No Book but the World: A Novel

by Cohen, Leah Hager

  “I didn’t know that, Gerta,” said Don.

  “This was before your time—long before you were a student there.” Gerta nodded at him and her heavy clay earrings swung precariously from earlobes that looked thin as paper.

  “You wrote an article about my father?”

  “Just shot it, dear. I took the snaps. But he had the right idea, I thought. Your father. Beautiful man. He reminded me of Oberon. The fairy king. Beautiful school, all that wilderness, the woods, the freedom, the children going in and out of doors as they pleased. None of them wore shoes, as I recall. They looked like fairies, too, little rascal fairies. Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed . . . what’s the other one named?”

  Conversation around the rest of the table had ceased, and Gerta Hauptmann had taken on a new vivacity, the glow of her memory seeming to illuminate her bony features.

  “Moth,” supplied Tariq.

  Gerta turned to him. “But the reporter felt otherwise,” she recalled, frowning. “What was his name?” She appeared to consult Tariq. “He had terrible hands, I remember, quite hairless. And pink. Smug little hands. That was when all men wore hats . . . but I digress. Anyway, I was only the photographer. In the end, the words tell the story.”

  “What did he say?” asked Don.

  “The reporter? He wrote a snide—oh, a sneering piece, full of moral stuffing and . . . what is the word? Certitude.” She addressed Ava. “He said your father would follow his pupils into the woods, where they’d set up play areas, camps and forts and things, and observe them. Never interfere, not even when they got into fights. He said—this was the damnable line—he said your father was more primatologist than educator.

  “Of course, it didn’t do a bit of harm among those who really appreciated what the school was doing. My pictures didn’t do any harm either,” she added, demurely boastful. “Enrollment went up.” Gerta’s small fist thumped the table triumphantly. Cups rattled in their saucers.

  And over the crumbs and cold, pooled coffee, a kind of fermata settled.

  “Excuse me,” said Ava. She rose and took two steps toward the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom, but teetered so alarmingly that Richard pushed back his chair and rushed to steady her. When she turned to thank him, Dennis saw that her eyelids were at half-mast, and her speech sounded occluded, as if she were balancing a plum pit on the middle of her tongue. So he rose, too, and saw her to the bathroom—that she did not object to his help was further confirmation of how past her limit she was—and from there proceeded with her to his parents’ bedroom, where he settled her onto their bed, covered her with a woven throw, and lowered the window shade. On his way to the door, he heard her say, “Den,” in a crumpled voice. He went back and knelt beside the bed.

  Her eyes were closed, her mouth pinched. “I’m wretched.”

  Ambiguous little pronouncement: Verdict or complaint? Dennis stroked her forehead, hoping to make the vertical line between her eyebrows disappear.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she murmured.

  “There’s no chance of that.”

  “No, I didn’t—I didn’t want to lose you.”

  “What do you mean, Ayv?”

  In a cracked whisper: “I didn’t want Fred to move in with us when my mother died.” From behind closed lids, tears. “I wanted to keep . . . I wanted us to be—”

  Dennis passed his finger over her brow, willing it smooth. “Shh,” he said, even though her words had run dry. What else could he say? “Sh.”

  In time her breathing eased into the rhythms of somnolence. He watched her tenderly but with curiosity, too. He had a thought about Ava, one that had occurred to him in the past but which he would never share with her: it was that sometimes she seemed to have her own small impairment, a milder version of what, in her brother, was more plainly, more problematically manifest. Yet would Dennis have ever formed such a thought if it weren’t for Fred? Surely all husbands found their wives unfathomable to a degree. Surely everyone was a riddle, a muddle, a bundle of more or fewer broken parts. And just as surely, Ava saw in Dennis things she found inexplicable, without being moved to question his wellness, to wonder whether he was sound or impaired.

  Ava slept, the line between her brows gone at last. Dennis watched her and marveled at the ludicrous dignity of the human face in repose: stripped of sentience, pared to its composite parts, a cipher.

