The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  “Why?” Her face was spare and hard and scary-wonderful, like Georgia O’Keeffe’s or Martha Graham’s. There was nothing to do in the face of such a face but tell the unvarnished truth.

  “We’ve been more or less estranged since I was eighteen, and, even before that, we were never close. Nothing even close to close. I want to understand what made him the man he is.”

  “For your own benefit?” Her eyes were fiery. “Or his?”

  “Mine.”

  She smiled. “All right, then.”

  She fed us espresso in tiny black cups and lemon ricotta cookies on square black plates. And when she had drained her cup, she began to talk. She was a mesmerizing speaker, her facial features full of fine-tuned eloquence, her right hand moving like a dancer at the end of her wrist, the rest of her still and taut.

  “My father was an accountant who wished he were a mathematician. He loved numbers; they were the only thing for which he had any affection, as far as I could detect. He wasn’t a kind man. Now, I see that his bitter disappointment in himself and his life warped him. He was smart enough, but not brilliant, and he hated that. When I was a child, though, I just thought he was plain mean. Because he was mean, especially to Wilson.”

  Barbara shook her head and shrugged, with such languid grace that it looked like a piece of choreography. “Some fathers like that would have seen their second chance in a child like Wilson. They would have basked in reflected genius and trumpeted the boy’s every achievement to the world. I know this isn’t a good way to parent, but it would have been better than what my father did to Wilson.”

  “He undermined him?” I asked.

  “At every turn. He mocked his achievements, reveled in his failures, although there weren’t many of those. And I’m talking about from as far back as I can remember.”

  “That’s rotten,” said Ben.

  “Yes,” said Barbara. “That’s just the word for what it was.”

  “What about your mother?” I asked.

  “My mother was the sort who kept her mouth shut. I think she was cowed by my father. I certainly was. A lot of people were.”

  “Wilson, too?” I asked, trying to imagine Wilson being cowed by anything.

  “No, I don’t think so. Although it was impossible to say what was going on inside Wilson’s head. Maybe he was hurt; maybe he secretly wanted my father’s approval. The older I get, the more I see this as likely. On the outside, though, he seemed to despise my parents, roundly.”

  “Always?” I asked.

  “Possibly,” said Barbara drily. “I’m four years younger and only caught on to it when I was six or thereabouts, but even then Wilson had the air of someone who was capable of despising precociously.”

  At this, Ben’s lips twitched into a wry smile.

  “Ah,” said Barbara to Ben. “I take it you know him.”

  “Knew,” said Ben. “I’m pretty sure he despised me, too.”

  Barbara shrugged. “What can you do? What can anyone do with a person like that?”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I adored him,” said Barbara.

  “Oh,” I said, startled. “So did I.”

  She gave me a sharp look. “I got over it, with effort. How about you?”

  “I’m working on it,” I said. “Getting close, I think.”

  “Excellent,” she said. “Possibly it was just a way of protecting himself against my father, but Wilson’s problem seemed to be that he was so smart that he thought smart was everything, which is terribly wrong, of course.”

  “Did he have friends?” I asked.

  “He didn’t do well with other kids, although no one bullied him. We didn’t talk much about bullying back then, not like people do now, even though it happened all the time. But Wilson was too big for his age, maybe, and too un-invested for the bullies to truly take an interest. It’s hard to hurt someone who doesn’t give a damn about you. At the time, I couldn’t tell for sure, but, when I look back, I see that he was lonely, lonely without realizing it, which might be the worst kind of loneliness of all.”

  “He had you, though,” I said.

