A Model World And Other Stories (13 page)

There was avid competition for fourteen-day books in Henrietta County, which was the ostensible reason for these weekly raids and the explanation that Dr. Shapiro gave to his wife and even to Nathan. His true motive was his lifelong need of minor rituals, a need that had lately become almost compulsive as the extreme state of his marriage and the sadness of his new job—he was working at Sunny Valley Farms, a small private psychiatric clinic for children, where he was exposed to a great deal of various and fairly sinister childhood lunacy—had robbed his life of the quotidian and left him with all the surprising novelty of a nightmare. His pipe, his weekly move in his correspondence chess game, and his trips with Nathan across the backroads of Henrietta County were the only commonplace ceremonies he had.

On Thursday nights, when the libraries stayed open until nine, he would come home from work, shower, put on blue jeans and a clean shirt, and sit down to watch the last fifteen minutes of
Lost in Space
with Nathan. Dr. Shapiro, who at his son’s age had attempted, according to a recipe given by an article in
Science Wonder Stories,
to create life in a laundry pail, took a guilty interest in the show, and had seen every absurd episode at least once. After it was over, he and Nathan would leave Rose and Ricky to their dinner, step, still chuckling, into the drizzle and hydrangea, and drive off. As he guided the car onto the winding old tobacco road that led across townhouse parks and cornfields to the Gunpowder Creek Branch, the unremarkable Landscape and the quizzical conversation of his son would bore and relax him, and leave him feeling halfway blessed and less mindful of his grip on the wheel.

They made up nicknames for his colleagues at Sunny Valley and for Nathan’s schoolmates, wrought long chains of bad puns, sang operatic versions of advertising jingles. Dr. Shapiro had few friends, and his older son, from the time of his first words, had been the chief partner in his imaginative life. He knew that it could not be good for a father to depend in this way on his child, and disapproved of himself for it; he supposed that his was not an adult need at all, and that he should long ago have surrendered the soothing foolishness of words. Once, he had been able to dwell with Nathan for hours on end in a perpetually expanding universe of nonsense, but as they both got older, and as marital unhappiness and financial ambition and the passage of time came increasingly to dominate his thoughts, these hours had shrunk to the three they spent visiting libraries each week. Dr. Shapiro’s need had never diminished, however, and had, if anything, been strengthened, in recent months, by the changing character of their conversations. Nathan tended increasingly to pose difficult questions that required careful replies, asked him to explain the rings of Saturn, the partition of India, the New York subway. The ardor of Nathan’s desire for facts seemed to quicken a sympathetic current within the father, and his heart would pound as he endeavored, despite damnable gaps in his knowledge, to provide his son with good information.

One Thursday evening, about two weeks before the beginning of the summer, Dr. Shapiro at last found himself faced with the task of explaining to Nathan the nature of divorce. He was loath to derange their weekly idyll with this particular collection of sad facts, but he had been putting it off for nearly a month now, and come Saturday he would—how incredible—no longer be living within the same building as his family. It would have to be tonight.

It was a windy, damp evening with no trace of June in it, and as they drove into the pale, almost imperceptible sunset he toyed with the idea of leaving without saying a word, of truly deserting Nathan—as his own father had done, in a different way, a year ago. The thought of his own insubstantiality, of his capacity simply to vanish, was horrible and seductive.

They had just come from the G. Earl King Memorial Branch, sixth on their route, and were headed for Lucci’s, the Italian delicatessen where they always broke their trip. Nathan, who’d been unusually silent all evening, had a stack of paperbacks balanced on the back of his bent right forearm and was attempting to play Quarters with them, to grasp them abruptly in his hand before they could fall. They kept spilling across the front seat, over and over, with a disturbed, truncated flutter, as of startled pigeons. One struck Dr. Shapiro on the cheek, and the boy jumped preemptively away so that his father could not strike back, but Dr. Shapiro did not respond. It seemed to him that the road flew beneath them, that they had not hit a single red light, that there was nothing to slow their hurtling career. They were less than five minutes from Lucci’s. Generally, he knew, he burdened his son with bad news or disapprobation in restaurants, for reasons that were unclear to him, and he didn’t want it to happen that way this time. Unless he spoke now, he would have to wait until after they had eaten their pink, oily submarines and were on their way to the Cross Fork Branch, the very best, when he would not want to spoil for Nathan the prospect of its luxurious Young Adults Room, with the potted palms and microfilm machines. He cleared his throat and cursed his own cowardice; he foresaw himself stalling until the last possible moment, sputtering out the words in the darkness of their driveway as with a ponderous hand he restrained his son from getting out, as he cut the engine and the interior filled with the sighs and ticking of a car at journey’s end.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” said Nathan, arranging his books now into a neat and penitent stack on the seat between them and folding his hands in his lap.

