Surrogate Child

by Andrew Neiderman

  Kevin was a six-foot-two-inch, burly man with licorice-black hair and deceptive dark brown eyes. It was only because of their years of friendship that Joe was able to tell when Kevin was kidding and when he was serious. For the most part, Kevin liked to put people on. He could carry a joke or a fabrication deeply into a conversation before revealing through his impish smile that he wasn’t telling the truth or that he really didn’t mean what he said. Joe liked him because he was a bright, witty man who seemed unflappable. He used his sense of humor to insulate him from frustration and unhappiness, whether it involved his personal or business life.

  “Maybe it’s a reverse Oedipus,” Kevin said. “You know, usually the son resents the father’s closeness to the mother.”

  “You think I’m jealous of my son’s relationship with his mother?”

  Kevin smiled and shrugged. In this case Joe sensed that he was only half joking. He couldn’t blame him for having such a theory; he had thought of it himself. In a way the possibility haunted him and made him somewhat paranoid about his own words and deeds.

  He respected Kevin’s opinion, not only because Kevin was a bright man, but also because they knew each other so long. Kevin and he had been high school classmates. They were lifelong residents of the area who had gone off to college and then decided to return to make their lives here. More and more lately that kind of thing was becoming a rarity. Young people were eager to make a completely new start, distancing themselves from their families and their origins. Kevin thought it was because travel was faster and miles of separation no longer had the same meaning.

  “AT&T has made it possible to reach out and nag someone who thought he had escaped,” Kevin said. “But I don’t blame them for wanting to escape. Don’t you remember how much we hated it here when we were in our senior year? It was fashionable to knock your hometown then,” Kevin said.

  Joe remembered, but he also remembered he wasn’t as sincere about his criticism as some of the others were. Perhaps that was why he returned so easily and why he jumped at the opportunity when IBM offered it to him. Kevin had even closer ties, since his father had been a successful attorney in the area, and he could capitalize on his name.

  Kevin’s father had died when he was in his second year at law school, but when he graduated there was still a place for him at the firm. Joe was already working for IBM, servicing business machines. He met and married Martha after only a year and a half on the job. She hadn’t gone to college. Right out of high school, she went to work for her father, who employed her as a secretary in his dairy business in New Paltz, which wasn’t that far from the IBM plant. He came to service her electric typewriter and was immediately taken with her soft, and what he considered, naturally beautiful look.

  Aggressive women turned him off, even frightened him a bit. Martha had a shyness to her that he found charming. Perhaps it came from being the only daughter in a family with six children. Four of her five brothers were older than she was, and from what she told him after they had started dating, they were quite overprotective and dominating. Her father was a stern, Old World type obviously uncomfortable in the presence of strong-willed and authoritative women.

  It wasn’t hard to see why Martha was somewhat subdued and lacked self-confidence. Right from the start, it took a great deal of convincing on his part to get her to do anything that involved her with the public. She didn’t make friends easily, and most of the women who were married to the men he knew resented her for relegating herself to what they considered the old-fashioned role of wife and mother. To their thinking, she sacrificed too much of herself.

  Even Kevin’s wife, Mindy, never missed an opportunity to bawl Martha out for not being demanding enough. She wasn’t underhanded about it; she would list her complaints about Martha right in Joe’s presence. Martha made too many meals and didn’t insist on Joe taking her out as much as she should. She should have demanded a cleaning lady. She shouldn’t be looking after her son so much. “Don’t worry, children get along,” Mindy told her, but Martha thought that Kevin and Mindy’s two boys were self-centered, indulgent, unambitious children, logical products of parents who made their own pleasure the priority.

  “They accumulate children the way most people accumulate most of their material possessions,” she told Joe. He thought she had a good point, only he didn’t see where they were having far superior results with Solomon.

  Martha could cook; Martha took pride in her housework and believed no cleaning lady would have the same concern; Martha was understanding when it came to finances; Martha watched the budget and didn’t splurge on clothing. In short, Martha became something of a threat to some of these women, so they rejected her, avoided her, and ridiculed her. Solomon’s violent death seemed to confirm something for them, although they weren’t in agreement as to what it was.

  Joe’s mother, Sara, who lived with Joe’s youngest sister, Brenda, and her husband, Gary, in Yonkers now, had been a devoted wife and mother. Yet she was not limited in her vision. She had pushed Brenda into a college education. Brenda was an accountant, working for a big firm in New York City. They had two children: a ten-year-old boy, Stuart, and an eight-year-old girl, Harriet. As far as Joe could see, neither of Brenda’s children seemed neglected because their mother was a working woman. Of course, he recognized that his mother was still a big help when it came to raising Brenda’s children.

  His father had died at the age of sixty-four, and although his mother could get along well by herself, being only fifty-nine at the time, Brenda and Gary were so sincere with their invitation, she couldn’t resist moving in with them. Often now, Joe wished he had been smart enough to invite her to live with him and Martha. Perhaps, with her in the house, Solomon wouldn’t have been driven to suicide.

