Schroder: A Novel (7 page)

One of the pieces of advice offered to parents in extremely contentious custody cases is confiscation of the children’s passports. If there is any worry on the part of one spouse that the other spouse is at risk for flight with a child—that is, kidnapping (there, I said it)—the concerned spouse should request that the courts hold that child’s passport. However, parents should understand a) that the United States has no exit controls—in other words, any of us can shamble in or out at any time we take a fit, and b) that there is no way to track or revoke a passport once it has been issued.

This is where things get murky.

I mean, where the unconscious mind enters. Mine.

Emboldened, I guess, by the damning child custody evaluation, your side appealed the custody arrangement with new allegations that I was a danger to my own daughter, stipulating that these charges would not be dropped until I submitted to psychological testing. In the meantime, your lawyer informed Thron that she was making a motion to restructure the custody agreement to be less, not more, collaborative. Their proposal, The Opposition warned us, was that I
be forbidden under any circumstance to spend unsupervised time with Meadow. Visits between us would be monitored by a state-appointed chaperone. Never again, the lawyer vowed, would I be allowed to endanger the girl with my bizarre, neglectful parenting. Nor would I be allowed to speak with her privately. If I wanted to be with Meadow, I would have to do so under the supervision of someone from Child Services.

I responded to this development by imbibing such a quantity of Canadian Club that I woke up the following morning shirtless on the carpet, my face hot with midday sun. I looked around the bedroom in which I lay. Everything that was not nailed into the floor had been pushed over—I could only assume by me—the secondhand bedside table, the bookshelf, and even the old, gothic wardrobe that I had taken from our Pine Hills apartment, claiming it as a Kennedy heirloom. As I tried to lift this wardrobe back onto its feet, something slipped out from between the wardrobe and its pasteboard backing and fell to the floor at my feet.

Now, even though I had erased any sort of paper trail of my life
before
I became a Kennedy, I had not, by necessity, destroyed my German passport. I was not an American citizen, so the German passport would have to do in the event of emergency international travel, which I’d easily avoided. I’d hidden the booklet inside this wardrobe who knows how many years ago. Now it lay open suggestively on the floor. I rubbed my eyes and leaned down to peer at it. There I was, a decade younger, an unmarried man of twenty-eight. My skin was taut, my stare a little icy. I barely recognized the face.

The name?

Well, everyone knows it by now.

Schroder.

Erik Schroder.

No, no.
Schroder
. Try to pronounce the
r
as a guttural. Really get in there.

Schgroder. That’s it.

Where’s the umlaut? Relinquished. Before we left Germany, Dad had been forewarned by somebody or other that Americans didn’t believe in umlauts, and that no one in the United States used surnames anyway, but rather greeted each other by saying, Halloo, Guy! And since my father barely assimilated in the eight years in which I lived with him in Boston, I would count the umlaut as Dad’s single concession to America, a change he noted to each of his auditors in 1979 as we processed from queue to queue at Logan International.

He had planned to naturalize us, my father. But he never did. We remained resident aliens. Therefore, we lived with the low-level paranoia of people vulnerable to deportation. We drove slow, never jaywalked, carried no debt, and avoided the giving and getting of favors, basically alienating ourselves from the rites of Boston brotherhood. A stickler for rules, however much he resented them, Dad even made me carry my permanent resident card with me at all times, as he carried his.

I didn’t get it. My father spoke venomously about Germany. He said he didn’t care what people said against him or against Germans because nobody hated Germany or Germans more than he did. No greater country had ever
ficked
itself so thoroughly as Germany. He had surrendered our umlaut. Didn’t that just about sum it up? One day when I was in high school, I actually went and got naturalization forms for both of us and brought them home. I had been astonished to learn that on Part 1 (D) on Form N-400, the applicant is asked if he
would like to legally
change his name
upon naturalization. The possibility of this made my heart race, for I
had
a new name by then, and here was a chance to legitimize it. If I could just say it aloud. To him. To say,
This is who I am now. This is what I call myself. I
like
who I’ve become
. Standing beside the card table I used as a desk, my father reviewed the documents. He studied them for a long time. During that same interval, I realized that my quest for legitimacy was ridiculous. The difference between summer-me and Dorchester-me was so stark, the space between them so great, no mortal boy could oonch them closer. I would never be able to say my new name to my father. I couldn’t be both men to anyone. By the time my father replaced the applications on the card table, crossed his arms, and shook his head slowly, I was relieved.

“
Nein, Erik. Ich will das nicht
.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“
Das Problem hat nichts damit zu tun, deutsch zu sein. Das Problem liegt mit den Staaten. Und daß es Staaten gibt
.”
⁴

We remained there for another moment, him standing there beside the card table.

“
Außerdem
,” he said, shrugging. “Don’t you know it yet, Erik? There is no such thing as forgetting.”

ERSTER TAG
OR
DAY ONE

Curious weather. A thunderstorm gathering down in the valley. The sky dark and roiling, even though it was morning, with patches of crucified daylight dazzling between. Leaves twisted in the wind. Weather vanes whined. The birds were silent. My skin felt different. My scalp, tight. I was sick with some kind of charge—a surge, a change in my fate, a redirection. Some kind of breaking up that I needed.

