My Education (40 page)

“He's beautiful,” I said. We might have been standing there silent for hours.

“He's fortunate in his resemblances. He's his mother's son in most ways.”

This was my cue to turn around, and face that other photograph, and so I did, and did not turn to stone or to liquid, and my eyes didn't even subside beneath tears. I almost smiled. It was difficult not to, receiving that gaze, one of such serene love. I took a guess why Nicholas had called this one, also, a photograph of Joachim. “Did Joachim take this photo?” I asked.

“He did. And he sent it to me, as a sort of sly message. A flag for ‘all clear.' There's a story. He sometimes spends part of the summer with me. Last summer my going-away gift to him was a digital camera. I'd known that he wanted one badly, but it stirred up a ruckus with Martha when he brought it back home. So this photo told me she had softened up to it. She'd sat for her portrait.”

“What sort of ruckus?”

“Oh, Martha's very austere now. Or should I say, again. Very much as she was years ago when we met. Now she's found her way back.”

I wanted to say, as if seizing the clue,
Back to where?
But instead I said, “I didn't know that could be done—going back.”

“I suppose it can't quite. The place you go back to gets changed by your very returning.”

“The time-traveler's conundrum.”

“Exactly. But I'd say Martha's gone back in spirit. When I met her, her dream was to live in a tipi. Either that or on board a boat. Now she's got that, a little.”

“The tipi, or the boat?”

He laughed. “Neither. But nevertheless, she appears satisfied.”

What Martha had was a property in Mendocino County, some small, picturesque number of sheep, some comparable number of hens, a wonderfully typical rooster, all censorious pomp, and a wonderfully typical sheepdog, right out of the pages of James Herriot—or so went Nicholas's inventory of her household, downright puzzling to me in its eager affection until I understood that, like the portrait before which we stood, this manifestation of Martha manifested for Nicholas only his son. His son's eye, his son's world. “There's a great deal of shearing and carding and all sorts of wholesome nonsense—would you like to see?” he went on, hardly waiting for me to reply before turning his laptop around on his desk. There onscreen, at the ready, was a long-legged, lacy-cuffed sheep. “The spring lambs,” Nicholas explained, scrolling. “Of course this post is rather belated. He begins it by saying, ‘I took these shots six weeks ago.'”

Eleven years before, when Nicholas had started the job at Columbia, all three members of the erstwhile household had moved to New York, so close on my heels perhaps they had trod on my barely dried tears. Martha had come for an adjunct position at New York University that was beneath her, she had made it a point of remarking, as she had made it a point of remarking on every sacrifice, professional or personal, she was making to accommodate her ex-husband's career. At that time they still shared custody, Joachim's time divided equally between them to the minute, under the terms of an agreement it had taken them over a year of embittered warfare to work out. By the time it had been finalized Joachim was almost three, and within a year of its taking effect two developments had pointed the way to its being untenable. First, Martha lost her tenure case and consequently her job; and second, conversely, Nicholas's “light” book on Shakespeare and Eros became a mainstream best-seller, and he found himself offered, by Columbia, the best-paying job in his field.

Even before that grim spring of their starkly opposed job prospects it was already clear their careers weren't advancing in tandem. Martha hadn't published since Joachim's birth, not even essays that Nicholas knew were completed, let alone the first book that her chances for tenure required. She'd ignored a colleague's offer to publish whatever she had, even fragments, in the department's
Americanist Quarterly
. Meanwhile Nicholas had one admired book already under his belt and was in the last knotty stages of completing another when he'd decided, it seemed in the way one decides to step out for a breath of fresh air, to set his scholarly project aside for a couple of weeks and instead write “for fun” about Shakespeare and Eros. It was just the sort of book I'd expended such effort to not hear about, avoiding high-minded bookstores, and discarding the
Times Book Review
in the trash, for those first several years after failing to finish grad school. In the wake of the book's unexpected success Nicholas had been invited to do a thought piece on eroticism in everyday life for the opinion page of the
Times,
and enjoyed a small profile in
Newsweek,
and even been sent on a book tour, all heretofore unthinkable pomp in the dowdy, prim, penniless world of university presses. And so his stock had been high—very much higher, he unconcernedly told me, than at present or, in all likelihood, anytime in the future. Yet high as it was, Martha had complete power over him. Under the terms of their shared custody, he could not move away to New York unless Martha moved also. Martha had far less to stay for than he—he still had his old job—yet he'd known he would be in her debt if she did choose to go. Martha wasn't some camp follower. Her parents' deaths had given her a good amount of money and even then she'd been talking about buying land. And so she could have stayed put, and made him stay put too. But in the end, making clear that he'd owe her beyond his capacity ever to pay, she had taken the NYU job, and a spacious apartment overlooking the Hudson in Lower Manhattan, at the opposite end of the 1 train from where he would now live in Morningside Heights.

