Making Toast (8 page)

Amy and Harris were married in our Quogue house in 1998 on one of those fiercely bright June days which draw artists to eastern Long Island. It never mattered to Amy that we could not afford a big wedding like those of her friends. I told her what was possible. She was thrilled. We rented a big white tent, which billowed in the wind on the front lawn. Amy and Harris chose a band from New York that played mostly sixties music. There were blue blazers and red ties and navy-blue dresses with white trim, and many white roses. The sky was clear as glass.

We had asked Amy what sort of ceremony she and Harris wanted, and she said they’d like the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, a close family friend, to marry them. After making inquiries, we learned that New York State does not permit cartoonists (or any other layperson, for that matter) to perform wedding ceremonies, so we arranged for two ceremonies—one by the cartoonist and a legal one performed by Erik Kolbell. The morning of the wedding, Amy, Ginny, and Jane Pauley, the television journalist and Garry’s wife, were having their hair done at the Quogue beauty parlor. Jane had given Amy a pair of diamond earrings to wear as “something borrowed.” At the beauty parlor she told Amy her earrings would be borrowed only until the pronouncement of man and wife, after which they would be hers to keep. Garry said many beautiful things to the couple, before telling the assembled that he was marrying Amy and Harris with the power vested in him “by the State of Euphoria.”

The following day, before Amy and Harris went off on their honeymoon, we served a brunch for the wedding party and friends. Amy and I took a walk, just the two of us, arms around each other. I do not recall what we said.

Bubbies sits in my lap in the den. He locks his hands behind his head when he relaxes. I do the same. We sit there in a lopsided brown leather chair—same pose, sitting in tandem, like luge drivers.

One evening, he points to the shelf to his left and says, “Book.” He indicates
The Letters of James Joyce
, edited by Stuart Gilbert. It seems an ambitious choice for a twenty-three-month-old boy, but I take down the book and prop it up before us.

“Dear Bubbies,” I begin. “I went to the beach today, and played in the sand. I also built a castle. I hope you will come play with me soon. Love, James Joyce.”

Bubbies seems content, so I “read” another:

Bubbies turns the pages. I occasionally amuse myself with an invented letter closer to the truth of Joyce’s life and personality.

It tickles me that Bubbies has chosen to latch onto a writer who gladly would have stepped on a baby to get a rave review.

I try to put back the book, but he detects an implicit announcement of his bedtime, and he protests. “Joyce!” he says. Eventually, he resigns himself to the end of his day. He puts the book back himself, and quietly says, “Joyce.”

When Bubbies was a few months old, Amy used to prop him on her knees, hold him under the arms, and look straight into his eyes with an indefinite urgency. Then she would sing her curious lyrics to the tune of “Frère Jacques,” which now makes me wonder if she had an unconscious premonition that she would not be around for him.

I drive Ginny and Jessie to New York, and join them for a pancakes-and-French-toast breakfast at a diner uptown, then go my own way. This is to be a girls’ day out in the big city. Sammy will have his own day later on. In the morning Ginny and Jessie go to a hair salon, where Jessie gets a blow-dry and has her nails polished. The manicurist asks what color she wants. She chooses an electric blue.

In the early afternoon they go to the American Girl store, a mecca for preteens in midtown, on Fifth Avenue. The store sells the American Girl dolls and their clothing and paraphernalia, clothes for children to dress like their dolls, books about dolls, paper dolls, has a tearoom where a child can have lunch or tea with her doll (it is booked solid, so Ginny and Jess lunch elsewhere), and a doll hospital. Jessie gets an American Girl sweatshirt and a white nightgown for herself and her doll, and two books. She also buys a computer game for her friend Oana.

They stroll and they chat, taking in the still magnitude of New York on an August day. They go downtown to the West 20s, where friends of ours, the artist David Levinthal, his wife, Kate Sullivan, and their little boy, Sam, live in a large loft. Kate is a professional baker. She and Jess make cookies together in various shapes, and she gives Jessie molds to make more. On the way back uptown, Ginny points out the Gramercy Park neighborhood where I had grown up, and where she and I spent lots of time in our high school and college years. John ends his workday with us at dinner. John has always been a favorite with the children, who are drawn to his gentleness and reserve. At his appearance, Jessie cheers. She deems the day “perfect.”

