What Is Missing

by Michael Frank

  Henry studied the letter as if it held some kind of encrypted clue. On the envelope Costanza had carefully, and clearly, written a return address, the address of her mother’s house in Recco, which Henry interpreted as a signal. Even if it wasn’t intended as a summons, Henry had decided to allow himself to be summoned. He had allowed himself to travel to Italy and find his way to this bench, and now … now what? That was the question.

  Again, yet again, he revisited that April evening. He had come home from work hoping, naïvely—stupidly he eventually saw it—to find something settled, or peaceful, or at the very least neutral or suspended, between the two of them. He had told Costanza the truth finally, and he had done what she asked. He had gone to see Andrew, and he had spoken to Justin by phone. He was so weary and so hungry that he even hoped to find one of her tasty dinners waiting for him in the kitchen. He had even—more naïvely still—allowed himself to hope that Costanza might by then have turned her attention to the remainder of the cycle, whose importance ought to have supplanted everything else.

  What he found instead was a quiet, dark apartment. Costanza was not in the bedroom. Her clothes were gone. In the library her desk was cleared. In the kitchen, on the table, was a note:

  I thought I knew you. Then I learned that I did not. I thought I knew myself. I now know I have a lot more to learn.

  If I start to speak about the drugs, the drink, my mind, the way my emotions were stirred by everything that I discovered in the middle of that brutal night, I’ll try to explain myself, and I can’t do that, not now.

  Nor can I see you right now, or speak to you. I have to go away. Please don’t come find me. Please.

  Henry tried her cell, then Andrew’s. Neither picked up. He went downtown to her apartment in the East Village—no answer. He phoned Justin, who said he had seen Andrew and described him as struggling, but Andrew had left earlier that morning and did not say where he was going.

  Henry raced up to the Upper West Side, to Judith’s. Her doorman told him to go upstairs. The door to the apartment stood open. He stepped through it and followed the scent of coffee down a long hall to the rear, where he found Judith in the kitchen, sitting at a round wooden table with a steaming mug in front of her. She was staring out over the rooftops.

  “Sit, Henry.” She calmly sipped from the mug. It was as if she were tasting those words the way she was tasting her coffee. Savoring it. Savoring the command, the tilt in her favor, for once after all these years, the knowledge she had of what had happened, because she knew, it was stamped all over her. He knew her well, too well still.

  Yet her face did not seem at all calm, once he really looked into it. Instead it was rigid with upset: a mirror of what he expected his looked like.

  Henry dropped into the chair. “Do you know where they are?”

  “Andrew,” Judith said slowly, “is staying over at his friend Kevin’s for a few days.”

  “And Costanza?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Judith wrapped both her hands around the mug, as though she was trying to draw the warmth out of it and into her palms. “Andrew wants to spend the rest of the school year here with me. He wants you to leave him alone while he thinks things through, sorts things out.”

  “But I didn’t do anything to—”

  She put up a hand. “This may come as a surprise to you, Henry, but I think it’s best if I don’t hear what you have to say. The truth is, you’ve become a memory to me, a figure from a previous chapter of my life—a previous volume. And I’d prefer not to change that now.” She paused. “The only thing I know is that we, you and I, could have done better by the boys. We should have spoken to them—both of them—when they were younger. We should have been open. It was a grave mistake in judgment. I see that now.”

  Henry went home. In the cold, quiet kitchen, he picked up one of the chairs—a wooden chair—and in a rage smashed it to pieces, tearing off its legs and back and breaking its seat into two jagged wooden planks. The chair was broken and so was he. Broken, shattered—mystified. What had he done to deserve this punishment? Withheld some information from Costanza? Not told his sons the truth about their origins? Not—for the second time of his life—known the woman to whom he had entrusted his heart?

  Costanza wrote that she had not known herself. Had he not known himself?

