The Children's Crusade (14 page)

He returned to his family in time to hear James say, with a familiar edge to his voice, “Where’s Mommy? When are we going to sit down?”

“James,” their father said in a low voice. “It won’t be too much longer, honey. Can you be patient?”

“No. I want to sit
down,
” James said loudly, and he plunked himself down in the middle of the rug.

“James, get up!” Rebecca said.

“Daddy,” he wailed, and people near them began edging away.

“Never mind,” Rebecca said, “I’ll take him outside,” and she grabbed James’s hand and motioned for her brothers to go with her. Ryan followed easily, but Robert delayed long enough to calculate the costs and benefits of complying, ultimately deciding that getting out of the crowded room more than outweighed the loss of status he’d suffer by doing as Rebecca wished.

Dr. Lawson was still in front of the house, talking to a stocky white-haired man the children recognized as their father’s doctor, the existence of whom they found both preposterous and consoling.

Pulling free of Rebecca’s hand, James headed for a flowerpot, which he dragged over to a low stone wall and used as a stepping stone. Once he was on the wall, he held his arms out, lifted one foot, and began to hop. After advancing no more than a yard, he paused with his foot in the air and dipped sideways in what was obviously a bogus move meant to suggest he’d nearly lost his balance. Then he continued forward.

The other children watched him. More guests arrived, walking up the long driveway in couples and families.

Ryan said, “I just don’t know where Mom is.”

“You should spend less time thinking about Mom,” Robert exclaimed, “and more time—” He was going to say “more time working on your fielding” but stopped himself. That spring Ryan had gotten involved in Little League for the first time, and he was the only boy on his team who had never played before. On afternoons when Ryan had practice, Robert tried to assess his skills. It wasn’t that Robert thought Ryan should be as good as he’d been, but he ought to take it more seriously if he was going to bother doing it at all. Robert’s father had asked him to be careful of Ryan’s feelings, though, so he didn’t finish the thought.

“You guys?” Ryan said. “Why did we stop our crusade? I think we still need it.”

“Not this again,” Robert said. “It was a bullshit idea then and it’s a bullshit idea now.”

“Don’t say that!” Rebecca exclaimed. “Just because you’re a quitter doesn’t mean we are. And it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Maybe we’re not going to have a crusade, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do something.”

“Why can’t we have a crusade?” Ryan said.

“It was just a word.”

“But it was a thing.”

“It can still be a thing,” Rebecca said, turning away so she could focus. She had thought about the crusade many times since the start of school, but lately it had slipped her mind. This made her feel guilty. But what was there her mother might want to do? Nothing. All she was interested in was some craft or other.

“Uh-oh,” Ryan said.

James had reached the far end of the wall and was using his belly to ease his way to the ground. Now his shirtfront was streaked with dirt, and he brushed at it with both hands, succeeding only in spreading the dirt around.

“He’s like Pig-Pen,” Robert said.

“He’s young,” Ryan offered.

“No, it’s true, he is like Pig-Pen,” Rebecca said, and that seemed to decide it.

Robert went back into the house and saw his father talking to a few other men. He squeezed past small knots of adults and arrived in time to hear his father say, “He’s working very hard,” and though Robert knew it was unlikely, he hoped his father was talking about him. He
was
working very hard; he needed to get home to rewrite an essay that was due the next morning. He had a sound thesis, but
he’d been too literal when it came to “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.” He thought he ought to use his thesaurus to change some of the words.

“And doing brilliantly,” said a man with thinning red-blond hair and a bushy mustache.

“I wouldn’t say
brilliantly,
” said a man Robert thought he recognized. “I’d say he’s doing well.”

If this was the person Robert thought it was, his name was John Mallon and he was an orthopod, a word Rebecca found hilarious because it sounded like some kind of prehistoric creature that walked on all fours. Either that or a robot. But orthopedics interested Robert. Lately he’d been thinking that if he became a doctor he might want to be an orthopedist, a doctor of muscles and bones, since that seemed a much cleaner business than most other specialties.

Robert’s father saw him and said, “Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce my oldest. Robert, these are Doctors Mallon, Burke, and Friedlander.”

