The Children's Crusade (21 page)

“They don’t anymore.”

“You sound very certain.”

“Shhh,” I said, and he walked me backward to the bed. His apartment was a second-story unit with a bedroom that looked over the top of a fence into a bedroom in another building. We had noticed that the inhabitant of this other apartment frequently stood at his window looking out, and he was there now. “The curtain,” I said.

Edward glanced over his shoulder. “Imagine he’s you and we’re your parents.”

“I’d rather not, but what choice do I have now?”

“I saw my parents once.”

“That could be an invention, you know. Rather than a memory. They’re very common, they’re called primal scene fantasies.”

“Shut up.”

“The curtain.”

He dropped to the floor and crawled to the window, where he got hold of the curtain and pulled it closed. “What if you’re wrong?” he said, returning to my side. “About your parents. Perhaps they have an ongoing secret sexual life.”

“I really don’t think so.”

“All right, they don’t. You’re the only one in your family to do this. And,” he added, “it has to be said that you quite enjoy it.”

After that we stopped talking. It was only at times like this that the idea of losing him made me unhappy, and usually the feeling vanished within an hour or so. It was particularly intense that night, though, the dread of loss, and when we were finished and lying limp in each other’s arms, I thought maybe I
would
fly over for Christmas.
I knew Edward had grown up in a postwar housing development, a sort of British Levittown, but as I drifted toward sleep I imagined instead a picturesque village of the kind seen on
Masterpiece Theatre
and how it would be to arrive after dark and get out of a taxi in front of a glowing stone house set back in a snowy field. How inside that house I would find him again, my partner in astounding sex.

6

THE STUDIO

R
obert was seventeen. He was five-eleven and weighed 132 pounds, and for an entire school year, on even the warmest days, he wore long-sleeved shirts so no one could see his puny biceps. He met Gina at debate club, but he saw her before he met her and he liked her before he knew her. She had pale skin and severe freckles, and she carried her books in a worn leather briefcase instead of the usual backpack.

An only child who came from a broken home—though she preferred “shattered” and said so to any and all—she accepted his attentions so blithely, it was as if he were trying to return a dropped pencil, not go out with her.

From the beginning she enjoyed dinners with his family. Dr. Blair, with his poignant gray hair and frequent throat-clearing, struck her as the most polite person she had ever met. Her own father was perennially late and sloppily dressed and had not mastered the routine apology, a skill he needed all the time. The month she spent with him in San Diego each summer was like a sentence for a crime she couldn’t remember committing. Dinners with Robert’s family—school-night dinners, which had the delightful feel of a last run-through before opening night, everyone hurrying to deliver their lines—were to Gina a perfect antidote to the time spent with her father: a reward for a success she couldn’t remember achieving.

This was in 1978. Robert was a senior, and by November he was
spending part of each evening working on his college applications. He wanted to go to the University of Michigan, as his father had, but his grades and SATs made everyone think he should try for an Ivy. Gina was a junior, but she seemed to understand. She sat on his bed and did her homework while he rolled onto the platen of his typewriter forms bearing the crests of Harvard and Yale. “Make a typo,” she said. “Or you could write the world’s shortest essay. ‘Why do you want to go to Harvard?’ ‘I just do.’ ”

Robert enjoyed her flippancy but wondered at her nonchalance over the fact that he would be leaving. Best-case scenario, they had ten more months—if they lasted.

Their relationship had begun when they were jointly assigned the task of putting up recruiting signs for the debate club, which had, the previous June, seen two-thirds of its members graduate. Within several days they had sped through the stages of holding hands and walking arm in arm, but they slowed down on the stretch from first base to second, a deceleration that Robert had decided was his choice, reflecting a gentlemanly restraint, and therefore not just acceptable but honorable. Still, he had a goal in mind, the shedding of his virginity sometime before his eighteenth birthday in March, or by graduation at the latest, and he worried that her apparent indifference to their impending separation meant she had decided against crossing that final frontier with him.

James was ten and large for his age. He was attracted to Gina in the way a dog is attracted to and quickly overtaxes the patience of a friendly new human. When she came through the front door he ran to greet her and, lacking any real conversation, reported to her in excruciating detail the games he’d played during recess and lunch on each of the days since he’d last seen her.

“James never leaves us alone,” Robert said to his father early one morning when the two of them were up before the rest of the
family.

“Never?” his father said.

“He bothers Gina. He makes eyes at her, I’m serious.”

“Does Gina complain?”

“No, but she doesn’t like it.”

“Has she said so?”