  • • •

  BACK IN THE MAIN ROOM Dennis sought out his mother. Meg was at the kitchen end of the room, working on the redistribution of leftovers. He let her know where he’d left Ava, and Meg murmured, “Poor thing. She hasn’t been sleeping well?” with such apparent cluelessness that Dennis was annoyed.

  “Well, that and the fact that Dad was doing his best to get her sloshed.”

  “Oh, Dennis, he was not.”

  “He was topping off her glass every three minutes.”

  “He was a little nervous,” Meg allowed, “a little . . . misguided about how best to show his concern.”

  Sarcastically: “Ya think?”

  “She didn’t have to drink it,” Kitty pointed out, sidling up behind him. She pried an edge of pie crust from its dish and chewed it smackingly by his ear. The three of them stood around the butcher-block island, where Meg had stalled in her task at the preliminary stage of simply gazing back and forth between an assortment of plastic containers and the serving dishes that had been cleared from the table. Everyone else had been shooed down again to the other end of the room, where they sank willingly onto the brown sofas there, beneath the skylight and the tall, graceful windows that gave onto the backs of the neighboring apartment block: a view of narrow gray and brownstone buildings; an intricate geometry of fire escapes; thoughtfully plotted miniature gardens and crisscrossing strands of holiday lights that had already, in the smoky light of late afternoon, twinkled on.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Dennis asked.

  “Just that. Dad might have been misguided as a host, but Ava might have welcomed getting blotto.” Kitty plucked an olive from the dregs of the salad bowl and sucked it impassively from between her fingers. Her flaxen hair, modishly cut, sparked out all around her heart-shaped face.

  “A little harsh, no? Given what she has going on right now.”

  “I don’t mean it to be harsh. But I don’t think we’re doing Ava a favor by ignoring her part in it. I don’t think we do anyone a favor by absolving them of their personal responsibility.”

  “In what way is she personally responsible for her brother being in jail?”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean responsible for drinking as much as she did.”

  Dennis thought of Ava curled in drunken slumber on his parents’ bed, of her garbled self-indictment and his own disloyal musings about how much she might share in common with Fred. He looked at Kitty now blithely feeding herself remnants of Stilton, nibbling up crumbs from the cheese board. “Certainly you’ve always made impeccable decisions under duress. What was that particularly impressive display of fortitude a few years back? When that dog-walker/musician guy broke up with you. Those were some solid choices you made, Katherine, giving up food and living on cigarettes and Ensure—”

  “Dennis! I can’t believe you would bring up Enzo.” She glanced toward the other end of the long room, where Tariq was changing Dilly’s diaper while she chewed on a board book. “I’m not saying I haven’t made bad decisions in extremis. I am saying they were my decisions and I take responsibility for them. Just because Dad’s clueless about refilling guests’ glasses doesn’t mean it wasn’t Ava’s decision to drink too much.”

  Dennis opened his mouth to return the volley, but was not sorry when their mother cut in. “Children,” was all she said, in the gentlest of tones; nevertheless the utterance was as effective as it was concise.

  It resulted in Kitty’s and Dennis’s exchanging the look they’d e
xchanged a million times: a look that did not forsake entirely their own lingering adversarial positions, but acknowledged shared amusement at their mother’s mellifluous protest. More than once Dennis had wondered if this wasn’t in fact the genius of Meg’s mild rebukes: perhaps she knew full well that the absurd softness of her appeal brought them together in silent laughter.

  Kitty fished a piece of oil-soaked arugula from the bottom of the bowl and licked it off her fingers.

  “Stop eating everything,” ordered Meg. “What are you, pregnant?” Kitty’s hands dove into her trouser pockets. Meg turned to Dennis. “You’re the engineer.” She handed him the stack of plastic food containers. “Figure out what to do with these leftovers.”

  “Not actually an engineer,” he demurred, accepting the assignment nevertheless. Dennis had dropped out of graduate school after one semester, sick at last of books and theories, impatient to get his hands on actual things. Score one for Neel Robbins, he’d grudgingly thought, while Don and Meg made valiant efforts to hide their fretful disappointment. Luckily, he’d had to temp only a few months before landing a job at the green-energy start-up Greensleeves.