“It’s all right,” Dr. Shapiro replied. Then he was aware of the throbbing of his cheek where the book had hit him, a triangular pain over the bone. “It was an accident.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Nathan said. “It was an accident.”

The boy smiled at him with his wild teeth, and his bright eyes behind the heavy eyeglasses looked false, a little out of kilter, as though his son were a doll of humble workmanship. Like those of his patients, Nathan’s was an almost heartbreakingly plain face, and in it he thought he could read the same short narrative of rage and confusion. He had resolved a hundred times not to be a doctor to his sons, not to listen for and study the messages coded in their sudden misbehaviors, and to allow his children to disarm and to perplex him, but as he looked at Nathan he saw quite clearly that the boy was cognizant, however dimly, of the fear and shame and failure his father could not bring himself to express, and had already begun—accidentally— to retaliate. Dr. Shapiro’s information was suddenly an unbearable weight upon him, an iron belt around his chest.

“Ask me anything,” he said, too loudly, taking his foot off the accelerator pedal. The car slowed and then drifted to a halt in the middle of Old Rolling Road, five hundred yards from the next intersection. “Isn’t there anything you’d like me to explain?”

Nathan looked over his shoulder, out the rear window, then turned back to face Dr. Shapiro. He bit his lip and at the same time smiled the anxious, sober smile of someone confronted with the folly, the minor act of vandalism, of a friend on a drunken spree. The few drivers lined up behind them honked their horns, then swerved brusquely around, shaking their fists as though in encouragement. “Do it!” they exhorted him. “Let the kid have it!” For a moment they sat all alone in their car, in the empty roadway, as Nathan seemed to search for the name of some thing he didn’t know or had until now never quite grasped.

“If I was a mutant,” the boy said at last, his gaze falling on the gaudy cover of one of the paperbacks, a novel called
More Than Human
, “would you and Mom ever tell me?”

Dr. Shapiro gave a sigh that was like a laugh, weary and slight. “No,” he said. He had turned his damp face toward the window, ashamed, unable to preserve his son any longer. “I think we would just have to let you find out for yourself.” He braced himself for the sentence he was about to utter and pushed down on the gas. The car gathered speed and drew relentlessly toward the intersection. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, opened it once more.

“Then I guess I already know,” said Nathan, from whom he had failed to conceal, failed to deflect, failed to ward off all the hazardous radiations of adulthood, of knowledge, of failure itself.

On the day his father moved out, Nathan’s parents sent him and Ricky to the mall with his friend Edward, a decision of which, on the whole, Nathan approved. Although a part of him was curious simply to see what it looked like when one’s father carried his things, his books and records and pipes, out the door—he loved those rare occasions, when Dr. Shapiro, puffing out his bearded cheeks, engaged in some heavy labor—he had caught a glimpse that morning of a liquor box, full of hats, on the floor of his parents’ bedroom, and the sight of a black Russian hat made of fur that was swirled like a brain, which Nathan remembered his father wearing on some black-and-white winter day before Ricky was ever born, had filled him with such longing and anger that he was glad to spend the afternoon eating pizza and wishing for toys in the Huxley Mall, whose air was sweet with candles and soap, and bitter with the chlorine from the fountains.