  “He did, such as it was. A long time ago, when my first grandchild was a toddler, I began to hear my son and his wife use this term ‘parallel play,’ and I realized that’s what Wilson and I did, even though he didn’t play in the traditional sense. He read or wrote in his notebook or performed scientific experiments, while, nearby, I colored or played with jacks or Tinkertoys or dolls. Later, I mostly drew. I loved to draw. He would let me be near, but he never asked to see my pictures. He only looked at them when I showed them to him. And then—”

  She broke off and her fingers curled into a soft near fist, as if she were holding something tiny and breakable.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He changed, got colder, angrier, even more distant. I believe he hated us. He was gone or in his room almost all the time. It was the summer before he started eighth grade.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

  Sorrow filled her face, and she seemed about to explain, but she just popped open her fingers in a single-handed, shoulderless shrug.

  “He went through a rough patch I suppose you could say. In any case, that year, he applied to boarding school. Did it all himself, researched schools, picked one, filled out all the paperwork, interviewed with a local alumnus, applied for financial assistance, got my parents to agree to it all, packed his things. He even wanted to take the train, but, for some reason, my parents insisted on driving him. I went along. We didn’t stay for more than an hour, didn’t attend the parent reception or go on the tour. It was clear that Wilson couldn’t wait for us to leave. I sobbed all the way home in the car.”

  “You were, what? Ten? That must have been awful.”

  She smiled. “Tragic. I would never have admitted it to myself, but I think I knew he was gone for good.”

  Carefully, I said, “I visited the school and looked up his records. I saw that he changed his name before eleventh grade. And stopped listing a home address.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s when he emancipated himself. At an honor student function, he met a member of the school’s board of directors, a man named Cleary. He was rich. He didn’t adopt Wilson, was more a benefactor, like something out of Dickens. I guess Wilson changed his last name in order to honor him because he was never actually a member of the man’s family. I don’t even know how much time they spent together. But apparently, as difficult as he was, Wilson could charm people when he needed to.”

  “He still does,” I said.

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Barbara. “The school gave him a stipend on top of his full scholarship and enrolled him in work-study. It had to have taken some finagling, as well as some string-pulling on the part of Cleary, who was a very fancy attorney, but, at sixteen, Wilson was able to demonstrate enough financial independence to get legally free of my parents. And that was it.”

  “It?” said Ben. “You mean, he never came home after that?”

  “Never. Not one time.”

  “Really? Your parents agreed to that, even your mother? She didn’t fight him on it? She didn’t try to get him back?” he asked.

  There was my Ben, full of the bewilderment of one who’s been adored by at least two, sometimes three, sometimes four parents his entire life. But I got it. Or, if I didn’t quite get it, I wasn’t stunned. I knew how easily some people could let go of their children.

  “You know, I think my mother admired him for it, at first,” said Barbara, “took it as a sign of his independence. I’m sure my father was jealous because he was jealous of everything Wilson did, but he was also probably glad to be rid of him. However, no one can ever quite know what’s going on inside other people’s hearts, especially when they’re closed-off people like my parents were, and I never talked to them about it, not directly. But, no, they didn’t fight for him. When my father died, it was the first time I ever saw my mother cry about Wilson, and
it was mostly out of anger. She wondered what kind of person would fail to show up at his father’s funeral. He didn’t so much as send a note.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “Did you fight for him?”

  “I wrote him letters, sent him drawings I’d made, and when I was older, over the years, I tried to get in touch with him now and then. Never in person—I’d grown too proud for that—but I wrote him at the university, called him a few times. The one time I persuaded him to speak with me—I was twenty-one, about to get married, and I suppose I felt a surge of family feeling or something—he told me to let the past go. So I did. He erased me, and I erased him back.”

  “Why do you think he did it?” I asked.

  Her eyes flashed scorn, and for a moment, I could see a trace of Wilson.

  “Well, that much seems obvious. We didn’t fit into his story,” she said.

  “Yes, but why not make you a footnote, a two-sentence paragraph?” I said. “I’ve thought about this, and I still cannot figure out why he had to erase you. He told my mother that your parents had died in a car accident when he was at boarding school. He never even mentioned a sister. Why?”

