Schroder: A Novel (27 page)

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“OK. But could you wait a minute? I need to go get a couple people.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

The man stands. “I’m sorry about your father,” he says. “Would you like me to get the chaplain for you? We’ve got a good one.”

“Why would I? I’m totally fine. I don’t believe your document is authentic.”

The man looks baffled. “You don’t?”

“No. It’s some kind of ploy. Psychological torture. I want its authenticity confirmed by an independent party. And,” I say, raising a finger, “I want to speak to my daughter.”

The man hesitates for a moment.

“Are you serious?” he asks.

“Yes, I’m serious.”

He’s looking at me closely. “I’ve got to be honest with you.
It’s going to be a hell of a long time before that happens. Your daughter was the victim of a crime
you
committed.”

“That’s not how I see it.”

“It doesn’t matter how you see it.”

“I’m her
father
.”

“You’re in jail. You have the rights of a person in jail. Those rights aren’t the same as the ones you had yesterday.”

I pull myself up as straight as possible.

“Then I would like to speak to a lawyer,” I say. “A good one. Your best.”

The man sighs and reaches for the door.

He leaves.

He does not come back for a long, long time.

THE SILENCE OF MOURNING

Have you ever heard of Bob Kaufman? He was a poet no one’s ever heard of. He once took a legendary vow of silence that lasted ten years.

Born to a Catholic African-American mother and a German Orthodox Jewish dad, Bob Kaufman lived a revolutionary and drug-addled life as a beatnik in San Francisco in the 1950s and ’60s. Although his biography is full of disappearances and lacunae, some of us know him as the author of
Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness
or maybe the
Abomunist Manifesto
? He was always writing and reciting poetry in unlikely places. Rooftops. Street corners. The day President Kennedy was shot, Bob Kaufman took a vow of silence. For ten years, he spoke to no one. He recited no poems. Nobody even knows where the hell he went.

The day the Vietnam War ended, Bob Kaufman walked
into a coffee shop and recited a poem, gifting his most glorious moment to a bunch of tired strangers. After that, his life cycled through periods of methadone addiction, poverty, and creative inspiration. It was as if he was trying to erase his life as he lived. He wrote his poems on napkins and newspapers, things that blow away. “I want to be anonymous,” he once declared. “My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”

DEEP-DOWN THINGS

OK,” my court-appointed lawyer says. “It’s true, about your father. He passed away three years ago. I suppose with no forwarding address for you—with no other living relatives—Look, it’s no one’s fault. It’s just something that happened. He died of natural causes. The medical report says complications from pneumonia. He was seventy-two.”

I say nothing. My lawyer adjusts his seat. He’s an absurdly young guy. Slim, olive skinned. Pakistani, I decide. A public defender, fresh out of law school. They’ve called him in to get my extradition going, to get me moving along. After that, I’ll need to find a new lawyer—not Thron, but somebody more qualified to deal with somebody like me. Somebody with lots of layers. I look at my lawyer’s fingernails (immaculate), his tie (silk), and finally his face, which stares back at me in abject receptivity. But I’m looking at him from the bottom of a well. There is nothing in the world somebody so young and pleasant can do for me.

“I’m sorry,” he says, finally. “My office is trying to track down your father’s effects. Whatever is left belongs to you. Maybe seeing these things will give you some resolution?”

I say nothing. My lawyer looks uncomfortable. I feel bad for him. His youthful looks must piss him off sometimes.

“As for your estranged wife,” he continues, “she’s, well, distraught. She wants to cooperate fully with the prosecuting authority, which is Albany County, where you’ll be heading, just as soon”—he looks over his shoulder, as if my custodian, the stork of the criminal justice system, has missed his cue to enter—“just as soon as someone is available to drive you. There will be a preliminary hearing. And your wife will have to testify at that hearing. But you could always hope”—my lawyer pauses, groping for the bright side—“that when she calms down—when she becomes less angry—she might not want you put away forever. I mean”—my lawyer laughs self-consciously—“you
can’t
be put away forever. Twenty-five years is the maximum for a class-E felony. Of course, that sounds like forever. A charge of custodial interference—instead of kidnapping—has a maximum sentence of four years. Much better, right?”

I stare back at him.

“There are potential fraud charges. You are living under a false name. That puts you under immediate suspicion. Truth be told, you might have to defend yourself twice. Both as Eric Kennedy, and as—as”—he checks his notes—“Schroder.”

I clear my throat but do not reply.

“Your participation is going to be important. So your lawyers can do everything for your defense. You need to paint the whole picture here. Of your marriage and your family life and most especially your past—” He pauses, looking at me closely, waiting. “You could get as little as a year if your story holds water. You told investigators yesterday that you were
willing to give your statement. Then it appears you changed your mind.”

I say nothing. I consider explaining:
Listen, it’s not personal. I have simply taken a vow of silence. I will not utter a word until I hear from my daughter or my wife. Someone I can trust. Someone I know
.

“Consider you wife’s current position,” he continues. “She’s just discovered that you are not who you said you were. Your entire identity—your past, everything—is not what you said it was. Even her own last name, her married name, is an invention.”

Nothing I haven’t already thought of myself, I want to tell him.

(Mountebank! Huckster! Swindler! Cheat!)