Robert had hoped to elicit a different reaction from his father, and he changed the subject. He said, “I’m going to talk to Mr. Verhoeven after school today.” Mr. Verhoeven was the honors physics teacher, a thin, bespectacled man with a wing of white hair over each ear. He had given Robert an A+ on the most recent test, but had written—somewhat ominously, in Robert’s view—“See me if you want” on the test paper, below the grade. Robert had agonized for a couple of days but had finally decided, thanks in part to Gina’s input, that the A+ probably meant Mr. Verhoeven wanted to encourage him. “He wants to recommend you for Harvard” was what Gina actually said.

“James is young,” his father said, not taking the bait.

“He’s ten.”

“I mean he’s young for his age. Development is very individual. He’s big, so people expect a lot of him.”

“You mean I do.”

“No, honey, that’s not what I’m saying. He’s your brother and that colors how you see him. If he were someone else’s brother, or a neighbor, I think you would react differently to him.”

“He wouldn’t be in my house bugging my girlfriend.”

“It’s you he’s bugging.”

“He lies down in my doorway! And then won’t move!”

“And to think he used to save that for Rebecca.”

Robert had forgotten this: James lying in Rebecca’s doorway after dinner, and how she called Ryan to bring her glasses of water
or sharpened pencils so she could avoid stepping over James and thereby gratifying him.

“You know what I’m going to say?”

“It’s important to treat little kids well.”

His father smiled. “Children deserve care.”

Robert thought there was something unfair about this, because what was he but a child who deserved his father’s care? Also, his father used to say it wasn’t Robert’s job to take care of his siblings, which was a nice idea but hardly true in real life. Robert had been watching out for all of them, especially James, forever.

“You’re shipping out soon,” his father said.

“So I should be more tolerant.”

“No, I was just thinking how much I’ll miss you.”

As November progressed, Robert began to talk about inviting Gina to go on the family’s annual Thanksgiving trip to Sacramento. He imagined walking with her around his grandparents’ neighborhood and perhaps stopping at the local elementary school to make out. The family car held only six people, though, and his mother raised the question of what Gina’s mother would do without her. She also pointed out that there would be nowhere for Gina to sleep, given how tight it always was with just the family.

So Robert was out of luck. When they arrived on Wednesday evening, he greeted his grandparents with an obvious lack of enthusiasm and then spent the next two hours trying to make up for it by playing cards with his grandfather and brothers. John Greenway had congestive heart failure and pretty much lived in a chair in the front room. He was supposed to wear special socks to improve the blood flow in his swollen ankles and feet, but he claimed they were too stretched out and did him no good anymore. He wore plain black socks instead, and corduroy slippers both indoors and out. Sometimes he was so tired that he had one of the boys play his hand
for him; he would have his proxy set his cards in a rack only he and the proxy could see, and he would whisper instructions while the other two boys hummed so they couldn’t hear. James loved this, and when it was time to hum he got to his feet and marched in place and did a fair imitation of a kazoo. His once silky white-blond hair had darkened gradually; it was nearly black now and growing thicker and coarser. He was taller than Ryan. Ryan watched him march and hum and thought there was a good chance that James’s voice would start to change before he reached junior high.

Ryan had skipped junior high. Sand Hill Day had turned into a K through 8, with Ryan and the other five kids his age forming the pioneer class, and he was going straight to high school when he left. Wednesday night, once the cardplaying was over and he was in bed, he realized that when he got back to school on Monday he’d have only six more months at the school he loved.

Thanksgiving dinner took place at two o’clock in the afternoon and involved moving Grandpa Greenway from the front room to the dining room, where custom required that he relieve the turkey of its meat with a carving knife that once belonged to his grandfather. He could neither stand up for ten minutes nor relinquish the duty, so Bill put the bird on a rolling cocktail cart and pushed it to the old man’s chair. Ryan remembered being in a store with his grandfather when he was seven or eight and how his grandfather spent a long time looking at an electric carving knife and then said, as he led Ryan away, “That would be giving in.”

Penny sat next to her father but returned to the kitchen, where her mother was transferring peas to a serving bowl. At seventy-six, Audrey Greenway was as shrunken as her husband was puffy, and her hands were knobby with arthritis. She had been cooking for a day and a half and was pleased with the way everything had come out, the stuffing just how her grandchildren liked it, the sweet pota
toes mashed for her husband.

“Coming, coming,” she said to Penny. “This is the last thing.”

“Mom, Dad shouldn’t be trying to carve. Bill should be doing it.”

“Oh, I don’t know. What’s the harm?”

Penny had hoped her mother would recognize and appreciate her concern for her father, and there was a slight edge to her voice as she said, “He could have a heart attack.”

“He’s probably going to have a heart attack.”

“Not today! How can you be so blasé?”

“Penny, please. Try to relax.”

