The Children's Crusade (15 page)

“Actually, I have to find my mother,” he said, and he took off at a quick walk that became a trot when he had some distance from her. He found it weird that she’d commented on his father’s looks and even weirder that she thought he looked like a movie star. His father was ordinary-looking, with extra-long earlobes and hands that bulged with blue veins at the end of the day.

Dr. Lawson and a couple of guests lingered at the front door, but the driveway was deserted. Robert decided he’d intercept his mother to make sure she saw the bronze on her way in. He wanted to ask if she’d ever been to a foundry. She took her clay pieces to a store with a kiln and then went back a few days later to pick them up, and he thought she might enjoy a visit to a foundry, where you could see the action. In fact, this could be it, the very thing that would bring her back to the family or take the rest of them to her. The crusade had been his idea in the first place, and now he’d come up with the perfect solution.

He made his way out to the street and turned toward where they’d parked. He walked past other parked cars, past other houses, farther than he’d remembered coming, far enough that he reached a corner and had to cross the street. Yet they hadn’t crossed a street, had they? He wondered if he’d somehow gone the wrong way. He stood at an intersection with a high boxwood hedge on one corner and a row of palm trees on another, and he understood that his mother had taken the car and left them.

Dr. Mallon gave the Blairs a ride home. They sat quietly on the leather seats of his shiny black BMW and felt, each of them, a separate and private shame. Only James was spared, because he was so young, but even he knew not to talk and instead sat in the backseat between his brothers and kept as still as he could. Rebecca was squished with her father into the front passenger seat. She knew she
should keep things in perspective—she didn’t have it nearly as bad as Cassie—and she wished she could be as calming as her father.

Her mother was walled off: she was inside a large circle of fence, a corral, and Rebecca moved across the landscape and made her small and then smaller.

Robert was furious and Ryan was heartbroken. As the car moved along the leafy lanes of Atherton, they stayed angled toward their respective windows and thought about what it would be like to see her at home.

For that’s where she was. Bill had ascertained this—he had telephoned, and she had answered. She had “changed her mind.” Bill hadn’t known what to do but convey this to the children, and so he simply told them, straight out. She changed her mind. They accepted this as the incomplete story it was and asked no questions, but when he offered them the option of staying for the recital, they said no in a single voice.

Enraged though he was, Robert imagined a great act of forgiveness. He would find her, in the mud pantry or the kitchen or her bedroom, and he would describe the sculpture. He would explain that bronze was cast, that you melted it to 2000 degrees and then poured it into a ceramic mold, and he would give her time to picture this and then unfurl his great idea, his invitation.

Or else he wouldn’t. He had already learned that his plans collapsed sometimes, and he was familiar with the dismay of realizing he’d done exactly what he’d decided not to do, or not done what he’d set out to do. At home, in just a little while, he would pardon her and ennoble himself with the gift, to the entire family, of a brilliant, restorative scheme. Or he would sulk. It was no use deciding now, it would go how it would go.

Ryan drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs. He rested his head against the car door and knew he would
cry when he saw her. He didn’t fight the knowledge, just as at home he wouldn’t fight the tears. After some time had passed, he would sit near her on the couch. This was less a plan than a prophecy. He attached a near-magical power to the simple act of sitting near another person on a couch and would continue to do so for the rest of his life.

“Dad,” Rebecca whispered, twisting around so she could look up into her father’s eyes.

“Rebeck?”

“Do you think she has a condition?”

“Your mother?”

“Cassie, Dad. My friend.”

“I don’t know, honey. I suspect she might.”

“But do you think she’ll be okay?”

Bill felt Rebecca’s shoulder digging into his upper arm. He would have liked to wrap her in a hug, but the constraint of John Mallon’s leather bucket seats and the sadness emanating from the backseat left him unable to move.

“Do you, Dad?”

“You have a wise heart, Rebecca. And a kind heart. You’ll never want for friends.”

The station wagon was in the driveway, at an angle to the steps and several yards short of its usual place next to the Valiant: less parked than abandoned. John Mallon stopped but didn’t cut the engine. It was rare for him to do anyone a favor, and he found himself overtaken by a powerful feeling that he mistook for concern for the Blair children when in fact it was a desire to be extravagantly thanked. What he received of gratitude was heartfelt but inevitably truncated, and twelve years later, as an attending at UCSF, he would take a powerful dislike to a serious dark-haired medical student named Robert Blair and seek to make the young man’s ortho
pedics rotation as difficult as possible, without ever becoming aware of the connection.

