The Children's Crusade (2 page)

Penny was an only child who for company during her school years had drawn pictures of the children she expected to bear. On the day Bill proposed to her, she handed him a portfolio containing
a sampling of these sketches, and he was moved and intrigued by her having chosen to include two boys and one girl rather than the one of each most people would have selected. “Three, then?” he said, and she said, “Yes, don’t you think?”

They were married at a small ceremony in Sacramento and received her parents’ friends’ good wishes at a late-morning reception where coffee was served from a large silver urn. Bill’s side was represented only by a colleague from the hospital; his parents and sister had never flown, and he had convinced them to forgo the long, tiring trip in favor of a more leisurely visit that he and Penny would make to Michigan. He believed he was looking out for them, and perhaps he was, but it also suited him to take Penny as his wife without his family’s witness, though he would have denied this had anyone suggested it.

Penny’s head fit perfectly into the hollow of his shoulder, and they spent their first year together in a state of deep contentment. At the end of the day, when he came in from work and found her in the kitchen with a cookbook open and a smudge of flour on her jaw, he was tempted to set aside his trust in science and believe, if only for the moment, that it was fate that had led him on the long road from Michigan to Korea to this woman. Every night she sat with him while he bathed, often leaning over the side of the tub and scrubbing his shoulders with a sudsy washcloth. If he leaned back against the porcelain, she sometimes abandoned the washcloth and reached into the water to stroke him. This thrilled him, but his greatest pleasure came when, at the peak moment of his attentions in bed, she threw her head back and sighed. Matrimony, he began to think, was a cure for an illness he hadn’t known he had.

As for Penny, it seemed to her that the formlessness of her life until now had been a kind of prepayment for the many perfections of her husband: the perfection of his good black hair, the perfection of his
even temperament, the perfection of his voice on the telephone consulting about an ill child. “I know it’s frightening,” he said into the phone one night as she lay next to him in bed, “but I’m going to tell you how to bring the fever down now, all right? The baby will be fine, and you’ll feel better, too.” Once the call was finished, he pulled Penny back into his arms, and while he murmured apologies for the interruption and moved his lips and tongue down her neck, she decided it was the last part of what he’d said to the worried mother—“and you’ll feel better, too”—that made him such a good, kind man.

Only one thing troubled her, but it sometimes troubled her a great deal: she didn’t always know what he was thinking. Often, almost daily, she would say, “Me for your thoughts”—me, since she was Penny. And he would say, “Oh, just daydreaming” or “Oh, my thoughts aren’t worth near that much.”

He liked to be outdoors when he had free time, but San Francisco was mostly too cold for that, so they began Sunday trips to visit his property in Portola Valley. He bought a used car with a mammoth front seat, and one day when the ground under the oak tree was too damp for their usual picnic, they sat in the car and ate Penny’s deviled eggs, and then Bill stretched out with his head and shoulders against the passenger door and arranged her on top of him, half sitting and half lying. He kissed her, and she felt the change beginning between his legs. She pressed against him, and he patted his hip pocket, where he kept his wallet, and said, “I don’t have a rubber.”

“I should hope not,” she said in the arch, slightly flirtatious voice she sometimes adopted, a voice he didn’t like and she didn’t hear. “Why would you carry one of those around?”

He kissed her again while trying to sit up a bit to change the way their bodies were meeting.

“Let’s start a baby,” she said. “Right here. Right now.”

He smiled, but a sadness tracked across his face, and it seemed to her that he disappeared for a moment. She said, “Bill, what is it?”

He shook his head. He was ready for children, but not if he and his wife differed in something as important as how they might each view this moment. If he continued today, they would give up rubbers until there was an infant in the house, but they would never know which ejaculation had released the one successful sperm. She—he saw this whole—would want to believe conception had taken place here, now, on this cool, damp afternoon when the oak leaves were at their softest and she was wearing her lucky cameo pin on her collar. He didn’t think he would be able to tolerate that.

She loomed over him, hands on his chest, her pelvis moving against his. “Won’t we live here with him?” she said. “With all of them?”