Carl, Wendy, and the boys return to Fairfax, leaving Ginny, Harris, the children, and me to spend a few days together before summer ends. I stand holding Jessie’s hand at the lip of the ocean. When she was a baby, she would not allow her feet to touch the sand. Sammy had the same reaction to snow. Neither child trusted uncertain surfaces. Now Jessie plunges into the water. Harris sits a few yards away making a castle with a moat with Sammy. Ginny wears her Obama cap. She and Bubbies remain under the yellow-and-white-striped umbrella. She reads to him, her calm and patience limitless.

A picture comes to mind of my mother reading to Peter when he was Bubbies’s age. She too was a teacher. I watched them as they sat on lawn chairs in a hotel where we were staying, my mother positioning the book under a shaft of sunlight.

I tell Jessie, “Here comes the wave. Here it goes. Will it touch our knees or our ankles or our toes?”

“Our toes,” she says.

Miles east of here, the beaches of Southampton and East Hampton are mobbed, but in Quogue the beach lies open, with ample room for play and for walking. A girl about Jessie’s age approaches and introduces herself. “I’m Schuyler,” she says. Jessie greets her warmly. She moves on. Jessie watches the boats against the pale sky. She watches the bigger boys on their boogie boards. She smiles with her mouth slightly open and gap-toothed and amazed, the way Amy did at her age.

“Let’s go in!” says Harris. He and I take turns holding Jessie in the waves. She swims from one of us to the other as we tread water about thirty feet apart. Ginny, on shore with the boys, observes us anxiously. A strong swimmer, she has always been wary of the ocean. Amy was also a strong swimmer. Our favorite photo of her as a six-year-old was taken in a swimming pool in Washington, Amy underwater, doing the breaststroke toward the camera.

“Daddy! Here I come!”

Before heading home, we get ice cream cones. Sammy wants a sugar cone with vanilla ice cream and rainbow sprinkles. Jess and Bubbies want cups of vanilla. Harris abstains. Ginny and I have moosetracks. Constellations of families are spread out on the beach. Ours does not look very different from the others.

Late in August, we return to Bethesda for the first days of the children’s schools. Bubbies begins preschool at Geneva. Ginny takes him. He cries on his first day, and is fine after that. School for someone thirty inches high—it seems preposterous. Jessie starts second grade at Burning Tree, Sammy kindergarten. He is excited, mainly about taking the school bus. The first day, Sammy’s bus runs out of oil on the way home.

“What was your favorite part of the day?” I ask him.

“When the school bus couldn’t move,” he says. Harris says that might turn out to be Sammy’s favorite part of the whole year.

On the weekend, we visit the cemetery. Each time, I go with a mixture of need and trepidation, because I know I may break down at the sight of the small rectangle of earth, the boxwood outlining it, the conical brass receptacle for flowers, and the marker, which is so definite. When we chose this spot in December, the nearby office buildings showed through the shorn trees. Since spring the area has burgeoned with dogwoods and magnolias.

Jessie has brought white carnations; Sammy, a Washington Redskins balloon in the shape of an oversized football, which he plans to release into the air. He seems fragile these days—drifting into faraway stares and silences. Yet he talks more about Amy’s death. Yesterday morning, he asked me again how Mommy died. “The heart stopped. Right?” he said. His first day of kindergarten, when the children were asked to draw pictures of their families, Sammy’s drawing included Amy lying dead on the floor. Catherine Andrews, the children’s psychotherapist, says that Sammy is expressing recollections as they come to him, but that this is a way of expelling them, and they are unlikely to be repeated.

At the gravesite, Harris asks Sammy if he has something to say. He stands behind the marker and says, “I miss you, Mommy.” He tells Amy about Bubbies’s first teacher in preschool, Ms. Franzetti, and about Jessie’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Salcetti, and about his own, Ms. Merritt. He tells Amy about the balloon, and predicts the Redskins will win the Superbowl. Jessie has no message for Amy today. Sammy asks Harris if he can be buried next to Mommy. Harris says yes, but tells him it’s a very long way off.