One by one the men offered Robert their hands, and he felt a blast of righteousness. Dr. Lawson had viewed him as a child, but that didn’t mean everyone would.

Dr. Mallon asked where he was in school, and Dr. Burke asked if he was dissecting earthworms in science class. “Quite a business, dissection,” Dr. Burke went on without waiting for an answer. “Earthworms, frogs. The world inside.”

“Nothing can prepare you for opening up a human body,” said Dr. Friedlander, who wore aviator sunglasses even though he was indoors. “Not an earthworm, not any other animal.”

Dr. Mallon tsked.

“You disagree?” Dr. Friedlander said.

“Alas,” Dr. Mallon said, “I fear we are not so far from our predecessors as all that.”

There was a brief silence. Robert had found Dr. Mallon’s “I wouldn’t say
brilliantly
” a little obnoxious, and now he saw that Dr. Mallon was possibly an obnoxious person.

“I don’t mean anatomically,” Dr. Friedlander said. “I mean what it feels like. Another human being. Are you thinking about medicine, son?”

Robert said he was, but he wasn’t sure what kind.

“That’s okay,” Dr. Friedlander said. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

“If you ever want to talk about orthopedics,” Dr. Mallon said, putting a palm to his chest.

“I don’t think it would be orthopedics,” Robert said quickly. “Or gastroenterology.”

All the men laughed except Robert’s father. Dr. Burke said, “A GI doc I know married a gal who’s an OB/GYN. Tells me, ‘We’ve got both holes covered.’ ”

“Gentlemen,” Robert’s father said. “Excuse us.” And he put a hand on Robert’s shoulder and guided him away.

“Dad,” Robert said when they were clear of the crowd. “I’m thirteen. I got it.”

“I know you got it,” his father said. “But that doesn’t mean I liked it.”

Robert thought his father was a bit of a prude, but he didn’t mind being taken from the conversation. In the matter of sex, and especially the female body, and most especially the lower half of the female body, he was allowing himself a kind of Indian summer of disinterest, set off by some diagrams at his father’s clinic that he’d spied one Sunday afternoon. While his father was busy, Robert had wandered into an empty exam room and found a booklet—or not exactly found it, since he’d seen it a few times without having had the opportunity to take a good look—and he spent a few minutes flipping back and forth between the page about male reproductive
organs and the page about female reproductive organs, the complementary nature of which had left him uneasy.

“So, no orthopedics?” his father said now. “I remember teaching you the bones when you were, oh, just a little fellow. Five or six. You really enjoyed learning. I think you still do.”

“Can I see your wrist?” Robert said.

His father pulled back his cuff and held out his arm. Robert put his forefinger on the knobby protrusion on the outside of the wrist and said, “That’s your ulnar styloid process.”

“Why ulnar?”

“It’s at the end of the ulna. Can I try the carpals?”

His father put his hand on the crown of Robert’s head. “You can try anything, Robby. You can do anything.” As he spoke, his face changed around the eyes and mouth, as if love lived in particular regions of the skin, and Robert felt his own face grow warm.

“Scaphoid,” he said. “Lunate. Pisiform.”

His father shook his head. “You missed one.”

“I thought I knew them!”

“No reason you should. There are twenty-seven bones in the hand alone.”

“But I—”

“Remember the mnemonic?”

A mnemonic was a mental cheat sheet; Robert’s favorite had always been Kids Prefer Cheese Over Fried Green Spinach—Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. He tried to remember the one for the carpal bones. It was something a little naughty. Then he got it: She Looks Too Pretty, Try To Catch Her. He had left out a T. He said, “Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform.” He paused to think. “Trapezoid, trapezium, capitate, hamate.”

“That’s all eight of them.”

“But in the right order?”

“Very close. Trapezium comes before trapezoid, but what mnemonic could remind you of that?”

“Actually, there are three Ts,” Robert said. “Triquetrum.”

“So there are.”

“Like there are three Rs in our family. What would be a mnemonic for us?”

“I would never need a mnemonic for you,” his father said, but then he smiled.

“What?”

“I thought, ‘Run, Run, Run, Jump.’ And speak of the devil.”

