by Amy Waldman
“Come on,” Claire said. “He’s six. He lost his father.”
“Didn’t they all,” Jane said evenly, looking not at Claire’s eyes but at the roots of her hair, as if trying to ascertain its true color.
“Leave it,” said the voice in Claire’s head, but her actual voice said, “If you have something to say, say it to me. Your children need to learn how to behave.”
“Did it ever occur to you that my boys behave the way they do because of what happened?” Jane asked. “I’m not going to pretend they were angels before, but they were a lot easier. They’re different kids.” Claire felt an unwelcome twinge of recognition. She often wondered what William would have been like if he hadn’t lost his father. Less petulant, maybe; more carefree.
“Hundreds of hours of counseling,” Jane was saying, “and now I need to feed them a bunch of crap about how America is such a great country that it let the very people who murdered their father design a memorial to him? An Islamic garden, no less.”
“But it’s not the same people—that’s the point,” Claire said. “And there’s no proof the garden is Islamic. If it is, it could be benign. A gesture of peace, even.”
“You try explaining that to an eight-year-old. Or have you? Have you given William your little civics lesson?”
William was suddenly behind her. Or maybe he had been there all along. What had he heard? “Where’s your sister?” she asked.
“With-the-girls-at-the-cake,” he said, running all the words together. And, although Claire hadn’t asked: “She’s fine.” His feet were planted in place. His expression, as his eyes moved between her and Jane, reminded Claire of the deer in Chappaqua, the way they always paused with a look wistful and curious and fearful all at once before fleeing. But William wasn’t going anywhere. He looked transfixed by the sight of his mother arguing.
“What’s wrong with the Garden?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Claire said.
“Tell him,” Jane said.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Let him be the judge of that.”
“You want to put this in the hands of a six-year-old?”
“He’d probably get it more than your jury did.”
“Ladies,” Nell said. She’d come up with a fresh vodka tonic for Claire. Her own speech was slightly blurred. “You may want to continue this another time.”
Claire saw the Hansen twins standing with William, the three boys now united in wary confusion.
“You’re right, Nell,” she said. “Jane, I’m so sorry about … about everything. We’ll talk another time. William, let’s go check on your sister.”
They walked off, hand in hand. Her knees were buckling. Maybe these events drew a certain kind, the conformists, the mainstream. Outliers knew better than to seek group consolation.
“What’s wrong with the Garden?” William asked again.
“Some people want a different design,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because they don’t like the man who designed it.”
“Why?”
“For no good reason, William. That’s why we were arguing.”
Cal’s voice urged her to the margins, but if their positions were reversed, would he take their children there, exile himself for Mohammed Khan? Cal’s own beliefs had cost little but money. A position to defend at a dinner party, a direction in which to channel donations, a box to check on the ballot. Pocket change. Noblesse oblige. These were the phrases Cal’s mother had used to describe the Bridgeport teen-mothers program. His boldest move had been quitting the golf club. For all its merit, this was no great sacrifice. He wasn’t good enough at golf to miss it.
They couldn’t leave the cruise early, as Claire wanted, so she told a crew member she was feeling ill. He led her to a blanketed cot in an airless cabin, where, with the children baffled in their jackets, readied for departure, they sat and waited the long hour for their vessel to make land.
Flipping television channels one night, Asma came upon a news story about a boat trip for the families of the dead. The faces of the women—and it was mostly women—were familiar, and not just because she had seen some of them on the news before, giving interviews, holding press conferences, attending funerals. They had a look about them—blank and guarded, overprotective of their children yet not entirely present to them—that she sometimes caught on her own face.
The Circle Line she knew, too, because it was one of the few splurges she and Inam had made in their two years together. She could still remember the price per ticket—twenty-four dollars—which worked out to sixteen dollars an hour for the two of them, which was seven dollars more than Inam earned in an hour, and she could remember her doubt because she had heard from Mrs. Ahmed that the Staten Island Ferry was free, and you could see the same water, the same city, the same statue, but Inam had insisted and he rarely insisted on anything, and so she had agreed.