  He had made two people close to him angry. He had disappointed them and he had hurt them. He’d made mistakes—he saw that—but did he deserve to be abandoned, to be left in the dark like this, to know nothing about his wife, their marriage, their future?

  In the succeeding months Henry had had nothing else to go on. Nothing. Twice he ambushed Andrew after school; both times Andrew said he wasn’t ready to see him yet, and would he please go away. When Henry pleaded with Andrew to let him know, at least, if Costanza was all right, Andrew said that she was fine. That was all he said.

  Being cast into this limbo, this unending limbo, was a torture to Henry, as both Costanza and Andrew must have known. He was never given the chance to say to either of them, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told that one particular untruth about Costanza knowing all along about you boys—fine, not that untruth; that lie. But I was overwhelmed and afraid. He didn’t have a chance to say to them, How could you just disappear from my life, both of you? Or: I understand your anger—which he didn’t, he couldn’t, completely; but he was willing to try understanding on, just to see how it felt, or if it would change the way he thought, if it would stop him from waking in the middle of the night, sick and trembling with anguish and rage. He didn’t have a chance to speculate, for Costanza’s benefit in particular, if maybe the drugs had colored (darkened) her thinking, possibly even driven, somehow, her dramatic decision to abort the cycle and just vanish. These hormones are powerful, he might have said. I once had a patient who stabbed her husband in the thigh with a dessert fork merely because he questioned whether it was too soon to pick out a color for their baby’s room …

  He realized, as he thought this, that he might be looking to give her an out. If he gave her an out, might she see her way to giving him one? Is that what he was looking for? Not to feel guilty, not to feel responsible?

  As time unspooled, Henry was willing to look back over the whole arc of his behavior to see how he might have conducted himself differently. He was willing to listen, to try to explain. Yes, he was open to that. He thought he was open to that. He also, desperately, wanted to hear what Costanza had to say. He could do none of this on his own. All he could do was suffer, and that was what he had done.

  * * *

  The woman next to him on the bench didn’t even glance at him when she picked up her bags and moved on. He might as well have been invisible.

  Henry went on staring at the sea. When he found himself counting the boats on the water, he recognized that he was trying to postpone the inevitable. He would have to turn around and look at the house, really look at it. It was the next step in this journey, perhaps the last one he had worked out with any certainty.

  He turned around and faced the hill across the street above him. There it was. Costanza had described the house too, and she had shown him photographs of it. Large and square, it rose to four stories and had a hipped roof and a large garden. Like many of the houses in the area its detailing was rendered decoratively in paint. Bright yellow and pale green trompe l’oeil quoins delineated the corners, and painted frames outlined the windows. A band of molding with swags and leaves, also painted, divided the first and second floors. Only the shutters were three-dimensional, made of wood and colored dark green. The decoration made the house feel more like pastry than architecture; its buoyancy seemed at odds with what he knew about the lives that had been lived there.

  On the second floor a small terrace projected over the vestibule that contained the front door. This floor and the ground floor below, Henry knew, belonged to Maria Rosaria. Her grandfather had built the house in 1900, and it had been divided up over the generations. A pa
rlor, a bedroom, a dining room, and the kitchen were downstairs. A large marble staircase led up to the bedrooms. One of them opened onto the terrace, where a striped awning provided cover overhead.

  A laundry rack stood in one corner. Henry squinted at it. He couldn’t tell if the clothes drying on it were unusually small, or if he was just far away. He rubbed his eyes and decided they were likely an adult’s socks, or underwear.

  He looked at the house for the longest time. It seemed so fully inhabited. Costanza had spoken to him about it in so much detail that he could not regard it as a mere building. After staring at it for a few more minutes, he turned back to face the sea.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, above the birdsong, he heard a faint squeaking, followed by a gentle metallic clang. He pivoted around again and looked at the house. No one was at the gate at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe the sound came from another gate at the top of them, a gate Henry could not see but deduced was there.

  A twin gate, up at the other end. Installed years back maybe to keep children, Costanza herself once, from tumbling down the steep stone stairs.