He looked past her head, through the windshield with its edges cloudy from released breath. The land he’d bought all that time ago had lost something. It no longer seemed quite so splendid, and he knew the change had come about when he started bringing her with him to see it. This was not knowledge he could accept, and to make it go away he kissed her. She pressed again, and he made a decision that necessitated a rearrangement of clothing and resulted in the start of something new, whether in their minds or in her body only time would tell.

2

THE PARTY

T
he children got up early and gathered in the kitchen. Their mother was still in bed and their father was already gone, rounding at the hospital so he could get to his clinic and be home by midafternoon. At ten, Robert was the oldest, a serious-looking boy with straight dark hair and a habit of blinking two or three times before he spoke. Rebecca was two years younger and the only girl. Ryan was six and James was three.

The kitchen had the tranquility of early morning, the counters and stovetop gleaming from the wipe-down they’d received the night before. Penny Blair was a dogged if uneven housekeeper, and the chrome sink fixtures shone while streaks of day-old juice created a sticky archipelago on the floor.

Robert brought out cereal and bowls and told the others to eat quickly. James was allergic to milk, so Rebecca poured orange juice on his cornflakes, and the four of them spooned up their breakfast without talking. At dinnertime they had set places at the table—Robert and Rebecca on one side, Ryan and James on the other, and their mother and father at the ends—but when they were alone they sat anywhere, including the places usually occupied by their parents. Without being obvious about it, Robert generally tried for his father’s chair, and that was where he sat this morning as he finished his cereal.

“Hurry up, you guys,” he said, carrying his bowl to the sink and
turning on the water so hard that it hit the inside of his bowl and splashed his face. This was an insult to his dignity, but it was possible the other children hadn’t seen, so he didn’t dry off, though he hated the idea of cereal water on his eyelid.

“Don’t put it in the dishwasher,” Rebecca said. “Wash it and put it away.”

“I was there,” he said. “I have ears.”

The night before, the family had talked about how the children could help their mother get ready for their annual summer party. Robert and Rebecca wanted to do more than just leave the kitchen clean after breakfast and keep James busy, and their mother had said there would be all kinds of ways to help: mushroom caps to stuff with bread crumbs and parsley, carrots to scrape for the crudités platter, soft cheese to roll in chopped nuts. And dozens of cookies to bake. “We’ll have an assembly line,” she said. “A cookie factory.”

“Doesn’t that sound like fun?” their father said. “I wish I could help with that. I’ll be the iceman, though. I’ll bring home lots of ice.”

Drying his cereal bowl and putting it away, Robert went to the sliding glass door. From where he stood he could see the backyard, a small square of lawn bordered by the beds of flowers his father cared for with the attentive nurturing Robert had heard him recommend to the parents of newborn babies. The property was on a hill, with a shallow upward climb out the eastern windows and a steep descent to the west. Beyond the house and the driveway and the groomed backyard, the land was crowded with oak trees and bay laurel, eucalyptus and manzanita. In summertime, the clear areas were hot and dry, but in the areas of heavy growth the earth seemed damp until June or later, and the fallen leaves made a soft blanket on the ground.

The house was low and spread out, with doors and windows that slid open and a roof with deep eaves to protect against the afternoon
sun. Portola Valley was known for its rustic quality, and like most of the houses in the neighborhood, the Blairs’ was painted shades of tan and brown that blended with the bark of the trees and the dusty gold of the hills. Bill often told the children that he’d bought the land on a whim, precisely because of how rural the area still was, long after the last of the ranches and orchards that once spread from the bay to the mountains had been replaced by shopping centers and crowded subdivisions. He was not a man given to whims, and they viewed the story as central to their family’s creation myth, though they wouldn’t have those words for it until many years had passed and Rebecca had begun to collect terms and phrases that helped her explain people to themselves.

At the moment, she was at the table, finishing her cereal. She liked the kitchen in the morning, before her mother was up, and if she’d been alone she would have lingered, but she didn’t want to get stuck with all the cleanup. She had read in a book of her mother’s that women should make sure their daughters didn’t internalize the idea that the kitchen was their domain, and since she couldn’t really count on her mother to make sure of this, she was trying to make sure of it herself. She had a very large vocabulary for an eight-year-old, but she hadn’t known that “domain” meant “place” rather than “job,” and Robert had laughed at her when she announced at dinner one evening that she was going to get a summer domain when she was sixteen because she wanted to save up to buy a microscope.

