The Children's Crusade (24 page)

Bill put his hand on his son’s head. “Let’s keep going, maybe we’ll see it. I need to stretch my legs.”

“I need to stretch my whole body,” James said, and he jumped as
high as he could, extending his arms over his head, and then did it again after he landed. “Imagine if you could swim through air,” he said, circling his arms one after the other. “I’m swimming,” he said. “Dad, swim with me!”

Bill circled one arm and then the other and tried kicking his feet behind him. “Not much of a swimmer.”

“Race me,” James said, and he took off with his arms flying—a flailing four-limbed creature ungoverned by pattern unless you knew where to look. When he got to the corner, he turned around. “Dad, do it!” he called, and Bill cycled his arms as he jogged—halfway on board, which he knew would satisfy his son.

They walked for another twenty minutes. Bill didn’t bring up Jim Jones again. He’d heard that syringes were used to get the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid into the babies’ mouths, and he cringed to think they must have used the same technique he taught parents whose infants required liquid analgesics: squeezing and pulling forward on the cheeks to create a dam against backflow. His nurse, Dorie, a grandmother, had wept when she learned there’d been a nurse in Jonestown handing children cups of poison.

His father-in-law was resting when they got back to the house. James joined the other children in the kitchen, where their grandmother was serving turkey sandwiches, and Bill headed for the bathroom only to have Penny walk in behind him, saying, “James is out of control. I hope you gave him a good talking-to.”

Bill paused, his back to her though he could see her in the mirror over the sink. She wore a necklace of clay beads she’d made herself, and a scowl on her face. He said, “You didn’t like him standing on the chair?”

“And yelling! Did you? Why do I have to be the one to object?”

Over the years, as things had gotten worse at home, Penny had become more and more particular about the children’s conduct
when they visited her parents. It would have made sense to Bill if she’d been that way from the beginning, but when Robert and Rebecca were small she’d actually encouraged what she called “free expression” on these holiday trips. He remembered one Thanksgiving when she insisted on having the children help in the kitchen, and the meal, when it was finally served, two hours late, bore signs of their overinvolvement: giant hand-torn pieces of celery in the stuffing; a pie with no pastry, as they had shredded it over and over until it seemed best simply to bake the filling in a soufflé dish. Another time, visiting in the summer without him, Penny bought a small wading pool, and her mother’s roses were flooded twice when the children experimented with standing on the pool’s flimsy walls.

“He made a scene yesterday, too,” she said. “Dad told Mom and she told me. She was very upset—you know how rigid she is.”

Penny had said this many times, but Bill found his mother-in-law to be quite flexible—and youthful in a way he couldn’t recall his own mother ever having been. “It’s a small house,” he said. “Tight quarters.”

“I guess we should have thought of that before we had four children!”

He nearly bumped into her as he reached around her to close the bathroom door. “Please lower your voice.”

“Don’t you dare be so high and mighty with me!”

“All I said was please lower your voice.”

“Yes, but I know what you’re thinking, and you didn’t want him, either.”

“Oh, Penny, my God. Please.”

“You can’t agree with me?”

“This is hardly the—”

“Do I have to remind you of the foundation?”

At first he had no idea what she meant. Then he remembered the
three R’s he’d carved into the wet concrete. Eight years after that, when Penny was overwhelmed by James’s birth and he wanted to soothe her, he told her that when they were first married he’d truly been with her in thinking that the right number was three; and that alongside her secret sketches, her childhood drawings of two boys and a girl, he had his own secret physical proof in the form of a daydream etched into hardening concrete. It struck him as dangerous that she remembered this—something she could use against James if she wanted to.

“Penny,” he said. “You must never—”

“Oh, don’t worry. Your secret is safe. But he’s a problem, and it’s not fair to leave it all on me.”

“He’s an active ten-year-old.”

“You didn’t say anything to him?”

