The Children's House

by Alice Nelson

  The waiting room was hot and dense, the ceiling fans broken. A young woman sitting across from them pulled a red and white box of Crown fried chicken out of her bag and started feeding the child beside her. Gabriel stood next to Marina’s chair, staring at her, his finger in the corner of his mouth. At first he stayed just beyond her reach, ignoring any attempts she made to talk to him. He turned his face away from her when she looked at him. Could he be autistic? Wasn’t avoidance of eye contact one of the signs? But no, Marina thought, looking over at Constance, who sat staring fixedly ahead of her, there were other reasons the little boy was like this. And she had been that way as a child, too. Never knowing where to look, what to say. So often she had felt herself to be almost invisible, to be barely existent in the world. It had startled her as a child when someone spoke her name; as if she had not expected it to be known by others. Perhaps all unsheltered children felt like this.

  After a while the little boy reached out and touched the shell button of her dress, his small finger pressing against her. Constance leaned forward and swatted his hand away, pushing him hard enough that he took a few faltering steps backwards and sat down on the floor, a surprised look on his face. Then he began to cry. It was the same furious sorrow as when he had wailed in her kitchen the day before. Constance ignored him, folding her arms across her chest and turning her head away. The cries turned into angry screams, and he lay back on the floor and kicked his legs. ‘Shut that kid up,’ a man yelled from the other side of the room. Marina bent down and picked Gabriel up from the floor. She could not remember the last time she had held a child in her arms. He was hot and damp, the shudder of his crying still moving through his body, which was surprisingly light, but taut and strong. At first he stiffened in her arms and she thought she would have to put him down again, but then he surrendered. He let himself be held.

  It struck her how unknown this child was, how unprotected. Apart from his mother and now Marina, did anyone know his name, or his birthday? He shifted in Marina’s arms, leaning back tentatively at first and then succumbing, moving to make an easier place for himself against her. He stopped crying and his breathing slowed gradually. He smelt of soap.

  They sat there together among rows of others in the sourness of the room, the hard cry of a woman turning away from one of the counters making them all start. Gabriel’s head pressed heavily against her breast as he fell asleep, a faint tremor under one of his eyes. Looking around, she wondered how the others in the room must regard her. A white woman. A social worker. A do-gooder. It was an uneasy thing, this proximity to real need, this guilty knowledge of her higher place on the food chain. When she had dressed that morning she had tried on several outfits in front of the mirror. None seemed right. Even the simplest of her dresses felt too showy, too expensive. Eventually she had settled on a pale-blue linen dress, ballet flats. She hesitated over jewellery, wearing just her wedding ring in the end. She could not shake the uneasy feeling that she was putting on a costume for a role in a play. Leah would know what to do, would know how to coax Constance out of herself. She would know how to speak to her, how to resolve this business with Public Assistance.

  When Marina was brushing her hair that morning, Jacob came in to kiss her goodbye. Marina had not told him about Constance’s visit to the house the day before. She had been on the verge of bringing it up several times during the evening but had found herself hesitating. If she told Jacob about the strange afternoon tea, she would also have to tell him about the reason for Constance’s visit. He would think that she had been rash to involve herself, would tell her it was not her responsibility to sort out the girl’s financial affairs. It had always been there in Jacob, this ability to preserve a sensible distance from the sorrows of the world, to keep sight of the line between compassion and over stepping. Not everything could be salvaged, he had told her once. She would tell him about Constance after they had been to the Public Assistance office together, Marina decided. Over dinner, a bottle of wine between them. By then the task would be accomplished and she would hopefully have a successful mission to report on. She would turn it into a story for him, a kind of anthropological foray to relate. Yes, it was best not to alarm him unnecessarily.