Her mother’s door was closed, and Rebecca tiptoed past it to her own room. On the bedside table was a stack of library books:
All-of-a-Kind Family, More All-of-a-Kind Family,
and
All
-of-a-Kind Family Downtown,
the first three in a series of books she loved, about a family of five girls growing up in New York in the olden days. Rebecca had withdrawn them yesterday, for the fourth or fifth time. She wasn’t sure she would read them, but it was nice to have them again.
At bedtime her father had noticed the books and said, “Ah, Rebecca. You’ve been having sister wishes again, haven’t you? Let’s get you a friend over this weekend, shall we?” Sometimes he knew what she wanted even before she did.

She kicked off her shoes and lay down. Staring at the ceiling, she had the thought she always had when she lay on her bed after breakfast, which was that sleep was a very strange thing because you had no control over when you did it. Also: when you went to sleep you forgot who you were—really, you forgot everything—but when you woke up you remembered what you’d been thinking and doing just before you dropped off. It was like taking the needle off a record, waiting ten hours, and then putting it back down in the same groove as before. Another strange thing about sleep was that sometimes you thought you were awake but then you woke up, which proved you hadn’t been awake after all. The night before, she had dreamed about the party—she realized this as she lay looking at her ceiling. She had dreamed that the party was the way it always was but without any lights. All the grown-ups were standing around the living room with their cocktails and talking as if it were normal that they couldn’t really see each other. Rebecca and Robert were watching them from the kitchen and saying to each other, “Dahlink, pass me my drink because I can’t see it. Dahlink, I’m blind but I don’t care.” Remembering this made Rebecca sit up. Another thing she couldn’t control was whether or not Robert would be in her dreams. Sometimes, falling asleep, she would issue a statement—
You can come tonight
or
Tonight you have to stay out
—but he did whatever he wanted.

James and Ryan were still at the table, James because he was playing with his food and Ryan because he was the slowest eater. His father said he had his own clock—meaning he didn’t feel time in the same way the other children did—and though Ryan knew what his father meant, he wondered what it would be like to carry around
an actual clock, invisible to everyone else, ticking in his hands. He didn’t really remember last year’s party. “Is it the one with all the food and all the people?” he’d asked the night before, and his father had placed his palm on Ryan’s head and smiled.

James spooned sugar into the mush of cereal and juice in his bowl. “I see, I see, I see,” he sang; or maybe it was “Icy, icy, icy.”

“What do you see, James?” Ryan said. His badger was on the table near his elbow, and he thought they’d been apart long enough and tucked the animal under his arm.

“Goin’ for the salt now,” James said, unscrewing the top of the saltshaker and trying to pour some into his spoon. It came out fast and spilled into his bowl. “Goin’ for the pepper now,” he crowed.

Robert came over and grabbed his hand. “James, no.”

Ryan made big eyes and covered his mouth to show James that he shouldn’t be scared of Robert.

“Nye-nee,” James said happily.

“Nye-nee” was as close as James could get to “Ryan,” and Ryan smiled. “You want to come with me?” he said. “Come with Nye-nee?”

James launched himself from his chair. He was big and clumsy, prone to spectacular tumbles—loud wailing, tears and mucus everywhere, blood on his knees. This morning his feet landed flat on the linoleum. “Go with Nye-nee!” he said.

Robert watched his brothers head off. This moment alone in the kitchen was rare and not to be wasted. He knew he should clean up, but on a shelf next to the refrigerator a jar of coins waited for him. He scooped out a handful and slid them into his pocket. He was quite certain his father wouldn’t mind if he knew why Robert was taking the coins, which was so he could practice the magic tricks he’d been teaching himself since summer began.

“I’m telling.”

He turned and there was Rebecca, standing in the doorway. He
said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.”

“What then?”

Just a day earlier Rebecca had overheard her father telling her mother that this minor stealing of Robert’s was just a phase, some need to approach the line between good and bad, and “not an occasion to humiliate the boy.” Rebecca thought wrong was wrong, but because it was the day of the party she decided to let it go.

“We should clean up,” she said.

“Then let’s clean up.”

