Childish Loves (15 page)

Occasionally I saw the little English girl again with her nanny, but never her mother. There were plenty of others though. My own mother is German, and I try to speak German to my daughter as much as I can. This tends to attract questions, and questioners. The neighborhood we lived in had a good supply of home-grown Germans, employed by the universities and the local tech industry. So I practiced my
Deutsch
on them, which is for me really the language of my childhood and calls up childish feelings and memories.

Another youthful association: one of the mothers I met was a woman named Kelly Kirkendoll, recently divorced, with two children. She looked familiar to me when I first saw her, lifting her boy off a slide he was climbing up, to let another kid go down. And I wondered if we'd been at college together. But Kirkendoll is a good Texan name, and her maiden name turned out to be even more familiar: Manz. The Manzes lived in the posh colonial house, red bricks and white columns, on the corner at the top of our road – a baseball throw from the house I grew up in. We used to get the bus to school together in the morning. But Kelly was pretty and fair and naturally sociable and unreserved, and I was none of those things and never said more to her than a few words. She seemed to me more approachable now.

‘I'm a mess today,' she tended to announce when she saw me – as a matter of habit. A kind of apology for being thirty-three instead of thirteen. As if to say, what must you think of me, I've gotten older.

She had moved to Cambridge with her husband a few years before for the sake of his job. Which meant giving up her own job, as an elementary-school teacher. She wanted to get back to work, and Austin, Texas, but it was complicated for legal reasons, and her divorce had only just come through. So she was ‘treading water' – her phrase, though it summed up what we both felt about those playground days. The first time I saw her she had both kids in tow. Later, once the older boy was settled in school, our three-year-olds learned to occupy each other. We could sit more or less peacefully on one of the park benches and let the afternoon go by.

Sometimes my work-thoughts carried over uncomfortably. My daughter was only three, but there were eight-, ten-, twelve-year-olds, who came to use the swings after school or climb up the more ambitious slides. Byron was said to have corrupted his page-boy, Robert Rushton, when he was not much older; and the subject of one of his most famous love poems, ‘The Maid of Athens,' was hardly ten when Byron and Hobhouse lodged briefly with her mother on their first Continental tour.
Childe Harold
itself was dedicated publicly to a young girl, about whom he wrote, ‘I should love her for ever if she could always be only eleven years old – and shall probably marry her when she is old enough & bad enough to be made into a modern wife.' By our own modern standards he was probably a pedophile and certainly a rapist, at least of the statutory kind; and it was hard not to imagine that Peter's interest in him contained an element of something unpleasant.

*

Caroline found work interning four days a week at a local public radio station, which suited her, she said, much better than TV. So we hired a nanny for three of them and split the other two days of childcare. Every morning I watched her leave the house in a smart professional jacket and modest skirt. The same leather briefcase clutched against her side. Then she got in the car and drove to WBNW, which was housed in an industrial park off the highway to Needham. The station she worked for had a books program, and she managed to get me an invitation to it. This made her very excited. (I used to tell her, in the first few years of our relationship, that she brought me luck.) So one morning we shared the commute and I saw her at work in the office. Thin false walls and stippled ceilings, a water keg, a few plants. Windows that couldn't be opened overlooking the parking lot, and the heating already on in October. She sounded to me much more efficient and English than she had sounded in years, and I was reminded again of the girl I used to know, whom I didn't know well. Afterwards, she forgot to give me a kiss, and I got in the taxi she had called for me and was driven away.

When she came home she wanted to talk about my impressions. We always had a lot to do, from about five thirty in the evening to half past seven, when our daughter went to sleep; and these sorts of conversations would be interrupted by cleaning up, making her dinner, running the bath and so on. If one of us had something we wanted to talk about we could be easily offended. The thing I said that pleased her most was: ‘You seem really to like the job.' To her ears, this meant that she looked natural and happy in it. But when I asked her if there was any chance it could turn into something more than an internship, she became upset. ‘I don't want to stay here,' she said.

