A Theory of Relativity (46 page)

Rain rapped insistently on the bay window, and the thirsty, bedraggled August foliage rattled. Gordon found six of Keefer’s seven hundred socks, one stitched with tiny blue cats all around the ankle by his aunt on her Singer. He found spoons from the period when Keefer would eat only yogurt, when he’d been so frightened that she would starve; he’d purchased a dozen rubber-coated spoons that he carefully lined up before each feeding attempt so that he could keep on shoveling, even when she threw one over his head.

He opened his drawers and his files from school and began to 309

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prune. Teacher of the Year. All District. His first year. His teacher’s test keys, his plan for his mating-dance class. He made a note to himself: Secure a biohazard bag for the disposal of the frozen products in his classroom. Plants and frogs trapped in time by cold, their wonders transformed into maps. Vials of insect egg sacs. A human placenta.

People were trapped. When things were ending, the past blossomed. Everything past seemed better. The legacy of people.

When his father phoned, Gordon thought, oddly, this might be one of the last calls he ever received in Tall Trees. Mark said that there was an old colleague in Madison who had, at one time, collected derelict farmsteads he planned to rehabilitate and sell as hobby homes after his retirement from the faculty. And sure enough, the man was juggling three of them right now, and one only eight miles south of the city, a perfectly serviceable three-room house that needed only a couple of coats of paint and a good airing after the eviction of some renters who’d turned out to be more like squatters. If Gordon wouldn’t mind ripping up some decent carpet that had been ruined by cat urine, Mark’s friend would be entirely willing to let Gordon live rent free until fall. It wouldn’t take that long for him to find a place, Gordon had ventured, touched by his father’s munificence.

“Take your time,” Mark urged him. “You need to find an apartment that you can stay in for a while. You want to make it nice for you and Keefer.” He’d offered Gordon a loan, but Gordon refused. It was he who would have to help his father, down the line, with all the legal bills. He was sure he’d immediately find work subbing in Madison, even though the district was renowned around the state for its pricey clannishness. He was a man, and that was helpful, and he could sub phys ed and health as well as science. And a decision on the three-year doctoral program would be forthcoming by December. The forms, completed, lay on Gordon’s unfinished secretary desk. In three years, Keefer would be looking at kindergarten, and the provision the Cadys had accepted—to remain in the Madison area for at least five years—would still be in force.

Though only a week of days and nights had passed since the last conference with the judge, he’d made his decision so quickly that all that was left for him to do was to pack up and leave.

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Overnight, Gordon’s immediate future had telescoped into a series of good-byes. Good-bye to his job; that had been easy. His relations with Hart Rooney had, he thought in retrospect, been traversed by unspoken resentment and obligation from the first. Gordon had put it down to a town-bound older man’s natural wariness of a former student who’d returned glossed with some mildly surpassing accomplishments—Hart had been a science teacher himself. The necessary pressure on the school created by his frequent absences during Georgia’s illness had been something Gordon hoped to repair after the conclusion of the case, and he had been comforted in the knowledge that his student and peer reviews were uniformly excellent. But Hart’s palpable relief at his resignation lent weight to Gordon’s suspicion that the aloofness between him and his boss had older, tougher roots, that it went back to the days when he’d outshone Rooney’s own stodgy, replicant sons, one year older and one year younger than Gordon. It went back to Lorraine’s not particularly covert resentment of Rooney’s well-meant comments about adopted children. That series of nasty letters, without postmarks, making reference to serial killers who were adopted, had come from somewhere: Gordon knew that there had never been love lost between his mother and Laurie Rooney, Hart’s shrill wife, who was the band director at the middle school. He would miss his classroom, its noisy, chaotic safety, and the daily interaction with kids he’d come to love, but he was glad to close the book for his own sake, and for his mother’s.

The deal he had cut with the Cadys had broken her spirit, if not her heart. Nora had cried. His father had left the room. But his mother had said nothing. She had not disputed him, only looked up at him—she was so tiny—in a way that made him feel sorely the immensity of his role measured against the span of his immaturity.