Six months after her arrival in America, on a Sunday, Inam’s only day off, they had set out. The other passengers—Americans and Swedes, Japanese and Italians—were drinking, even at that morning hour; some leaned against the rails and kissed. She and Inam had not drunk, had not kissed. They held hands and looked down at the water and studied the city, as if from this distance they could finally understand it. They walked over to look at the orange life vests and boats neatly lined up in case of disaster. Each thought about, and knew the other was thinking about, ferry travel back home: Bangladesh was a country of rivers perilously crossed on rickety, overcrowded boats that flipped or sank or collided, tossing bodies into the water the way these passengers tossed their plastic cups.
From the boat Manhattan had no sound, like a television turned to mute, but around them the wind whipped the water, which slapped the boat, and the tourists laughed and shrieked, and the cries of the white gulls dropped down like loose feathers. The impudent breeze had lifted the tail of her headscarf as if to unwrap her, and Inam had yanked it back down, pretending to battle the wind for her honor.
Inam took her picture with a disposable camera and asked a Swede to take their picture together, then a Japanese man asked Inam to take a picture of him and his wife, and so easily they became a part of everything, New Yorkers. They had no worries that day, money and jobs, language and family, all as insignificant at that moment as a bucket of water poured into the harbor.
On her television the widows were giving strained smiles to reporters who jabbed microphones at them like doctors probing for disease. There was the blond widow from the jury, her son crying on her lap. Mechanically, Asma spooned more rice pudding into Abdul’s bowl, her attention on the television children, their faces and free T-shirts smeared with ketchup, their smiles, unlike their parents’, bright and real. Abdul was watching her. He could always sense when grief or anger or envy took her elsewhere, and he always brought her back, those betel-brown eyes the deepest correction. He didn’t know he was missing a father, hadn’t come into the world expecting one, or expecting anything, including a free Circle Line cruise. Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.
She woke the next morning to the sound of her neighbors arguing. Asma thought American buildings would have been sturdier, their walls thicker, but this was like being back home: the ability to know, having to know, what was going on in lives not your own or your family’s, so that sometimes it was hard to know where your own thoughts left off and others’ began. The next-door neighbors, Hasina and Kabir, Bangladeshis who had arrived six months ago, were a married couple in their thirties with no children. This did not surprise Asma: she never heard sounds of love from next door, only anger. Quarrels, in her admittedly limited experience, did not make babies.
Hasina lived in strict purdah, never leaving the house without her husband. Sometimes she would ask Asma to bring her something from the market, an ingredient she needed for cooking, or sanitary napkins, or once even underwear, telling Asma her size. On occasion Asma and Mrs
. Mahmoud would invite her for tea, but her husband disapproved of Asma living on her own in America with her son rather than returning home to family. Hasina had told her that, but Asma also knew it by the way Kabir avoided her eyes in the hallway, uttering only a gruff “Asalamu alaikum” to avoid being impolite. They were, of course, a favorite subject of Mrs. Mahmoud’s, but Asma had grown as weary of talking about her neighbors as she had of listening to them. Twice she had heard Kabir hit Hasina, or at least she thought so from the sharp scream and muffled cries that followed. But everyone pretended they had heard nothing, that the fights did not exist. When she tried to check on Hasina, Kabir would say, through the door, that his wife was “busy.”
Their fighting was like a radio Asma could not turn down, which gave her the idea of turning hers up. She switched on the BBC and turned up the volume, trying to drown their noise. The radio was so loud that until Mrs. Mahmoud shouted for her, she didn’t hear the phone ringing to inform her of her father’s death.