  “Kitty, you go see if anyone needs anything. Where’s my grandbaby? Oh, having her bottle. Li-Hua looks like she’s dying of boredom. Why don’t you go ask Tariq to let her finish feeding Dilly?”

  A single grin passed between the siblings. They loved this about her, too: that beneath the dulcet tones lurked an efficient brigadier general.

  Afternoon progressed toward evening. The sky turned dusky, unfurled pennants of pink, then went swiftly, definitively black. The lights outside multiplied, illuminating other holiday gatherings in the apartments across the way, while above the rooftops and stretching west they plotted a pointillist picture of downtown. Gerta Hauptmann left first, ushered into a Gramercy-bound cab. Soon after, Chris and Richard and Li-Hua headed off for the F train back to Jackson Heights, and then Don and Tariq pulled wool hats on over their twin pates and went out for a walk with Dilly, who’d begun to fuss, in hopes that the motion would make her fall asleep. In the bedroom, Ava slept on. And in this way, Dennis found himself once again alone with Kitty and Meg. As if by prearrangement, the moment the umbrella stroller had been maneuvered out the door, the two siblings and their mother launched into the discussion they’d been longing to have, no antecedent necessary.

  Kitty turned to Dennis. “So is he getting out?”

  Dennis shook his head: Fred was being held without bail.

  “But I thought that was maybe going to change. At the pretrial hearing? Or detention hearing, whatever?”

  It hadn’t, though.

  “Why not?” Kitty demanded. She was reclining on one of the brown sofas—they all were now: shoes off, feet up on the cushions, throw pillows tucked under various parts of their anatomies—so that the vigor of her indignation seemed at odds with the languor of her pose. “Is he a danger to the public?”

  “It’s because he doesn’t have a permanent address, I think,” ventured Meg. She and Kitty lay at opposite ends of the same sofa, and Meg stroked her daughter’s stockinged foot. “It makes him a flight risk.”

  “Also no ties to the community,” confirmed Dennis.

  “Oh. That’s how law works?” Kitty drawled the noun, leveling accusatory looks at Dennis and then Meg, as if they might be the very legislators responsible for these rules. “So, what—you can’t get bail if you’re homeless?”

  Dennis explained what Ava had told him the lawyer told her: “It’s not cut-and-dried. It can depend on the nature of the crime, the way it’s playing out in the media, the feelings in the community, the whim of the judge. Apparently in Criterion, it’s not even a judge-judge. It’s a lay magistrate. They don’t have to have any legal training. The guy in Perdu, the magistrate there, he’s a local businessman.”

  “What kind of businessman?” Meg asked.

  Kitty snorted. “Does it matter?”

  “Ava said he owns a hardware store.”

  “Jeez. Well, what about the lawyer?” asked Kitty with new animation. “Is he any good? Do the lawyers in Podunk have to have legal training?”

  “Careful,” said Meg, tweaking her big toe.

  “What?”

  “You’re sounding like a snob.”

  “I’m seriously asking!”

  Dennis, from the adjacent sofa, considered his little sister. He was accustomed to people referring to her, almost matter-of-factly, as a beauty. Even Neel used to call her Bonny Kitty. Much of her charm resided in her energy: the liveliness of her chin, with its defiant whisper of a cleft; her high, smooth forehead pleating in consternation; her bright chicory eyes flashing at you expectantly; even her nose was lively, now wrinkling, now flaring. But he saw it as too much performance, for he’d seen it too often performed. And he could not shake the conviction that she was enjoying being outraged at least as much as she was genuinely experiencing outrage; that her sense of injustice and her indignation on Fred’s behalf thrilled her.

  Meg gave Kitty’s foot a reproachful little slap, but added, “Denny, love, how is the lawyer?”