James was the first out of the car. Unencumbered by so much as a tiny layer of propriety, he scrambled over Robert and was up the steps and banging on the front door before the others had set both feet on the ground. He pounded with the flat of his hand and then turned the knob and was inside. “Mommy,” he shouted. “Mommeeeeeee!”

The house was empty: the kitchen and mud pantry as they’d been before the recital, the living room sunny and quiet, his parents’ bedroom darkened by the drawn curtains and betraying an indentation on the bedspread but no human form anywhere. Their bathroom—empty, too.

“Mommy,” he shouted as he barreled down the bedroom hallway, past the children’s bathroom, and into the laundry room. By then the others had come inside, and James rejoined them at the front door and waited while they saw for themselves.

“Where is she?” Rebecca said. She was the only one who could make it a question and not merely a lament. “Where on earth is she?”

“I think I might know,” their father said. He glanced through the window next to the door—reflexively verifying that John Mallon had departed—and then led the way down the driveway with the children trailing behind and to his sides like the wake of a motorboat, until he reached the spur that led to the storage shed.

And there she was, standing with her hands on her hips, twenty or thirty yards away. She was facing the shed and didn’t turn around, though she must have heard them; she must have heard John Mallon’s car, for that matter. She’d changed into blue jeans and a plaid shirt, and her hair in its single braid hung down her back.

“Penny,” he called.

She turned.

“What—” he began, but he found he couldn’t put into a meaningful group of words the hurt he felt on behalf of his children. He couldn’t speak, and so he held his arms out wide in a gesture that could have indicated confusion and could possibly have indicated forgiveness but that Penny took to be a reference to Jesus on the cross.

And so she laughed.

“Mom,” Ryan whimpered.

“Why is she laughing?” Rebecca asked.

“She’s happy we found her,” Robert said, going for sarcasm but landing considerably short of his target.

“There’s my mommy!” James shouted.

He ran down the spur, and the other children followed, and Bill watched them crowd around her: Ryan crying, Robert tapping her shoulder intently. Only Rebecca remained at a slight remove, but even she seemed primed for engagement: head tilted to the side, her trademark announcement that she was thinking hard and would soon have something to say.

Bill saw that the children were defining the moment as a rescue operation rather than the act of capture it actually was.

Penny watched him approach, each step a concession she knew he didn’t want to make. He was obviously angry, and she wished she had it in her to apologize, but she was too caught up in the thing that had drawn her away from the recital in the first place: her realization that the path to happiness she’d thought she might never find was an actual path that lay a mere hundred yards from her house.

The shed was going to be her salvation.

“Don’t say anything,” she said when he reached her and the children. “Don’t say anything. I shouldn’t have left and I’m sorry, but did you know there are many kinds of emergencies? Children, did you? There are all the normal kinds of emergency, the medical kinds,
but an idea can be an emergency, too. You can have an idea that is so important, you have to act on it or you’ll . . . you’ll die. Not really, but the part of you that thought of it and that was so excited—that part will die just a little bit. And that’s your soul, children. That’s the creative, beautiful, mysterious thing we all have inside of us, and if it doesn’t get what it wants, if it doesn’t get air, it begins to shrivel. What good would I be to you if I began to shrivel? I have to keep myself alive so I can help you live. It’s not just doctors who do that.”

“Mom, what is it?” Ryan said. He wanted to put his hands on her face, to smooth her eyebrows. “What’s your idea?”

“
I
have an idea,” Robert said.

“And I have a hammer!” James exclaimed.

“Shut up, James,” Robert said, stomping his foot.

“I hammer in the morning! I hammer in the evening! I hammer in the afternoon! I hammer at night!”

“James,” Ryan said. “That’s not how it goes.”

“I always wonder about that song,” Rebecca said. “Why is it ‘I’d hammer out danger’ and then ‘I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters’? Danger is bad, so you’re hammering it out, right? But then why do you want to hammer out love?”

“I have something to say,” Penny cried.

“Oh, goodness,” Bill said. “Let’s all take a deep breath.”

“It’s not
a medical emergency,
” Penny said. “We don’t need
deep breaths
!
”

“But you said ideas need air,” Rebecca said.

“
No
!
” Penny cried. “
Please
!
”

She hadn’t wanted it to be like this: she had wanted everyone to admire her idea, to see how it would help her and thereby help them all. But it had gone very quickly from promising to muddled, like so many other moments of family life. She said, “This is what I can’t take, this is what I can’t stand!”

