Schroder: A Novel (15 page)

“But it
is
funny.”

“Yes, it is funny,” I said. “Life just gets funnier and funnier the longer you live it.”

I stared up at the ceiling of our cabin. The night was moonless. As if hearing my guilty misgivings, Meadow clicked on her flashlight. The beam roved across the ceiling, illuminating the cobwebs.

“Hey, Meadow,” I said. “How about, if you don’t mind, we play pretend while we’re on vacation? You can be some other girl you want to be, and I will still be your father but
I’ll have a different name, you know, like John. You can pick your own name. Some name you’ve always liked. And I’ll
call
you that and we’ll make up stories about our life. Like, you can have the little sister you always wanted—”

“Oh, I don’t want one of those anymore.”

“All right.”

“I would prefer a hermit crab. But I want a real one, not a pretend one.”

“Well, what kind of pretend pet would you like to have?”

Meadow thought. “A Portuguese water dog? Like Sasha Obama got?”

“OK, OK. That’s great. You’ll have a Portuguese water dog back at home. And we’ll be from Toronto. And my name will be John, and your name will be—”

“I think you should be mayor.”

“Of Toronto?”

“Yes. Mayor John Toronto. And on the Fourth of July, you get to launch the fireworks.”

“OK. And your name? What should I call you?”

Meadow considered the ceiling. “Chrissy.”

“
Chrissy?
Really?”

Her eyes flashed angrily in the dark.

“OK,” I said. “Chrissy is good. In case we need a code name.”

“And I have blondish goldenish hair. Like Rapunzel.” Meadow sighed. “I’m
wide
-awake, Daddy. I’m absolutely
wired
.”

“Me too. Would you like me to read aloud from
Birds Come and Gone
? Maybe that’ll put us to sleep.”

Wedged next to the le Carré novels of our cabin’s small bookshelf, we had discovered an ancient pamphlet of poetry by a dead society lady named Kitty Tinkerton Bridge, who
wrote rhyming poetry about birds. Lacking other appropriate bedtime books, we had read from
Birds Come and Gone
and had both come to appreciate Bridge’s amateurish but somewhat musical verse, and it had become a kind of ritual to read from it.

“All right,” sighed Meadow. “Read to me.”

As I opened the book, I heard the slap of the screen door across the path. Given the otherwise dead silence in our remote cove, I could only assume that the resident of Cabin One was home.

MY FIRST LIE

Technically, fraud is defined not by the act of lying but by
the intent to benefit from lying
. If you lie for fun, or for the various other reasons that we lie (e.g., to avoid physical pain or recrimination, or to perpetuate heartbreaking self-delusion), that is not necessarily
fraud
. I suppose my first
fraudulent
lie was told in a distant wing of the West Berlin Rathaus, in 1975. It also happens to be one of my few clear early memories. My father was speaking with a West German man in civilian clothing. The man had fuzzy hair that he wore in a kind of blond atmosphere around his head, as well as a shirt whose top two or three buttons I assumed had come undone accidentally, because this sort of experimentation with male décolletage had not yet arrived in East Berlin, from whence we had just emigrated hours before. The man and my father had been arguing most of that time. My father’s brother-in-law, the man who was to let us live in his garage apartment, had left hours ago, leaving us with his address and assurances that we’d be processed soon. But the blond West German seemed to be losing patience with my father.

“But I need some sort of confirmation, you see.”

“You have confirmation,” said my father. “You have two exit visas.”

“But you are married. There is no certificate of divorce, which you are instructed to produce, not just there, but here. You have nothing—”

“I had one hour to report to Friedrichstrasse. Did you want me to dig up the body?”

My father’s voice was rising in pitch, as it did whenever he felt persecuted by other people’s stupidity. Finally the sponge-haired man looked at me and called out into the hallway. A pretty brunette came to the door. The blond man whispered something to her, and she smiled at me.

“Well, hello,” she said.

She disappeared for a moment, only to return with a small silver canister, which she held out to me. I remember this clearly: The can was aluminum, with a pear-shaped hole for drinking, which was still preserved, until the woman peeled it off, by a tacky silver sticker. The canister was beautiful, a tiny powder keg. I vowed to keep it.

“Thanks!” I exclaimed.

“Drink it. It’s juice,” said the woman, lingering prettily in the office. “How old are you, sweetie pie?”

I held up one spread hand.

“Five? My, my.”

My father glanced down at me in the folding chair beside him, with a look I could only describe as aggrieved, and despite the fact that my cuteness was overshadowing his entreaties, I guzzled my juice with relish.

“What a
Süßer
. What a
strammer kerl
,” the woman said to my father, using two phrases that were in German but beyond my ken, because although there was love in East Germany,
sober, private love, for certain, there were—you’ll have to believe me—no endearments. I loved the lurid sound of them immediately.

“Look at him,” the woman continued. “Sitting so patiently. So poised. His mother would be so proud of him. Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” said my father, looking pale. “My wife—my late wife—doted upon him.”

The man with the blond hair looked down at me in exasperation. “It’s true, then, what your father says? Your mommy has died? We need to know that she isn’t missing you.”

My eyes went wide. I was not surprised by the news that my mother was dead—I knew that was a complete fiction, as I had just seen her that morning—I was only surprised that I was being addressed. After hours of sitting in a windowless room full of folding chairs, my father bargaining with everybody he could find, no one had yet asked a direct question of me.