  When she had walked into the projects to collect Constance that morning, Marina had felt a small surge of dread and then a creeping shame at her fear. How sheltered her life had become. A few people were gathered in the foyer and they fell silent as she walked through the entrance door. A cool, watchful appraisal. There was a low whistle from one of the men and a loud burst of laughter, something ugly in it. She felt her heart thumping. The fluorescent light was flickering as if any moment it might sputter out. The lobby was stale-smelling and squalid, piles of trash and cigarette butts clustered in small eddies in the corners. The knot of men parted to let her pass and she hurried up the stairwell.

  Constance opened the door immediately, as if she had been waiting for Marina’s knock. Had she been standing there by the door, Marina wondered. There was no sign of the little boy and for a moment Marina thought that perhaps Constance had left him with a neighbour or a friend, but then he came out of the bedroom, standing warily in the doorway. She watched while Constance hoisted him on to her back, tying the cotton fabric firmly above her breasts. It was only nine in the morning and the girl already looked exhausted, something vacant and detached in her expression.

  At last their number was called by a weary-looking young man with thick glasses, and they were ushered down a drab grey corridor and into a small cubicle. Gabriel was awake now and he sat very still on the chair between them, staring around. There was a damp patch of sweat on Marina’s dress where he had been pressed against her. On the pin-up board behind the desk Marina noticed a typed Bible verse. ‘Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken.’ It made her feel hopeful, the sight of the laminated scripture with its background of a gaudy sunset, as if the man would somehow be required to be kind to them because of his faith. Mercy would be demanded of him. He looked like a young monk, Marina thought, as he sat there typing rapidly at his computer. There was a red apple and a small container of juice sitting in the corner of his desk, like a child’s packed lunch. She thought of Cézanne’s red apple in the painting she and Jacob had seen the day before. She looked up at the Bible verse again. Were they the righteous ones?

  Eventually the case worker turned to face them. An avalanche of language, terms Marina had never heard before, acronyms she could not understand. Outside, the wail of a siren rose up through the tiny window. Marina felt as if she was advocating in a language she could barely speak. She wanted to defend Constance, but she felt too tentative, too unsure of all the arcane mechanisms involved. Again, a panic-stricken sense of not knowing the right thing to say came over her. Constance herself sat there staring fixedly at her feet; she seemed not to be listening. It was as if she had removed herself entirely so none of this could touch her.

  ‘If you don’t reopen her case,’ Marina said at last, ‘this woman and her child will not be able to eat. They can’t wait four to six weeks for a new application to be processed. Is there anything that can be done?’

  The young man took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He picked up a green form from a tray on his desk and put his glasses back on, then sighed as if he had decided it was easier to succumb to her. To show mercy.

  ‘It’s irregular, but we’ll do the recertification now. Extenuating circumstances. They can process it in twenty-four hours.’

  An hour later, as they were getting up to leave, Marina thought of something else.

  ‘If she gets a letter for another recertification, she won’t be able to understand it. That’s why she didn’t come to the last appointment.’

  ‘You can be her authorised representative.’ The young man pulled out another form and started to fill it in before Marina could say anything. ‘Copies of all correspondence will be sent to your nominated address and you can act on her
behalf. Just fill in your details here and she can sign and authorise it.’

  Marina hesitated. Did she really want to take on this responsibility for the girl, the intimacy of this involvement in her life? Perhaps it could just be for now. She would talk to Leah when she returned from Guatemala, see if there was some sort of service available to help. Surely people could not be left as profoundly adrift as the girl and her child seemed to be. Marina watched as Constance slowly wrote the letters of her first name at the bottom of the form. She leaned over the desk, making the shapes she had clearly memorised and then staring at the result as if it were something both miraculous and suspicious.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time they emerged from the building. The sky was so grey that it seemed as though an earlier dusk had settled over the streets, a disconcerting, humid twilight. A hot wind whipped the pages of a newspaper past them as they walked down 125th Street. Nearly a century before, this had been the Harlem of the jazz era. The Renaissance. Musicians, gamblers, poets, prostitutes. Girls who came up from Carolina in pressed cotton dresses. Gangsters, tricksters, fortune tellers and preachers. The Apollo Theater, Minton’s Playhouse, the Cotton Club, the Savoy Ballroom. Even the names sounded magical. Now the street was full of decrepit shopfronts, Caribbean restaurants and dollar stores. In the shadows of the elevated train lines, young men spread out blankets and sold CDs, shoes and handbags. They passed several shops advertising African hair braiding, improbably glossy wigs lined up in their windows. Did Constance come here to have her hair done, Marina wondered, looking over at the girl’s dark head with its neat rows of braids.

