The town of Catskill announced its arrival with a succession of hand-painted welcome signs. It wasn’t long before we were in farmland, with cows and barns and bales of hay scattered around the cropped fields, wrapped in white plastic, which made them look like gigantic marshmallows. Karen opened the windows and the sweet grassy smell of the sun in springtime filled the car.
I sensed a tiny glimmer of the kind of peace and comfort the country used to give me when I was still capable of experiencing the full range of human emotions. Jake was always telling me to stop blaming everything on the autism. He said that no one our age reacts to the glories of the world with the same kind of intensity they experienced when they were young.
My usual response to the first sight of a cow or a barn or a grain silo was to make sure that Danny saw it. I tapped on the glass to try to get his attention, but his eyes stayed glued to the television screen. Jonathan acknowledged my tap with an eager grin and an even more eager wave. I waved back.
I felt the same about Jonathan as I had during those playdates eight and a half years ago: I felt sorry for him but his insatiable hunger for affection repelled me. Beholding it made me feel grateful for Danny’s total lack of interest in anyone who wasn’t his mother or his father; yet if Danny had waved at Karen as Jonathan had waved at me just now, I would have called Jake right away to rejoice with him about it.
For years we had been wishing that Danny would show some interest in humanoids for reasons other than how tall they were, how much they weighed, the color and texture of their skin and the year and date of their birth. Nevertheless, we couldn’t help feeling that maybe Danny was lucky to be so emotionally self-sufficient, to be so irrevocably himself. We liked to believe that this was because somewhere in that peculiar brain of his he knew he was loved.
Danny’s complete lack of self-consciousness, vanity, shame, jealousy and pride; his utter disregard for what other people thought about him; and his freedom from the emotional burdens that plague most humans created the illusion of strength. I wanted to believe it was strength. But I knew it wasn’t. I knew it was a terrible weakness.
Sometimes, when Jake and I thought about what would really happen if our happy son ever made that big breakthrough we had been working so hard for him to achieve, we would wonder if we were doing the right thing with Danny. What would happen if he ever woke up completely? If one day he discovered a need that he had never known existed. Jake and I wouldn’t be enough for him anymore and his next discovery would be that he was lonely.
We were waiting at a stop sign at the end of a country cemetery now. Off in the distance I saw a woman in a blue dress banging her head against one of the tombstones.
At last Karen turned into a long circular driveway at the end of which was an old farmhouse and a red barn and a vast stretch of lawn.
“We wanted to find a place away from everything. When Harold is ready to retire—sometime in the next five years—we’re going to move here and say good-bye to the city and all its bullshit forever.”
She had told me there was a forest on one side of the house, and there it was. On the other side were some twisted old apple trees, and on the front lawn, slung between the trunks of two colossal maples, was a purple, red and orange polka dot hammock.
As I stepped out of the van, I felt enveloped by the sudden silence. Then I felt a thread of something very delicate touch my forehead and mouth, and as I waved my hands in front of my face to wipe it away, a slender strand of a silk-like substance became visible in a stray shaft of light, and I looked up and saw an inchworm dangling from the droopy leaves of the big weeping willow.
“We’re here, Danny,” I called out, knocking on his window. “We’re in the country. Look, an inchworm,” I said. Danny loved bugs, especially if they had interesting names: stick insects, pill bugs, dung beetles, inchworms. I opened the door to his side of the van. He sat there, bleary-eyed from three straight hours of Pokémon. Then, without warning, he jumped out the door and started crawling in the grass. Soon, he was standing up with a four-leaf clover in his hand. It was the fourteenth he had found in the past three years.
At the entrance to the house was a hand-painted wooden sign that said, welcome to our happy, happy home. Karen had once mentioned that arts and crafts were a hobby of hers. Everything she had told me about her childhood infused the block of wood with yearning and heartbreak.
I had mentioned to Karen that Danny liked swimming, and hiking in the woods and eating out at restaurants, and before taking the boys upstairs to set them up in front of the television, she assured me that she had a bunch of fun activities planned. “But we’ll also need to spend time recuperating from our little outings, because, let’s face it, it’s hard work being with these kids.”
Karen left me in her elaborately decorated living room while she took the boys upstairs to Jonathan’s room. There were champagne satin drapes slung over tasseled braided ropes and crystal chandeliers and gold satin sofas and Oriental rugs and vases, and original Victorian-looking oil paintings hanging on the walls. Still, ornate as the decorations were, the room didn’t have that patina of invulnerability that the rooms of the wealthy usually have. For one thing, it was very messy. A flannel shirt hung over the back of one brocade armchair, and there was what appeared to be an oil stain on one of the satin sofas. Newspapers and pieces of unopened mail lay scattered on the floor, and the toe of a worn-out pair of running shoes was stuck beneath the foot of a china cabinet.
The Persian rug was scattered with sooty footprints made from the ashes that had spilled out of the fireplace. A collection of framed pictures sat on the mantelpiece and I went to look at them. There was a photograph of baby Jonathan sitting on the shoulders of an older man, whom I assumed was Harold. I had already formed a picture of Harold in my mind—he would be stocky and jovial, with a balding head, and the face that looked back at me from the picture frame bore a remarkable resemblance to the face I had imagined. Next to it was a picture of Harold with his arm draped around a beautiful young woman who was dressed provocatively in high-top boots and a tight-fitting, low-cut red dress.