  Her dancing hand dropped to her lap and she sat, thinking. Then, slowly, she said, “The boy he had been, up until he was twelve and grew hateful, would not have gone so far, I don’t think. He would have left and stayed away. He might never have spoken to my father again, but he would not have cut us off like a diseased limb.”

  “Did someone—hurt him?” I asked.

  Barbara said, gravely, “Abuse, you mean. Physical or sexual. No. Nothing like that. But he was damaged all the same.”

  Again, I knew that she was holding something back. I waited, but she didn’t say anything more. Presumably, she had been harboring this piece of Wilson’s story, which was also her story, for decades. Who was I to try to wrench it from her now?

  “Still,” she said, hotly, “people have wretched things happen in childhood and they grow up. They grow past them. Nothing can justify the way Wilson, the adult Wilson, behaved toward a sister who did nothing, God help her, but love him.”

  She glanced at her wristwatch, a plain, heavy face on a wide black strap.

  “I fear I must leave in a few minutes to meet my husband for dinner. He’s just getting out of a meeting, now.”

  “Your husband?” I said. For some reason, despite the fact of her three children, the thought of her being married startled me.

  She smiled, luminously, and it was as though every edge she had softened. Whatever had warped Wilson into a failure at loving his fellow man hadn’t warped Barbara. “My sweet George,” she said. “Forty-five years.”

  Then, she looked straight at me and said, teasingly, wrinkling her sculptural nose, “I triumphed, you see. One can be dumped by the great and terrible Wilson and still live a happy life.”

  “That’s my plan, too,” I said. I glanced at Ben, who gave me an encouraging grin and a thumbs-up.

  Just before we left, I asked to go to the bathroom, mostly so that I could see more of Barbara’s marvelous house. Luckily, the powder room was at the back of the house, which meant that, on my way to it, I got to walk through a study, and the dining room, and the butler’s pantry, and the kitchen. The place was perfection, every inch. It was on my way back through the dining room that I noticed: first, the wall hanging—wild and delicately spiny, like a cluster of sea urchins made of glass—and second, the chandelier over the table—hundreds of minute iridescent blue and silver glass droplets pouring like rain from a circle of steel. As I was staring up at it, the lights in its center came on, making me gasp. Barbara stood there, by the switch.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s one of hers.”

  I nodded toward the piece on the wall. “That one, too.”

  She nodded.

  Barbara lifted her hands. “I guess I am not as good at erasing people as I would have had you believe.”

  “You’ve been keeping up with him,” I said.

  She flicked her hand, impatiently. “I have no interest in his career, his accomplishments.” She gave me a tender look. “I’ve been keeping up with you. His family. I just—I thought someone should, someone from Wilson’s side.”

  “My writing. You said you looked me up. Did you mean yesterday?”

  “Yesterday and a long time ago, too. I’ve looked you up over and over. Does that make you feel infringed upon? That I was out there all along, keeping up with you as best I could?”

  “No,” I said. “How could it? It makes me feel watched over.”

  She leaned against the wall and briefly touched her finger to the nosepiece of her glasses. I swear I saw tears in her eyes.

  “I’ve wanted to know his family. I couldn’t help it. But I never thought I would.”

  The clean blue rain-light from Caro’s chandelier fell over the room, over the table, walls, floor, over me and Barbara, my aunt.

  “There are more of us,” I told her. “I’m just the beginning.”

  AFTERWARD, I INVITED BEN for coffee in the pool house, mostly because I wanted to drink coffee with Ben in the pool house, but partly because I wanted to show myself, Ben, Wilson, the whole world, that I could. Because he’d driven us to visit Barbara, we were in his car, and the fact of Ben’s car in Wilson’s driveway gave me a small, petty thrill of satisfaction. We were halfway across the dark yard, leaves and stalks crunching under our boot soles, stars glittering, when I said, “She doesn’t look like him at all, does she?”

  “No,” said Ben. “But she looks like you.”