Everyone fell silent. Bill put his hand to his mouth, as if her words had not yet been uttered and he might prevent them by suggestion; but they were far from speaking with a single voice. At times he viewed himself as a kind of diplomat/translator for her and the children, and after she said something hostile or confusing he tried to convert it into a sweeter, clearer statement. But he was dry now.

“I need a place,” she said. “For my supplies, my arts and crafts. For me. And we’ve got this shed down here going to waste. I mean, why do we have a rowboat? Why don’t we have a kiln?”

Robert had been holding back, reserving his beautiful foundry trip for just the right moment, and now he saw it sailing past, departing without him. “But wait,” he said. “There was this sculpture—”

“And if we’re going to clear it out and make windows,” his mother continued, with a glance in his direction that seemed to convey censure, forgiveness, and apology all at once, “we might as well go the extra step and make it a little bigger, since there’s plenty of level ground off to the side here. And we could put in a small bathroom just to save me time, so I wouldn’t have to go up and down to the house all day. Just a toilet and a sink. I’d need a sink anyway, so really the only extra would be the toilet. You can spare me a toilet, can’t you, Bill?”

All this time, the children had thought she was speaking to all of them, but now they understood it was only their father she was addressing. She wanted something from him.

“Mom,” Ryan said. “You aren’t moving down here, are you?”

“No, of course not,” Bill said. “Of course she isn’t.”

5

REBECCA

P
eople have always asked how it was for me, being the only girl in a family of boys, but I never felt we were a family of boys. We didn’t have the kind of household in which the brothers set the tone with roughhousing and smelly socks, and my brothers didn’t gang up on me or put slugs in my bed, which happened regularly at my friend Joyce’s house, where there were only two boys and a far warmer and more watchful mother to boot. My brothers shared a room at Sea Ranch, where we spent a week each summer, but even there I was never the odd one out. In fact, Ryan and I were particularly close during those vacations. Arriving late on a Friday evening, after a four-hour drive that always seemed even longer, we’d grab flashlights and make our way across the meadow to the cliffs overlooking the ocean. We’d stand close together under the thick stars and listen to the waves pounding the rocks. This was the Pacific as wild beast, and we loved it. We loved the harsh air and the glints of moonlight far out on the water. If we weren’t too cold or tired, we would hike to the piece of driftwood someone had set like a bench overlooking the scrap of beach where we would have our salty lunches the next day. “We’re back!” we would yell at the ocean. “We’re back!”

Unless James came with us. He sometimes tagged along, and when that happened I kept my eyes on his every move. I was terrified he would fall off the cliff. “I think part of you wished he would fall,” my first therapist said in response to this, and I suppose it’s an
indication of how primed I was for psychology that I didn’t spend a lot of time arguing with her. Maybe she was right: it was possible that my maternal feelings toward James began as a reaction formation against an unconscious hatred of him.

Now he was back, and though I was forty-three and he was thirty-eight, I felt it all start up again. I wanted him to get to bed at a reasonable hour; I wanted him to tell me whether or not he’d be home for dinner. Mostly I held my tongue, but one evening I knocked on the guest room door and asked if he had any laundry he wanted me to do.

“You’re kidding,” he said with a smirk.

“I wasn’t.”

“What are we going to do with you?”

“What are we going to do with
you
?” I said, and a shadow crossed his face, reminding me of how defensive he’d been about having shown up unexpectedly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll leave you be.”

“No, hang on a sec.” He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, computer open in his lap. “Come in.”

Already the room felt less like my guest room than his bedroom. This was not so much a matter of his dirty clothes in puddles on the floor as a feeling I noticed in myself, of nervous restlessness, as I stood there looking at him.

He said, “I’ve been wanting to ask you something, pick the famous steel-trap brain. I hitchhiked back from Rob’s yesterday, and I—”

“Wait, you hitchhiked?”

“Yes, I hitchhiked. What’s so terrible? It’s two people, one has a car and one doesn’t. Kind of a win-win, right? But no. Don’t hitchhike, the driver may be a serial killer. Or the hitchhiker may be a serial killer. Someone’s going to be a serial killer.”

“James.”

“No, it’s like how people don’t let their kids play outside anymore. The paranoia. This woman I know—” Abruptly, he lowered the cover of his laptop and very deliberately set it off to the side.

“This woman you know?”

“Never mind. I hitchhiked, and the guy who picked me up was going to the hospital, so I got out there and walked the rest of the way. But here’s the thing: seeing the hospital reminded me of this memory. And I can’t make sense of it or even be sure it’s real or—” He paused and stared at me. “God, please don’t go all shrinky on me, okay? I don’t want to hear how whatever I think I’m remembering
signifies something
whether it happened or not. I want to know, was I ever alone in the hospital?”