“Is this Harold’s daughter?” I asked Karen when she came downstairs. “She’s gorgeous. I didn’t know he was married before.”
Karen laughed. “That’s a picture of us on our honeymoon.”
“That’s you?” I asked, not bothering to try to hide my astonishment.
“That was me,” she said.
“Wow. You’re quite the trophy wife.”
“Harold’s not the one who got the trophy. I’m the one who got the trophy. I really don’t deserve him. But he’s mine.”
“What a lovely thing to say, Karen.”
“It’s a pretty funny story. Can you keep a secret?”
And then, not bothering to wait for me to respond, she went on to tell me how she and Harold met. She was living as a high-priced call girl in Los Angeles at the time, and Harold was one of her clients, she informed me in the same offhand way she said everything.
“I was his favorite hooker. And soon I was his only hooker.” On their tenth assignation, Harold showed up with a nine-carat emerald-cut diamond ring. He decided they would move to New York City, to get a fresh start.
“He said we would just put it all behind us. He concocted a story about how we met. That I had come to him with a broken leg after a water-skiing accident. He’s been the only man in my life ever since. Not that anyone would want me like this,” she said, pulling up her sweatshirt and grabbing hold of a big hunk of belly fat.
“I have Jonathan to thank for this. Harold put me on a diet of three-thousand-calorie protein shakes when I was pregnant. He wanted to make sure we had a healthy baby. What a joke that turned out to be. I suppose I could lose the weight easily enough. Bulimia used to be a specialty of mine. But to tell you the truth, it’s a relief being able to walk down the street without men hitting on me all the time. Except I have to say peo
ple are not very nice to us fatties.”
“What about Harold?” I asked.
“Harold?” She laughed. “Harold just says there’s more of me to love. Even if it was my body that got me to him to begin with, he says it’s my soul he loves. To tell you the truth, I think he might prefer me this way. The guy’s a gem. But like I told you, he’s a lot older than I am, and who knows how much more time we have left to be together. That’s another reason I came up with my plan.”
It was then that Karen told me that she had decided to send Jonathan away to a residential school.
She said that it took her a while to get Harold on board with it. He was so madly in love with the kid. But she had finally managed to convince him that living away from home would be the best thing for Jonathan. How else would he ever learn how to be independent?
“This is the hope all of us fools cling to, isn’t it? It’s so pathetic,” Karen said. “I don’t buy it. I never did. Not for most of the kids I know, and certainly not for Jonathan. But Harold’s head is so stuck in the clouds when it comes to Jonathan, that’s what changed his mind about sending him away. The idea that Jonathan could learn how to be independent.
“I had to look at seven schools until I found one that would be acceptable to Harold—and acceptable to me, too—because I really do love the little fucker,” she said.
When Karen called to make arrangements for this trip, she told me she had lost all faith in the willingness or the ability of any educational institution to do what it took to help a child like her son. She said that Jonathan’s speech therapist used to have him play video games during what were supposed to be his speech therapy sessions. And the job development counselor stuck the kids in the dark basement of some department store stamping shoeboxes all day. Yet now here she was telling me that she had decided to institutionalize her son.
I had little hope of influencing her decision. Nevertheless, that was my intention when I told her about a trip Jake and I once made to Boston with Danny to see a residential school that The District wanted us to visit. We had no intention of ever sending Danny away, but we knew that it would work against us if we didn’t take him to see the school.
The city paid for a limousine to drive us there. The principal seemed to be very proud of how neatly the children—all of whom were dressed in uniforms, the boys with crew cuts, the girls with the same short haircuts—marched in single file to class (“like little soldiers”). In order to maintain discipline and keep them in “tip-top shape,” the students were required to jog around the campus for an hour every morning before breakfast and for an hour every evening before dinner.
On the way out of the school, I saw a mother in the parking lot bent over the hood of her car. I went over to her and asked if there was anything I could do to help. I put my arms around her and she told me that last week the police had carted her eight-year-old son away in handcuffs. When I asked her why, she told me that he had talked back to the principal.
“Maybe he yelled at him,” she said, explaining that he did that sometimes when he couldn’t find the words to express what he wanted to say.
“So I guess you’re going to take him out of here,” I said.
“No. I can’t,” she responded. And looking at me with eyes that were too bereft for anger, she told me that all the other residential schools were even worse than this one.
I asked Karen where the school they had in mind for Jonathan was located and she told me it was in a beautiful rural area in Phoenix, Arizona. Right near the Phoenix Mountains. They took the kids hiking every weekend. It was called The Miracle School.
“Harold fell in love with the place,” she told me. “Jonathan seemed to like it, too. He was ecstatic about the TV, which has a screen the size of a movie theater screen. And the indoor swimming pool. And the petting farm. It’s part of the ‘therapy,’ they say.
“Of course, he has no idea he’s going there. Anyway, when we got back, I set everything in motion. We should be getting the acceptance letter in a couple of weeks. I figure the kid should be settled there by the time the spring semester rolls around.”