“I can’t believe
you’re
telling
me
to relax.”

Audrey raised her eyebrows briefly, a tactic Penny knew from early childhood, when it had had the power to silence her. Audrey had married and borne Penny late in life, and Penny sometimes thought her whole existence would have been different if she’d had a younger mother.

“Go on,” Audrey said. “I’m right behind you.”

Penny returned to the table, but she felt chastised. She listened to the holiday talk: the children telling their grandparents what they were doing in school; Bill asking his usual questions about his in-laws’ lives, remembering, as he always did, to inquire especially about Audrey’s work at the horticulture club and how John’s hardware store was doing under the new ownership. Penny stayed quiet and felt expendable, also familiar from childhood.

After dinner, the children lounged in the front room and watched through the windows as the afternoon light failed. It was fully dark before long, and they were lethargic from the food yet at the same time restless.

“I’m going to call Gina,” Robert announced, but then he didn’t move, which peeved Rebecca since he had taken the only comfortable chair not occupied by their grandfather, leaving the rest of them
to make do with the couch and folding chairs.

“Go if you’re going,” she said.

Robert frowned. “What is that? God.”

“Don’t say ‘God.’ ” Rebecca took a quick look around, but her grandmother was out of the room and her grandfather was asleep in his chair.

“What are you talking about?” Robert said. “I can if I want to.”

Their father sat on a folding chair, holding open a section of newspaper that Robert knew, from having checked the date earlier in the day, was over a week old. He said to Robert, “But do you want to?”

Robert felt his face grow warm. He knew it was a trick question but didn’t know in which direction the trick would go. “What do you mean?”

“I mean if it would make someone else unhappy. It’s your choice, but—” Bill let his voice trail off and looked at Robert.

“I said it once,” Robert said.

“It’s okay,” Bill said gently. “I think you understand now.”

“Understand what?” Penny called from the dining room. She had found a measure of solace in a junk drawer from the garage that she’d brought inside to see if it contained anything interesting, but she was still out of sorts. “How can you expect them to understand?”

“I’m sorry?” Bill said.

She came to the arch between the front room and the dining room. She’d pulled her braid over her shoulder, and it hung like a pull-cord down the front of her shirt. She was thin, but time had softened her face, making her look younger than her forty-four years, which in turn made her hands—roughened and crisscrossed with cuts, the nails permanently split and discolored—appear to have been borrowed from a woman who’d spent her life cleaning other people’s houses. She said, “We’ve never educated them about
religion, so how can they understand?”

Bill cleared his throat. “I just meant Robert might choose his words differently here. I was saying I thought he understood it’s a choice.” He glanced at Robert and smiled slightly. “As I think he does.”

At this, Grandpa Greenway startled awake and said, “Now then, now then.” He shifted in his chair and moved his hands to his lap. They looked like baseball gloves: big shapeless paws with fingers like sausages and no definition at the knuckles. For dinner he’d worn a camel sport coat, but he’d traded it for a golf cardigan, and he fumbled for a moment with the buttons, then gave up. He said, “Who’s hungry? James, are you hungry?”

James looked to his father to see if this was a joke. His father was smiling but looking at Robert, so James couldn’t be sure the smile meant he should laugh.

“James,” Grandma Greenway called from the kitchen. “There’s more pie.”

Ryan nudged James. He wanted James to wriggle around and maybe laugh a little and then go into the kitchen. That’s what he would have done—not for pie but to make both grandparents happy. In the kitchen, his grandmother would put her finger to her lips and then get out a plate and a knife and noisily draw the knife across the plate. Then he would open the silverware drawer and rustle around in the forks and perhaps, if he felt like it, smack his lips together a few times.

Bill said a walk might be a good idea, and the children—including Robert, who had forgotten entirely that he wanted to call Gina—jumped to their feet and found their jackets. Penny stayed behind, her interest in the junk drawer sharpening into excitement, followed by a vision of nuts and bolts and washers stacked together so they looked like trees, then laid out—maybe in an old metal cake pan—to resemble a forest. Or maybe her father’s old tools themselves—
screwdrivers and wrenches and pliers—could be made to look like trees, shrubs, flowers, and could populate a metal garden. Her father might even get a kick out of it. She remembered going to the store with him on the occasional Sunday, when he was closed for business, and how she walked up and down the empty aisles while he sat in his office and went over the books. Her favorite was the electrical aisle, with its spools of wire and cartons of lightbulbs. She was fascinated by lightbulbs, how delicate and shatterable they were. At home she always begged to be the one to replace a burned-out bulb, a task her father carefully supervised, his finger at the switch so they could test the new bulb as soon as she’d finished screwing it into the socket.