Off Teddy ran to join the other boys. She watched him go and worried that he would tear his shirt, or his trousers would ride up the leg in some rough boys’ game, and the others would see his scars. She worried about the awful things children say. That he was having fun did not lessen her concern. Still, she was glad to feel it, because it seemed akin to Ania’s concern, to a mother’s concern. Ellen tried on the feeling, stepped into it, pressed her palms against its walls, pushed to see where it would go. This was a regular exercise of hers. Sometimes she spent hours in a reverie of pretend motherhood. Other times she couldn’t stand it for a moment.
She knew Frank was watching her, so she turned to him. She brushed a fly from her shin.
“You could change your mind,” he said. “Adoption—”
“We can’t adopt him. He’s taken.”
“Of course not him. Another.”
She took a bite of the chicken sandwich, then wiped mayonnaise from the corners of her mouth with a napkin. She swallowed before she spoke.
“I want a child I love,” she said, “the way I love Teddy—or more. Aren’t you scared at the thought of taking a strange child into the house? No? It terrifies me. There are so many I don’t even like. Look at the bunch out there.” She pointed at the boys. “Who’s to say we’d get the right one? It’s not like a dress off the rack. We couldn’t bring it—him, her—back to the orphanage.”
“You underestimate yourself,” Frank said. “Given time, you could love any child.”
She slipped off her sandals and turned down the brim of her straw hat to shield herself from the sun. She crossed her legs and opened Teddy’s sketch pad in her lap.
“We don’t come here often enough,” she said. “It’s so beautiful, and we live so close.”
“People with children go to parks,” said Frank. “And old people whose children have grown and left home.”
“Don’t be cruel,” she said.
They sat a while without talking, looking around the park but never each of them at the same spot. Frank concentrated on the duck pond and the parking lot, Ellen on the children and the sky. Then Frank asked, “Which roses are these?” He tugged a nearby stem.
“Grandiflora,” she said.
“And those?”
“Trailing Memories.”
“I could cut one for you,” he said, pulling his penknife from his pocket.
“Don’t you dare. It’s illegal.”
“I’ve cut them before. That rose you get every morning on your birthday.”
She paged through the sketch pad, past Teddy’s uncertain efforts to copy white-crowned pigeons and Carolina parakeets from her Audubon book. She found a blank page and doodled with the colored pencils, drawing an oceanside landscape she had never seen, all wide beach and distant water. The afternoon disappointed her. She had expected that after lunch Frank would return to work and she would have Teddy to herself. Foolishness. There were actual boys about. Why would Teddy play with her?
Now he scrambled to escape the older boy, joy and panic on his face. When tagged, he fell, picked himself up, and with a grin and a shout started the chase anew.
“I don’t know why it bothers you,” she said, “having him around so much. I’d think you’d want him around, too.”
“It’s different for me,” he said. “I don’t know why, but it is.”
“You don’t feel age yet.”
“I’m older than you.”
“That doesn’t matter. I feel it closer now. And I don’t have the distractions of an office.”
“You bought him shoes today.”
“He’ll need good shoes for school. The ones he has pinch.”
He finished the soda Teddy hadn’t touched, tilting his head way back. She could see the stubble in his skin under his jaw. She leaned forward and kissed his neck. “Thank you for my annual contraband rose,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he said, and he squeezed her hand. Over the last few months, their conversations had been like this: quarrels and tenderness and misunderstandings. They faced a new life, and they were trying to understand what that meant and what they wanted now.
Teddy ran back to ask for soda.
“Please,” instructed Ellen.
“Please,” said Teddy.
When he leaned over to pick up a bottle, she could see under his collar a patch of rippled, bruised flesh, like a drying flower petal. Ellen had never seen all of Teddy’s scars. Though she had often washed his hands and his face, she had never bathed him. She suspected that he suffered from knowledge of his own skin, that although the physical pain of the fire had years since passed, he must wonder in confusion about his difference. She imagined that he inspected himself in mirrors when no one else was around.
Now the knees of his long pants were dirty. Mud on blue.
“He’s got to be hot,” Frank said. “Can’t we roll up his sleeves or something?”
“Ania’s afraid he’ll be teased.”
“They’ll tease him anyway,” Frank said, “because he dresses funny.”
She remembered a few nights before, at a party fund-raising dinner: everyone drinking new French wines, fantasizing about a Truman visit to the state, attacking the Republican assembly for dillydallying when what our boys needed was more housing and bigger state colleges. “And not just a guarantee on city construction bonds!” Frank had said, nearly shouting. “Real money. Real bricks and mortar.” There had been an Italian woman from Waterbury at their table, and while the men made jokes about Robert Taft and the Republicans, this woman complained to Ellen about school pageants and the extra grocery shopping and the spread of pink eye. When she asked how many children Ellen and Frank had and Ellen answered none, the woman said, “Ah, how wonderful to be free.”
Now, on the blanket in the park, recalling that harpy from Waterbury, she said to Frank, “You don’t want a child.” She had never known this about him, but she knew it now.
“I do, if you want one.”
“That hardly seems to be wanting enough.”
