Schroder: A Novel (5 page)

“OK,” I said.

“Do you know, Eric, that spouses who initiate divorce often think of the divorce as a ‘growth experience’? They even show better immune function. But you—the spouse who stuck around, the loyal one, the one who
meant
his vows—what do
you
get? You get left holding the bag. Your divorce could make you sick.”

“It has!” I cried. “I’ve had bronchitis for months.”

“If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times, Eric. You should have come to see me a long time ago.” Pertly, Thron stacked some papers. “Now, who filed the petition?”

“Petition?”

“The petition for divorce.”

“We haven’t filed. It’s—we’re separated. It’s a trial separation.”

“Then we’re filing today.” Thron licked his thumb and peeled a form off a thick pad. “We’re going to file today, so we can start litigation. You can’t litigate with no divorce. Otherwise, it’s just a friendly disagreement. And you tried that already, right? You need to sue.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“You can. File first, Eric. Be the plaintiff. Don’t be the defendant. Don’t spend your life counterpunching.”

“I need a day,” I said.

“One day. One day. Tomorrow you come in and file. Then ASAP we’ll also file a petition in family court for a modification of the custody agreement. If your estranged wife does not agree to it,
bam
—we go to court.”

“OK,” I said.

“We’re also going to hire—granted, at some expense—a topflight, independent child custody evaluator. This individual will observe you alone, and also you with your daughter—you know, playing checkers, sharing a soda—and he or she will write what I’m sure will be an A-plus report on your skills as a father. This report will be on file to aid the judge’s decision should we go to trial. OK?”

“OK.”

“Because you know what, Eric? You are a good father.”

“Thank you.”

“I can
tell
you are a good father. I can see it in your eyes.”

They could not help it; those eyes filled with tears. My heart let its ragged doves to the sky. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted someone to say just that to me.
You are a good father
. I was sweating everywhere, my underarms, my forehead, my back, secretions that seemed born of relief.

At the same time, a different voice inside me said, Don’t. Don’t do this.
Trottel. Idiot.
Don’t you know a
thing
?

“Now, Eric,” said Thron. “Let’s go over some basic information. Let’s start with your date of birth.”

“March 12, 1970.”

“Place of birth?”

I looked out Thron’s window. The clouds were easing down the Hudson, as they often did in the afternoons, leaving the sun canting down into the valley in shattered-looking rays.

I came very close to telling Thron the truth in that moment.
I am not who I say I am
, I almost said.
When I was five, I crossed the East German border holding nothing but my father’s hand
(I almost said).
I spent my shitty adolescence in an immigrants’ ghetto in Dorchester, Mass. And that’s just the beginning
(I almost said).

Out Thron’s window, between the buildings on Quackenbush, I stared at the Hudson. How pitiable is a river. Nothing belongs to it, neither its water nor its sediment. This will never be over, I reminded myself. You created it to have no end.

“I was born,” I began, “in Twelve Hills, Massachusetts, not far from Hyannis Port.”

“Sounds nice,” said Thron, taking notes. “A small town?”

“Very small.”

“And you lived in town?”

“Right in the middle of town,” I said. “Our house was a modest saltbox. Sixteen hundred square feet, not counting the finished basement. We weren’t rich, although both of my parents came from money. My paternal grandparents lost their entire fortune when they were betrayed by a trusted business partner in the late fifties. They moved into the Cape house, and my father grew up there. And I grew up there. The property itself was a gem. Oceanfront. Landscaped with beach heather, wild roses—”

“Fine,” said Thron. “And your parents? Alive or deceased?”

“My mother passed away when I was nine. She’s buried right there in the village cemetery. My father, an entrepreneur, now lives overseas. I rarely see him.”

Thron squinted at the page, and his eyes took on a greasy iridescence. “Hey. You’re not related to the
Kennedy
Kennedys. Are you?”

I smiled, shrugging.

“The connection,” I said, “is distant.”

DADDY

I had been bullied in Dorchester. Habitually. The black kids were decent to me on the whole, if only by turning away from my vulnerable stare as if I wasn’t even present, but the Irish American princes who looked like me and lived, like me, in sagging three-story tenements were looking for a fall guy. They tricked me, shoved me, and suckered me, while never being so cruel that I could easily recognize any one of them as the enemy. They made fun of my German accent long after I could have sworn that I no longer had one. On one occasion, a boy no bigger or stronger than me confronted me in the concrete drainage ditch we used as a shortcut home from school. I had never considered this boy an enemy. In fact, we often compared homework on the school steps in the morning—and so I was surprised when he put up his fists and began hopping from one foot to the other.

“Come on, Schroder,” he said anxiously.

I was confused. “Come on and what?”

“Come on and fight. Fight!”

“Why?”

“Because! That’s why!”

I could have fought him. I probably would’ve won. I knew that a victory would bring some relief from the teasing and unchecked xenophobia that surrounded me every day. But I didn’t fight him. I had been taught only to escape. I spied a swinging gate in someone’s chain-link fence and I ran through it and slammed the gate back toward my pursuer.