Bill wanted to sit down with his older children and talk to them about the picture they’d assembled, to ask what they remembered about the trip to Michigan and to answer any questions. He was also hungry. But he didn’t move. He looked at his wife, just yards away from the room where, on Thanksgiving night, for the first time in months, they had made love. He recalled the early years of their marriage, when their bed had served as a treatment room for the ills his separate daytime life inflicted on their relationship; how he’d soothed her with the calm, steady attention, the gentle strokes he recommended for colicky babies. And how, with her emotional hunger sated, a wilder hunger took hold of them both.

“What?” she said. “Is that an unreasonable question?”

“I was thinking,” he said, “about the other night.” He tilted his head in the direction of the bedroom.

Penny’s mouth tightened, and he wished he hadn’t spoken; they made love rarely and had a tacit agreement not to talk about it—the activity or the infrequency. He thought of James, the way he’d swum
down the sidewalk, his chaotic curiosity stilled only through action. “I’ll talk to him,” he said. “I’ll make a point of it.”

• • •

They left Sacramento at midmorning on Sunday and arrived in San Francisco just as the fog was lifting. Everyone was hungry, and Bill got off the freeway so they could stop for lunch. Ryan, who rarely asked for anything, said he had heard from Sierra about a place called the Magic Pan, in Ghirardelli Square, and because that meant sundaes at the Chocolate Factory might be a possibility afterward, the others agreed. The Magic Pan was a crepe restaurant, which called to mind something small and dainty, so each of the Blairs was surprised to be served a giant lacy half-moon oozing creamy chicken or crab with cheese sauce.

Robert was not an adventurous eater, and he sliced his open and watched suspiciously as the filling spilled out. Rebecca ate five quick bites and felt a little sick. James scraped and rolled and scraped and rolled until his crepe was free of all but a thin coating of sauce, and he chewed it quickly, saying it wasn’t bad if you just ate the crunchy parts.

Ryan fell in love. He ate slowly, arranging each forkful to contain a stamp-size piece of crepe and a single sauce-coated piece of meat, the combination of which struck him as almost magically balanced between crisp and soft, dry and creamy. He understood why the place was called the Magic Pan and imagined telling Sierra about it in the morning, and how maybe they could come back together, maybe toward the end of the school year, when their time at Sand Hill Day was running out. They would be attending the same high school, but it was so big that Ryan wasn’t certain he would be able to find her at recess and lunch. At this thought a tear seeped from his eye, and he stuck out his tongue and caught it, pleased when the extra salt made the food in his mouth even more perfectly savory.

Bill didn’t care for the food, but he smiled encouragingly at the children. “Crepes,” he said, “are particular to a certain region of France called Brittany. That’s where Mont Saint-Michel is. Do any of you know about Mont Saint-Michel?”

“It’s a fortress on an island,” Robert said. “When the tide comes in, you can’t get to it. Then the tide goes out and a natural bridge comes up again.”

“There’s actually a road,” Bill said. “But that’s the general idea.”

“Have you been there, Dad?” James said.

“He hasn’t been to Europe,” Rebecca said. “Only Korea. And Japan.”

“Let’s go someday,” Bill said. “Shall we?”

“Mom, what do you think?” Ryan said. “Would you like to go to France? To Paris?”

Penny looked around the table. She once harbored a deep wish to go to Paris, just as she once wanted nothing more than to sit with her family on the porch of her husband’s childhood home. The jigsaw puzzle, its old photograph transformed into a warning about the danger of desire, had upset her more than she’d expected, and her response to Ryan was brief and bitter. “I’d rather go nowhere. Then I’d never be disappointed.”

For the next several minutes, everyone was silent. Forks scraped over plates, milk was sipped. Bill asked for the check and paid with two fifty-dollar bills.

James still wanted the Chocolate Factory, but he was overruled and they got back into the car. Bill made his way to Van Ness. “There’s city hall,” he said as they passed the back of the giant domed building. He wondered if there might be a memorial inside to Congressman Ryan, whose body had arrived in San Francisco a few days earlier. Bill had seen footage of Mayor Moscone weeping at the funeral.

“It’s beautiful,” Ryan said.

“The front is better,” Robert said, “if you like that grandiose sort of thing.”