Once they were finished, she went outside to see what needed to be done. The house had its morning look, closed and dark. She had never thought about the house’s color until the day in first grade when she saw a house that was violet. Now she knew houses could be any surprising color you could come up with—turquoise, buttercup yellow—and she thought the dull, plain surface of her house demonstrated a failure of imagination. She kept this to herself, though, because of how much her father loved the house and how much she loved her father.

Robert wondered when his mother would get up. With nothing else to do, he sat at the piano and looked at his sheet music. He hadn’t practiced in weeks and was in a state of conflict about the whole matter. When school started up again he would be in the fifth grade, the age at which Mrs. Bostock, his piano teacher, made you start playing in recitals. This wouldn’t be so bad except she wanted the students to memorize their pieces, and Robert was sure he wouldn’t be able to do that. The obvious solution was to begin campaigning to quit piano well in advance of an actual recital setting up residence in his worries, but the problem was that he was pretty good at piano, and it wasn’t just his father who said so—Mrs. Bostock did, too, and so did Mr. Gleason, his fourth-grade teacher.
“Very agile” was what Mrs. Bostock said, while Mr. Gleason demonstrated his approval by sometimes calling on Robert—but never anyone else—to accompany the class when they sang rounds on Fridays.

Robert realized that once again he was acting as if Mr. Gleason were still his teacher. He was not and never would be again. He was by far the best teacher Robert had ever had, and when Robert thought about a new set of kids sitting at the desks in Room 9 come September, his stomach began to hurt. His stomach hadn’t hurt in a few weeks, not since the Fourth of July, when his father had brought him home from the club while everyone else ate hot dogs and played capture the flag.

He left the piano and lay on the couch. His stomach really hurt, and his father wouldn’t be home for hours. There was a chance the milk had turned, though if that were the case then the other children would start feeling sick soon, too. He reached over to the coffee table and picked up his mother’s abalone shell from the beach at Sea Ranch. People used it as an ashtray, and it smelled like cigarettes, or actually more like after-cigarettes, which was a dirtier, nastier smell. At the party there would be a little smoking and a lot of drinking. He enjoyed watching adults, and never more than when they were tipsy. He thought they were very, very funny, with their loud voices and sudden, jerky movements. At last year’s party, his father’s friend Marvin Miller had gotten so loud that his father had left the party to take him home, and the next day he’d told Robert that for some adults, alcohol could be like candy in that it tasted really good but you could go overboard and then not feel well.

Robert returned the shell to the table and concentrated on his stomach. His father said not to think about whatever hurt, but Robert couldn’t help it. On the Fourth of July, lying on the couch while his father sat beside him and stroked his head, Robert noticed that the pain in his stomach had gone away, and he told his father it was
good he’d been concentrating on it because otherwise he might not have realized he was feeling better.

He sat up slowly. In the bedroom hallway his brothers were being rather loud, and he went to investigate. When he was Ryan’s age, he’d read chapter books and ridden a two-wheeler, but Ryan could do neither. Maybe worse, Ryan cried whenever he was taken to the barber, so his hair was almost as long as a girl’s.

“You guys are being really loud,” Robert said.

“We’re playing track meet,” Ryan said. “Want to play with us?”

Track meet was a game they’d invented early in the summer, following a trip to an actual track meet at Stanford. Robert said he was busy and disappeared into his room, and Ryan shrugged at James and returned his attention to his next event, which was long jump. He took a run and a leap and then at the last minute tucked into a somersault that delivered him to the floor right in front of his mother’s closed door. This hurt his shoulder and his ear, and he made his badger give them both a nuzzle. Badger had been a present to Ryan from James, on the day James was born; James had given Robert a play bow-and-arrow set and Rebecca a book of paper dolls. Ryan wasn’t sure why James hadn’t given their parents anything. Their mother would have wanted a present, he felt sure.

He half pushed and half slid closer to her room. His feet needed somewhere to go, and they landed against the door. From there, it was possible to tap his toes without making any noise. He tapped out “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” using the big toe of his left foot for a few words, and then the big toe of his right foot, and back and forth. “Have you any wool,” he sang softly, and for the rest of the song he patted his badger once for every toe tap.