The Children's Crusade (16 page)

We sat on the deck with foamy amber pints. Six or seven cyclists coasted to the bike rack and dismounted. They wore tight black shorts and brightly colored shirts festooned with giant logos. James and I talked for a while about the kids; he’d gone to Katya’s preschool at circle time that morning, to be her show-and-tell.

“Do you even like beer?” he said abruptly.

“Not much.”

“So you’re what? Trying to make me feel better?”

“I wish I could. I’m hoping you’ll feel safe telling me what’s going on.”

He looked away; he was having none of it. “Hey, it’s Google,” he said, pointing over my shoulder.

I saw a small blue car with a Google logo on its side and a camera mounted to its roof.

“I’ve never seen that before, have you? That must be how they do the maps. Which— Wow, I didn’t even think of this. I’ll bet Neil Young’s ranch is on Google Maps. What’s to stop someone from looking it up?”

“Conscience?”

“Ha. You’re obviously not going to finish that, are you, so let’s get out of here.”

I asked for the check, and while I waited he strolled over to the colorfully dressed cyclists and began chatting with them, bending over to look more closely at the bicycles. Heading down the mountain a little later, we were silent for so long that I turned on the
radio. He reached over and turned it off.

“If you won’t help me find Neil Young can we at least stop at the house?”

“Our house?”

“Of course our house.”

“People live there.”

“Ryan said they won’t mind.”

“We can’t just barge in on them. It’s almost dinnertime.”

“So they’ll probably be home. Please, I really feel like I need to see it. For my, you know,
psychological well-being
.”

I smiled, and he smiled, too, but only for a moment.

“I’m serious, Rebecca. It’s something I need to do.”

It was dusk when we arrived. Robert had been the point person in our dealings with the tenants, and I’d only ever met the husband—and him just a couple of times, when I was on my way to see Ryan and he was on his way down the driveway in his black Ferrari. His name was Lewis Vincent, and he was home alone and seemed to relish the intrusion, offering us glasses of wine and then beckoning us to see his “brand-new toy.” A muscle-bound five-eight, he was the kind of man who’d transformed a slightly awkward body into an asset—or this was my thought as we followed him to the garage.

“Wow,” James said.

In place of our father’s tools and workbench there were now three floor-to-ceiling steel cabinets with glass fronts, revealing shelving for hundreds of bottles of wine.

“Temperature-controlled, of course,” Lewis said with a grin. “The installation guys just left. That’s why I’m home—normally I’m at work till seven or later. Isn’t it beautiful? I’ve got my work cut out for me, though, moving bottles from the house. I have at least a couple hundred in various cabinets and closets.”

“Want a hand getting started?” James said.

Lewis looked surprised. “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“You didn’t, I offered. That’s what I do.”

Lewis said something about how he hadn’t gotten where he was in life by saying no to people who wanted to help him, and he led the way back, talking about his plan to invest in a winery someday or maybe spend a month in Napa learning how to make the stuff himself. I was only half listening, wondering instead at James saying “That’s what I do” and thinking there was something different about him, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

In the kitchen he told me to leave without him—“I can always hitchhike”—but I figured I’d help, and I listened while he and Lewis spent a few minutes talking about the best way to move the wine: packed into roll-aboard suitcases with towels, placed upright in cardboard boxes, or simply carried in our hands. By now James was calling Lewis “Vince,” which seemed to amuse Lewis, even please him. It reminded me of James’s charisma, his way of tunneling through diffidence or reserve, even through indifference, to create a quick if impermanent rapport with a stranger. His talent for this had begun to reveal itself toward the end of his teenage years, as he gained impulse control and recognized the usefulness of being liked.

Hands for now, they decided. We went into the mud pantry, where three or four dozen bottles were stored, in racks jammed into cabinets and on a freestanding shelf unit that had been wedged behind the door. Lewis’s wife and daughters were out, and as we gathered bottles he began talking about the younger girl’s unhappiness with her new school, to which she’d been admitted a week after the year got under way, and what did I think of that, moving a child under those circumstances, was it okay?