He had been sick for two weeks—“water in the lungs,” the doctors said, as if he had taken the delta inside of him. His voice on the phone, on the days he could talk, was all rasp and rattle, faint and frail, nothing like the commanding music she remembered. Her mother kept insisting she should come home, and Asma packed and unpacked in her mind, sometimes even in her room. If she did not go, Abdul would never know his grandfather, as he had never known his father—wouldn’t know that a father or grandfather could be anything other than the satiny surface of a picture to stroke. But once she left America, she might never be able to return. Why this mattered mystified her mother, for whom New York was as unreachable, as unimaginable, as unnecessary as the stars, which were proof of God’s greatness but otherwise of negligible use.
Asma was also afraid to know her newly weakened father, since her stubborn strength was modeled on his. To hear him faded was to feel her own power ebb. So much of who she was came from him—and would keep her from him. Clinging to America, to the possibilities it dangled, was her own small war of liberation, if a lonelier one.
She harbored a secret fantasy that in America, she could remarry. Not now, not for a long time, not while her ache for Inam remained so deep. But someday she wanted her son to have more than a paper father. If she remarried in Bangladesh, she would have to leave Abdul with Inam’s family. This she would never do. It wouldn’t be easy to remarry in Brooklyn, but if she had gotten out of Sandwip, she imagined she could get out of Kensington, too. What would it be like to live in those neighborhoods she saw on TV, with white people and big houses and driveways with cars? And sprinklers? She wasn’t saying she wanted to live that way. She just wondered.
“Will you come?” her uncle asked now. Why, she wanted to say: her father would be wrapped and buried before she got home.
“Insh’Allah,” she said.
She ended the call inconsolable and irascible. Abdul had put a pot over his head and was stumbling around, bumping into furniture, giggling hysterically. Her neighbors’ argument continued, their voices rising and falling with no consideration for her loss. It was disrespectful, like bombing during Ramadan, not to pause for the news of her father’s death, even if they didn’t know of it. She resented them as much for having each other as for hating each other—for having each other to hate.
There was a moment of stillness; perhaps it was over. Then she heard Kabir’s voice again, louder, angrier, then a shriek and a howl and sobs. She had had enough. She thought of her husband, the kindest man she knew, and of her father, the bravest; picked up Abdul, took the pot off his head, marched next door, and knocked loudly.
When Hasina’s crying stopped, it left a vacuum—sharper than mere silence—in its wake, like the sudden, startling end of a monsoon. Even wriggling Abdul grew still, as if sensing something had changed. Asma banged again. There was a rustle; she sensed a presence behind the peephole. Then Kabir opened the door, and Asma pushed past him to Hasina, who was huddled on the couch, her face red and puffy, her right eye starting to swell.
“Come with me,” Asma said, trying to grab Hasina’s elbow without dropping Abdul. Hasina seemed to be making her body dead weight, hugging the couch with her thighs. Abdul, straining his own legs toward the floor, wasn’t helping. “Come with me,” Asma said louder, as if Hasina hadn’t heard. “I’m going to find you a place to stay. You must leave this marriage.” She had read about a shelter for abused Muslim women in one of the Bangladeshi papers. And now here was a perfect candidate, as if a character had walked out of a television serial.
“Leave?” Hasina hissed. “Where do you get such language, such thoughts?” Her venom took Asma aback. “I don’t want to leave,” she said. The skin of her socket was still puffing; soon the eye would disappear, like a rock in water. “Shame! Shame!” Her hysteria rose and she began screaming at Asma to mind her own affairs. Soon Kabir joined in. Asma clamped her hands over Abdul’s ears, but he began to scream, too. Backing out of the apartment, she found the hallway full of neighbors, Mrs. Mahmoud among them, who had come to see what was going on. Before they could investigate, opine, pronounce, she ran into her room, locked the door, and sobbed into Abdul’s hair.
Two hours later came a knock on Mrs. Mahmoud’s door. Three men known to Asma as residents of the building stood there announcing their concerns about her interference. Her response, as in any difficult situation now, was to call Nasruddin. He came quickly, in an elegant pajama, and she wondered, guiltily, if she had taken him from a family occasion. She told him the story, then sobbed to him about her father.