Despite the fact that you had secured yourself an excellent lawyer, a young, Cornell-minted go-getter, and all I had was Rick Thron and a damning child custody evaluation, somehow we got your side on the run. Due to the skipped visitations, a judge held you in contempt of court. I don’t know how he did it, but Thron somehow suppressed the child custody report, and without this key piece of evidence, your team panicked. A hasty move to appeal was thwarted when the judge reminded us that we already had an arrangement on the books—a hard-won parental agreement that had functioned well for Meadow for an entire year. We could still negotiate the conditions and limitations, but you
had
to let her visit me.

By then, I’d stopped caring about the legalities. I knew
it was only a matter of time before I’d be found out. I was reckless, illogical, maybe even lacking moral character, but I was
not
crazy. I could tell how much better your lawyer was than mine. Mine hadn’t even checked out my bogus documents. The only thing I knew for certain was that I could not bear it anymore, the suspense of the way things were. I could imagine that someday, maybe, I would feel better, I would get accustomed to my new life, but today—
this
day—I couldn’t take it anymore, the way the wind went out of the world whenever my daughter left. When she left, the yards, the parks, the streets of Albany all seemed abandoned. The life went out of things. And until my life returned to its cycle of baked beans and sporadic couch sleep, I would experience a spasm of grief, a kind of spiritual lockjaw, that I stopped wanting to bear. No, I thought. Not today. I can’t do it. If you had told me I was going to die at the end of today, I would have said,
Good
.

The familiar black Chevy Tahoe pulled up to the curb.

I came out to the stoop, hands in pockets, and waited. My father-in-law gave me his trademark surprised smile, like
Hey, you’re still you
, and waved to me as if I were not actually locked in mortal conflict with his daughter. I waited for Meadow as she jogged across the spring grass carrying her backpack.

To the first question:

Did the accused premeditate the abduction?

The answer is no.

Or, not really.

Besides, the word
abduction
is all wrong. It was more like an adventure we both embarked upon in varying levels of ignorance and denial.

“Good morning, Butterscotch,” I said.

She looked up at me, her red-framed eyeglasses reflecting the several large willows that loomed over the ranch house from the backyard. The wind rose, lifting the ends of her long brown hair. She hoisted the backpack onto her shoulder.

“Morning, Daddy.”

THE ROAD

After lunch, I told Meadow to wash up and get her backpack.

“We’re hitting the road!” I said.

She tilted her head. “We’re
hitting
the road? With what?”

“No, no, no,” I laughed. “We’re going driving. We’re going on a trip. A spontaneous trip. You and me. How does that sound?”

She slid off her stool, leaving the crusts of her peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the Mickey Mouse plate I kept around for her.

“OK,” she said. “Where’re we going?”

“Well. How’d you like to spend the day at Lake George?”

She clutched her hands in front of her chest. “Yes yes yes!”

“Who wants to sit around
here
all day? I think it’s plenty warm to swim, don’t you?”

“Yes!”

“Did you happen to pack a swimsuit?”

“No!”

“Not a problem!” I shouted back. “We’ll buy you a new one when we get up there.”

That morning, before her arrival, I had packed myself a small bag (swimming trunks, a toothbrush, some reading material), letting this small bag flirt with my own desire to flee, but not with the
clarity
of premeditation. It was more with a desperate flourish that the last thing to go into the bag—after a slight hesitation—was my passport. Just in case! You never know! We climbed into my Saturn and rolled down all the windows. Meadow sat in the backseat in an age-appropriate booster. The car was clean and impersonal, with CLEBUS & CO stenciled cheerfully on either side, for anyone to see.

We were mostly through the suburban bottleneck of Albany when I became aware of something in my rearview mirror. A big black shadow of a car that had been lurking along several lengths behind. I took a gratuitous left. The car followed. I took a random right. Again the car followed. I sped up. So did my counterpart. I stopped at a Stewart’s and idled in the parking lot. My counterpart moseyed past only to pull over to a roadside asparagus stand about fifty yards ahead. I shook my head heavily.

“What is it?” Meadow asked.

“Pop-Pop’s following us,” I said.

She craned her head forward to gawk.

I stilled her with my hand. “No. Don’t look.”

“Why’s Pop-Pop following us?”

“I don’t know. I’d better think.”

“Are we still going to Lake George?”

“Hush,” I said. “Let me think.”

Meadow sighed, folding her hands on her lap, muttering, “You
said
we were going to Lake George. You
said
we could go. You already
said
.”

I watched the Tahoe idling just ahead down the road. I
could almost picture the poor man gripping the wheel, trying to retract his head into his torso. Did he really think I couldn’t see him?

“It’s so
boring
sitting at home.”

“Please, Meadow. Let Daddy think.”

“That’s all Mommy and Glen ever do. Sit around and talk talk talk.”

I raised my eyes to the rearview mirror. “Mommy and who?”

“Glen. Daddy, Glen talks
forever
. He’s boring. He’s a lawyer.”