I was shocked to hear that the school she had in mind for Jonathan was over two thousand miles away. How could she think of doing this to a child who was so desperately in need of her love that he was afraid a glass wall would make her disappear?
“We’re taking him to Disneyland during the break. As a kind of bon voyage present. I’ve never been to Disneyland. For me, Disneyland has always been the supreme symbol of childhood. Going there would be a way for me to reclaim my childhood that never was. That’s what my therapist says.
“I know you probably hate that shit,” said Karen, who apparently had more insight into me than I thought. “But I love it. And I won’t have to worry about the lines. They have these disability passes. Ours came in the mail today.”
I could think of a number of reasons why Karen would want to send Jonathan away. Her childhood had been a nightmare. Harold was the closest thing to a mother or a father she had ever had. She had never wanted to be a mother in the first place. The idea of being a mother to a child who would need a mother for the rest of his life frightened her. I came up with half a dozen other justifications for her decision. I didn’t want to judge her. Nevertheless I couldn’t stop myself from judging her.
It wasn’t vacation season yet and all the lakes were closed for swimming, the lifeguard chairs were empty and the snack bars were shuttered. This was a tremendous disappointment for Danny. But he was happy when we found a place that rented bicycles, even though we were confined to riding in an area that was under construction and cordoned off with orange plastic fencing.
We also went hiking. The hikes had to be easy for Jonathan’s sake.
After the trail passed through a meadow and we entered the woods again, Danny found a millipede (so he informed me after I asked him three times in a row what he was holding in his hand). The millipede was occupying all his attention, and after ten or fifteen minutes, I convinced him to set it free to spend the rest of its short life wandering the woods on its thousand legs.
“Millipedes don’t have a thousand legs,” he informed me. “The most they have is seven hundred fifty legs. That’s the species called Illacme plenipes.”
“Isn’t Danny smart?” Karen asked Jonathan. “Yes, Mommy,” he answered.
It made me feel ashamed to be proud that my son was smarter than another handicapped child.
We ate all our meals out, and always went out for ice cream afterward. Karen insisted on paying for everything. After each outing, Karen would send the boys upstairs to watch Pokémon and she and I would spend a couple of hours lying side by side on chaise lounges, relaxing on her deck. Karen, who was a recovered alcoholic, told me that it wouldn’t bother her at all if I drank. Harold drank in front of her all the time.
I had brought along a manuscript to copyedit. Karen lay beside me, reading a paperback edition of Nicholas Nickleby, which she held in one hand, bent at the spine. She loved reading and told me she was working her way through Dickens for the second time. I had never read Nicholas Nickleby, but I remembered from the PBS miniseries that Nicholas gets a job in a horrible boarding school for children whose parents just want to get rid of them. I wondered what in the world Karen could be thinking about, reading that book.
After my third beer I couldn’t focus on my copyediting so I put the manuscript back in its envelope. The view from the deck was magnificent, and it was entertainment enough for me to watch the dark blobs of cloud shadows migrating ponderously across the green mountains like the bubbles in a lava lamp.
Once, I heard Karen mutter to herself, “It will be good for him.”
On Sunday, when Karen dropped Danny and me off in Washington Heights, she and I told each other that we would meet for lunch sometime soon, but we never did.
Seven months after that weekend in the Catskills,
I was waiting for the legendary M4 bus on 116th Street and Broadway. A couple of girls were sitting in two of the bus shelter’s metal seats; the third seat was taken up by their Trader Joe’s shopping bags. I wanted to sit down, but asking them to move their bags required more social interaction than I had the energy for at the moment.
I had spent the last twenty-five minutes peering down Broadway looking for signs of the phantom Number 4, trying to summon it with the power of my impatience. Two had already come and gone, each one sadistically flashing its not in service sign just as it approached where I was standing. I thought I saw one stopped at a red light three blocks away. But I wouldn’t be certain for another block, whether it was the Number 4, or a Number 104, three of which had stopped and dutifully picked up passengers since I had been standing here.
Right after I determined that yes, indeed, there was only one digit on the bus’s digital display, and not three, I noticed a woman staring at me.
It was Aviva Brodner. Her hair was cut short, and she was dressed in jeans and a white tailored shirt. Her jeans were pressed, and she was wearing pearls. She was in the process of unbuttoning her cashmere coat, because the weather was unseasonably warm for late November. It was a Monday, and as I recalled, Aviva was an executive at L’Oréal. I had seen her only twice before—that first time in front of the subway station on 181st Street when Danny was sitting on the sidewalk reading his field manual, ignoring Howard’s thrilling account of the suit and the real man’s tie his mother had just bought him, and the second, when Aviva had ordered her husband to kick Danny out of Howard’s bar mitzvah.
“Mimi Slavitt?” she said. I was surprised that she seemed happy to see me. “I’ve wanted to apologize to you for a year.”
Was it possible that only a year had passed since Howard’s disastrous bar mitzvah? Was Danny really thirteen now? According to the Talmud, he was already a man.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” I said.
“Well, I wanted to apologize.”
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