The Children's Crusade (34 page)

Robert sat near his father’s knees. He didn’t know when he’d last seen his father in bed. It had been many years. “James told me why you were up late Friday night.”

“He hasn’t left the house all weekend.”

“You grounded him?”

“No, I’m thinking he grounded himself.”

“Didn’t see that coming.”

“It’s hard to be the youngest. He’s got two more years at home after this.”

“Assuming he goes to college.”

“He’ll go somewhere—it doesn’t have to be college. I worry sometimes that I didn’t let you kids know how many different good paths there are in life.”

“What, we don’t have to be doctors?” This was the moment for Robert to bring up his groin pain, which he could do lightly, in the context of how school was going—what a joke, huh? But he didn’t. He looked away, and when he looked at his father again, Bill had opened the magazine and was smoothing the pages. Robert got to his feet. He said he should be getting back, and he leaned down and kissed his father’s forehead and headed for the door.

Bill heard the front door closing, Robert’s car starting, the engine noise on the driveway. He could feel the imprint of Robert’s lips. It made him think of the last time he saw his own father, on a frigid day in 1962. His father was in the hospital, if not at death’s door then halfway up the front walk wondering where the doorbell was. He
had the raspy voice of a cigar smoker and the belly of a man who’d lived on a steady diet of butter, cream, and eggs for seven decades. He was only seventy-two, but an old seventy-two, with hypertension, emphysema, and, emergently, an MI. When Bill arrived, having rented a car at Detroit Metro straight off the red-eye from San Francisco, his mother and sister leaped to their feet as if he’d brought with him something far more powerful than love. “I want you to talk to the doctor,” his mother said. He stayed for thirty-six hours, as long as he could be away from his medical practice and his pregnant wife and his twenty-month-old son, and when it was time to go, his father summoned a bland expression and wished him a safe trip. His mother said, “Tell Penny it’s obvious she’s doing a good job taking care of you,” and his father, as if praising the financial practices of someone he’d known for a long time, said, “Yes, you always had sound judgment.” Bill said, “You were a good model.” By then he was at the door, and it would have required a giant shift in his basic life orientation to return to his father’s side and kiss his forehead, though he’d wished ever since that he’d done so.

He woke less than an hour later when Penny came in the front door. He was still sitting up with his bedside light on, and he quickly switched it off and moved under the covers. He heard her calling for James, and he thought he heard James’s voice, and hers, but he was asleep again before he could be sure.

Had he stayed awake and listened, he would have heard Penny scolding James for the mess he’d left in the kitchen—not because of the mess, which was minor, but because she’d failed to advance the cause of her career at the Lawson party, and James was a handy target. James said Penny blamed him for everything, and she said that if the shoe fit he should wear it. He grabbed a shoe off the floor and lobbed it, and it struck her—though only because she’d lowered her head into its flight path. They looked at each other in astonished
silence. She let out a sound that was both laugh and shriek, and he stepped into his closet and slammed the door. She knocked, and he told her to fuck off. She knocked harder, and he jerked the door open. She lunged at him with both hands up, and he dove to the floor and hit his head hard against the metal leg of his bed. He lay there moaning and writhing in pain, and she fell to her knees and said, “It’s me, it’s me, it’s always been me, it’s me, it’s me.”

Neither spoke of the incident ever again. For a brief period, James would believe she’d been confessing her guilt, her feelings of responsibility for all the pain he might have felt or might feel as represented by the pain of hitting his head, but this would be too much for him and he would retreat to the more obvious interpretation of maternal self-importance and cement the entire episode to the other pieces of grudge that together formed his rocklike objection to her, which would stay in place for decades.

• • •

At dinner the next evening, James had a lump on his forehead and a scowl for his father, whose Friday-night heroics had brought James the wrong kind of attention at school—not the outlaw admiration he’d gotten for wrecking two cars but a sort of sainthood by association that made people talk about him but not to him. Greer came up to him at lunch and said with resentful embarrassment that his parents wanted to thank James’s father, and James imagined a terrible future in which he was the guy other people’s parents encouraged them to befriend. He left the dinner table as quickly as he could.