Ellen looked at her husband, and she thought he must have seen that she was about to cry, because he reached out to cup her head with his hand. She whispered, “You want a Democrat for governor more than you want a child.” She couldn’t hold back now, and the back of her throat felt clogged with phlegm; her eyes burned though damp. He fiddled with her earlobe and her earring, then leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “You can’t stop me from buying him shoes,” she whispered. “I won’t let you. If I love him, then I love him, and you have nothing to say—” She cried some more, and she smelled the piney scent of his cologne and was angered by his constancy and glad for it. He shifted on the blanket so he was closer to her, and she gritted her teeth as he put his arms around her. She rested her head on his shoulder, and sooner than she expected she relaxed into the familiar feel of him, and he let her stay there until she’d had enough.
“I’d best get back to the office,” he said. He cinched his tie. He kissed her forehead at the hairline. “I’m already late,” he said. “Try to get home before the rain, okay?”
She wiped her face as he disappeared among the rose bushes. He would have made a good father, damn him. She could tell because he was so gentle when she needed him, and she so often needed him, it seemed. She was struck by the idea that without a child of her own, she might always be a child herself, stubbing her toe and screaming all out of proportion, needing Frank to kiss the wound and make her feel better. But no. The proportion was right. The grief was real.
In the sketch pad she added a few tufts of grass to the beach and a seagull to the sky. The grief was real. She thought of how a week earlier, after Ania had finished cleaning Ellen’s house, the two sat for coffee at the kitchen table and watched Teddy through the screen door as he studied a daddy longlegs that crawled over the steps of the back porch. Talking to the creature, he was as unaware of the two women in the kitchen as the daddy longlegs was of him. Ania smiled, as if happy to be taken
for granted in this way. Then she began to say that she had never understood love until Teddy was born. Only then, because she knew how Teddy’s curled fingers made her insides liquid and how she had never felt any such thing before, not even love for her own mother. That awareness saddened her, because what was true for her likely was true for Teddy. “How do I say it?” she asked. “One hundred women could never sweep clean the house that holds how much I love him. But in the room where Teddy loves me, a little dusting, a little polishing, it’s done.” Ania twisted the corner of a napkin, and Ellen laid a hand over hers. Ania said, “Why am I crying? I’m so happy.”
Ellen closed the sketch pad just as the rain started. It felt pleasant at first, a balm from the heat, but then it fell faster and in dime-sized drops. She called for Teddy as she collected their plates and leftovers and the blanket, and by the time she reached the tarp raindrops darkened her dress over the shoulders, her bare feet slipped inside her sandals, and mown grass clung to her toes. The rain fell in curtains, faster than the ground could absorb it. She looked for Teddy in the crowd that stood shoulder to shoulder under the tarp. Other adults called out names. A dozen or more children still ran to and fro, laughing in the downpour. The older boy had stripped to his bare chest and short pants, then taken off his shorts, too, splashing around in his underpants and opening his mouth to the rain. Other boys mimicked him and stripped, all of them older than Teddy, and Ellen watched as Teddy—his hair plastered to the shape of his skull—began to do the same.
He unbuttoned his shirt and his sleeve cuffs.
He unlaced his shoes.
Now, clothed only in white underpants and socks, he looked toward the adults sheltered under the tarp. She caught his eye, and he hesitated as if worried she would call him back. But she didn’t. She knew Ania would, but she kept silent. She wanted, for once, to see him as his mother saw him. So she nodded her permission, and Teddy yanked off his socks.
She could hardly see his scars. At that distance, through the heavy rain, his skin looked no worse than the tanned flesh a boy might gain from beach sun. The children kept playing, and the older boy encouraged them, waving his arms like an orchestra conductor. Around him frolicked Teddy. With the others he marched in circles. Collided in accidental hugs. Fell in the wet grass and new mud. There was whooping and squealing and the drumming of rain across the tarp. Some children escaped the shelter to join the romp, but others who tried were seized by the hand of a grown-up.
Then the downpour moved on, leaving only a drizzle in the half light of thin clouds.
The children slowed their play. The older boy seemed to realize now that he was more than half-naked in front of adults, and he scrambled for his pants. Next to him stood Teddy, his body plain. Ellen saw for the first time his collection of dimpled patches. Light purple in some places and gray in others, with the ghost lines of stitchings still visible. A collage of his brief and painful history, and so lovely.
Other children gaped, too. Teddy looked about, and in his eyes there was no panic, only surprise that the game was over, and then a slow-born awareness that he and his patchwork skin had become the center of attention.
Children arrayed around him, all wet and grassy and mud-streaked in the unceasing drizzle, questions and curiosity in their postures and faces. Some stepped from under the tarp to see the fuss. As they did, Ellen clutched the blanket, wanting to sweep Teddy into it and save him from the cruelty of children.
But Teddy seemed not to care. He grinned, and his face radiated as if inspired by some grand joke he’d heard years before. He bowed to the other children in an exaggerated way, as a harlequin might bow to royalty. And he sang to them.
I’m a little teapot, short and stout.
Here is my handle, here is my spout.
When the tea is steaming I will shout,
“Come tip me over and pour it out!”