  He hated that expression “driven to suicide.” The implication was quite clear—the boy hadn’t wanted to kill himself, but something, some actions on his or Martha’s part, perhaps, had pressured him into it. After Solomon’s death, he read everything he could about teenage suicide, and whenever the subject came up during a television talk show, he was glued to the set. Martha avoided the subject, but he knew he would search forever for the cause. He was only afraid that Kevin’s reference to Oedipus would prove true in another sense: like Oedipus he would seek the villain, only to learn that he, himself, was the villain he sought.

  Joe discovered that teenagers were killing themselves today for a variety of reasons: some drug oriented, some associated with the pressures of school or the demands made by parents. Some couldn’t tolerate failure in romance. But whatever the reasons were, Joe thought, wasn’t it also possible that they had some fundamental weakness in them; something might even be genetic, like a faulty circuit or bad transistor in a computer. Eventually something would cause it to short out, but if the circuit or the transistor weren’t faulty to begin with . . .

  It made sense to him. He favored such a theory because it helped mitigate any responsibility he had for what Solomon eventually had done to himself. After all, they never pressured Solomon about his schoolwork because he did so well without their pressuring him. They encouraged him and congratulated him on his achievements, but there wasn’t any overt influence. As far as they knew, Solomon was never involved with drugs and refused to be friends with those his age who were. And although he wasn’t what Joe would classify as a lover boy, he had female interests and a strong relationship with one girl, Audra Lowe.

  Kevin was sympathetic to Joe’s theory about genetic flaws when they eventually discussed it. Of course, it took a while before he could talk about it, even with his best friend.

  “You did the best you could,” Kevin said. “You certainly didn’t want him to kill himself. You weren’t out to hurt your own child. It’s got to have something to do with his own psychology. I think you’re right: it might have been inevitable. I wouldn’t swear for anyone, not even my own,” Kevin said. Joe knew that Kevin was referring to his older boy’s flirtation with cocaine. They alrea
dy had him in counseling.

  It was good having at least one friend like Kevin. Frequently, especially during the last few years, he found himself talking about more intimate subjects with Kevin than he did with Martha. It took him back to his teenage years when he and Kevin would confide in each other about their feelings and their fears concerning girls and school and their family life. They weren’t afraid to expose their deepest thoughts. There was trust, the kind of trust that Joe realized should now be between him and Martha.

  For a long time they had had it. Then they lost it, and now he had high hopes they were going to win it back. Recently, they were well on the way toward such a rebirth in their relationship. He had to do all that he could to keep it on track, and if that meant tiptoeing around the new kid for a while, why, he would do so.

  The important thing was that she was happy again and that they seemed to have finally put Solomon to rest. The only thing that made him anxious now was the strange idea that the new boy could somehow resurrect him.

  But why would he want to? From all of his experience, he knew that teenagers especially had such strong egos. These were the critical years for self-image and identity. Something that Mrs. Posner from the child-care agency had said made him wonder, though.

  “These poor children, they’re searching for an identity, searching for a place to belong. A name without a family attached to it is . . . is like a kite with a broken string floating aimlessly.”

  “Not anymore,” Martha responded, and raised her hand to demonstrate her determination. She closed it in the air as though she had grasped the string. “I’m going to take hold of that string and bring it back to earth.” She looked proud of the way she had seized on Mrs. Posner’s image. Mrs. Posner was impressed.

  But who was seizing on whom? Joe wondered, now that he thought about the quick and complete way in which the new boy had taken to his new home and surroundings, even to the point of breaking into the computer, though he had little prior knowledge of how to operate one.

  He went off to work, hoping that his anxieties were imaginary and short-lived.

  Martha wanted to accompany Jonathan to be sure everything went smoothly, even though the child-care agency had sent all the necessary papers and information to the school. In her mind, the situation resembled the first time she had brought Solomon to school to enter him into kindergarten. He would need her beside him to give him confidence and reassurance.

  Only, when she was truthful with herself, she had to admit that Solomon hadn’t really needed her. While other four- and five-year-old children were crying and resisting being separated from their mothers and fathers, he quietly took his place and waited. She would never forget Mrs. Scoonmaker’s admiration for him.

  “Your son is such a little gentleman already. So mature. You’ve done well by him, Mrs. Stern,” she said. Ten years later he would kill himself. If she could start over again, she wouldn’t want him to be so self-reliant. At least, not from the very start. That was why she was so unhappy when Jonathan rejected her offer.

  “I’ve had a first day before,” he said. She detected a note of bitterness in his voice. Whom did he blame, she wondered, for his lot in life? Did he blame his own parents: a mother who had him out of wedlock and a father who deserted them before he was two years old? His mother neglected him so badly, the authorities finally took him away from her and began placing him in foster homes. And then look at all the failures he had experienced with foster parents since. No wonder he was bitter.

  She nodded with understanding, but she could see he wasn’t looking for sympathy. And there was no point in her insisting she go with him. She wouldn’t push him; she’d made up her mind about that. She recalled how Solomon reacted whenever she insisted he do one thing or another. He would become like stone, refusing to argue, refusing to do it, whatever it was. He would stand there, biting down on his lower lip so hard it made his chin whiten. Once he even drew blood, but he didn’t cease. He would wait as though she were a bad spasm that simply had to be tolerated. Eventually, she would give up and he would go on to do whatever he wanted.