Penny had spent the day prowling the house for items to use in her next assemblage, and she felt the restless exhaustion of having worked without really working. Her failure with Phyllis Grant had put her exactly where she’d been Saturday morning, before her stop at the decorators’ shop, though she felt as if she’d been moved back
ward in life, unfairly.

“I could use some help, you know,” she said to Bill once the two of them were alone in the kitchen, and for a moment he thought she meant with the dishes, which was confusing because he was already doing them.

“What can I do?” he said once he understood.

“Ask around? There must be lots of people in the medical community who know people in the art world.”

“I’m not sure I have the opportunity,” he said, and she lifted her palms beseechingly.

“Make it. You have to make the opportunity.”

“What happened at the party?”

“If something had happened at the party, do you think I’d be talking to you?”

Bill turned off the water, methodically wiped his hands on a kitchen towel, and turned to face her.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Where do we go from here, Penny?”

“We don’t go anywhere. I go to my studio, as I do every evening.”

“That’s my point.”

“You don’t even want me here. Think about it. All you care about is the kids.”

Bill sighed. They’d been married for twenty-five years, and there was little about their current situation that had not been true for a long time. Nonetheless, the past several months had brought him anguish of a new order. Ryan was gone, his kindness was gone, and Sierra was gone, too. Together with the two of them and James, Bill had felt some peace, the safety of numbers.

In a few days everyone would be home for Ryan’s birthday, and Bill thought about the last time they’d all been together, over Christmas, when even Robert spent a few nights at home. For the previ
ous few years, Ryan and Sierra had occupied Robert’s room, but now that he had returned from Michigan and lived close enough to come home fairly frequently, it was not quite so obvious who should sleep where, and in the end Robert got his old room, Bill shared with James, and Ryan and Sierra took the master bedroom. Falling asleep in Ryan’s old twin bed, knowing his children were all under one roof, Bill had the familiar and much mourned feeling that all was right with the world. And in the morning, up early and not wanting to wake Ryan and Sierra, he showered in the children’s bathroom for the first time in his life and decided he could make do with anything, any small corner of the house, if only his children would stay there with him.

Penny saw this and almost pitied him. He was so dependent: as she’d once been on him. What she wanted now was much less than what she wanted originally. Just a little help, a gesture of support. A phone call or two. He had to know people who cared about art. She wasn’t asking for a handout; she just wanted a chance. An opening. She was ready for the next step.

She had not let go of the idea several days later, on the evening of Ryan’s birthday celebration. Everyone was in the living room after cake, chatting idly about playing a game or possibly going to a movie, the conversation itself the only activity they needed, though the occasion necessitated that they contemplate doing something more. Penny came in from the kitchen and said, looking first at Bill and then at the rest of them, “Have you asked yourself, has anyone asked himself or herself, what it would mean if I began selling my art?”

Sunk deep in an armchair, James plonked his bare feet on the coffee table, belched loudly, and said, “What about ‘itself’?”

Penny ignored him and focused on Bill. “I’m not getting the support I need. That’s not unusual for a woman artist, of course, but
I’ve asked and you’ve essentially said no.”

“What kind of support do you need?” James said. And then, seized by righteousness, he leaped to his feet and shouted, “What more do you want from him? God!” He crossed the room and took a small watercolor of hers from a shelf where it leaned, unframed, against a row of books. It was a picture she’d done years earlier, of the front of the house in the late afternoon, with the low sun reflected in the narrow panes of glass that flanked the front door. “You think someone would pay for this?”

“James,” Rebecca said.

James looked around the room, at the smug, aloof faces of his family, none of whom understood what life was like for him, how boring and pointless, and he held up the watercolor and ripped it in half.

“No!” Penny cried.

