding horses. My sister is great at playing the flute.”

“I know what you’re great at,” he said.

“No, you don’t. There’s nothing to know.”

“You’re great at being Daphne.”

“No, I’m not,” she said. “Anyway, my name is Laurel.”

She went into the living room and made her way to an end table on the far side of the couch. It was a boxy wooden table with heavy legs and a low shelf four inches off the floor. On top of the table was an unusual lamp, a perforated metal tower about two feet tall, and at first I thought she was going to turn it on. Instead she squatted, ducked her head, and climbed onto the shelf. This left her crouching inside the table, though “crouching” might not be the right word, given that it implies some kind of action, and once Daphne was situated the table did all the work of holding her in place. Her body filled the space, the back of her head and the upper part of her spine
flat up against the underside of the tabletop. Her knees were bent so tightly you couldn’t have slid a coin between her calves and her thighs, which left her buttocks about an inch off the shelf, with no support.

James and I exchanged a look.
Do something,
his expression seemed to say.

“She’s in a tight spot,” I murmured.

“Literally.”

“I meant literally.”

Daphne wrapped her arms around her lower legs. From the kitchen came the sound of running water, and I wondered if this was a common late-afternoon scenario, Lisa in the kitchen and Daphne in the table. She was obviously accustomed to being there.

James cleared his throat and took a few steps in her direction. “Daphne, you should come out of there.”

Huddled in her ball, she shook her head and clutched her legs even tighter.

“Should I go get your mom? Do you need help?”

When she didn’t respond, he hesitated for a moment and then headed to the kitchen.

“You like to be called Laurel?” I said, approaching her.

“Daphne is a stupid name. And it
means
Laurel, so I’m changing my name when I turn eighteen.”

“How is it stupid?”

“Daffy, daffy, daffy.”

“Is that what people say?”

“None of your business.”

“That’s true. What’s it like in there? You had to make yourself very small to fit.”

“I’m the exact same size I always have been.”

“Daphne!” Lisa said, coming out of the kitchen. “We talked
about this.” She avoided looking at me as she made her way to the table. “Now,” she added as she held out her hand.

Daphne reached out and slapped it.

“Daphne!”

“I’m a scorpion,” Daphne said. “That’s what scorpions do.”

“You may not hit.”

“That’s what scorpions
do
.”

Lisa turned away from Daphne and sighed. Then she looked at me and James and said, “What do you people want? Why are you here? Sell us the house or don’t, but please, please decide.”

• • •

We were silent in the car, rain pouring over us as we made our way back to Palo Alto. I knew James was uncomfortable, but I also knew that if I said anything about what had just happened, he’d take it as a rebuke. Walt was working late, and the prospect of spending several hours alone with James seemed overwhelming. I told him I had a dinner meeting, dropped him at the house, and returned to my office. I lay on the couch, which gave me a view I never had from my desk or from the chair where I sat during sessions with adults: of a wire sculpture of Penny’s. Made of copper, it was abstract but looked from certain angles like a crouching lion and from others like a seascape.

I’d last spoken to her during the summer. She sounded as she usually did, joyful and slightly harried, which I chalked up to maternal awkwardness: if she acted rushed or distracted, she could end the call abruptly if she didn’t like the way it was going. We exchanged news and then, toward the end of the conversation, she asked about James—for the first time in a long time. She said, “Tell him I’m glad to hear he’s doing well.” I hadn’t conveyed the message, and as I lay there in my office I wondered what would happen if I did so now, if
it would help him get over his block against calling her so we could move forward on the house.

But I didn’t want to move forward on the house—did I?

I wanted the uncertainty to be over, for the next phase of my life to start.

Then all at once I pictured the house again: not the Portola Valley house but the one I’d been imagining lately: the stone house in the snowy field. It was in England, I suddenly knew. Some romanticized Christmastime England. And I thought of Edward Beale, who apparently had been in the back of my mind for several days.