I ran. I ran for a long, long time. I ran in a hysterical pattern that was random enough to lose anybody sane. Tearing my way through the weeds and broken tricycles and dirt yards of Dorchester, I didn’t even turn around to see if the boy was still behind me. I ran crazily, crisscrossedly, as some sort of artistic expression, now that I look back at it, of what it felt like to be me.

Later that evening, against my will, I began to cry in front of my father. I was ashamed. I told my father what had happened, that a boy had tried to fight me, but that I had not stood and fought him, but instead I’d run away.

My father put down his fork and looked thoughtful. I stared at his beard, cranberry red at its thickest, and hoped that whatever he’d say would relieve me. He was a man of very few words, and the longer we lived in Boston, the fewer of them there seemed to be. After a moment, he picked up his fork.

“
Natürlich hast Du nicht gekämpft
,” he said. “
Es ist nicht natürlich, zu kämpfen. In Wahrheit ist es natürlich, wegzulaufen
.”
³

EVALUATION

I will not rehash here the series of contortions, gambits, and hurt surprises that took our custody battle onward to its next, more acute stage. Of course, any shred of hope for marital reconciliation was lost as soon as I enlisted Thron’s services, but I guess I expected that. And although my time with Thron would turn out to be short, for several months that spring he was something of a friend, and I trusted him. So when he proposed we go ahead with the child custody evaluation, I agreed. I would have several long, probing conversations with the evaluator, in the privacy of his or her own office, but first I would meet him or her in public, with Meadow, during a regular visitation.

I picked my site—the playground at Washington Park. This was the playground on which Meadow had virtually grown up. When she was a tot, she had feasted on its wood chips, and when she was old enough to grip the handlebars, she had sagged back and forth on the metal spring horses. In recent years she had learned to kite on the adjacent hill. Whenever I wanted to spoil her, I’d buy her some huge, delta-winged kite made out of brightly colored ripstop, and we’d wait for a good
day to try it out. So I pictured us there on our hillside, tethered to the broad blue belly of the sky via one taut string, looking favored, looking somehow worthy of endorsement.

The first stumbling block came with the news that Thron’s pick for our evaluator had been nixed, and soon we were forced to accept a last-minute substitution of a different expert by The Opposition. Also, there was no wind. Awaiting our rendezvous, Meadow and I tried to force the kite into the sky. Several attempts left it flightless in the grass. We tried again, and a rogue gust tacked the kite sharply sideways, where it looped itself around the low branch of a large beech tree. This augured poorly. And I—maybe I was making Meadow nervous?—because the whole goddamned thing was making me nervous, but
still
—I proposed we rescue the kite. I figured Meadow could easily reach it if she stood on my shoulders.

Usually, it’s easy to get Meadow excited about things like that. All you have to do is add a dash of intrigue, a little pretending, in which our small task becomes a principled affair. (
If we don’t retrieve the kite, the Stalinist zealots will swarm the city by nightfall!
) But that day, I couldn’t get Meadow to play along. She seemed put out, suspicious of me. I could tell she’d been talking about me with her mother. I didn’t really blame them. I think I speak for a lot of divorcing parents here when I say that there’s so much bad shit coming at you during a divorce that a child’s emotional distress takes its place in a whole constellation of problems, and these problems are so numerous that one starts to pin one’s hopes on a legal resolution as some kind of final, almost atomic solution, something obliterative, and until then, well, it’s almost a
personnel
problem; you don’t have the staff; there aren’t enough
yous
.

“What’s the matter, Butterscotch?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I’m just not feeling partyish.”

“Well, you don’t have to feel
party
ish. But if nothing’s wrong, maybe could you put a little pep in your step? A little zip in your skip? You look like someone just killed your puppy.”

“I don’t have a puppy.”

“Exactly. Come on. Crack a smile. Please? For me?”

She wandered across the old playground, making a halfhearted sally across the monkey bars. She wore an old purple jumper and white stockings, dingy at the knees. Her hair was lank and flat, slipping out of her headband. Here was one of many moments in which I might have walked away, called the whole thing off, gotten used to being powerless, learned to be patient and conciliatory, and spared us all of what was to follow.

But a car door slammed nearby, and here she came—our potential savior.

I had never seen anyone who looked quite like her. The woman’s face was as round and white as a potato, but her hair was black and coarse. Across her puffy cheeks was a spray of pigmentation, dots too big to be freckles. On each wrist she wore a black splint. She walked from her beat-up Toyota with a slightly neuralgic gait. Although she was one of the homeliest women I’d ever met, I remember thinking, Good. Here is a woman who can sympathize with me. Why else had she entered the field of psychology, but because of her own rich ache?

“Thank you so much for coming,” I said, shaking only the fingers of her hand. “Your expertise means so much to me and Meadow. We just want to resolve this dispute and get
our lives back to normal. We’ve been kiting—” I gestured to the snagged object in the beech tree. “Too bad you missed it. Meadow is an excellent kiter. She has excellent motor skills for a child her age. Please…” I gestured toward a picnic table on which I’d set up some supporting materials. “I’ve got some things to show you.”

The evaluator, a Ms. Sonja Vang, followed me. I whistled for Meadow. She peered around the tree and pleadingly shook her head no.