The Children's Crusade (32 page)

No,
this
was, Penny thought as she put her goggles back on and returned to her power saw. This was.

• • •

The day was glorious for the middle of February, the temperature heading toward seventy; when Rebecca got back to campus, she changed into running clothes and jogged to the hospital. She paused in front of the entrance. Robert had been denied admission to the medical school, and it troubled her to think she would probably be accepted and probably go.

She took the fire stairs to the pediatric ward and found her father in the corridor, wearing his white coat and badge, as he always did at the hospital even when just stopping in. He thought visitors were comforted by the sight of white coats, and he didn’t mind being
stopped with questions, especially simple ones about directions or visiting hours. “It’s part of the job,” he always said, “to allay anxiety. When we can, we should.”

“Is that Greer’s room?” Rebecca said as she joined him. “Is he okay?”

“He will be.”

“Is he still passed out?”

“Rebecca, you know I can’t say. What brought you here? Just checking?”

“On you.”

“Well, I should have expected nothing less.” He pulled her close and kissed her forehead.

Through an open door Rebecca saw the bottom portions of two beds, and two pairs of feet draped with sheets. “Are his parents in there?”

“Walk with me,” Bill said. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

They walked back to her dorm, where Bill kissed her forehead again. The temptation to take advantage of her maturity was powerful. He could think of nothing her point of view wouldn’t likely illuminate, and her competence in virtually everything she undertook meant her help was always helpful. How soothing it had been to hear her voice on the phone last night, telling him where James was. Bill didn’t know if he could have kept calm had the call come from James himself, over an hour past his curfew and just weeks after the nightmare of the accident. Bill had been waiting up that night, too, and the sound of the cars colliding had shaken him deeply. Opening the front door and seeing the wreckage: he hadn’t felt that combination of horror and dread since his first days in the navy.

He drove home, trying to decide if he’d say anything to Penny about where he’d been and why, given that it would have to include at least a little about what James had been up to. He’d last seen her at
dinner the evening before, a typically gloomy fifteen minutes of the two of them plus James spread out at the formerly crowded kitchen table. The tradition of everyone taking a turn to talk about his day had been abandoned when Ryan left for Santa Cruz. It probably would have been abandoned earlier if not for Sierra, who had participated eagerly whenever she was present.

Penny was on her way up the driveway before he’d gotten out of the car, and he decided to keep quiet. “Morning,” he said. “Or I guess I should say ‘Afternoon.’ ”

“Where have you been?” she said. “I can’t be stranded here all day. It’s absurd for two adults to share a car.”

“It’s quite common, actually. Are you going somewhere?”

“I thought I would.”

“That’s fine, that’s fine. What’s James doing?”

“I haven’t seen him. What makes you think he’s up? It’s not even one yet.”

Bill shrugged and went up the steps. Rebecca had said James was heading for the shower when she left, but his bedroom door was closed, and when Bill knocked gently and pushed it open, he found the room dark and stuffy, with James facedown on his bed, asleep. Penny was in the master bedroom, opening and closing drawers. Bill didn’t like to think of himself as avoiding her, but if he came up with a legitimate reason to do so, he used it. This sometimes involved checking on things, and now he left the house and headed for the garage, where he checked on plant food and fertilizer, thinking it might not be a bad idea to spend a few hours in the yard tomorrow. The family bicycles were neatly parked in the rack he’d bought to keep them organized, and on a whim he wheeled his and then James’s out to the driveway, where he pumped air into the softening tires and used a rag to clean the gears. While he was working Penny got into the car and drove away, which coincided nicely with his
running out of things to do outside.

He returned to James’s room and sat on the edge of the bed. It was still the room of little boys, with baseball quilts and desks so small that a few books and puzzles rendered them all but useless for homework.

James groaned and lifted his head a few inches.

“Good afternoon,” Bill said.

“What time is it?”

“Two something.”

James groaned again and buried his face in his pillow. “Maybe I’ll just skip it.”

“What’s that, son?”

“The day.”