She'd made the move because she wanted to—Martha never did things without wanting to, even if the desire was fleeting—but it was useful to her to maintain that she'd done it for him, sacrificed so that he could advance, just the same as if they were still married. Nicholas had expected and hoped that this theme would abate once their life in New York had set roots. He was sure Martha felt the same way, that the tale of her sacrifice to him was only for face-saving. Before their marriage Martha loved New York. It had always been far more her city than his, something it had taken him years to understand, given their shared love of nature. But extremity and challenge were the things Martha liked, whether urban or wild. She was equally gratified by New York as by unspoiled backcountry. What she had no use for was the pastoral or meditative, which was why she'd so hated the storybook town where we'd lived.

Returning to New York as an actual resident, and the mother of a four-year-old child, she must have been dismayed, then, to discover she now hated it almost as much as that town, if not more. Must have been dismayed, Nicholas said, because of the effort she'd made to conceal her feelings. It had only been the depth of her Manhattan zealotry that prompted Nicholas, who still knew her so well, to suspect she was deeply unhappy. For Joachim and herself she subscribed to the Children's Playhouse and the Family Philharmonic and, at Christmastime, to multiple
Nutcracker
s. Afternoons and weekends she marched Joachim on an unending round through the Temples of Culture, not just the usual ones but the very obscure ones that native New Yorkers ignored or had not even heard of, the museums of Theosophy or of the Lenape Tribe, or the uncovered African burial grounds. She paddled a kayak off Battery Park, and broadcast her intention to moor a sailboat at the World Financial Center Marina. She grew tiresome about extremely local causes, giving her time away to them—to the persecuted South American fruit vendors, to the underfunded monument preservers, to the visionary bike path proponents—as if doing penance.

By contrast to Martha's frenetic displays of enthusiasm, Joachim's attitude to New York started off tepid and steadily lost temperature. He tolerated everything and loved nothing. His well-regarded public school—for Martha had also become a zealot about public school—was, each year from kindergarten forward, “okay,” or “fine,” or “all right.” “Okay” and “fine” and “all right” were Joachim's workhorse adjectives, applicable to all the nuances of city life. The subways, the buses, their high-rise apartment, the boats of all sizes pursuing their tasks up and down the great Hudson, the candelabra-palisade of the Metropolitan Opera as one crossed the great plaza dew-drenched by the spray of the fountains: all this was “okay.” The view from the top of the World Trade Center disclosing—my God!—ancient stubs of the Ramapo Mountains, the fjord of the Hudson at Storm King, Jamaica Bay's islands adrift on the beaten-gold sea: all of this, equally, was “all right.” No degree of Martha's enthusiasm could prompt Joachim to feel a passionate attachment to the city, and perhaps this was why her enthusiasm notched up evermore—because she lacked the attachment as well, and suspected he knew.

What did Joachim like? Peace and quiet. He remarked endlessly on the level of noise in Manhattan. What else did he like? Their old garden when they'd lived “in the country,” which, even by age nine, he still hadn't forgotten. They tried to re-create it with tenth-story window boxes, but it wasn't the same. Their life in New York, even after five years, still felt somehow provisional, and now came the fall of 2001, with Joachim starting fourth grade.