Edward was an Englishman I’d met halfway through my residency at Stanford; he was doing a fellowship in neuromuscular medicine. Until then, I’d had only one real boyfriend, during medical school, but we were both so busy it lasted just three or four months. Edward was my lover for over a year. He had thinning sandy hair and a divot below his left eye where he’d been cut by a sharp rock in a fall when he was twelve. When we could get time off, we went on car trips to the coast—Half Moon Bay if we had only an afternoon, West Marin, Big Sur. “Staggering,” he always murmured as we looked at the ocean, in a mild tone that stood in marked contrast to the wildly enthusiastic yelling that Ryan and I had done all those years earlier at Sea Ranch.

With his fellowship coming to an end, Edward applied for positions up and down the West Coast and was choosing between the University of Washington and USC when he received a phone call from home with the news that his brother was losing muscle tone in his right leg, likely the first signs of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a hereditary neuromuscular illness suffered by Edward’s grandfather as well. It was in order to learn about the inexorable march of weakness, numbness, and pain that had laid waste to his grandfather’s body that Edward had chosen neurology in the first place.

Within a few weeks Edward decided to decline both positions and go home. We’d spoken of the easy flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles or Portland and how his move would not have to end our relationship, but in some way I was relieved by his decision. We’d been very compatible sexually, but now, with an end in sight, it got more intense. Mornings when we’d slept together I woke him with oral sex, and after an evening out I often reached for him while he was still behind the wheel of the car. On our last coastal trip, we had sex in the restroom of a filling station where we stopped for gas before starting the drive home. The restroom was the single-occupancy kind for which there’s a key on a giant ring hanging at the cash register. I bought a bottle of water and took the key. Edward was at the pump. I held up the key for him to see and then went around the side of the building and let myself in. He knocked on the door a few minutes later and then pressed me against the concrete wall as if we were characters in a movie performing the kind of urgent upright copulation that looks painful if not impossible. Turns out it’s neither.

“Have you invited Rebecca to visit you in England?” my father asked Edward.

This was maybe five days before Edward was to leave. We were with my parents at a stuffy Italian restaurant in Menlo Park, a relic of times gone by complete with a coat check at the door and starched white linens on the tables. For the occasion my father and Edward wore neckties, but this was just before the summer Penny spent in Taos, and she was in her high artist phase, wearing her daily uniform of dusty, irregularly washed blue jeans and a waffle-weave shirt the color of oatmeal.

From another person my father’s question might have seemed pushy, or at least a little presumptuous, but from my father it had the feel of the gentle relationship advice that it was: he liked Edward
and was sorry he was leaving.

“That would be lovely,” Edward said.

“Just think,” my father said to me. “You could see Big Ben.”

“And Buckingham Palace. And the Tower of London.”

My father smiled and recited: “ ‘They’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace. Christopher Robin went down with Alice.’ ”

I smiled, too. “Ryan always liked that one.”

“But the minute I started it,” my father said, “James would beg me to do ‘James, James, Morrison, Morrison.’ ”

“And what James wanted—” Penny said.

“Don’t!” my father snapped, more anger in his voice than I could remember hearing in a long time.

She stared at the backs of her hands and then reached for her glass and dunked her fingers in the water. She swirled them around and shook them off. “No finger bowls,” she said defiantly. Then she dried her hands on her napkin and left it crumpled on the table, streaked with gray.

No one spoke. My father had bowed his head. At last he looked up and said, “I’m sorry”—but to the table, not to her.

After dinner Edward and I headed for his apartment. It was May and the daytime temperature had been close to eighty, but the evening was chilly and I wrapped my jacket tight. We didn’t say much until we were inside again.

“That must have been uncomfortable for you,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

“Not at all. It sounded like an old argument.”

“They don’t really argue. It’s more like they disagree.”

“About?”

“Everything.”

We were, by then, undressing in his bedroom, I on one side of the bed and he on the other. We seemed to have made an unspoken,
mutual decision to go straight to bed.

“Do you ever think of them having sex?” he said, taking off his underwear and approaching me. He had the beginning of an erection, and I got on my tiptoes and squeezed him between my legs.