I was wondering about this woman he knew, so it took me a moment to respond. “I don’t think so.”

“I have this memory of walking down a hospital corridor by myself. And I looked through an open door and saw an old man with a huge stomach like a pregnant woman.”

This was our father: what James might have done with the information that our father’s abdomen was distended when he was admitted to the hospital just before he died. James wasn’t there, so he could only invent the scene, and distort it. A hypothesis, anyway, if a very shrinky one.

“Dad wouldn’t have taken us on rounds, would he?” James continued. “And I wandered away?”

“Never. But if he had, you wouldn’t have seen an old man. We’d have been on the pediatric ward.”

“It’s really bugging me. I want to go up there,” he added, and for a moment I thought he meant the pediatric ward, though it no longer existed; now there was an entire children’s hospital. “To the house, I mean.”

“You miss it.”

He shrugged.

“It’s a loss. I miss it, too.”

“So where’s that husband of yours, anyway?”

“Work.”

“The honeymoon’s over?”

Walt and I had been married for only a year, but we’d never had a honeymoon of the kind James apparently imagined, spending every possible minute together. For most of our careers we’d both believed that a serious relationship would hamper us professionally, and when we met and began dating we were amused to discover we were both inventing busy calendars to protect our weeknights for work. Early on, we decided that Monday and Tuesday evenings would be spent separately unless arranged otherwise in advance, and this seemed at least partially responsible for how happy we were together.

“He’s a nice guy,” James said. “I’m glad I finally met him.” Quickly, he picked up his laptop, hit a key several times, and pressed the cover closed again.

I said, “Honey, what’s going on?”

He froze and then began nodding and snapping his fingers R&B-style, singing, “What’s goin’ on? What’s goin’ on?”

“James, please. Tell me with the crap cut?”

This was something our father had said when the teenage James, caught one night coming into the house around three a.m., said he’d heard something in the yard as he was going to bed, had stepped outside to investigate, and had fallen asleep on the ground. It usually got a smile out of James, but not this time.

“James?”

“Nothing’s going on.” He looked away and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Things are weird in Eugene, okay?”

Since 1989, when he left school for good, James had lived in so many places even I couldn’t remember them all. He’d moved from
Santa Cruz to Tucson to Boulder to Portland to Arcata. He’d spent over a year wandering around South America. He’d odd-jobbed, dishwashed, house-sat; he’d done carpentry and lawn maintenance and telemarketing. He’d driven a cab from midnight to eight a.m. and worked at a bakery from four a.m. till noon. He was itinerant, peripatetic; our father always said he was a seeker who was seeking the identity of his own grail. The stability of his life in Eugene had seemed too good to be true; perhaps it had been.

“Oh, James,” I said.

“ ‘Oh, James,’ ” he repeated bitterly. “ ‘Oh, James.’ That’s the Blair family mantra, isn’t it? ‘What will we do about James?’ It’s like ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ How
did
they solve a problem like Maria? There she is, Julie Andrews, running through the alpine meadows, just so difficult. What do they do? They make her a governess. Sorry to disappoint you, Rebecca, or do you think maybe
I
should become a governess? I’d like to go to bed now if you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” I said, taking a step toward the door. I wanted to add that I was available anytime he felt like talking, but I didn’t want to crowd him.

“I know,” he said as if I’d spoken. “Thank you.”

I returned to my office and began writing up notes from the day’s sessions. I saw anywhere from a quarter to a third of my patients at the hospital, children who had cancers or autoimmune diseases and were too sick to come to my office. My first patient of the day had been one of these, a boy who was gravely ill with leukemia. He was eleven, and I’d been treating him for three years, the longest I’d treated any critically ill child. He had gone through hell several times. He hadn’t left the hospital in over four months, and lately it seemed he wouldn’t be able to go home for even a final brief visit. That morning, near the end of our time together, I asked him a
question, and he said with the impish quality he still sometimes displayed, “Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. No more questions. It’s time to say good boy.” He looked embarrassed and said quickly, “Goodbye. I meant goodbye.” But “good boy” stayed with me, and now I thought of how important the word “good” had been to us in the conversations we’d had. Packard was a good hospital, and his oncologist was a good doctor, and his parents were good people. That was always the word: and it could mean anything from mediocre (we used it forgivingly in that case) to excellent (when we used it almost superstitiously, as if to say anything more would be to invite trouble).