  He looked so hard at the bottom of the staircase, the three or four steps that were visible from the bench, that the scene blurred. He blinked. Someone was standing at the gate now. He—it was a he—pressed a button to his right. A buzzing sound followed, and the gate popped open.

  Another squeaking sound, more robust this time, as the old hinges turned, the gate opened, and Andrew stepped through it.

  Henry blinked again to make sure his eyes, his eyes and his brain, weren’t playing tricks on him. They weren’t. It was Andrew, incontrovertibly. He was wearing running shorts and a Penn sweatshirt and was carrying a white plastic bag. A garbage bag. He looked in both directions to make sure that no cars were barreling around the curve, then he crossed the road and approached.

  Over a tightening chest Henry said, “Andrew, what—what are you doing here?”

  Slowly Andrew answered, “It’s my winter break. I’m visiting.”

  “It’s your winter break. You’re visiting.” Henry had to feed breath into his lungs. “You’re visiting … Costanza?”

  Andrew nodded. Well, half nodded. “I arrived a week ago. I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m going to meet Ben in Sicily.”

  “Ben?”

  “Schoenfeld.”

  “Your…” Henry could not bring himself to say the word brother. His mouth simply refused to form the syllables.

  “My friend.”

  It was Henry’s turn to nod. The nod was such a neutral, noncommittal act. So open to interpretation. Why had he not spent more of his life nodding?

  Nodding and breathing—as he was now, to try to slow his heart, clear his mind. “Has Costanza been here all this time? Since April?”

  “She spent a few months in Florence, at the pensione. Then she came up here.”

  Henry’s eyes shot involuntarily back to the upstairs terrace, to the drying rack with its tiny garments.

  Then his nose. It flared open. He took in the scent emanating from the bag of garbage Andrew was holding. It had the familiar acridity of—was it possible?—soiled diapers. Actually it was unmistakable, now that the thought had occurred to Henry.

  His stomach, his whole body, constricted. “Is there a baby?”

  Andrew looked away. Color came into his cheeks.

  “But how?”

  Andrew set down the garbage bag and faced Henry. “Costanza asked me to help her, and I agreed. I helped her the same way Isaac helped you and Mom all those years ago.”

  Henry forced his mind to slow down so that it might absorb this information.

  Semen produced by Andrew, his son, had impregnated Costanza, his wife.

  Andrew, his not son; Costanza, his not wife.

  Suddenly everything made sense. Dreadful, frightening sense. Henry didn’t know that he would ever be able to wrap his brain around this. He felt his heart. Just that. He felt his heart.

  “The baby is—well? Healthy?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “She.”

  A she. A girl. A daughter. Whose?

  “And Costanza?”

  “She’s good. She’s tired. The nights…” Andrew stopped there. He studied his father for a moment. “What about you? How are you doing?”

  “Me?” Henry seemed almost surprised that Andrew would ask. “I suppose I would say I’m not so okay really. Not at all okay.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  What did that even mean? Sorry that Henry was not okay? Sorry that Andrew had done what he had done? Sorry that they had come to—this?

  Andrew pushed his hair back off his forehead. “May I ask you a question?”

  Henry nodded.

  “When I first held the baby, I tried to imagine how it felt for you, when you first held me. Me and Justin.”

  “Wonderful is how it felt,” Henry said in a soft voice.

  “Wonderful is an interesting word, isn’t it? There’s the sense of great, but there’s this other sense too: full of wonder. Wondering at, wondering about. Did you ever sit there thinking, ‘This is my child—but not really? This is Isaac Schoenfeld’s flesh I am holding. Isaac’s and Judith’s genes, not my genes with my wife’s but his.’”