  “I’ll take the bus today,” Jonathan said. “Get the route down and then tomorrow, I’ll take my bike.”

  “That’s good. You’ll want to ride the bus whenever we have bad weather,” she told him, and then she thought, Did he say “his” bike?

  Martha smiled to herself when she turned away from him at the front door. It was nice that he was taking to everything so quickly. Naturally, she wanted that to happen, but even she was quite surprised at how easily he was adapting to a new home and new parents. Was Joe right in sounding a note of caution?

  Poor Joe, she thought. She was doing this for his sake as much as she was doing it for her own. In time, he would see that. He had suffered so after Solomon’s death. She knew it, even though he was silent and devoted himself to making her happy. His tears were falling inside. How many times did she see him go out to look at the tree? She never joined him or said anything about it, but just like him, she couldn’t look back there without seeing Solomon’s body dangling. Once she even suggested they cut the tree down, but he didn’t think she was serious about it.

  She was. As long as it was there, it haunted her. That long, thick branch loomed larger and longer every time she went back there and envisioned him, his body turning ever so slightly north, northeast, south, southwest. It was as though the corpse were on an arena stage accepting applause from the full circle of admirers.

  It was the look on Solomon’s face that got to her, and she was sure, got to Joe, too. There wasn’t an expression of pain; there had been no last-minute change of heart. There was certainly no fear of impending death. Instead, there was that sneer, that one expression of his that she hated so. He usually wore it when he ridiculed something either she or Joe suggested or did. She could remember him putting on the expression even as far back as grade school.

  Solomon was never a whiner; he didn’t nag for things. If a request for something was turned down, he didn’t cry or beg or even sulk. Sometimes, she wished he had. Instead, he would simply nod and look thoughtful. Joe used to say he was filing his anger away, storing it all up for use at a later date. She refused to believe that. How could a child plot so and be so conniving? Why, when she was his age, she wouldn’t have even been able to think of such things, much less carry them out.

  But maybe there was method to Solomon’s madness, now that she recalled it. After a while she got so she hated that deep thoughtful look more than other mothers hated crying children. The result was she gave in to a great deal more than she would have had Solomon not reacted to rejection in his special way.

  She never told Joe, and in truth, she never fully admitted it to herself, but at times, she often felt anxious about Solomon. She had a mother’s sixth sense about it. She knew there was something explosive in him. Perhaps her vigorous disagreements with Joe over some of the things Solomon did or said was a result of her own anxiety. Was she wrong to have ignored it? Maybe if she hadn’t . . . she didn’t want to face any such conclusions.

  Anyway, if she would have listened to Joe’s evaluation of Solomon, it would have been almost like believing he wasn’t their child, for what in Joe’s background or in Joe’s personality and what in her background and her personality could combine to produce such a . . . a creature. That’s what he would have been if she had agreed with Joe half the time.

  What else but a creature would want to set its parents against each other?

  “That’s exactly what he’s trying to do,” Joe said once, but she wouldn’t even tolerate a discussion about it. She sensed a strain in Solomon’s relationship with Joe, but she favored the idea that it was part of being a teenager, and had nothing to do with Solomon’s personality.

  Joe didn’t really think it was that, either. He thought worse. It got so they didn’t discuss much about Solomon at all. She sadly admitted to herself that toward the end, they had become more like three strangers in the same
house. How did it happen? How did it come to that? She couldn’t remember when it had begun. All she could remember was how it had ended.

  It wasn’t going to be that way with Jonathan. She was determined to make this work. She could understand Joe’s misgivings; they were natural, considering what had occurred, but she would overcome it all. This boy was exceptional. The resemblances to Solomon weren’t just a coincidence. In time, Joe would see and understand. In time, maybe they would both win back some of the life they had lost.

  After Jonathan left for school, Martha went upstairs to work on the bedrooms. She went right to Solomon’s old room, enthusiastically welcoming the added labor. But when she opened the door, she was surprised to discover that the room was in perfect order. The bed was made with that familiar military efficiency—the bedspread was taut; the pillow was perfectly centered. There were no articles of clothing left lying about, either on the floor or on the chair and desk. The closet door was closed, and all the drawers in the dresser were closed. Everything on the desk was neatly arranged. There was absolutely nothing for her to do. The room was just as it was when Solomon was alive.

  For a few moments, she simply stood there staring at everything. Had this new boy really been here? He left the room in such order it looked untouched. As strange as it would sound to anyone, she felt a sense of disappointment. She wanted to look after Jonathan; she wanted some responsibility. She had expected it, especially after the descriptions of where he had been before he had come here. Those people didn’t sound like the type of people who would imbue such a sense of decorum in the boy’s life. From where had he gotten it?

  Suddenly she had the vivid image of Solomon standing by the right window staring out at the lawn and the woods. It was like so many times before—she would come up the stairs quietly or down the corridor softly and stop to look in at him whenever he left his door opened. If he had his back to her, neither of them spoke, but after a few moments, he would say something that indicated he knew she had been there awhile.