He was a good boy. Thinking about him, I did what I always did when I was on the verge of being overcome by grief about a patient, though perhaps in this instance I was also influenced by having heard James’s memory of being in the hospital: I remembered a moment from my early childhood. Or rather, I remembered my memory of the moment, because after so long that’s what memory is: the replaying of filmstrip that’s slightly warped from having gone through the projector so many times. I’ll never know what actually happened and what distortions I added.

It was a Saturday, and we were going somewhere as a family. This was before James was born. Our father needed to look in on a patient, so we stopped at the hospital and he left the three of us kids to wait with our mother in the cafeteria. I didn’t want to sit down, so I stood at her elbow and watched while she drank coffee and the boys drank milk. There was a terrible weight to the place, a heaviness in the way people held themselves, in the way they lifted their skimpy sandwiches to their mouths. Some were in wheelchairs. Others were terrified or grief-stricken, but I didn’t understand: at such a young age I had no knowledge of illness and no awareness that people suffered because they loved. Despite having a doctor for
a father, I didn’t really know what hospitals were for, why some people were sick enough to need them and others weren’t. In my family, sick meant it hurt to swallow; it meant aching arms and legs and sleeping during the day.

I told my mother I wanted to leave, and she said we couldn’t leave, but if I promised to be quiet I could go over to the window. On the other side of the glass people were moving quickly: doctors in white coats, nurses in caps, regular people in regular clothes. They were alone or in pairs, talking or not. I didn’t know why or how, but I knew they were different from the people in the cafeteria. And to get closer to them, all I had to do was be quiet.

Was this the moment when the seeds of my vocation were planted? I’ve always thought so. I wanted to be on the other side of the window, away from the sick and the worried. And to get there, I should cease talking. I should listen.

Heavy, James would say. Maybe Robert and Ryan would, too. Walt would nod politely and perhaps ask a question, but his only comment would be something like “Huh” or “Interesting.” He’s a scientist, and for him the mind and its mysteries don’t hold a candle to the brain.

Though now that I think about it: doesn’t the brain hold a candle to the mind? Isn’t that what neuroscience wants it to do—illuminate? This is the kind of idea I would have taken to my father, whose interest in psychology had bloomed as I hit my stride. We handed dense books back and forth long after he’d retired and up until the end of his life. Freud, Klein, Winnicott—especially Winnicott. There was one paper, “The Capacity to Be Alone,” that he asked me to photocopy for him—poignantly, I thought, given his life at that point. In those years I finished work early on Friday afternoons, and I’d go up to the house, where we’d sit and talk until I felt he should, for the sake of his health, get up and move around. “Well, Rebecca,”
he’d say, “this has been very interesting, thanks for stopping by,” as if it were an occasional rather than a weekly occurrence. He didn’t want me to think he depended on it.

• • •

“Oh, hallelujah,” James said when I got home the next afternoon, early because of a cancellation. “I’m bored out of my mind. What say we drive up to Skyline? Bet you haven’t been there in a while.”

“Actually, I have. Walt and I hike a lot.”

“Walt and you
hike
a lot?”

“You didn’t think I was capable of surprising you?”

The October sun hung above the hilltops as we headed west. We took Sand Hill Road up past the turnoff for the freeway, with the mile-long tan barracks of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center off to our left, visible and then invisible behind all the new construction. We passed the fenced-off entrance to Searsville Lake, where we’d swum as children. Soon we were on the winding road to the ridgetop dividing the valley from the Pacific Ocean.

The forest was dense, and I pushed my sunglasses to the top of my head. Every quarter mile or so we passed a small turnoff marked only by a cluster of mailboxes. When we were children, these roads led mostly to undeveloped land, to the occasional cabin. Now they were as likely to lead to locked gates protecting the estates of venture capitalists and billionaire patent holders.

“I know,” James said after we’d been climbing for a few minutes, “let’s go find Neil Young’s ranch.”

“What, and knock on the door?”

“I was thinking a love note in the mailbox. Ryan would.”

Redwood trees soared all around us, making the sky very small. At the intersection of Woodside Road, Skyline, and La Honda, there was a restaurant that was jammed on weekends, but today there were
just a few cars and motorcycles and maybe half a dozen bicycles.

I looked at James, with his hollowed-out face and ropy arms. Tell me, I wanted to say. Tell me about Eugene and why things are weird there. Instead I said, “Let’s go in and have a beer.”

“I’ve never had a beer with you in my life. Jeez, Rebecca, hiking and beer, what’s next?”