  Henry ran his hand through his beard. He knew he had to speak carefully. Everything had to be careful, much more careful, now. “Of course I had my moments. I would be lying if I didn’t say that. But, Andrew, you must understand that you and Justin arrived after a lot of planning, a lot of yearning. I can tell you that with the clearest conscience. You and your brother were wanted—both of you most certainly and unambiguously came from love.”

  Andrew gazed beyond Henry, at the sea. He didn’t say anything right away.

  “The way this baby happened was—unusual. I recognize that. And even though I’m sure I will always know her, and do my best to love her, and tell her the truth of how she happened, I believe, and Costanza agrees, that I have to live my own life, just as she has to live hers.”

  Henry nodded again. That nod was proving more essential than he could ever have foreseen.

  “And Costanza, what does she want? What is her plan—for herself, and her baby? Is she going to live here, with the mother she finds so difficult? Is she done with New York?”

  “You have to ask her yourself.”

  Henry leaned heavily into the back of the bench. “How? When?”

  Andrew looked up at the house. So did Henry.

  “She saw you sitting here all morning.”

  “I feel spied on.”

  “Just observed. And photographed.”

  “So you’re still taking pictures.”

  Andrew nodded. “I can take a break, but I can’t seem to stop.”

  Costanza saw him all morning. What did that mean? That she was waiting to speak to him, to apologize to him, or have him apologize to her, or to tell him, or ask him, what? Did she expect him to pick up where they left off nine months earlier? Now that she had her baby, did she want Henry back, did she want to come back to Henry? Her baby: who was not his genetic offspring but who, if they found a way (what way? How?) to resume, he would be raising, as he’d raised Justin and Andrew, who were also not biologically his? Well, he would not be raising her as he’d raised Justin and Andrew, since he was no longer that father; that man.

  Henry turned to look again at the sea. So did Andrew.

  “It’s hard to look away,” Henry said. “From all this blue.”

  “I sat here a bunch of hours myself, when I first came.”

  “Between the water and…” Henry looked back at the house and pointed. “That’s Costanza’s room, with the laundry outside?”

  “Yes. The terrace is off her bedroom. It gets all the sun. It’s the best place to dry the baby’s clothes.”

  The baby’s clothes. Drying in the sun, the tiny strips of white cloth looked like beacons, or flags—of surrender?—flapping in the breeze.

  Andrew followed his
gaze. “Maria Rosaria put Lia’s laundry out this morning, even though the sky was so dark when we got up. She said she knew this sky, she knew the rain would pass quickly.”

  “Lia.” A chill came over Henry. It began in his feet and shot all the way to his scalp.

  Andrew nodded. “Costanza named her for Grandpa. She said she couldn’t name her for her father because he chose death. Grandpa instead, despite everything, she said, chose life.”

  This was such deeply, such profoundly, uncharted ground. Henry hardly knew what to think, let alone how to act. A child, named for his father, had been born to his wife but was conceived by his son. She was his child and his grandchild, legally both, but genetically neither.

  For once Henry refrained from further comment. What more could he add that would matter? Andrew would live all his life with what he had done, what he and Costanza had done together, and his experience of what he had done would likely change over the years in ways that no one could predict. Henry had Andrew—and Justin—to reckon with, just as Andrew now had Lia.

  After a few moments, Henry said, “I hope, Andrew, that one day you and I might start to find our way back, or forward, to being connected again. Reconnected.”

  “I think we already may have, Dad.” Andrew picked up the trash bag.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I’m going to throw away the garbage. Spazzatura,” Andrew said, carefully enunciating each syllable. “Then I’m going to run to the Punta.” He gestured at the horizon. “There are these paths with stairs that rise up into the hills, then down again and along the slopes, over a footbridge and a ravine with a little stream. They lead you all the way down to the water. The whole thing takes a couple of hours. This place is…” He looked around. “Enchanted, like a fairy tale.”

  Henry had never much liked fairy tales. To him they were such bleak stories, with broken families, dead mothers, children who are lost, abandoned, stolen, or blighted—though sometimes also improbably, impossibly, lucky.