I said, “It sounds like you’re worried about her.”

“Einstein,” James said. “That’s what we call her at home.”

Lewis glanced at James curiously. To me James seemed distracted,
the comment delivered almost automatically, and I imagined myself explaining to Lewis that James didn’t mean anything by it, he was just discharging excess energy.

“Is there research on that?” Lewis asked me. “Changing schools? This is your field, right, aren’t you a child therapist? She’s eight, if that matters.”

“I don’t know of any research.”

“She also has trouble falling asleep at night—but I guess that’s not so unusual.” He hesitated. “Is it?”

I smiled noncommittally, and he let the subject drop as we took our first load of bottles to the garage. At first I was afraid James would drop one, but with his big hands and long arms he was able to carry eight at a time.

After depositing a load of bottles I asked if I could use the bathroom, and Lewis and James were gone when I returned. It was nearly six, dusk; I’d told a colleague I’d be free for a phone conversation at six-thirty.

I thought about carrying some more bottles to the garage, but once I begin to think about being late it’s as if it’s already happened. I didn’t want to delay our departure by the few extra minutes it would take me to make another trip, given that they’d likely be back in a moment or two. Then a few more minutes went by, and I regretted that I hadn’t gone because I’d spent at least as long standing there waiting for them as a trip to and from the garage would have taken me.

At last I set off, and it turned out they’d stopped working and were standing there talking.

“Rebecca,” James said, “you just missed it. Vince was telling me about the amazing ideas he has for the property. Tell her,” he said to Lewis. “Beck, you’ve got to hear this.”

“Actually, I’ve got to get going.”

“It won’t take a minute. Then we’ll go, I promise.”

Lewis was obviously uncomfortable; Robert had told him we had no interest in selling the house. But he began to talk, and as he went along his voice picked up speed and he grew animated. He described the multilevel house he envisioned, probably six or seven thousand square feet; and the series of terraces that could be created once the woods were cleared; and what could go on the top terrace (a swimming pool), and the next terrace (a tennis court), and the third (a guesthouse), which he was thinking could have a separate driveway. “I don’t know,” he said as he finished. “It’s just fun to think about.”

I glanced at my watch; it was six-fifteen. “I’ve got a call scheduled,” I said, and we exchanged thank-yous and shook hands, and James and I headed for my car, James whispering “Shh-shh-shh” as we hurried along.

“What?” I said in a low voice.

“Wait till we get going.”

He stayed silent until we’d closed the car doors. Then he gave me a mischievous smile and said, “One way to think about it? The more detailed his vision, the more he’ll pay to realize it.”

“James,” I said. “We’re not selling, remember?” Then suddenly I was afraid. “Wait—how did it come up?”

He smiled. “I brought it up. Told him things have changed.” He fastened his seat belt with a hard click. “I’m crossing over,” he added. “Hello, dark side.”

• • •

Ryan once had a dream in which the house hadn’t been built. He stood under the oak tree, surrounded by other trees and shrubs, and felt utterly bewildered. At last he realized he was in our father’s painting of the land before the ground was broken. He knew this because the colors he saw were muted: they were the painting’s col
ors, based on the true colors of nature but lightened and grayed.

He had this dream at a low point in his life, after his heart had been broken for the first time. We were both in college. He told me about it on a weekend afternoon, the two of us side by side on lawn chairs in the backyard. When he finished describing the dream, he closed his eyes and held out his hand, and I took it. We sat like that for several minutes. It was the first time I’d sat holding anyone’s hand in . . . well, perhaps in my life. Of course I’d walked while holding hands any number of times, when I was very little and one of my parents was escorting me or when I was older and escorting Ryan or James. But to sit holding hands: this was new for me. Finally, Ryan gave my hand a squeeze and dropped it. Then he said, almost as an afterthought, that in the dream the rest of us weren’t there with him, but he knew we were coming. He was alone but not lonely.