I clutched my canister. I would keep it forever and I would play with it. We did not have silver juice canisters in East Berlin. I knew that my father and I had an understanding. I would say what he needed me to say and he would protect my right to my juice canister. I could feel his large, fading heat beside me, his hands still smelling—as they would forever after—of the inkpad from the border crossing at Friedrichstrasse.

I looked across the desk at the blond man. He inspired no feeling in me. But when I glanced toward the doorway, I saw the brunette with her soft cheek pressed against the doorjamb. And even though I knew my mother was still
there
—somewhere, on the other side—I slipped into a black-and-white
reality in which I had lost her entirely, which was closer to the truth, anyway.

“Little boy? Can’t you speak?”

I burst into tears.

“Oh, leave him alone, Gerhardt,” said the woman in the doorway. “For God’s sakes. Does it even matter anymore? What are you going to do, send them back?”

VIERTER TAG
OR
DAY FOUR

I awoke with a headache, as if I’d been drinking heavily. I sat upright on the edge of my bed for a long time, watching Meadow sleep. Dawn was a reckoning. In the daylight, it was difficult to deny that I had only one clean option. This thing about Meadow being in danger was a misunderstanding. I could clear that up by returning her to Albany as soon as possible. I’d pay fines. Maybe I’d even be arrested. None of that caused the physical aversion I felt just as soon as I pictured myself doing the right thing. Why? Because I wasn’t ready to blow up my life. Maybe nobody else cared about it, but it was my life. My lovingly constructed American life. I wanted to keep being who I was. I wanted to keep being Eric Kennedy. If I went back now, they’d make me be Schroder. And claiming that name would be part of my punishment, a ceremonial rite. And no one would listen to me when I would tell them, But I am not Schroder, no one would understand what I meant by that. It’s your legal name, they’d say. I understand that it’s my legal name, I’d say. And they’d say, Are you really in any position to object?

In the warped glass of the window over Meadow’s bed, I
spied my face, gazing back at me plaintively. I ran my hand around my jaw. I gave that sad sack face a couple fit slaps that brought water to my eyes. Harder, I thought. You’re not even capable of hitting hard enough. I stopped to catch my breath.

“John fucking Toronto,” I muttered, getting up to shave.

Meadow and I headed out into a hazy morning. I couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm as I had the day before. I kept staring with preoccupation out at the lake, wondering which way they’d come from. Maybe this was just the imprinting of my childhood’s apparat, but it seemed to me that if you scratched anybody deep enough, you’d reveal some criminality, a questionable exchange or evasion, a moment where he or she bent the law at its most flexible joint. And so I had believed—right up to the moment when I saw myself on TV—that I had not “kidnapped” Meadow but that I was merely very, very late to return her from an agreed-upon visit.

“Daddy,” Meadow said, shaking me by the wrist. “Aren’t we going to Mount Washington yet?”

“Not today,” I said. “I just feel like kicking around here.”

“But how many days do we have left?”

“Plenty.”

“How many is plenty?”

“We’ve got plenty of time, OK? Why don’t you go play?”

“I want to play with
you
.”

“I’ve got a headache.”

“Why does your head ache, Daddy?”

“I don’t know, Meadow. Maybe because you keep asking me questions. Now, please. Leave me alone. I need some time to think. Don’t you ever just want to be alone?”

Her face clouded. Fine, I thought, I hurt her feelings. Fine. She had, to my mind, another long, blessed day, an entire
beach all to herself. She had her whole life. She walked down the beach, moping, kicking sand, digging up rocks, not going very far.

That’s when a tall woman in a sheer nightgown emerged from Cabin One, her arms stretched expressively over her head.

“Well,
hi
,” she said when she saw me. “I’ve got neighbors.”

Meadow and I both jumped. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, and Meadow, who’d been squatting in the water smiting two rocks together, drew to standing.

“Hi,” I said.

The woman walked in a lazy path toward the beach, which was not ten steps from her door, and stood there on the grassy rise between Meadow and me, her hands on her hips. I could see the outline of darker panties beneath her nightgown. The woman seemed unconcerned by this.

“
Hey
,” she said, shaking a finger at us. “Isn’t that funny? I saw you guys yesterday. At that bar in town. I remember you because I thought, how funny to bring a little kid into a bar. How old-school. Like we’re back in County Cork or something.” The woman looked down now at Meadow, who stood in her spangled bikini, rubbing one bare leg cricket-style against the other. “But I bet you had fun, didn’t you, hon? You didn’t want to be left out, did you? No. I’ll tell you what. You can learn a lot in a bar.”

Meadow’s eyes grew large behind her glasses. Our statuesque neighbor looked even more impressive from her knoll, staring back at us with the smile from her previous question still on her lips. Was she pretty? Not technically. She was too formidable to be pretty. I ran over the scene from the bar in my mind. I remembered a blond woman in the booth, yes.
Hadn’t she left before the news story about us aired? I walked toward her, my hand extended.

“Hi,” I said. “My name’s John.” I gave an inner wince. “John Toronto.”

She took my hand firmly. “Hi. I’m April. April Los Angeles.”

“OK,” I said, taking my hand back quickly. I waved it toward Meadow. “And that’s my daughter, Chrissy.”