Back in Portola Valley, Penny disappeared immediately, and the children settled into their rooms, happy to spread out. All except Robert, who drove to Gina’s without calling. He couldn’t wait to see her. Parked out front, he waited for a moment, looking at her house. It was incredible that he’d known her for less than three months.

When he knocked, she came to the door and spoke to him through the screen. Her mother had a headache, so Robert couldn’t come in. “Can you come out?” he said, disappointed by her expression, which conveyed a not altogether happy surprise at the sight of him.

She hesitated before disappearing briefly and then reappearing with a pair of tennis shoes dangling from her fingers.

“How was Sacramento?” she said as she joined him on the porch. “Did you miss me?”

Robert had expected to have a lot to say, but now that they were together, now that he was finally looking at her soft, kissable mouth, he was stupid and tongue-tied. She was still barefoot, and this struck him as a bad sign: if she wanted to spend time with him, wouldn’t she have put on her shoes?

“I missed you,” she said.

“I’m sure.”

“I did.”

He shrugged and then stood there.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “Why are you being so weird?”

“I’m not.”

“I’ll be the judge of that!” she responded playfully, but he quickly dismissed the playfulness as an attempt to deny the terrible awkwardness that had sprouted between them.

“My grandfather,” he said, “is very sick.”

Gina’s face grew serious, her small brown eyes narrowing.

“He has congestive heart failure,” he added.

“Your mom must be upset.”

“She doesn’t give a shit.”

“Robert, I’m sure that’s not true!”

“In case you haven’t noticed, she doesn’t care about anyone but herself.”

Gina sat on a low wall at the side of the porch. Absently, she brushed off the bottoms of her feet and put her shoes on. Leaning forward, she put her forearms on her knees like a boxer resting in his corner between rounds.

“You have noticed, haven’t you?” he said.

“Maybe we should just talk at school tomorrow.”

He stepped off the porch and headed for the car. He tried not to stomp, but he could feel himself emitting upset and knew he looked ridiculous. If he had called her over the weekend, this never would have happened.

At home, the afternoon was condensing into a typical Sunday evening, and after dinner he holed up in his room and began what he knew would be about seven hours of homework. He couldn’t stop thinking about the terrible scene on Gina’s porch, returning again and again to the truth of the statement he’d made about his mother. She didn’t care about anyone but herself. He was tired of pretending she was normal. He decided he’d prefer an out-and-out broken home like Gina’s over the sham that was his family. Then he thought about Gina’s father and realized that she had never once complained about him, though Robert knew she didn’t like him. Robert, in making such a true statement about his mother, had brought honesty into their relationship. He spoke the truth while Gina spooled out lies. She was just a junior and a full year younger than he, so maybe she wasn’t ready to be genuine, but he was.

If he hadn’t been so overwhelmed by homework he might have
stayed in his room and nursed this idea, held it close until it was ready for the world, perhaps even discovered it was only half-formed and would not survive for long. Instead, doomed to be up until one or two in the morning, he decided to hell with it and went out to the living room.

His siblings were sitting with his father, all quiet with books or their thoughts, even James. “Where’s Mom?” he said.

“Where do you think?” Rebecca said.

“After dinner?”

No one responded. It wasn’t unheard of for Penny to go back to the shed after dinner. Sometimes she didn’t come back until everyone was in bed.

“I wanted to tell you,” Robert went on, “that I’m going to break up with Gina tomorrow.”

His father looked up. Rebecca frowned, conveying doubt rather than disapproval. Ryan was stretched out on the couch, and he laid his book facedown on his lap. James shouted “You can’t do that!” and ran from the room.

“What happened, Rob?” Bill said.

“She’s just too young for me. She’s immature.”

“Immature,” his father repeated.

“I don’t really have time for a girlfriend. It’s senior year—I’m so busy. I have college applications.”

“You’re almost finished with your college applications,” Rebecca said.

“People say fall semester senior year is the most important time of high school. Kids get ahead of themselves and think they’re finished, but they aren’t. You have to be careful not to get sidetracked.”

“Did something happen?” his father said.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Robert said. “It’s not like I was going to marry her.”

James had disappeared into the bedroom hallway, just out of the others’ sight. He came back and said, “Then
I
will!”