Having already learned how this story would end, I felt I hardly needed Nicholas to tell me the details, which I could have invented myself. Nine-year-old Joachim Hallett-Brodeur, delicate of feature and pale of skin, an uncombed hank of his father's gold hair hanging into his mother's gray eyes, seated in a relatively quietish corner of the impossibly hard-surfaced cacophonous school cafeteria at eight forty-five in the morning, outsize backpack still weighting his thin bony shoulders on top of his hoodie because like a soldier, or like a New York City schoolchild, he's learned to hump half his weight on his back without thinking about it. One small-palmed, long-fingered hand holding open the absurd doorstop of the latest
Harry Potter
, the other idly stickying itself in the morning's Free School Breakfast, pancakes with imitation maple syrup, the usual and welcome Tuesday fare; Thursday, the other day he comes to school early to sit with the kids from the projects and eat the Free School Breakfast because his mother teaches an eight-thirty class, the entrée is cinnamon rolls with icing. Beverage choice of chocolate milk or juice. Martha forgivably sanguine about this nutritional nadir in Joachim's day because she gives him whole grain cereals and fruits in the mornings and wrongly believes that he gets the Free Breakfast at school just for show but does not really eat it. This illusion, like so many others, will expire today. Several hours later, when at last Joachim with strange slowness comes into her arms, his face smooth of expression and absent of tears, rather like that of a sleepwalker, his hand will still be tacky from imitation maple syrup because, unusual for a fastidious boy who washes hands before and after every meal without fail, on this morning he has never been able to go to the bathroom. When the first airplane strikes, its vast detonation just four blocks away making all the cafeteria's cumbersome combination table-and-twenty-stool units jump slightly on their black rubber wheels, Joachim is still subsumed in familiar aloneness, an aloneness made safe by routine. By the time the still-living bodies of people are plummeting off the tower's crown to the street Joachim has been swept into a dangerous crowd, of panicked teachers and children, all made anonymous and vulnerable by the collapse of routine. Disaster procedures, such as they exist at the time, disintegrate beneath the onslaught of parents rushing into the school to take children home. When Joachim tells the mother of one of his classmates that Martha is at NYU, teaching class, the mother takes Joachim with her. It doesn't occur to either of them, adult or child, that by this time Martha has canceled her class and rushed downtown against a tide of people rushing up, and that in fact she is in the school building, unable to find Joachim. Outside, on Greenwich Street, Joachim, pulled along by the mother of his classmate but paid no attention by her as she's too occupied with her daughter, walks looking back over his shoulder and has a clear view of the plummeting bodies, each as distinct to him as would be people on the subway or passing him by on the street. Some pump legs and arms in wild panic as if they had not meant to jump but were pushed. Some are strangely lumpy and thick until he understands that they're two people, tightly entwined. Some go down striking what seem like intentional poses, as if at a previous time in their life they had worked out a posture for this situation, like the teenagers at the Carmine Street pool coming off the high dive. One falls perfectly upside-down, one knee bent, both arms flush to the torso. From the distance it's hard to tell if they are women or men. Like most children, excellently defended by innocence, Joachim never imagines the falling are children like him. They are adults, to whom, he's remotely aware, death applies. When the mushroom cloud blooms from the top of one tower and the whole of it starts to cascade, with surprising, contained elegance, as if it too had worked out in advance just the right way to fall, it's Joachim's intake of breath that alerts his friend's mother. With a shriek she exhorts them to run, but just then some Korean store owners, standing aghast in the door to their deli, yell, “Children, inside! Come inside!” and they tumble inside as the wave of gray ash passes by.

At the age of seven Joachim had been a scholar of Pompeii as he had also, at various times, been a scholar of such things as the moon landing, Da Vinci, and dinosaurs, and in the days that followed, Pompeii was his template for what had occurred. Everything fit: the nice day turned horrific; the black column of smoke and orange flames; the fine rain of gray ash; and the plummeting black silhouettes of those headed for death, even in their last seconds of life rendered into abstractions, just like those sprawled, featureless statues one gazed on in books, Pompeii's fossilized dead. That a metaphor of natural disaster left no room for intentional evil seemed to Nicholas healthy, perhaps even miraculous, as did Joachim's other chief posttrauma symptoms, though they were not without irony. Joachim was suddenly an ardent, possessive, protective, patriotic New Yorker. New York was all he wanted to discuss: its history, its buildings, its street grid, its subways, its people from all the nations on earth. He'd grown abruptly alert to his fellow New Yorkers as if having discovered them under his bed, as if he were their sovereign now tenderly responsible for every aspect of their health and well-being. He would stand and talk to the doorman, Enrique, for hours if you let him. Every Korean deli they passed, he would want to go in. Bonds of friendship had bloomed all around him at school. It was as though he had fallen in love, was what Nicholas thought, but Martha, who saw everything differently after that day, saw this differently also.