And now he would have to tell her that he, too, would be moving away from her. Tell her, knowing that this last choice of his would complete the demolition of the familial village Lorraine surely had dreamed of—peopled with her children and their children—so long ago when first Georgia, then Gordie, came back home.

Coward that he was, he’d waited until a doleful dinner, a few nights after his conversation with Delia.

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Lindsay and he went together. It was not a festive feast. All of them were picking at a pork roast with apple glaze in silence, Lorraine’s and Mark’s appetites no keener than their guests’.

Sure that one more hitch of the ticking clock would explode him into babbling hysteria, Gordon simply came out with it. Perfunctorily
.

I’m thinking of going back to school, to Madison, to be closer to Keefer
.

Shock yawned in the room. Lindsay was obviously angry at being flanked by this announcement, which was news to her; his father was both constrained and yearning, his mother suddenly very busy gathering up things to take to the kitchen before dessert.

He was home alone later, after Lindsay had left frustrated by his feeble promises to discuss his rashness more fully, when the telephone rang.

“It’s me,” Lorraine said, and she would not have had to say another word; the volume of her injury was so distinct in her voice, in her breathing, that he’d wanted to slam down the receiver and run to her, as he’d run to her every day when he was small, entering the quiet house after school, frantically searching for evidence of her presence, her purse in its customary place on the ledge, her honeysuckle scent in the hallway, throwing himself at her midsection, the fear he felt all day when he was a first-grader, a second-grader, melting in the beatitude of her greeting, in the rapture of their reunion. Georgia, who considered the short bus ride home a rolling recess, an occasion to plan and bicker and carouse with other kids, would come home later, after the endless series of stops at the end of graveled roads to eject dozens of farm and lake kids. More days than not, Gordon would manage to elude the bus, running through the parking lot behind Wilton’s, through the middle-school playground, holding his breath as he jogged through the cemetery so that he would get his wish, jiggling his pee-loud bladder on the curb as he looked both ways before rushing across Cleveland Avenue.

Tell me every single thing that happened today, Lorraine would urge him, confidingly, and, over granola bars, he would lead her through his day, through his triumphs in spelling and in gym, his painful struggles in math, his suffering at the hands of the Reilly brat. It had been their protected time, the half hour before Georgia burst in, pulling them into Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 313

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the vortex of her demands and her energy. They talked and snacked, played long, archaically precious games, such as cat’s cradle and jacks—Gordon still played a mean game of jacks—or she held his hand while he drew a thousand elephants, the curve of the elephant’s ear that he could see, then a blind curve, with eyes closed, his hands taking over for his eyes, feeling the sweep and heft of the trunk, the tusk. They plucked overblown roses—“That’s right, sweetie, above the three-leaf”—in the front yard in June and sang, old rounds and rhymes,

“Waters of Babylon” and “Wren, Wren, Little Wren,” and the old song that repeated, “Will you go, lassie, go?” the song about mountain thyme that played when Georgia walked down the aisle at Our Lady of the Lake. They rooted out the outlaw dandelions, Lorraine teaching him the chin test for telling if a boy loved butter, and searched for butter-cups. They were utterly content and contained, in ways that Gordon, as a horny, irascible teenager would recapture only when he was fortunate to get a sore enough throat that Lorraine would not only let him stay home, but take a day of leave herself.

Georgia had been able to take his mother’s love for granted, but he had not. He had never been able to bear to hurt her, and had been aghast at the casual way that even good kids, such as Kip, shouted at their mothers, called them “old bitch” behind their backs.

