Surrogate Child

by Andrew Neiderman

  “Is that what you did, Dad? You showed them you were human?”

  “I didn’t do so badly,” he said, but Solomon had already put him on the defensive. The point he was trying to make was lost, even to him. He retreated from the discussion.

  Joe simply expected Martha would agree with him when he said Jonathan was just like Solomon about his schoolwork. After all, she had been pointing out analogies all week long, hadn’t she? But she surprised him this time. She looked up at him on the ladder and disagreed.

  “No, he’s not, Joe. He’s doing his work because he wants to do it, not because it’s something Solomon would have done. They’re two different people, Joe.”

  “Huh?”

  She didn’t remain to explain it. He watched her hurry off back into the house and shrugged to himself.

  Women, he thought. They’re so damn inconsistent. Not like computers. He spent the rest of the time working and daydreaming about the future when men would be able to program their wives. And especially their children!

  That evening Joe sensed some subtle advances in the relationship that had been developing between Jonathan and Martha. It was as though Jonathan’s accident on the ladder had shattered what remained of any formalities and hesitation between them, not that much had. But Martha’s assimilation of Jonathan into their family and his involvement with them couldn’t be more complete. They joked, touched, and spoke to each other as though they had known each other all Jonathan’s life.

  Joe wasn’t sure how to react, for he saw now that it wasn’t simply a reincarnation of the relationship Martha had had with Solomon. There appeared to be a difference, and that difference pleased him. This evening Jonathan was careful to include him in every discussion and wait for his opinion, too, when he asked a question. There were times when Solomon was alive when Joe felt completely left out, even when only the three of them went to dinner. Martha and Solomon would carry on conversations about things Joe didn’t know and about things they had said to each other when he wasn’t around. He was often ignored.

  For this occasion, Martha put on her light blue tweed skirt and jacket outfit with the button-down dark blue cotton blouse, the one that had the white tie hand-painted on it. She washed and brushed out her hair so it looked more fluffed and full and then put on those gold-leaf earrings with the blue emeralds in the center. He thought she looked stunning.

  Jonathan dressed in the sports jacket she had had tailored to fit him and wore a pair of Solomon’s black leather loafers that were, as Martha had said, practically unused because they turned out to be too tight on his feet.

  “It was almost as if he were buying things in anticipation of Jonathan’s arrival,” she quipped, and Joe looked up in amazement as he polished his own black loafers. He could understand her pleasure over having the boy, but was that pleasure so strong that it wiped away the memories of all the pain? Usually, any references to Solomon left her face dark and her eyes tired. He didn’t understand it, but he wasn’t sure it was something he should pursue. He was still afraid of spoiling things.

  He rushed to finish with his shoes because he was the last to get dressed. They were both ahead of him, and he could hear them talking downstairs. Martha shouted up to tell him to hurry because they were hungry.

  As he came downstairs, he heard Martha and Jonathan kidding each other about their clothing and their appearance. The nature of their jokes surprised him. They sounded more like two teenagers. Their laughter was free and natural, and he envied them the warmth between them, but as soon as he stepped into the room, Jonathan brought him into the foolery.

  “And here he is—Mr. Munster,” he said, and she laughed.

  “Huh?”

  “He says we look like the Munster family from the old television show.”

  “I look like Herman Munster?”

  “Especially in the sports coat,” Jonathan said.

  “What?”

  “He’s right, honey. It’s time you bought some up-to-date clothing.”

  “Is that so? I want you to know I accepted an award in this jacket last year, and no one commented about my being out of fashion.”

  “Where was the award given, Transylvania?” Jonathan asked. Martha laughed hysterically.

  “All right, all right. So it’s a little long, and the collar is a little wide. I bet we’re still going to be the best-dressed people eating at Hong Fu’s,” he said.

  The rest of the evening went the same way. On the way to the restaurant, Martha acted like a tour guide pointing to out the homes of people they knew and the restaurants and stores they frequented. After everything or anything any one of them said, someone made a witty remark or a joke. The mood was light and relaxed.

  At the restaurant, they fooled around with the chopsticks and imitated television and movie personalities; they told stories from their past experiences. They weren’t loud or ostentatious, but Joe could see that they were the center of attention. Other patrons of the restaurant watched them with looks of amusement on their faces. He imagined that in their eyes they appeared to be the perfect little family.

  The only time during the dinner when Joe sensed a break in the mood was when Jonathan ordered egg foo yung. That was Solomon’s favorite Chinese dish, and he would order it nine out of ten times whenever they went to a Chinese restaurant. It used to annoy Joe that his son would spend ten minutes studying the various dishes on the menu and then conclude by ordering one of the more simple ones practically all the time. Whenever he commented about it, Martha would say, “Let him eat what he wants. He doesn’t like to experiment with food.”

  “That’s boring,” Joe said, and left it at that.

  However, now, as soon as Jonathan said “Egg foo yung” to the waiter, Martha interrupted.

  “Why don’t you order something more exotic?” she said. “They have so many wild and interesting things here.”

  “I like egg foo yung.”

