The Children's House

by Alice Nelson

  Because Marina was so much younger, and because of a certain hesitance in her nature, people assumed that she had been seduced by Jacob. A younger woman caught up in the slipstream of his success, his charisma. But it had not been that way. Marina had seen Jacob and hunted him down single-mindedly, tempted by nobody else. Often she returned in her mind to that first day, a lecture he was giving on grief and psychotherapy at Berkeley, where she was a doctoral student. He was a visiting professor, there for a semester from New York. The talk was open to the public and the hall was full and clamorous. Slipping in late she had found a place standing against the wall at the side, not far from the stage. She could see Jacob’s dark curls against his pale jacket, his elegant profile in the dim light of the lecture hall. He allowed a long silence to settle before he started to speak, and then he began, unexpectedly, with a line of poetry. ‘The same loneliness that closes us/ Opens us again’. A hush settled over the crowded theatre, Jacob descending into his lecture like a diver, slow and precise, surfacing briefly to look up from the lectern, a small pool of light from the lamp around him. Whispers spread through the room, all those women staring up at him from the front row, sitting up taller. Just let me be alone with him, she remembered thinking, everything logical in her suddenly unfixed. Just let me be alone with him.

  Some nights that first summer in Harlem, Marina would slip out of the house for a late walk, the moon hanging hazily above the skyline, the briny smell of the river coming at her on a sudden wind. She would circle around their neighbourhood, arms crossed over her chest, slowing down to read the posters and notices papered in a haphazard collage over the walls of the corner bodega. On these walks she felt an old wildness again, something reckless and shadowy rising up in her. She and Dov had walked the streets of Brooklyn at night like this when they were children. Sometimes because their mother had locked them out of the apartment, on other nights from a need to escape the tiny flat, their mother’s closed bedroom door. They would put on their coats and set out together, weaving up and down the streets of Crown Heights, often walking as far as the Botanic Garden on the edge of Prospect Park. There was something hushed and magical about the gardens at night, a wild and secret quality that was never there in the daytime. One winter they climbed through an unlocked window into the tropical conservatory and stayed there all night, in the ripe warmth of the palms and ferns. It was like being lost in the jungle. They felt like children in a fairy tale, alone with the dark mystery of the night. A gardener found them early the next morning, sleeping on their spread coats, and chased them out. The windows were always locked after that, but they still came back to the gardens at night, pretending they were wild children lost in a forest, camping out under the night sky. The stars could barely be seen in the city, even in the middle of the night, so Dov made a map for her. White buttons sewn carefully on to a dark square of silk stolen from their mother’s closet. Marina had it still, folded away among her letters. Even after twenty years it felt unimaginable to her that Dov was dead. She wondered if anyone but her still remembered him.

  Walking home along the edge of Mount Morris Park, Marina would look for Jacob’s silhouette in the light of his study window. Sometimes she would stop in the street and stare up at him, his head bent over a book. His beauty never ceased to surprise her. In the early days of their marriage she had harboured a sadness that she had not known him in his youth. She had only shards and rumours from those years; legends and stories that came to her from other people. A photograph of a young man leaning against a white car. Old medical textbooks with his name printed on the flyleaf. But something about the faint vulnerability of him now made her more fiercely tender. His hair faded to the colour of ore, the deepening eye sockets, the shadows and marks on the body, the paleness of his ankles. It would be enough, Marina thought, looking up at Jacob, just to be permitted to stay together quietly. To live unexceptional lives and not to have to unstitch or amend the replete, singular existence they had created. But permanency could never be assumed. She knew enough to know this.

  Upstate New York

  December, 1997

  Later in the morning the sway of the bus as it follows the curve of the highway makes Constance feel sick. She can feel the hum of the road in her bones. So different, this smooth glide along a paved surface, to the jolting lurch of the rare truck or car of her childhood in Rwanda.