  “She does? I always thought I looked like my mom.”

  “Your face does, but you have Barbara’s hands, and her neck, and the way her head, you know, moves around on her neck.”

  I stopped in my tracks and spun to face him. Since he’d only been walking a foot or so behind me, he almost crashed into me. Ben was right there, so close. I could see his breath, the thimble-shaped shadow above his upper lip. To steady myself, I tried to remember what that was called, that indentation. I stood thinking for so long that Ben said, “Hey, Taisy, you okay?”

  “Her hands look like mine?” I said. “See, you’re just flattering me now. Shamelessly.”

  “Come on, you’re saying you don’t see it?”

  I pulled off my gloves, stuffed them into my pockets, and held my hands out in front of me. They were long and pale in the dark, ghost hands.

  “Her hands are like ballerinas,” I said.

  “Like yours.”

  “No, I don’t mean they are like the hands of a ballerina. I mean they are like ballerinas themselves.”

  “I know.”

  “So delicate and supple. And they dance. Pirouettes. Arabesques.”

  “Like yours,” Ben said again.

  I stared wonderingly down at them. “Really? You mean it? If that’s true, how have I never noticed?”

  “Because they’re yours.” He shrugged. “I noticed.”

  We stood there, so close to each other, with the stars hanging right over our heads, looking down at my two hands like they were rare, precious objects, the kind of things Caro might make out of glass, and that’s when I knew, all at once, without a trace of doubt, that Ben loved me. Ben loved me in exactly the same no-holds-barred, body-and-soul, cliff-diving way I loved him. It was a pure and simple certainty.

  “Philtrum,” I said, looking up at him.

  “What?”

  Briefly, I touched the dent between his nose and upper lip. “I see your philtrum in my dreams. Along with your zygomatic bone. Not to mention your zygomatic arch.”

  “You’re the first person who ever has mentioned my zygomatic arch.” His voice was light, but I’d felt him shiver at my touch. I put my hands in my pockets. After I’d said what I needed to say, there would be no end of touching, but for now, I wanted the moment to be as direct and pared down as possible.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “Willow was right when she said that I didn’t love you enough, back when
we were eighteen. But I would love you enough, now. I swear I would.”

  Ben’s face was completely still.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t just love you enough. I’d be relentless. I’d be so over the top, like those storms that pummel the coast with a hundred-fifty-mile-an-hour winds and three feet of rain.”

  Ben smiled but only with the corners of his eyes. “You’d be a love hurricane is what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, and even if you don’t let me, I’ll love you like that anyway because I just can’t help it, and a hurricane without a coast, flailing around out there by itself, well, it’s just sad.”

  Ben didn’t take me in his arms or laugh for joy. Instead, he looked at me, not adoringly or angrily, but like he was trying to figure me out. Even in the darkness I recognized it: it was his physics face.

  “You would really want to do that again?” he asked, finally. “Be Ben and Taisy? After all this time?”

  “I never stopped,” I said. “Even when there was no Ben, I was Ben and Taisy.”

  For a long time, Ben was silent. Then, he said, “But I did stop.”

  “What?” I shook my head in disbelief.

  “I told you,” he said. “I boxed it all up and left it behind.”

  “No. You might have told yourself that, but it’s not left behind. It’s right here.” I took hold of his coat sleeves and tugged. “Right here. Ben and Taisy. Don’t tell me you don’t feel the same way.”

  He pulled away from my grasp and took a step back.

  “That whole first year, every time I got a letter from you, I put it in a box, unopened, and when I went to college, I left that box in my dad’s basement.”

  “You never read my letters?” I felt sick.

  “And then when I went to college, I made my roommate get the mail and throw away anything you sent before he even got back to the room.”

  “God. You were that cruel?”

  “Cruel?” Ben bit out the word. “Do you have any idea what it cost me? To not read those letters?”

  “How could you not read them? You were ruthless.”