“But also—and I don’t yet have kids myself, Mr. Kennedy, so I can’t really get an angle on this—she
could
claim that you put your daughter in grave danger, which would up your sentence significantly. You ended up in the ER. Your daughter’s life was in danger. This could be seen many different ways, in a trial. They could use medical experts—”

A flash of anger enters the young man’s eyes.

“Maybe you could nod or something, Mr. Schroder, if you follow me?”

I say nothing. I don’t nod.

“You don’t feel like talking,” he says. “Fine.”

He takes out a yellow legal pad and a pen. He slides them toward me across the table.

“Then write it down,” he says. “Write it. The whole thing.”

I stare at him.

“You know,” he continues, “I was thinking about this case last night and—to be honest, it’s one of my first, and I’m just here to advise you on your extradition, really—but it’s a compelling story. I kept thinking about it. I was thinking, if
I
were this guy’s wife, and I loved him once, and actually, I never suspected that he was anyone other than the person he said he was, what would I want him to say to me now?” My lawyer leans back against his chair and crosses his legs, relaxed now that he’s lost a clear victory, and opens his hands in a disarming gesture of wonder. Perhaps because I’ve been so silent, he imagines he is talking to himself, in my presence. “Would I want him to beg for forgiveness? Yes. Would I want him to tell me who he really is and why he lied to me? Yes. But most of all, I would want to know
everything
about the days in which I was apart from my daughter. Everything. I would want to know what routes she traveled, what the weather was like, what she ate, who she talked to, whether or not she had fun. Whether or not she brushed her teeth. If she was
hurt
. If she cried.” Lacking a window, he stares toward the ceiling vent. “Because it’s the not knowing that’s the worst part, isn’t it? The not knowing eats at us.”

For a moment, neither of us speaks. My lawyer seems to have forgotten about me and tilts his chair onto its back legs with his toes, like a boy.

“After that,” he says, “after I knew everything, I might be able to think of
you
again. As a person I knew once. I might be able to spare you a little sympathy. To accept your apology, assuming—”

The young man stops midsentence. Finally, he smiles. I have scooted the pad of paper toward me and have taken up the pen.

I begin to write.

What follows is a record of where Meadow and I have been since our disappearance.

As it turns out, it’s a long story.

I don’t know how it ends yet. But it begins with love.

YOU AND I AND WINTER MORNINGS

In the first trimester of your pregnancy, all you wanted was nectarines, nectarines, nectarines. In your third, you developed a taste for lousy movies from the 1980s starring B-list actors like Kurt Russell. As soon as you became pregnant, your entire personality changed. Your eyes lost their defiance, your voice its snip. I loved Pregnant You. Pregnant You was, despite her poor taste, a slower, more loveable creature. Your fatigue made you cuddly. Your bulk made you quick to accept help. Out from under the glare of your own cerebral self-scrutiny, you became downright friendly, and for once, it was
I
who had to wait for
you
, as you lingered in conversation with clerks and gas station attendants, as the blue rope of frozen Slurpee spiraled into your twenty-two-ounce cup. And so it was early on in your pregnancy that I understood the neutralizing effect this change was to have on you. You had been zapped by that great normalizer: parenthood.

We are all, all of us, bodies. None of us gets to not have one. We all enter life in the same way, and we all leave by dying. Maybe your pregnant body forced you to see that you were just like everybody else, when it came down to it. You
had always wanted to belong. Maybe this wanting to belong was one reason we spent most of your final trimester watching the local AAA baseball team from the bleachers of their tidy stadium. My Realtor’s hours made such afternoons possible for us. For a while, I enjoyed my own role as your elbow holder, teller of jokes, fetcher of French fries. But as the summer wore on and you did not stop attending the games, I have to admit I became confused. I don’t like baseball, and you knew that. (The sport makes me antsy, with its suspicious lack of action surrounded by tense silence, the occasional foul ball concussing someone in the bleachers.) But you. Was that really you beside me, cheering for the players by name?

But when I tried to get out of it, you insisted I come. You got nervous without me, you said. You felt vulnerable by yourself and pregnant. Besides, you loved my company. My tall tales, my jokes, my store of factoids, my talent for funny accents. And so I kept going with you, but suspiciously. Had you detected something in me, some foreign strain? I was so careful about my accent, careful about my Germanness; for thirty years I’d practiced, but maybe I’d missed something obvious. Something hiding in plain sight. I used to look around the hot aluminum bleachers at the bristle-headed American men and wonder apprehensively if I was supposed to be more like them, if that was really what you wanted, and if I could do it.

What was so unacceptable about the way I was? I thought I was doing pretty well. I was doing well at work. Granted, it was a bull market, but I was selling houses as fast as I represented them. Just little ranches and bungalows, but it was adding up. People seemed to like me. Long before energy conservation was a trendy cause célèbre, I had a wonky, teacherly way of
getting clients to think about the potential hidden efficiencies (e.g., untapped groundwater for the garden). Simultaneously, I stirred within them the collector’s sense of priority.
Look at that leaded window
, I would say.
Look at that forgotten hayloft. Come see this yellowed lithograph of a beautiful dead woman I found in an attic.
Plus, I was young and handsomeish. Conventional, clean of shirt. My hair had darkened with age but was still a dark blond, almost iron blond at the roots. In my sky blue chamois shirts and my Wellingtons, my name stenciled on the side of a clean Saturn, above the reputable name of Clebus & Co., I was a member of the community.