  It is nearly midday but the light is so pale it could still be dawn. A dim, grainy glow at the window. In her own country grey cranes were the first to say that the night-time was over. Then the turacos like big green parrots. If you looked close you could see the long-neck storks and pelicans slipping through the morning mist. Oh, it was something.

  This country, America, has its own bird talk but it is a different thing altogether. She does not know the names of any birds here. How can they survive this white time with no leaf on any tree, and the cold so strong that even one small square of bare skin can send it deep into you? Still, there are birds. She has seen them on the shore below, coasting on the cold waves. And back in the city there were clouds of them, rising up against the buildings. Once, a brown bird flew into the window of the apartment – she felt the sickening slap of it against the glass. She didn’t dare to look down at the courtyard below, for days avoided the place the bird might have fallen. She wonders if she will ever know what the birds here mean. Which are the ones to say that sunrise will not be long now. Which ones circle a grave or call out when the rains are close.

  She pulls a small knife out of her bag and uses it to slice apart an apple. It’s a habit she fell into with the child, passing him a piece of fruit that he would take from the blade. Sometimes he would reach for the knife and she would slap his hand and he would cry loudly so that she would have to turn away from him and cover her ears. She would walk out of the apartment and close the door and crouch down in the hallway, her head against the wall. His roar would grow terrible then, because he thought she was gone. He did not know that she was always there, just on the other side of the door. She would count all the numbers she knew in English before she went back into the apartment. Sometimes the chant of numbers felt like a prayer.

  Before they moved away from the city, the Catholic nuns who lived in the big brown house by the park had told her often that she must talk to the child. That otherwise he would be a lonely little boy. She thought of the mamas carrying their little ones in her village, but she could not remember any words she could say to the child.

  She has not spoken one word of Kinyarwanda since she came to America. If she has to speak, she uses the English words she has learned. ‘Apartment’. ‘Coffee’. ‘Diaper’. ‘Appointment’. ‘Late’. ‘Rent’. ‘Shoe’. Sometimes men she passed on the streets of the city tried a few words of her language, or a low hiss of Swahili. She ignored them, turning her head away and walking faster. She would never go among her own people again, not to listen to each one start to tell again what he saw, to travel in memory. The little boy didn’t know how to speak in any language. No word ever came from his mouth, though he was past the time of talking. Perhaps he would never speak. He cried though. Oh, he could cry.

  The nuns had told her that she should pray, too; pressed prayer cards with pictures of saints into her hands. Once, they gave her a string of rosary beads made of something carved and white like a fine bone. She buried the cards and the necklace in Mount Morris Park, at the top of the hill that rose up in the middle of the park. She dug a shallow hole with the end of a stick, watching as Jesus’ pale face on the card disappeared under the dirt. Over the weeks she added Saint Claire with her lamp, Christopher crossing a river, Ignatius kneeling in prayer, Francis and his tiny birds. She placed a stone over them to keep them safe. Gabriel the Archangel with those feathered white wings she put away in a drawer in the apartment. An angel’s name given to the child back in the refugee camp. For protection. The name of an angel and sweet prayers to Jesus were what he needed to live and to grow well, the pastor had told her. Bu
t he did not grow well, the child. She could see that. She had given him her fear, and something even worse than fear. A great cold hollow. Even she could see that.

  On the first nights when they were hiding in the marshes, people would gather together to pray to Jesus, even those who had no habit of prayer. But it had not lasted long. After so many weeks people had no will left for it. No strength or faith or memory of what words could be said. Constance would not pray again. Counting English numbers when the child was wailing was the closest thing she would do. At times her mind wanted to whisper names instead, but it was best not to. It was like a dark pool, she thought, one you could step into and disappear forever. The water would close over your head. When the names rose up she pushed them down. The best thing was to let a great emptiness fill her mind, as if everything had been scoured away.