  “But it’s so simple. I could make it for you at home.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I feel like it tonight.”

  “There’s just so much to choose from,” she insisted.

  “If that’s what he wants . . .” Joe said, and realized that somehow things had been reversed. It puzzled him. Martha was the one who looked annoyed now. She snapped her menu up in front of her and deliberately took longer to order her food. For a while afterward, they were left with a heavy silence among them that reminded Joe more of the old days. But, when the food began to arrive, things loosened up again, and the laughter and relaxation that had earlier characterized the evening continued.

  It didn’t end when they returned home, either. After everyone changed into more comfortable clothing, Jonathan joined them to watch television. It was something Solomon did less and less as he grew older, but Joe didn’t mind because whenever Solomon did watch television with them, he spent most of the time ridiculing whatever they watched, unless he watched something he liked.

  Watching television together started out well, but then Jonathan began making comments that Joe characterized as Solomon-like comments. If he closed his eyes and listened, he thought Jonathan even sounded like Solomon.

  Martha began changing channels to please him, only nothing seemed to be good. After a while the loose and jolly mood darkened. The three of them ended by staring blankly at the set, no one voicing any preference for anything.

  Joe was the first to go up. He was really tired from the house painting, and he knew he had a big day tomorrow. He was nearly asleep by the time Martha came into the bedroom. He vaguely heard her wash up and get into bed.

  A little after twelve o’clock, he opened his eyes because he sensed Martha was up and standing by the window that faced the rear of the house. He saw her silhouetted in the moonlight that came through the opened curtains. Before he had a chance to ask her what it was, she turned, somehow sensing that he had awakened.

  “What is it?” he whispered. “Why are you up?”

  “I
heard him.”

  “Heard him? Heard who?”

  “Solomon,” she said.

  Jesus, he thought, she’s having a bad dream, and she’s walking in her sleep.

  “Come back to bed, Martha. You didn’t hear anything.”

  “He did it because he was angry that we had such a good time with Jonathan tonight,” she said. She took a step toward him. “But don’t let him frighten you; don’t let him stop you from developing a good relationship with the boy.”

  “Christ, Martha. Go to sleep. Solomon’s dead. You can’t hear him.”

  “He was out there,” she said. “In the backyard. I went to look, but I knew what he would do.”

  “What did he do?” Joe asked. He braced himself up on his right elbow. Was it possible to carry on a conversation with someone who was walking in her sleep? She’s probably just confused now, he thought.

  “He hanged himself from the tree.”

  “Martha. Martha,” he repeated, speaking softly, “that was something he did well over a year ago. You’re dreaming.”

  “No, you don’t understand. He wanted to punish me with the sight again, but I didn’t scream.”

  “Martha, come back into bed. Come on,” he said, reaching up for her. He took her hand, and she let him lead her around to her side. She slipped under the covers.

  “He’s just terribly jealous,” she said. “It’s understandable, but he has no one to blame but himself.”

  “Martha, go to sleep. Come on. You’re having a bad dream.”

  She looked at him, and then she turned over and did fall back to sleep so quickly, he was convinced she was walking and talking in her sleep. It was nearly an hour before he could go back to sleep. He had to wait to hear her quiet, regular breathing. After that, he couldn’t help what he did, even though he felt foolish afterward.

  He got out of the bed softly and went to the window himself. When he first looked out, he thought he saw a thicker, darker shadow under the tree. It played tricks on his eyes, and he imagined that’s what had happened to Martha when she looked out. Understandable, he thought. In a way, we are being haunted, he concluded, and went back to bed, grateful himself now that in the morning Jonathan would be there to distract them and take their minds away from the memory of that fateful day.

  Perhaps we need this boy more than I ever believed we would, he thought.

  NINE

  Audra brought her knees up and embraced her legs. She smoothed down her blue and white-patterned, heavy cotton night gown and rested her chin on her knees to look down at Sally Kantzler, who lay on her side, her head against her hand, propped up on her elbow. For a long moment, the girls stared at each other. Sally was afraid to utter a word and chance breaking the spell. Audra had been speaking about the most intimate things, and Sally, although seventeen, had yet to experience any sort of significant relationship with a boy.

  Sally wasn’t ugly, but she was terribly shy and afraid when it came to romance. For now, her excitement came only through the vicarious experiences she enjoyed whenever a girl like Audra was willing to share. Few of her friends ever did, and it was especially rare for Audra to talk about these things, but something had happened to make her do so and Sally wasn’t about to chance any abortion of the discussion.

  As long as Audra could remember, other girls usually confided in her. She was the listener; she was the adviser. She had a strong sense of privacy, especially when it came to her relationships with boys, not that she had that many.

  Through her uncle Herman and her cousin Margret, she had met Steve Salvio, a neighbor of theirs in New York, who was now a freshman at City College, and they had carried on an off-and-on relationship for two years. Steve had known about her friendship with Solomon Stern, but neither she nor Steve had ever suggested they go steady and avoid any other romantic involvements, and since Solomon’s death, she hadn’t seen Steve or talked much with him on the phone.