  When they reached the Starbucks on the corner of the boulevard Marina paused. ‘Would you like to have some lunch? Gabriel must be hungry.’ Constance said nothing but she stopped walking and stared at the café. Silence, Marina thought, must mean assent. In the café she ordered iced chocolates for all of them, cheese and salad sandwiches in plastic containers, three slices of banana bread. Gabriel stared at his drink as if it were something wondrous, poking his finger tentatively into the cream. Marina broke his sandwich into small pieces, spreading them out on a napkin for him. Constance ate slowly, making no effort to help Gabriel with his food. She had a capacity to absent herself so completely that even her child seemed invisible to her.

  Halfway through the odd, improvised lunch, Marina looked up and saw Ben standing in the queue at the counter. He was with a young woman with black, heavy hair. She had a narrow face, something of the mater dolorosa about her. The girl was talking and Ben was staring at her with undisguised ardour. Marina could see why – she was incandescent. Shining hair falling almost to her waist, those huge eyes. She looked Spanish, or South American. Where did she come from, this luminous beauty? Wearing a sleeveless white dress that fell below her knees, she looked like she had stepped out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, the beloved only daughter of a wealthy coffee-finca owner. Marina chided herself immediately for such a cliché; she was probably a graduate student at NYU. She watched the girl and Ben as they ordered their drinks. He was solicitous, attentive, touching her arm gently. His eyes were alight in a way she had not seen for a long time. There was something more pliable, looser about him. He placed his hand lightly on the small of the girl’s back as they turned away from the counter, cups of iced tea in their hands. Marina wondered if they were already lovers. She had come home one day earlier that week to find two teacups in the sink. It had seemed a hopeful sign to her then – that someone had visited Ben, that they had made tea together. Now she tried to picture this girl at the kitchen table drinking tea, or sitting on the edge of Ben’s single bed, bending down to unfasten her sandals.

  A line came to her: ‘Your body can fill my life, just as your laughter can drive away the dark wall of sadness.’ It was from a poem by JoséValente that Jacob had sent her, just after he had left California to return to his life in New York and she had slipped, disconsolate, back into her meagre existence. She had felt marooned, stricken, able only to lie in bed staring up at the cracked ceiling with its spreading water stains. Her pillow still held Jacob’s scent from the day he left, the persistence of it increasing her desolation. He had stopped by her apartment unexpectedly on the way to the airport, the cab waiting in the street outside. When he left she stood in the window, wrapped in her Japanese robe, watching as the car slipped off into the pale dawn light, resolutely bearing Jacob away from her. She wondered then if she would ever see him again.

  Two weeks later a letter arrived in her pigeonhole at the university. A twin, she remembered thinking, to the one she had slipped under his office door only three months earlier. The Valente poem, typed out on a sheet of paper. On the reverse side, in Jacob’s unruly handwriting, two lines. ‘I don’t want to be away from you anymore. Come to New York.’

  Ben stopped when he saw Marina sitting at the table by the door. She watched him take in her lunch companions with a slightly surprised look, the girl behind him. Her face was solemn and composed, a certain ruefulness there even as she smiled when Ben introduced them. Please don’t let her be melancholy too, Marina thought. Let her be joyful. Let her make him laugh. She was wearing a gold chain with a small cross attached to it. ‘My friend, Alma,’ Ben said. Nothing more. Marina echoed his words, introducing Constance as her friend too, though it felt like the wrong word entirely. Constance did not even lift her head to acknowledge Ben and Alma. My stepson. Marina wondered if Constance had any idea what the word meant. Did such a term even exist in the place she came from?