  After the nuns moved out of the brownstone, Constance would walk through the park and climb the steps to the great rise of rocks. She liked a high place. There was never anyone at the top of the rise and she would sit, chin in hand, without counting the hours. Sometimes, peering down into the park below, she saw the white woman, Marina, with Gabriel, on the path near the playground. The summer was finished by then and brown leaves were everywhere, great piles of them in the small squares and parks of the city. Very soon the winter would come. All that white, leafless cold for months. Everything before and after just a dream or a memory of warmth.

  She hadn’t thought of the little boy as a child someone could want before she met Marina. In the morning she would bring him to the tall brown house where the nuns used to live, buttoned into his new red coat. Marina was always so happy to see him. The first thing she would do was bend down to pick him up so he could put his arms around her neck and press his head into her shoulder. This woman knew what to do with him, even though she had no babies of her own. There was the older boy, but Constance knew he was born to another woman. All of them in that family – the grey-haired father, the tall son, Marina, the aunt and the grandmother – they meant each other well. She could see that from the very start. They meant each other well.

  One day from the rock on top of the hill Constance watched Marina and the child playing in the leaves. She could see Gabriel’s red coat, the bright flash of him diving into the piles of leaves, his hands reaching up to Marina as she pulled him out. So small, the two of them looked down there. Both of them laughing. She couldn’t hear it, but she could see their faces twisted into the shape of it. Her own face, she thought, had forgotten how to do that. She tried to make the shapes of a laugh, opening her teeth and trying for the sound to see if she could remember it. Her voice sounded strange to her. When she had to speak she thought that her voice had become that of a ghost. It was not the new language; it was to do with her throat. Perhaps one day she would find she could not speak at all. Constance stood up and walked down the hill and left the park from the far gate, careful not to let them see her.

  She leans her head against the window of the bus, the chill of the glass sharp through the knitted cap she wears pulled down around her face. In the pocket of her coat is the paper for this journey and the words that will take her to the right place. It’s like a puzzle she has to solve, finding the right way to go. If she breaks it down into parts it is easier. This morning she pushed the piece of paper across the counter to the woman selling bus tickets, tapped her finger against the name of the town and slid some bills under the glass partition. And now this bus is flashing past so many towns, the sea already far behind her. When she reaches the next place she can find someone else to ask. Another bus, or a walk, if her legs can make it, although walking is harder because only the first few parts of the way they tell her ever stay in her mind and she has to keep stopping and asking which way next.

  Another bus would be better. Perhaps a bus that never stops, coasts forever through a white morning.

  Harlem, New York

  June, 1997

  Marina stepped out of the house, pulling the front door closed behind her. It was early but the heat was already hovering over the street like a dense fog. She sat down on the steps, a teacup in her hands. There was the world. The veer and bustle of it. New York in all its intricate, ceaseless motion. Garbage trucks, slamming doors, the squeal and hiss of a bus lurching in against the sidewalk. There was a small cluster of commotion on the corner, too far away for her to unpick. A mob of starlings rose up above the brownstones, a dark scattering against the unexpected blue of the sky.

  Earlier, she had poured a cup of coffee in the silent kitchen, looking out at the last curve of night. The spread of time just before sunrise was when she did her best work. Drifting straight from sleep to work she felt that something from her dreams was still strong in her. And then these moments on the steps, weighing what was already written, that feeling of the day stretching comfortably out before her. The summer was ahead of them – the long, hot weeks when the whole city seemed to unfurl; their usual month in the beach cottage they always rented on Fire Island. And beyond that, her long-awaited sabbatical. A whole semester to work on the new book, her chronicle of the Hasidic movement in the country. Not a cool academic study or a conventional history, but a looser, more creative investigation. Conversations with hundreds of cheerful young emissaries sent to remote and unlikely outposts, reflections on the relentless proselytising zeal, the passion for bringing Jews back to their faith. Just one mitzvah, enough to draw the Jewish soul a step closer to God. God’s sales force, a young rabbi had once called the movement. An odd choice of subject, most people thought. Such a shadowy, secretive world, so suspicious of out siders, so arcane and unfathomable. You should choose something more glamorous, one of her colleagues said to her. Less religious. But most of what she wished to know was in a way linked to strangers, to worlds she did not yet understand. And the Hasidic families she and Dov had lived among as children in Crown Heights had been kind to them. Invited them in for meals, sent them home with containers full of food and warm loaves of challah. After Dov had died and her mother had gone, it was an Hasidic family who had helped her, even though her brother could not be buried in a Jewish cemetery.