He mimicked the teapot, one arm out like the spout, another curled to his hip like the handle. He poured. He danced. He repeated the verse and poured again. Danced his difference higgledy-piggledy with whimsy and spunk. The older boy’s laughter was half-mocking, but that of the younger children sounded honest with delight.
When she gathered him wet into the blanket, and he was laughing, she could no longer hear the rain. She was filled with something louder, a passion new to her, one she’d not known through this summer or in the years before, something that could last beyond checkers and pencil sketches and new shoes that didn’t pinch. Teddy laughed in her arms, and she wanted him though she already held him, longed for him and had him and wanted him still. She had never felt so completely in the world.
On the walk home they surrendered to the drizzle and let the weather slide over them. She carried his wet clothes and admired his dance down the sidewalk, his little body still wrapped in the picnic blanket. He stopped for a moment beside an elm, and he opened the blanket, looked at his nearly naked body, and giggled. She squatted beside him—“My boy!”—and opened her arms to catch him.
He did not run to her. He said, “Mrs. Patterson!” and she let her arms drop to her sides. He said, “There’s a raindrop in my belly button, Mrs. Patterson!” and that world to which she had belonged fell away, carrying the boy with it, so once again she stood apart.
He squished the water out of his belly button, and she did not smile. They walked down Walbridge Road, and she did not even hold his hand when they passed the Griswolds’ house where his mother scrubbed and polished the bathroom floor, her dark hair (the color of his hair, she remembered) tied up in a haphazard bun.
Son of Captain America
THE BOY WATCHED FROM HIS BEDROOM WINDOW AS THE NEIGHbor beat the dog. The man used a branch broken from an oak tree. With one hand he pushed the dog by its collar toward the hard-packed ground and with the other hit its flank with the stick. The dog yelped and snarled, and together the sounds—the dog’s, the stick’s—sickened the boy. The dog was big, and white and black, and in the dark from the second-floor window the black part was hard to make out. But the boy knew the dog. He had petted it sometimes. He could picture its wet eyes, the scar across its muzzle, the fatty tumor over its ribcage that didn’t seem to cause the dog any pain even when touched. He remembered the trash-can smell of its breath. Elbows on the sill and palms against the window glass, the boy imagined what was happening to the dog more clearly than he could see it. Another yelp, and the boy’s father came into his bedroom.
“What the hell’s the racket?”
“Mr. Nardi’s hitting Tiny.”
“Jesus. He’s waking the whole street.”
The father threw open the window. Shower water dripped off him, and he smelled of Ivory soap. He wore a towel around his waist. The boy’s name was Franco. He was eleven years old. He called his father Pop.
“Nardi!” Pop yelled. “Cut it the hell out or I’ll come beat the hell out of you, too!”
“It’s my goddamn dog!” Mr. Nardi yelled back.
“It’s five in the goddamn morning!”
Mr. Nardi hit his dog again.
“Last warning!”
When Pop left the room, he ordered Franco back to bed, and Franco pretended to go. He paged through a comic book as the noise continued outside, and he read as if he were counting one-alligator, two-alligator …
“You—and—your—Commie—Masters—have—a—lot—to—learn—about—America!”
Through his open bedroom door, Franco saw Pop hurry down the hall to the stairs, still barefoot but dressed now in work pants and a dirty T-shirt, his face fixed in a familiar way. Franco had seen the look on comic-book superheroes who meant to save the world, and he’d often seen it on Pop, but on Pop it made Franco bite his fingernails. Mom in her bathrobe followed her husband to the top of the stairs. She saw Franco watching her and ordered, “You don’t go anywhere.” Then she ducked into his little sister’s room, shutting the door behind her.
Back at the window, Franco watched Pop snatch the oak branch out of Mr. Nardi’s
hands. Mr. Nardi punched at Pop, who slipped his head out of the way—didn’t even move his feet—then returned two left jabs square to Mr. Nardi’s nose. Mr. Nardi fled to his house, his arms waving like he was batting at bees. The dog retreated to a corner of its pen, and there curled itself nose to rump. Franco tucked himself into bed and waited, lying still, shivering though warm, until Pop came back.
“You have to get up for school in an hour,” Pop said.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Let’s have breakfast then.”
While Franco toed a slipper onto his foot, Pop gathered open comic books from the bed and stacked them neatly on Franco’s dresser. His face had changed now. He looked darker around his eyes and forehead, the way Franco’d seen people get when they thought hard, and the skin around Pop’s mouth twitched as if he couldn’t decide whether to smile or frown. He said, “I shouldn’t have hit him.”
Franco checked under his bed for the other slipper. They were his favorites. They looked like Indian moccasins. “He swung at you first, Pop.”
“Doesn’t matter. It was easy what I did. And mean. It’s easy to be mean. You gotta try for better, you know?”
On the walk home from school that day, Franco found the dog’s body left in the gutter for the street department to pick up. Franco was not alone when he found the dog. He was with his pal, Dominic. They had walked home together because they walked home together every school day, because they were neighbors and buddies. That day, though, neither had spoken to the other. Dominic was Mr. Nardi’s son.
The Greatest Show Page 6