The night James said he wanted to sell the house, I dreamed Ryan’s dream. I was alone under the oak tree and also inside the painting, surrounded by a version of our land that had been bled of its true colors. In my dream, the family was there, too, standing among the shrubs, leaning against trees I’d never seen in real life because they’d been removed to make room for the house. I could see them—my father, my mother, all three of my brothers—but I couldn’t reach them. I was lonely but not alone.

I woke from this dream at 4:28 a.m. Emotions in dreams can build to a pitch they may not reach in waking time because of our defenses, and I was suffused with feeling. I wasn’t just lonely, I was bereft. I was desolate. Walt was asleep beside me, and I moved closer to him, put my arm around his waist, and waited for equilibrium.

My father’s painting had been the subject of much discussion after he died. Having decided unanimously that we didn’t want to sell the house, we may have needed a point of contention or even just deliberation; in any case, we debated endlessly over who should
get the painting. Realistically, only Robert or I could take it—only we had room—but it seemed important that we go through some kind of process that allowed Ryan and James an equal and valid claim. Then one day all three boys came to me as a group—I didn’t think this had ever happened before, for any reason—and told me they’d decided I should have it. Maybe this story invalidates the idea that I was never the only girl in a family of boys, but I see it more as the exception that proves the rule.

The house, the painting, the dream: I feared I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Hello, dark side. James had been referring to the terms of our father’s estate plan. He’d been referring to Penny.

She first went to Taos in 1988, for a weeklong workshop on the found object in art, or The Found Object in Art, as my brothers and I somehow termed it, using emphasis and enunciation to capitalize the initial letters. A few years later she announced that she was going to spend the entire month of June there, and the following year it was the entire summer. Our father reported these plans with careful neutrality, and I let (or made) myself believe he was pleased with them, happy to have the house to himself for a while. I was busy with my residency and didn’t think about it very much.

At the end of the summer, she called and told him she’d found a room to rent in a tiny adobe house and wanted a year to figure out if she could support herself selling her art. She asked him for $2,000 a month and said that if by the end of twelve months she had not earned $24,000, she would give up and come home.

When he told me about this he tried to maintain his previous detachment, but I could tell he was flummoxed. “She needs to give it a whirl,” he said more than once, and it was his repetition of that exact phrase as much as anything else that clued me in to his anxiety. It was as if he’d memorized a line, the better not to say what he was really thinking. And “whirl”: the word seemed important. I sus
pected he was worried that the disturbed air might reach California and unbalance him.

Incredibly, she succeeded. By the end of the first year she had sold several dozen pieces, had rented space in a shared studio, and had broken even. And though he visited her a few times, and though she stayed at the Portola Valley house on the rare occasions when she came to California, they never lived together again.

When he turned seventy, he began to think about the house and what would happen if he died with his current will in effect. Despite California’s community property laws, he held the title to the house as his separate property, a state of affairs that had arisen from the fact that he’d owned the land before his marriage. From time to time he’d told Penny they could get a lawyer to do the legal work necessary to change this, but she never seemed to care and it never happened. In the original will, drafted when we were children, she was to receive half his estate while my brothers and I would split the other half. Thirty-odd years later he still wanted her to have half, but he knew she was itching to buy a place in Taos and was afraid she would force a sale of the house in order to cash out. He wanted us kids to be able to hold on to the place for as long as we all wanted. In the end, his lawyer set up a plan that left the house in trust to the five of us with the provision that it couldn’t be sold without the consent of Penny and at least one of the children.

And after his death she
did
want to sell; it was only because of the trust that we were able to hold on to the property. We were united in our desire to keep it, but we had our separate rationalizations. Robert said he might buy out the rest of us someday and live there, even though his current house was larger and more up-to-date, with a fabulous kitchen that his wife had designed. I was concerned about Ryan, who depended on the shed as a home for himself and his family. Ryan wanted to keep the house so Sammy, Luke, and Katya
would know the place where we’d all grown up. And James wanted to thwart Penny. If I’d had to list us in order of how likely we were to break rank—to go to the “dark side”—James would have been last.