  ‘All right,’ Ben said. ‘We’re off. I’ll see you later on.’

  He held the café door open for Alma. Marina watched them step around a dustbin that had been tipped over on its side. Alma’s white dress seemed like a hopeful sort of flag against the grey of the street. Of course Ben was in love with her; how could he not be?

  Later that night Marina stood at the bedroom window, watching the last of the light fade from the sky. Nine in the evening and still there was no pure darkness. The whole day had felt faintly penumbral but now that the real dusk had fallen the weather was kinder, a breeze from the river coming through the open window. Above the street she could see the shoes suspended from the wire. Aloft and swaying gently in the wind, they seemed an entreaty. She recalled Gabriel’s face as she had held him against her that morning. What were he and Constance doing now? Did they sleep together? She had only seen a single bed in the apartment.

  Ben had returned home early in the evening and, for the first time in months, come downstairs for dinner. Jacob was out at a late meeting, so it was just the two of them. Marina made an omelette, opened a bottle of good wine. How many evenings had they spent together like this over the years, eating dinner or sitting with their books or watching a film? When she had returned to New York to live with Jacob, Ben was only ten years old. Jacob was still running the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at Bellevue Hospital, working long hours. She remembered the frequent calls from the emergency room late at night, the unsettling jangle of the telephone and Jacob’s murmured responses, the long spaces of listening. Usually those calls ended with Jacob slipping quietly into his clothes, fumbling in the darkness for his shirt, the click of the apartment door closing behind him as he left for the hospital. Sometimes he would come home before dawn for a few more hours of sleep; more often he would work on through the day. Marina watched him battle his tiredness at the dinner table on those evenings, trying for her sake, and for Ben’s if he was with them, to appear animated, interested. It moved her deeply, knowing the enormous effort it must be costing him. She and Ben always knew when he was exhausted, conspired to finish dinner quickly, smiling at each other as Jacob laid his head against the back of the armchair and closed his eyes.

  From very early on, it seemed to Marina, she and Ben had been knitted together by their love for Jacob, and by an equally powerful need to protect him. More recently, she wondered whether it was this long habit that prevented Ben from expressing the real depth of hi
s current grief. Whether his need to shelter his father had created this sad gulf between them. And that perhaps, too, it was why he chose to speak to her, and not Jacob, about Alma.

  Ben stood beside her at the kitchen bench as she whisked the eggs, the glass in his hand lurching as he spoke. ‘Tell me about her,’ Marina had said quietly as she poured them both wine. The doors to the garden were open, the early darkness casting the kitchen into dimness. Alma was the sister of Juan, a friend Ben had made working at the grocery store. They had come, Alma and Juan, from El Salvador the year before, crossing Guatemala and Mexico, through the desert. Their father had been killed several years earlier during the civil war; an older brother had been murdered after the conflict’s end. Ben’s description of the country that Alma and Juan had escaped was a litany of horror. Savage murders, kidnappings, rival gangs, relentless violence. And then there was the terrible journey through the desert, the border crossing. ‘I know there are things she will never tell me,’ Ben said. Like any lover, he wanted to rescue her. It’s what we all want, Marina thought. To rescue or to be rescued.

  Staring into his glass of wine after he had told her Alma’s story, Ben looked grave, so sweetly earnest. At times when Marina looked at him she couldn’t help imagining the bewildered face of the small boy who had wept savagely for his mother all those years ago. For so long she had believed that Ben was the very likeness of his father, but these past few months she could see traces of Leni in him. Something about the set of the mouth, the faint sloe shape to his eyes. Perhaps it was just her imagining.