The construction of the family had plainly been intended for Gordon to be Mark’s child, his boon companion, a little man doing complex male things at the side of his patient elder mentor; and Gordon had certainly acquiesced, but it had never been to Mark that he’d brought his treasures, his granite wedge with its grinning slash of glinting mica, his mummified mouse, and his nuggets of emotional pain. It was Lorraine on whom he counted to examine and proclaim or dismiss them, Lorraine whom Gordon strived to please. Though Georgia reserved, with the stately assurance of a firstborn, her space in Lorraine’s lap, the eminence of her drawings and certificates in the middle of the corkboard, Gordon had believed all his life that it was he his mother loved best. She might call Georgia her image, but Gordon was her jubilee. He gave her the most ease, the most uncomplicated pleasure.

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As he grew older, and ambivalent about his adoration, he’d made his withdrawal from Lorraine careful, gratified that it was not he, but Georgia, who made Lorraine cry, who kept the line of light under his parents’ bedroom door bright late into the night, who picked at Lorraine until his mother’s temper detonated and Mark had to intervene.

Until he’d graduated high school, his mother had never, not once, forgotten to kiss him good night, reaching out, embarrassingly, to turn up his chin and give him a peck on the lips or cheek even when Gordon, buried in a book, would have offered her the top of his head with a mere grunt of acknowledgment. When he was ten and brought her a muddy bucket of crawdads for her anniversary—he knew she’d loved lobster—Lorraine had made a big fuss, preparing a savory tomato broth she served that night over noodles. It had been Georgia who found the package of frozen lobster buried at the bottom of the trash can and brought it to him, pointing out how his mother had been unable to cook his crummy crustaceans and had deceived him. Lorraine had burst into tears, called Georgia a vengeful little shit, let Gordon stay up late, even though it was a school night, and watch Johnny Carson in his parents’ bed. It was still one of his most cherished memories. And though he knew nothing could be more excruciatingly boring than watching someone else play golf, Lorraine had patiently trekked through the mosquito-plagued twilights at public courses every time he played, driven him to the Kwik-Stop for raspberry slushies on the way home, displayed his lame trophies on the mantel long after he would have preferred she box them. Until he had been a . . . parent himself, he could never have imagined how tireless Lorraine had been, always working, always making her art around their many urgencies, always preserving a radiant face for them.

That night, Lorraine had begun with tender questions, was he sure he wanted to move? There was his job. And what had Lindsay said?

What about his friends? They would still have Keefer two weekends every month. Rendered mulish by her concern, Gordon had offered more certainty than he’d actually felt. Until then, the move had actually been only an idea, a possibility. But suddenly, he was certain he had to make a break. He was all there was left; he would be again that little Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 315

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boy, racing hammer hearted and short of breath through the cemetery.

And he’d wanted, with fully half his heart, to relent and be that boy, but he was irrevocably grown. “If I can’t be her father, I want to be . . . sort of her stepfather,” he told his mother. “Delia and Craig have no idea how busy they’re going to be with a new baby and Keefer. I’m going to be there for her.”

Lorraine had not argued. But Gordon could tell, from small, stifled sounds, that she was crying.

“Mom,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes closed, hugging the phone with both hands, “Mom. I’m going to miss you guys—”

“It’s like losing her all over again.”

No, the voice in Gordon’s head cried! No! Foul!

“You mean Keefer?”

“I mean your sister.”

“But . . . I’m going to be around. I’ll bring her up here all the time.

And you and Dad can come—”

“Dad said we could move to Madison when we retired. He said we could get a condo, on one of the lakes.”

“But you live here, Mom! You and Dad have lived here a thousand years . . .” That hadn’t come out as he’d intended. It had sounded like a preemptory strike, a way to head them off from following him down there, something he almost felt but dismissed as his own fretful impatience. Why shouldn’t they move down there someday? He’d like it. It was just exhaustion, playing hell with him. He wanted sleep. He wanted for this to be concluded. “Not that it would be a bad idea or anything.

Take it one step at a time. You have a whole life here. What about your friends? And Nora and Hayes?”

“My friends are sick of me,” Lorraine said viciously.

“Things are going to get back to normal.”

“No, they aren’t.”