Ginny and I take turns holding Bubbies, who carries a small plastic penguin. When you squeeze its “trigger,” its beak opens and shuts, its little wings flap, and the penguin squawks. On an earlier visit to the cemetery, Bubbies refused to be taken from his car seat, and cried out, “No, no, no!” Today he has his penguin, and is content simply to look around.

Jessie places the carnations in the conical vessel. Harris writes, “We love you, Mommy” on the football balloon. The children let it go. It flies up in the heavy air and snags on a distant tree. We assure the children that the wind will free it eventually.

Bubbies’s birthday is in September, so is mine. For his, we gathered Carl, Wendy, and their boys, made a to-do, and gave him a toy grill to further his culinary bent. “How old are you, Bubs?” I asked him. “Two!” he said. For my birthday, Ginny gave me the kayak. Harris gave me an imitation Andy Warhol, which he ordered up on the Internet. It consists of four versions of a picture of Bubbies and me in Disney World last January, me leaning back on a bench, Bubbies standing behind it pulling my hair. In each picture, the hair, eyes, and skin are different colors. Ginny and I hung it in our bedroom where Bubbies likes to look at himself with green hair and me with blue. He comes down to the room all the time, to steal and hide Ginny’s curlers, or try to take my car keys, or to ask, “What is that?” about everything. Our room has become a home, with places for books, shoes, and suitcases, pictures of Amy and the grandchildren on my desk, and the kids bouncing in and out. Sammy will watch TV on our bed when Jessie has commandeered the one upstairs. Jessie wants to know how my IBM Selectric typewriter works. It fascinates her to see me at it—one antique using another.

One evening, Sammy rushes into the room naked from head to toe. “Boppo!” he says, having just watched a DVD of
101 Dalmatians
. “The dalmatian puppies were saved!” I ask, “Sammy, where are your clothes?” He says, “The puppies were going to be skinned for coats!”

He glances at Amy’s picture. “I miss Mommy,” he says. “Me, too,” I say.

To the array of the children’s activities have been added martial arts for Sammy, a new gym with balance beams and monkey bars for Bubbies, and yoga for Jess. On Saturday mornings in the fall, she has soccer. Her team, the Flames, wears uniforms of blazing yellow. Games are played simultaneously on three adjacent fields. Rob Hazan, the Flames’ coach, is married to Jill, a high school friend of Harris’s. Jill and the other mothers sit together on collapsible canvas chairs in the cool fall air, and Ginny sits with them.

This is the way it was when our children were small—parents loosely convened for recitals, plays, pageants, basketball, Little League. In Vermont, where we rusticated for a year between my jobs at the
Washington Post
and at
Time
in New York, we cheered in the bleachers of drafty school gyms with John in his stroller, as Carl hit a winning jump shot in a local basketball tournament and Amy scored all her team’s points in an elementary school game—four. In Bethesda it is as Ginny noted: she is leading Amy’s life. With one mother, she makes plans for a trip to the National Zoo; with another, a date to see
Madagascar
. The women speak of their children’s teachers. They praise, they complain, they collaborate, they gossip.

On Halloween, we go to the Burning Tree School to admire Sammy, Jessie, and the other children in their costumes and to watch a parade. Jessie’s second-grade teacher, Deirdre Salcetti, is a creative, quick-witted blonde in her forties, with a you’re-safe-with-me smile, which readily surrenders to laughter. She has the body of a gymnast. She teaches the yoga classes. Dressed as a bee today, she has antennas on her head and wears translucent wings and a tag that reads, “Don’t worry. Bee happy.” Mrs. Salcetti stands before the class. “I’m not going to start until everyone is quiet.” The children prepare to present themselves to the visitors.

A girl steps forward as Indiana Jones, and explains who she is. Another girl appears as one of the Jedi. Katie, who has no hair, is a wizard. I surmise that she is being treated for cancer, but am told that she has a genetic disorder. Her face is startlingly white. She smiles readily. A girl named Amy is a witch with a cat and a broom.