  From the top of the steps she could see her stepson, Ben, riding slowly down the street on his bicycle. She had never liked the word ‘stepson’. It sounded like something cold and formal, a gulf between them, a relationship somehow in opposition to another more valid one. When, at fourteen, Ben came to live with Jacob and Marina permanently, Leni railed against Marina, blaming her for Ben’s refusal to return to her house. Marina manipulated Ben, she claimed, lured him into turning against her. ‘You don’t have your own child, so you want to play at being mother to mine,’ she said. ‘You are not his mother,’ she wrote in an angry letter. The years Ben spent shuttling between his father’s house, and Leni and her partner Michael’s loft on Bleecker Street, had caused Jacob enormous grief. He hated the way that a large share of his son’s life was secret from him. Ben’s other bedroom with the bunk bed and the constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars that Jacob never saw; all the meals around the dining table with Leni and Michael; the trip to Disneyland of which there were no photos; all the tremors and echoes of that other home that would never be known to Jacob. His small consolation was that there were no other children. Children of Leni and Michael, half-brothers and sisters, would have seemed too much of a claim staked on his son. Even an unfamiliar sweater or a new pair of winter shoes could make Jacob feel queasy with loss.

  Ben wheeled his bike through the gate off the street and smiled up at Marina. He had just finished an early shift stacking shelves at the supermarket and he looked exhausted. He came to sit beside her. The boy had the most graceful beauty, the kind that made you want to stare a little too long. He looked uncannily like his father at the same age. Not even a slice of his mother in him. He was given to long, thoughtful stares like Jacob, to the same close, attentive listening, the same lovely solicitude. How strange it was to have this earlier, freshly minted version of her husband be
side her.

  She had been worried that Ben would need to swerve away from her and Jacob in adolescence, that their closeness might shatter and have to be reconstructed as something else later on. There were so many horror stories. Her friends with tall, truculent boys, teenagers full of rage and contempt, their adolescence a stage of siege. It had not been like that at all. Ben remained resolutely himself, pensive and steady, never anything awkward or unlovely about him. Still the clear, serious person he had been when she had first met him at ten years old.

  But something had happened to Ben that year. A kind of muffled sorrow had taken hold of him, an inexplicable and disabling mantle of grief. Although grief was not really the right word for it. It was quieter. Something flat and detached, and far more unsettling. He had announced to them just before the spring semester that he would not be returning to Brown to finish his third year of college. That he had decided to take a hiatus.

  ‘A hiatus?’ Jacob had asked incredulously. ‘To do what?’ Even from across the room Marina felt the quiver of panic in Jacob, his struggle to collect himself. His love for Ben had always encompassed something hovering and anxious, a deep fear that somehow Ben had been compromised by his mother’s defection all those years ago. A part of Jacob had been waiting all along, Marina realised, for a disaster to come to pass. And here it was, just when they thought they had reached safety.

  He would rather not be at college right now, Ben said simply, providing no other explanations. No, nothing bad had happened; yes, he still enjoyed his studies. He would rather not. It became like a refrain, the same words offered up again and again. He would rather Jacob not organise a summer internship with a biologist colleague at NYU; would rather not come to Fire Island with them that year; would rather not see the therapist that Jacob had found for him. He abruptly broke off his relationship with his high-school girlfriend, Isabel. The stricken girl turned up at the house one day when Ben was out, her lovely face blotched and swollen with crying. She had caught the bus down from Sarah Lawrence College because Ben was refusing to answer her phone calls.