Ryan and James arrived, slightly breathless, James leading the way and moving so fast that when he flung his arms around his father, his father had to take a step back for balance. “When’s it going to be over?” James cried. “Mommy still isn’t here.”

Robert went back outside and saw Rebecca talking to a strange-looking little girl, something not quite right about her head or her body, either her head was too big or her body was too small.

“Have you seen Mom?” Robert asked Rebecca.

“I’m kind of talking.”

“Sorry, but have you?”

“This is my brother,” Rebecca said to the girl. “Robert, the oldest. Remember I told you I have three brothers?”

The girl nodded but didn’t speak, and now Robert really looked at her. She was a head shorter than Rebecca, but her body seemed like that of an even younger child, her skin a damp ivory.

“Cassie is ten,” Rebecca said to Robert. “Like me for one more week.”

“Hi,” Robert said, toward but not exactly to the girl. “You still haven’t said if you’ve seen Mom.”

“I haven’t.” Rebecca glared at him and turned back to the girl. “Do you want to go in with me? I’m taking Cassie in,” she told Rob
ert, and she put her hand behind Cassie’s elbow as if to help her, though Robert couldn’t tell if Cassie needed it or not.

Rebecca wasn’t absolutely sure herself, but she thought it better to err on the side of too much help than too little. It was tricky, though. She’d seen Cassie standing alone on the driveway looking very sad, and she’d gone right over and then realized she couldn’t say what she was thinking.
What’s the matter? How can I help you?
But she also couldn’t just say hi as if it hadn’t occurred to her that something might be a little bit wrong. She had settled on a generic “Hi, my name is Rebecca,” but delivered in a voice that offered solace or sympathy or whatever might be required.

Cassie had gotten separated from her mother, but Rebecca thought that was only part of it, and that Cassie was sad not because she was alone but because her odd appearance meant people were reluctant to approach her.

Rebecca looked around the entry hall until she saw her father. She guided Cassie through the crowd and asked him to help. He crouched so his head was level with Cassie’s and told her his name, saying she might have noticed that he was on the tall side, which was useful if you wanted to see over people’s heads in a crowded room. He asked Cassie to describe her mother, and after each thing Cassie said, he nodded and repeated it back to her with a question tacked on at the end. “Brown hair? How long?” “Glasses? Are they wire-rimmed?” It was such a leisurely conversation that Rebecca began to get impatient. She thought her father could get Cassie to her mother faster, but he just moseyed along, and in a little while she noticed Cassie looked less sad.

“I think I see her over there,” he said. “Does she smile a lot? And tap her lips?” He brought two fingers to his own mouth.

Cassie nodded happily.

“There you go, Rebecca,” her father said, putting a hand between
Rebecca’s shoulder blades. “Your path is behind the man with the white hair, around the family of redheads, and along that wall where the painting of the horse is. And she’s just below the horse’s front legs.”

Robert was still outside. Earlier, he’d noticed a large sculpture at the far end of the flagstone terrace, and he went to investigate. It was solid black and not in the shape of anything he could recognize, unless it was a large egg with the insides missing and the shell pulled away in irregular shards. He imagined climbing into it and looking out at all the guests as if he were a monkey in a cage.

The woman in the patterned jumpsuit came over. “Do you like it?” she said. “It’s bronze—my grandmother commissioned it. You can touch it if you want.”

Robert didn’t like it but didn’t want to be rude. He touched it and found it surprisingly cold. He wondered if it was difficult to carve bronze. Back in fourth grade, Mr. Gleason had told the class that it took Michelangelo over two years to carve the
David,
but it was marble and probably the hardest material to carve.

“I guess you’d start with a chisel,” Robert said.

“Bronze is cast,” she said. “Melted and poured. We went to the foundry and watched. They heat the bronze to two thousand degrees and then pour it into a ceramic mold.”

He was embarrassed and said quickly, “I guess you’d need a pot holder for that,” and now she smiled.

“Is your family inside waiting? If we don’t let people sit down soon there’s going to be a riot. A very polite riot—instead of tear gas people would spray perfume, and they’d hit each other with fountain pens. Your father is handsome,” she added.

“My father?”

“He looks like a movie star.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Okay, have it your way. He doesn’t.”