“Did I do the right thing not to go back to Bangladesh?” she wept. “Tell me I did the right thing.”
“You did what I would have done,” he said.
When she finished crying, she felt emptied of fight, tired enough to sleep for days. Nasruddin left her to go thread peace through the building. An hour later, he returned. To stay without worry, he warned, she must leave her neighbors alone.
“There is a right way to handle problems,” he said. “You must learn it.”
“But how am I supposed to live next door to such a man?”
“I will work on him,” Nasruddin said, “but you must leave him to God’s judgment.”
“I am grateful,” she muttered. Embarrassed and angry, too, but this she kept to herself. The sense that she had been outdone by malevolent forces nagged at her. Her father would have been braver.
“What did you say? How did you do it?” she asked.
“I told them the truth,” Nasruddin said. Her father had died, and she had been mad with grief.
The Rally to Protect Sacred Ground kicked off on a balmy Saturday morning in a plaza opposite the site. The members of both the Memorial Defense Committee and Save America from Islam were there, gathered in a cordoned-off area in front of the stage. Behind them stretched a crowd of thousands: women holding signs that said NO TOLERANCE FOR THE INTOLERANT or ISLAM KILLS or NO VICTORY GARDEN or KHAN IS A CON; fathers hoisting small children on their shoulders; men in camouflage who may or may not have been veterans. There were hundreds of relatives of the attack victims there—Sean had called many of them personally to ask them to come. The crowd overflowed the small plaza, spilled along the sidewalk, out into the street, around and between the buses that had chauffeured protesters from across the country. News choppers huffed overhead.
Debbie Dawson was kitted out in tight black pants and yet another T-shirt she had designed, this one reading “Kaffir and Proud.” Two buff men in Ray-Bans, blue blazers, and khaki pants trailed her through the crowd. When she stopped to give interviews or greet supporters, they positioned themselves on either side of her, facing out, feet planted in a wide stance, arms never fully relaxed. Bodyguards, Sean realized. She looked like she was having the time of her life.
Taking the stage for his speech, Sean surveyed the swelling crowd. Maybe all the nut jobs had gathered near the front; there seemed to be a lot of them. An obese man in suspenders held a poster that showed a
pig eating a Quran. Three women hoisted a banner that said NUKE ’EM ALL AND LET ALLAH SORT ’EM OUT. A pimpled teenager dressed in black with Harry Potter glasses held a sign reading THEY CAN HAVE THE FIRST AMENDMENT BECAUSE WE HAVE THE SECOND, with a crude drawing of a gun aimed at the face of a turbaned man. Human loose ends: an irregular army that Sean hadn’t summoned and couldn’t decommission.
His idea of whiting out Claire Burwell’s face to paint in a question mark, which had seemed so creative, looked creepy when a hundred and fifty of the posters were being waved at him. The SAFI posters of Khan—a line drawn through his face or a target superimposed on it—didn’t look much better. The police were encircling one man who, with the selective application of lighter fluid to his poster, had managed to ignite Khan’s beard.
Every time Sean had given a speech since the attack—some ninety in all—he had been convinced that to lose a loved one in this way was a privilege as well as a curse. The overfed, overeager faces listening to him hungered for what couldn’t be bought, and he pitied them for the desire to go somewhere deeper, be part of something larger. Horrible as the attack was, everyone wanted a little of its ash on their hands.
But this mass, the largest he had ever addressed, radiated neither reverence nor yearning. Patrick once had shown him how the back pressure from opening the nozzle on a fire hose too fast could knock a firefighter off a ladder. Sean didn’t trust this crowd.
His game was off, his speech short. “It wasn’t enough for Khan to demand his rights as a Muslim. Now his garden has rights, too …” The cheers were scattered, irregular, as if people couldn’t hear well. The microphone’s feedback was distracting. When he said, “We all know the Constitution matters, don’t we?” there were uncertain roars, a few boos. “We just don’t think it’s the only thing that matters,” he finished. Some applause, at least, but tepid.