Bill opened the curtain. Bright light spilled into the room. “That’s a lot to skip.”

James rolled onto his back. “Don’t give me any crap about life being precious.”

“Check.”

“Is it nice out?”

“Very. Good day for a bike ride. I actually just pumped our tires.”

They hadn’t taken a bike ride together in years, not since an accident that sidelined Bill when James was twelve. They had ridden up Page Mill Road and were heading along Skyline when a squirrel darted in front of them. Bill braked, lost his balance, and hit the ground, all before James knew anything was amiss. He was riding behind his father, and then his father was lying on the shoulder of the road, gasping in pain. James had no idea what to do. He thought—this went through his mind—that maybe if he moved slowly enough, someone would come along to help before he’d gotten to his father. He put down his kickstand very deliberately and
then carefully turned his forward wheel to balance the bike. “James,” his father said when at last he’d gotten there and knelt down. “It’s okay. Don’t be scared.”

What happened after that? James turned thirteen, Ryan turned sixteen, Bill bought the Accord. The bicycles stayed in the garage. James occasionally sat in his closet, held his old stuffed dog in his lap, and listened to Ryan and Sierra in Robert’s bed. It excited him when they stopped talking—he knew they were getting down to business. Sometimes as he listened to their groans and sighs he stroked the dog, and sometimes he stroked himself. That summer he told his father he was no longer interested in father-son bike rides. “You’re a teenager,” Bill said in his kind, understanding way, and James—proving the point?—said, “And you’re a genius.”

Now, with the possibility of a ride hovering between them, James rested the back of his forearm over his eyes. “It’s too bright in here.”

“Your pupils are adjusting.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“I believe she’s doing some errands in service to an art project.”

James snorted.

“What?”

“ ‘In service to.’ It’s like the art orders her around. Do this, do that.”

“Very commanding, that art.”

“It’s a fucking five-star general.”

“James.”

“You started it.”

This was true, and it silenced Bill.

“I’d rather go by myself if I’m going.”

“That’s fine.”

“Actually, who am I kidding, I’m not going anywhere.”

Bill patted James’s shoulder and left the room. They came
together a little later in the kitchen, where Bill made sandwiches and they ate without talking.

They heard the Accord climbing the driveway, and in a moment Penny was in the kitchen, shopping bags in hand. She’d been in Menlo Park, at the decorators’ shop that sometimes supplied her with scraps of wallpaper for her assemblages. She looked different—her cheeks a little pink, eyes bright.

She said, “Guess who I ran into?”

In the parking lot she’d spotted Mary Lawson, wife of Bill’s old friend and colleague Harold Lawson. It had been a few years since they’d met, but something made Penny call hello, and Mary was warmer than Penny remembered, asking after each of the kids by name. She had grocery bags full of club soda and tonic, and when she saw Penny notice them, she said she was having a small birthday party for her husband the following evening.

“She invited us,” Penny told Bill. “Six o’clock at her mother’s.”

“Robert’s coming down for dinner.”

“I really want to go. She said any and all of us.”

“You don’t think she was just being polite?”

“What if she was? Her mother’s an art collector, you know.” Mary’s parents had begun buying in the early sixties, and after her husband’s death Phyllis Grant had become even more active, collecting pieces by nationally known artists as well as up-and-comers in the Bay Area. Penny thought there was a real possibility that Mrs. Grant would be interested in her work. “Please,” she said. “I can’t go without you, and it could really help my career.”

“You don’t have a career,” James said.

“James,” Bill said.

“No, he’s right. I don’t have a career. That’s the problem. That’s why we need to go to the party.”