  He told them what little he knew: that Ava hadn’t much liked Bayard Charles at first, that she worried he seemed quick to enter a plea, but then he’d gotten her name on the visitor list so she could see Fred, and now she thought he was becoming more invested in the case as he learned more about Fred, his background, the way he was, his peculiarities.

  Dennis used that word, there in the living room on Jane Street: peculiarities.

  No one said anything for a moment.

  Then Kitty propped herself up against her end of the sofa and looked pointedly at Meg. “Mom? I know we’re not supposed to talk about it, but what are his ‘peculiarities’?”

  Meg gave a slow, considered nod. Yet all she said was, “I don’t know.”

  “But you know what we mean.”

  “I do.” She squinted, as if into the vaults of memory. “But Neel and June never wanted to talk about it. I mean they didn’t want to give any sort of name to his . . . his condition. They wouldn’t have liked even that word. And it was . . . a politeness, or really a form of respect—”

  “What, not to mention it?”

  “I was going to say, to try to see it the way they did: not as a ‘condition’ you could separate out and—I don’t know, analyze, treat—but as part of the wholeness of the boy. Of Fred.”

  Kitty turned to Dennis. “Do you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Does Ava ever talk about it?” put in Meg.

  He hesitated, seeing the territory before him suddenly strewn with mines. He and Ava had made a practice, all these years, of eliding the subject of Fred. For Dennis it was simply a matter of following suit, deferring to his wife’s implicit wishes. He’d perceived how she worked to minimize his interactions with Fred, the way she’d encourage him to stay in the city whenever she traveled to Freyburg, or ask him to accompany her only when she knew Fred was away. Initially these efforts had struck him as odd. After all, Dennis had known Fred growing up; what was there to hide? (Although the fact of their families having known each other so long might explain why they never discussed his condition, parsed his Fredliness; it obviated the need. This might even, it had occurred to Dennis on occasion, be one of the reasons Ava had married him.) Later on he found her behavior insulting: Did she think Dennis insensitive, intolerant? Did she think so little of his love for her that she imagined he’d be easily put off? But eventually, as Dennis became more intimately acquainted with Ava’s own flickering strangenesses—the tiny foibles and quirks that set her apart from the world, that seemed to provide her with some necessary shade, as if she were a rare, delicate mushroom—he came to understand. Or to believe he understood.

  It was not Fred himself that Ava wanted to keep hidden. It was that part of her she feared bore too strong a resemblance
to him, that indistinct part that his presence might amplify, lend clarity and prominence.

  Dennis recalled the confession she’d made earlier, lying on his parents’ bed. I didn’t want Fred to move in with us when my mother died. Well, neither had he. So it had all been pretty convenient. Only now, two years later, did he wonder: How much of her disinclination stemmed from fear, fear of what might happen to their marriage, fear of whatever conclusions Dennis might form if not shielded from the daily reality of Fred? He shifted uncomfortably on the brown sofa, perpendicular to where his mother and sister lay cozily entwined. Did he bear some of that burden of guilt? Had he too readily accepted the solution of Fred’s going to work on the Cape? By the time he’d learned of this plan, it had all been arranged, apparently by June herself. But were he and Ava supposed to have countered with an offer of their own?

  No one—not June, not Ava, not Dennis—had mentioned the obvious: that Fred was good with his hands and the routines of manual labor. That Dennis was just starting his own home insulation business. That if Dave Alsop was willing to put Fred on his housepainting crew, Dennis might as easily offer to put him on some jobs closer to home.

  “Hello?” prompted Kitty. “What does Ava say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you have a thought?” Meg went back to stroking Kitty’s foot. “Dr. Manseau?”

  “Not actually a doctor.” Kitty’s degree was a master’s in psychology.

  “But you must have covered some of this in school. What might a diagnosis be? If you had to hazard a guess.”

  Diagnosis. That word even more of a betrayal than “condition.” And yet—Dennis glanced toward the hallway that led to the bedroom—mightn’t it also be a help, their speaking in these terms? Ava had said the lawyer asked some of these same questions.