  It was by no means a coincidence that Audra had chosen to be so open and revealing with Sally Kantzler. They had been friends since the first grade, both good students, both very conscious about their schoolwork. But Audra also saw Sally as somewhat innocuous in the sense that she wasn’t the kind who would run off with the tales to gossip in the girls’ room at school. Sally wasn’t very popular with the other girls, and she was disdainful of what she condescendingly referred to as “teenage business.” It was the way she generally characterized almost everything the others did. “They’re off doing their teenage business,” she would say.

  Yet despite Sally’s aloofness when it came to things teenage girls were doing, Audra respected her sense of proportion and her understanding of human behavior. In many ways, Sally was mature when it came to dealing with other people. She was the only one of her teenage friends who understood Audra’s feelings after Solomon’s suicide. She didn’t treat it like a front-page story in the Enquirer. Audra sensed that Sally empathized and felt the mental anguish Audra suffered. In fact, Sally was more sympathetic than Audra’s own mother.

  From time to time, Sally would sleep over at Audra’s house or Audra would go to Sally’s. Audra had asked Sally over this particular evening because she had come to where she felt she had to talk to someone about herself and Jonathan. She had arrived at the point where she was both frightened by him and attracted to him, and she wasn’t sure how to go about reconciling the seemingly contradictory feelings.

  In the back of her mind was also the idea that she had been permitting her imagination to run wild, and it was because of that that she was in this particular state of mind. She had little faith in this theory, a theory that now seemed more like a hope, and she thought if she could talk about some of it with a girl like Sally, she might better crystallize her feelings and arrive at a closer understanding of what was really happening between her and Jonathan.

  Sally had known Solomon and had gotten along with him. Audra even felt certain that Sally had a crush on Solomon. Once she and Solomon had discussed it, and he had made her angry because he seemed so arrogant about it, threatening to play with Sally emotionally.

  She bawled him out for having such a devious intention, and he did nothing like that to Sally, even though he teased Audra with the possibility occasionally.

  In any case, Audra believed that Sally was the only one of her friends who had an intimate enough understanding of the background and the people involved to appreciate what she was now going through. The two of them had begun the evening by doing their homework and then had changed into their nightgowns and sat around talking and listening to music.

  Audra eased herself into a discussion of Jonathan, almost the way someone began a series of sensitive negotiations. She began with references to relatively insignificant details about him, his appearance, and his behavior, testing Sally’s perception and seeing whether or not her intelligent friend had picked up as many oddities as she had and agreed on what she now considered the smaller aspects.

  “You know, of course, that the Sterns have given him Solomon’s entire wardrobe, and most everything fits him well.”

  “I saw he had on that blue shirt with the gold trim on the sleeves the other day, the one Solomon occasionally wore to school, and it suddenly occurred to me why I kept seeing something familiar about him all the time. I just never thought they’d give him all of Solomon’s clothes,” Sally said, and grimaced. “It’s ghoulish.”

  Sally had a pleasant, if not attractive, face. Her nose was a little long and the bone a little emphatic, but she had warm, light blue eyes and a dark complexion that had always been remarkably free of acne, something that symbolically separated her from the other girls and made it seem as if she had indeed skipped over what she would definitely consider a silly and uncomfortable aspect of adolescence.

  She wore her dark brown hair cut a trifle too short for Audra’s liking because she thought it brought attention to her round face and baby-faced cheeks, but Sally wasn’t the type who enjoyed spending time on her coiffure. She ha
ted makeup of all kinds and favored fashions that made her look older, even when some of the skirts and dresses made her hips look wider than they really were. She rarely wore jeans and a sweatshirt.

  “Didn’t it amaze you how quickly Jonathan made friends with all of Solomon’s friends?” Audra asked. Sally heard the tone in Audra’s voice and sensed that she was on an expedition. It excited her to be part of something like this, so she nodded quickly.

  “Yes, but then I thought he’s . . . more outgoing in some ways.”

  “It’s more than that,” Audra said. “He seems to know just what to say, just what they want to hear. It’s almost as if . . . as if he knew them as long as Solomon did.”

  “Really?” Sally sat up, her face became electric, the eyes brightening, her lips growing moist as her tongue moved out and over them nervously. “But how could that be?”

  “I don’t know. He’s bright; he’s doing well in school already. I helped him start to catch up, but . . .”

  “I’d never be able to tell he wasn’t there from the start,” Sally said quickly. “He’s answering questions, and he didn’t avoid taking Palmer’s exam even though Mr. Palmer said he could be excused because it involved a great deal of work that had been covered before he arrived.”

  “I know. And he got an A on that.”

  Sally thought for a moment and then shrugged.

  “So he’s bright,” she said, and started to lie back again.

  “No, it’s more than that.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just don’t know how to explain it. He’s like Solomon in so many ways, and yet . . .”

  “And yet what?”

  “He’s different,” Audra said, looking up. Sally sensed something very exciting was coming. Her heart actually began beating quickly. She held her breath, but Audra paused so long, Sally thought she wasn’t going to continue.

  “Don’t you like him?” she asked, chancing the question.