Bill took the lunch plates to the sink and began washing up.
“Quite the artist, your wife,” a colleague had said to him a month or so earlier, and Bill had smiled wryly, even gratefully, before realizing the other man was speaking with admiration. He was referring to Penny’s annual Christmas card, that year a series of green strokes on midnight-blue paper, with flecks of gold and silver. It was lovely, Bill thought, but was there any more to it than that? She tinkered, she played, but was she an artist? With the children he tried to conceal his doubt, but he knew he’d done a poor job concealing it from her. The thing was, it had all started so—what was the word?—amateurishly. Innocently. A young mother crayoning with her children. The years when Robert and Rebecca were elementary-age and Ryan and James were still at home: he could recall the difference in her on certain days, an ease, a temporary disappearance of the troubled look with which she most often greeted him when he came in from work. And alongside the children’s pictures on those days there’d be one or two created by an adult hand. She’d be relaxed, languid, almost post-orgasmic.

“Please?” she said. “Robert will understand.”

“You know I don’t like to go back on my word.”

She sighed and turned to James. “You’re not even dressed. Have you done your chores?”

In order to get a reaction, James once told a teacher that his mother made him clean the entire house, top to bottom, every weekend, but in reality she asked only that he keep his room and the children’s bathroom tidy and in any case cared more that he obey her than that the work be done.

He nodded.

“Well, you better have,” she said, gathering her bags. “I’m going to talk to Robert,” she told Bill as she left. “I’ll call him.”

Because when else might she meet an art collector? As she headed down the driveway she thought again—she’d been thinking about
this a lot lately—of how the inequities of the patriarchy extended through every realm. Male artists got far more attention and gallery representation than female artists, especially female artists working in a purely feminine idiom, as she did. All of this had become clearer to her after she encountered the work of Judy Chicago. With
The Dinner Party,
Judy had said women mattered, women’s lives mattered, women’s bodies mattered and were beautiful. If Penny was entirely honest with herself, she would have to admit that on first consideration the giant ceramic vaginas at the center of
The Dinner Party
had made her a little uncomfortable, but she understood now that was the point. What was disturbing was powerful.

Her own work was not disturbing, at least not in the same way. It disturbed assumptions. It said the tossed-away artifacts of daily life could illuminate life. Surprisingly, Robert seemed quite interested in what she was doing. When he drove down from the city, he always asked what she was working on, and he was the reason she’d started using cellophane egg noodle bags. One morning she had a pile of things on the kitchen counter and he walked in, saw what was actually a piece of garbage on the floor, and said, “Here, don’t forget this.” “Very funny,” she said, but she took it anyway, and now those homely bags were integral to what she was doing.

• • •

Robert might have been surprised to discover that his mother found him supportive, but he would not have minded, not in the way he might have at an earlier age, when it seemed that to be in favor of her was to oppose the rest of the family and therefore himself. He didn’t think much about what she did in the shed, but he had adopted a bemused attitude, and he often stopped in to see her latest efforts.

But this was never his reason for going to Portola Valley. More
and more, he had something on his mind that he wanted to discuss with his father. On the Sunday of the Lawson party he had something particularly pressing, and when his mother called that morning to ask if they could reschedule, he said he’d come down anyway and meet his parents at the party.

It was dusk when he arrived at the Atherton mansion. There were four or five cars parked ahead of him along the driveway, but the Accord wasn’t among them, and he sat and waited and remembered the bright April afternoon when he’d last been at this house. The woman who’d spoken to him that day had seemed so much older than he, but he guessed now that she’d been in her early twenties and that the age difference between them had been no greater than the one between him and Julie Anne, the woman he’d left in Michigan.

Like a mildly uncomfortable physical state that ebbs from consciousness in the face of more immediate concerns only to reassert itself later with extra force, his yearning for Julie Anne emerged from behind the mundane problems of the day, and he began to ache for her. Medical school left him no time for any kind of social life, but somehow it offered plenty of opportunity for loneliness.

His parents were suddenly at his window. He got out of the car, hugged his father, and kissed his mother on the cheek, a son-to-mother greeting he’d seen in an old movie and decided to adopt for himself. Penny always laughed when he did this, which he took to mean that she approved or at least didn’t mind.

The Lawsons and their guests were in a large white living room—painted white but also full of white furniture, white vases, calla lilies. White silk drapes hung in front of eight-foot windows. In contrast, the art on the walls was bold and dramatic and included what Penny recognized as a Franz Kline.