Over our own dinner, when the house was quiet again, she asked me if I ever ‘cared that our parents are friends. I mean,' she said, ‘did it ever change what you feel about me?'

‘I don't know what the right answer is. I think it probably did. It meant that I wanted to know more about you, because I liked your family. I wanted to know what it was like to be a member of your family. Is that the right answer?'

She nodded; to my surprise she was almost in tears. ‘I feel a long way from anything I know here,' she said. ‘But I know you.'

*

One of the benefits of the Harvard connection is that it allowed me to come into contact with the kind of people who might be useful to me professionally. These are all awful terms: connections, contacts, kinds of people. But a few weeks into my fellowship, I went to a reading at the Brattle Theater and ended up at dinner afterwards with several other writers and prominent editors – including the critic Henry Jeffries, who had recently taken a job at the
New Yorker
. A mild, handsome, balding, middle-aged Englishman. He had arrived in America ten years before, and we compared his first and my second impressions. ‘You must have had the sense,' I remember saying to him, ‘as an ambitious young man, of always leaning slightly forwards, if you know what I mean. An uncomfortable position, if you have to keep it up long.'

‘Yes,' he said, kindly, ‘I
do
know what you mean.' After a pause, he added, ‘You must be happy to be home.'

‘Well, I'm not really home,' I told him.

At one point, I succeeded in starting a more general conversation – on what was ‘essentially the subject of my fellowship.' For a minute I held the table, feeling in my own voice something of the effect of my personality on others. What can we say about a writer from the way he writes? Or she writes? (Drink had made me fastidious about these things.) His moral qualities; his life. Jeffries had taught with Saul Bellow before his death and told a few stories about him. Mostly admiring; but after receiving the Nobel Prize, Bellow had turned to his son and whispered, This is why I was never around. For this. Or something like it.

‘I don't even know what you win,' I broke in. ‘Money, a plaque?'

‘I couldn't say if they give you a plaque. But it's a lot of money.'

‘And for that he ducks his duties as a father? When his writing is mostly about the big questions at stake in daily existence?'

‘I suppose you blame him for his marriages, too?'

From the other end of the table, someone called out, ‘You can't blame a writer for his marriages, God help us.' Sam Hess, I think his name was. Forty-something, square-shouldered and – jawed and careless of his appearance; he was losing his hair. ‘A writer writes and sacrifices what he needs to.'

‘This is only because he's been told it's okay,' I said, ‘by a long line of shirkers and delusionals. Because it's a part of the culture that attracted him in the first place. But a guy like Bellow should have seen through it. The whole point of his work is the moral sympathies required to navigate your way through a decent life. He should have been great at marriage.'

‘Are people good at marriage?' Hess asked.

‘Sure they are. And Bellow should have been a first-rate husband and father. With his sensitivities, and patience for the long game, and powers of restraint. In
Herzog
he comes up with ideas for children's books, and these are great books: about the thinnest fat man, and the fattest thin man. And then he has to make excuses to his son? For the sake of a plaque, and money he doesn't need?'

Jeffries said, ‘I'm afraid that writers have their vanities, too. But it wasn't the plaque, as you know very well. It was the work itself that drove him.'

‘As if other people don't work. Who needs to work less than writers? Three hours a day is plenty. The rest of the time he can spend with his children, and cook and shop. Even if we don't hold him to a higher standard and forgive him a divorce or two, I still don't know what to make of five wives. Not every divorce is a failed marriage, okay; and people change. Life changes them. But I thought his special gift was character, I thought he was expert in the field of life-changes. Maybe what we should do is take another look at the work. Maybe that's where the fault lies: it wasn't profound enough. He needed to be deeper or greater. With more inner resources, he could have made it through ten years of dinner with children screaming and toys on the floor, like the rest of us.'

‘This is crazy,' Hess said. ‘What's it got to do with the work? A guy isn't a bad accountant if he splits on his wife.'

‘But if he gets audited himself, you might think twice about leaving your returns in his hands.'