Robert felt a twinge in his upper thigh, the first pain he’d felt in several days. Rebecca looked at her father and imagined leading him to a quiet white room that she understood, thanks to an emerging ability to think about what she was thinking, to be a combination of heaven and a mental hospital where someone might go for a nice long rest. Ryan thought ahead to the moment when he and Sierra would be in bed together and he would rest his head on her shoulder and his middle finger on her clitoris and they could begin to return to each other. Sierra felt Ryan press his thigh against hers, and she pressed back and wondered what it meant that she loved the Blairs more than she loved her own mother. Bill knew it was up to him to speak, but he was pinned to his chair by a combination of denial and astonishment and couldn’t say a word.

“That,” Penny said, “was a favorite piece of mine.”

“Piece,” James said scornfully.

“That’s what artists call their work.”

“James,” Rebecca said. “Do you think maybe—”

“Piece of shit,” James said.

Penny touched her fingertips to her throat. She said, “Does no one in this family have a single thing to say to James?”

Everyone stayed silent, and James was seized by an idea, only half-formed and therefore all the more powerful, that she was excluding him yet again. “Fuck you!” he cried.

Sierra climbed over Ryan and went to Penny’s side. “We can tape it,” she said. “Really, it’ll be okay. We’ll tape it from the back, it won’t even show. Here, James, you didn’t mean it. Do you have any of that clear tape in your studio, Penny? I’ll bet you do.”

“Why did you do that?” Robert asked James.

“Because that’s the kind of person I am!” James shouted, and he flipped the two watercolor halves into the air, a gesture that should have given him a feeling of power but that backfired because they were so lightweight that their descent to the floor was drifting and leisurely. Furious, he bolted out of the living room, grabbed the Accord keys as he passed the table where they were kept, and yanked open the front door.

“He’s not allowed to drive,” Penny cried, and Ryan ran after him and somehow made it down the pitch-dark steps to the driveway in time to position himself between James and the car. For a moment they wrestled, James trying to shove Ryan out of the way while Ryan planted his feet and bent his knees and pressed against the car door with all his weight. James looked over his shoulder, saw his father and Robert and Rebecca coming, and with a murderous yell threw the keys as high into the air as he could and took off at a run. He ran down the driveway, past the turnoff for the shed, and all the way to the road. There, fury pulsing through him, he yelled again.

Bill hurried back into the house to search for flashlights while Sierra tried to tape the watercolor and Penny hoped she wouldn’t
succeed. Penny was incensed and yet also somehow pleased by what James had done, for in crossing this line he had more or less demanded a strong reaction, and she had one in mind.

In 1957, around the same time Bill began bringing Penny to picnic at the Portola Valley property, a group of Benedictine monks from Hungary was founding a small boarding school for boys less than a mile away. By the 1980s, the Priory, as it was known, enrolled day students as well and had developed a reputation as a good place to send a boy who for one reason or another was in danger of going astray. Assisted by lay teachers, the monks, in their flowing black robes, taught according to Benedictine principles and every June graduated a group of fine-looking young men whose photograph appeared on the front page of the local newspaper. Penny had always liked the idea of the school, not for the Christian values but because the students, when she saw them around the village in their button-down shirts, struck her as the kind of kids who would treat their mothers with deference and respect.

“No,” Bill told her on the phone the next morning, pulled from an exam of a five-year-old with second-degree burns. “And please don’t tell my staff it’s an emergency when it isn’t.”

“No,” he told her that evening at dinner, the two of them alone at the table because James had refused to join them—with the certain knowledge, Bill figured, that once Penny was out of the house, his father would heat up the leftovers.

“No,” he said when she flipped the bedroom light on at midnight and announced that she couldn’t sleep, she was so worried—this was a new word—about James.

“Woodside High is so big,” she said, standing at the foot of the bed and glaring at him. “And his friends! It seems like a very bad place for him. I really think he would benefit.”

“Benefit.”

“From the structure. He’d have to do chores around the dormitory, he’d have to live with other kids again.”

“He wouldn’t
live
there.”