By the time they got home their father had already gone. Mrs. Shapiro sat alone at the kitchen table. As the boys came in, she stood quickly and, before she hugged them, swept two coffee cups and a plate of crumbs off the table and into the sink, blushing strangely. In their mother’s wet embrace Nathan felt all at once smothered, blind, panicked, as he sometimes did when play required that he climb into a refrigerator carton or a crawl space. He squirmed wildly out of her arms and drew back.

“If you two are just going to cry all day,” he announced, “I don’t want to be around.” He felt very wicked as he said this, and retreated from the kitchen in confusion. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom but was drawn inexorably to his parents’ door. It was ajar and he pushed at it with the tip of his big toe, as though he might startle some animal asleep on the bed. There were indentations in the carpet, he saw, from his father’s dresser, his desk, his creaking armoire, a pattern of twelve little circles like the spots on a domino. It hadn’t occurred to Nathan that Dr. Shapiro would take the furniture, and its absence, curiously, made him feel sorry for his father, who was going to have to make do with so little now. Would there be a bed in this unimaginable apartment? Would there be a soft leather chair that reclined?

He stood in the middle of the half-empty room for a minute or so, until his glance fell on a wastebasket that stood beside the space where his father’s desk had been. It was mostly full of shirt cardboard and the white wrappers of coat hangers, but at the bottom he spied a crumpled yellow ball of legal paper, which he fished out and spread flat on the floor. It was some kind of a list, made by his father, and Nathan knew at once that it was a secret list, and that after he had finished reading it he would probably wish he hadn’t, as he was continually pained by the memory of a love letter he had found in a box in the basement, written to his father by a girl who had once been Nathan’s favorite baby-sitter. He lay on his stomach in the space where there was no longer a great, oaken desk and read what his father had set down. The handwriting was neat and restrained, as though Dr. Shapiro had been angry while he wrote.

“
RESOLUTIONS
,” Nathan read: “1. I will never again raise my voice with my children, or threaten them with the back of my hand. 2. I will not think ill of any man or woman, for no one could possibly be motivated by more trivial or more venal concerns than I. 3. I will cease calling my father and mother by their first names, and will strive to regain what I lost when they became Milton and Flo to me. That is, I will love my parents. 4. I will not claim to have read books that I have not read, or to have been borne out in predictions that I never made. 5. I will cease to infect Nathan with a debilitating love of facts, nor will I pursue them myself with greed and possessiveness, as I have heretofore. 6. I will be a better father. 7. I will listen to Bartók every morning, and to Mozart before I sleep. 8. I will lay aside all ambitions save the one I have cherished since the age of nineteen, when I made my first list of ten resolutions—to love and understand art, sport, science, literature, and music, and to become, someday, a true Renaissance Man. 9. I will not throw away this list.”

In the midst of feeling sick to his stomach, and faintly horrified as by the glimpses given in his father’s medical texts of the inner human body, the thought that Dr. Shapiro had already broken number nine was of some small comfort to Nathan. He gathered up the paper in his hands and himself crushed it, bit it, tore it in two. The telephone rang, and from the soft, interrogative sound of Ricky’s voice in the kitchen he guessed that it was Dr. Shapiro calling. In a minute he would have to tell his father something, something his father would never forget because it would be the first thing Nathan said to him under these new and remarkable circumstances. Nathan hoped, he prayed very quickly to God, rocking back and forth on his knees, that his father would break all eight of the others as well, that he would continue to spank his sons, fall asleep with the radio playing Harry Belafonte and Doris Day, memorize the altitudes of the mountains of the world. None of these things seemed to Nathan to be of the slightest importance, and yet they had caused Dr. Shapiro to drive himself from the house where he had dwelt for so many years as a kind of adored, only occasionally dangerous giant, an intelligent, dexterous bear with a vast repertoire of tricks. Nathan could see from the list that Dr. Shapiro didn’t know of the constant delight that his sons had taken in him or of the legends and fables that had grown up around his name. How impossible was the life of a father! thought Nathan. The best man in the world could fill a thousand pages with fine resolutions and still feel forced to leave his home in shame.

“Listen, Dad,” said Nathan when he picked up the phone, throwing himself across his father’s abandoned side of the bed, “I’ve been thinking. And really. You could come home any time you want to.”