‘My example was a bad example. But you have to admit writing poses special problems. Writing what you think has a tendency to hurt people. Also, there's a pressure to be open to new feelings and experiences, which isn't always helpful to a marriage.'

‘That's a nice way of putting it. Maybe there should be more writers who write about what it's like
not
to experience very much, and
not
to feel new feelings. That sounds to me like the real human condition. Maybe this is what we need.'

‘I'm not sure I understand you, but what you describe also seems to me a recipe for bad marriages.'

‘Is this really the subject of your fellowship?' Jeffries asked me.

On the walk home, I cooled down a little, and the flush of high spirits turned into something else.

*

Steve Heinz had told me that Peter's mother was still alive, so I called him and got her name. Mary, he said. I would have preferred Orla or Clodagh, but there turned out to be only six Mary Sullivans in the Boston phone directory, and only two in Charlestown – which is where, I dimly remembered, Peter once told me he grew up. I tried both numbers and let them ring, twenty, thirty times each, imagining the hallways in which they echoed. Another week went by, with my head in Byronalia; when I was bored of it, I called. Once I got an answer from a woman who told me her husband was out, when I mentioned Peter to her, but I think it had little to do with the name itself. She was unused to the phone and suspicious of strangers.

‘He's back this minute,' she said, ‘if you don't mind ringing back.'

The addresses listed weren't more than seven or eight blocks apart – neither one far from the Navy Yard. So one afternoon, because it was sunny out, I put on my coat and caught the T to Haymarket.

Charlestown is huddled between river and highway; to reach it on foot, you have to cross a six-lane bridge. This is a good place to appreciate what the 1950s did to Boston. What you see is an architect's vision of human progress: the bright curves of access ramps; the strong splendid verticals of suspension bridges; billboards like movie screens. And between them, fragments of a low-slung Victorian terraced city: the North End. It's only the noise that's unbearable, and the nearer view of pot-holed roads and dirty cars. I came over on the wrong side of the bridge and had to chase a gap in the traffic to arrive at the relative quiet of Charlestown Square. From there, the old city emerges again: leafy streets, brick sidewalks and houses; steep hills.

This wasn't the neighborhood I imagined Peter growing up in, but Charlestown has suffered a sea-change since his childhood. It has become rich. The greasy spoons have been turned into coffee shops and the bars into restaurants. Most of the pretty row-houses have fresh facades; sometimes you can measure the effects of gentrification in the line of soot that separates one from the next. The first door I knocked on, after trying the bell and hearing nothing, had a basket of begonias hanging above it, still dripping from a spray. A tall narrow house with a dormer built on but in bad repair. Most of the other houses on the block, a side street that dipped then rose towards Bunker Hill, had been cleaned up and turned into flats. This was the only one with a single bell. About three o'clock in the afternoon, mid-October; I could see a dull light shining behind lace curtains on the second floor.

A short, elderly woman came to the door. There was a broad stairway behind her with a red tattered runner running down it, fringed in gold brocade. An umbrella stand, containing several tall umbrellas; a chandelier with little electric candles, colored by hand; and a row of old-fashioned mail slots hung against the wall.

‘Are you Mary Sullivan?' I asked. ‘I was a friend of Peter's.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Peter Sullivan. I used to teach high school with him.'

‘He's dead now, why don't you let him alone.' And she closed the door in my face.

There was a coffee shop on the corner, but I walked on looking for a stationers and ended up at a pharmacy, which sold gift-cards and envelopes. At the coffee shop, I ordered tea and sat down with a borrowed pen and tried to explain myself. It took me half an hour to come up with something serviceable, but in the end, I lacked the patience for a waiting-game and simply knocked at the door with the card in my hand. She opened it soon enough. I guess old ladies can't afford to turn away too many opportunities for diversion. But she looked perfectly respectable and sober, in a flower-print dress and sandals, over thick ankle-socks. She had none of the whiskery, red, angry Irish quality Steve Heinz had described to me. Maybe she had cleaned herself up or was only drunk for the funeral. When she saw it was me again, she said, ‘You think you're the first has come. On account of those books.'