The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  “I bet that happens a lot.”

  “No, I mean, I think he really, literally, wants to kill him. And he’s just dumb enough, poor boy, and just smart enough. So Danny, you can imagine, I had to make sure he wasn’t going home tonight.”

  “What did you tell the judge?” Danielle assumed there was a judge involved somewhere in this case.

  “Not that. As you might imagine.”

  “Poor kid? He sounds like a nightmare.”

  Annabel looked directly at Danielle. “He is a nightmare. But it’s complicated.”

  “Poor you, then.”

  Annabel gave a brisk smile. “Doesn’t do anyone any good to think that way. ‘Buck up, duckie’ was my college roommate’s motto. And quite right, too.”

  However frequently Annabel repeated this disturbingly Waspy mantra (where had she gone to college? Vassar? Bryn Mawr?), Danielle didn’t think it had had much impact on Marina, who was, at that moment, paying the Chinese food delivery man in the foyer with her father’s credit card. Or maybe that wasn’t quite right: maybe Marina was so busy bucking herself up that she had forgotten, or never noticed, that she was standing on nothing, poised in the void. The way, earlier, she had been talking so vividly, so amusingly, to no one at all.

  After supper—Danielle found the Chinese food tasty, particularly the moo shoo pork, but it was also lukewarm and very swiftly glutinous on their plates—Murray Thwaite pushed back his chair and revealed, yet again, his impressive height. “Ladies,” he said, running a hand through his silver hair. “If you’ll excuse me?” Then, “Marina darling, did you print out those dates for me?”

  “It was printing when I left for François, Daddy. I’ll just get it for you.”

  “And Marina darling,” he called after her, “your hair looks divine.” He turned back to the table. “Maybe half an inch too short? But it’ll grow. Good to see you, Danielle. You’re looking quite beautiful yourself, you know.” He kissed her; she blushed and muttered. “And darling”—to his wife—“will you tell me when it’s eleven? That idiot is on Charlie’s show tonight.”

  “If I’m still up I will. If not, I’ll get the girls to do it.”

  Annabel and Danielle cleared the plates, and Marina resurfaced just as her mother finished putting them in the dishwasher.

  “I think Popey’s done it again, Mom. There’s a stink in the living room, but I can’t find it.”

  Annabel sighed. “Off you go, you two. I’ll take care of it.”

  The only thing about Chinese is that the whole place smells of it afterward,” said Marina, as she shut the door to her bedroom behind them and moved to light the scented candle on her dresser. “Lavender of Provence okay?”

  “I don’t smell a thing.”

  “Moo shoo pork? You don’t still smell it? Ugh.” Marina gave an exaggerated shudder. “How about a little Chopin?”

  “Whatever.”

  Marina’s room was disorganized, in as charming a way as its owner. The chair at her desk was draped with discarded clothes, her dresser cluttered with lipsticks, pens, and an uncapped bottle of perfume, its amber liquid illuminated by the candle’s flickering flame. The bed was messily made up, imprinted with the ghost of Marina’s supine form, and scattered with a few books and a splayed sweater. The lamps shone low, their light eggy, and through the half-open closet door, Danielle could see competing bursts and tufts of clothing and a jumbled pile of shoes.

  “Your mother must be exhausted,” Danielle said as she moved the laptop to the floor, its little green light glowing, and settled into an oyster-colored armchair, lifting her feet onto the ottoman. Marina, busy choosing a CD from the shelf by her stereo, didn’t reply. “I feel guilty,” Danielle went on, “making extra work and then not helping.” What she meant was that she felt guilty about how little Marina had helped.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Danny. She’s not doing anything she wouldn’t do if you weren’t here.” Marina flopped onto her bed, which was richly pillowed and covered with a terra-cotta duvet dotted with smiling suns. Like everything else in Marina’s evening, it reminded Danielle of adolescence.

  “M,” she said, “is this really going okay?”

  “What?”

  Danielle gestured broadly. “This. Everything. The book. Living at home, for God’s sake. It can’t be easy.”

  Marina put her hands behind her head and closed her eyes. “No. Of course not, if you really want to know. How could it be okay?” She opened her eyes—they were a beautiful deep blue, almost purple, bright and clear, the color her father’s eyes must once have been, before they became popped and bloodshot. “But what else am I supposed to do? I’m completely broke, and my parents have been really nice about it, but you see what it’s like. It’s driving me crazy.” There was a silence. “I just don’t know what I can do,” she said again.

  “You could get a job, sweetie.”

  “A job?” Marina snorted. “And how would I get this book finished then?”

  “Well, I don’t know. But people do, you know. They work at night, or early in the morning, on their own stuff. Even a part-time job. It just seems to me you really need your own space.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to get a job, by now. I really need to finish the book, that’s all. That’s the first thing.”

  “But—” Danielle paused. “Just tell me true, are you going to finish it? When are you going to finish it?”

  “It’s due in August.”

  “Wasn’t it due last August? And the Christmas before that?”

  Marina sat up. “So I’m slow. So it’s late. What’s your point, exactly?”

  “I don’t have a point. I think you’re stuck, is all. And if things aren’t getting better, then they’re getting worse, you know what I mean?”

  “Did Julius tell you about his latest love disaster?”

  “Okay. I’ll leave it alone. But think about it. We can all help you find a job. I can ask around. You could ask around. Hell, your dad could ask around.”

  “Fine.” Marina crossed her legs in the lotus position, pausing to pull back the flesh of her buttocks. She sat up very straight and took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go into this again, because I know it just bugs you and you’ll tell me to get over it, but you don’t have any idea what it’s like to be Murray Thwaite’s daughter. I don’t want some job just because he got it for me, and I can’t see just taking any dumb thing because it’s somehow ‘good for me’ to have a job. I’ve got to believe, I mean, I know that I’m more serious than that.”

  “You mean, you’re better than that.”

  “Whatever. I want to—it sounds so trite, but I want to make a difference. By writing. Doing something important. And I don’t mean, I don’t know, covering Staten Island PTA meetings for the New York Times”—a college friend of theirs had recently, enthusiastically, taken such a position—“which we both know I couldn’t get even if I wanted to.”

  “Everybody starts somewhere.”

  “What is this? Cliché night? I’m starting with my book. It’s just taking a while, a bit longer than I expected.”

  Danielle made the same sweeping movement with her hands that she had made before. “Whatever,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. So, what about Julius’s latest broken heart?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Introducing Murray Thwaite” by Roanne Levine (newspaper staff)

  Few contemporary journalists are as versatile, as erudite, and as controversial as Murray Thwaite. Now sixty, Thwaite is best known for his monthly articles in The Action, and his frequent essays in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He has also written or edited twelve books, including Rage in the System and Underground Warfare in Latin America. His most recent book is a collection of his essays about late capitalism, called Waiting for the Fat Lady to Sing. Thwaite appeared on campus recently to address Professor Triplett’s History 395 seminar, “Resistance in Postwar America,” where he spoke about the work he did in his youth in the anti–Viet
nam War movement. A tall, handsome man with thick silver hair, a square jaw, and piercing blue eyes, his tweed jacket is elegant and a little old-fashioned. He waved his hands a lot when he spoke. He is a dynamic speaker, and unafraid of the most challenging questions. One student asked whether he really thought his antiwar activism had made any difference, and Mr. Thwaite literally pounded the table when he answered, “Absolutely. It may not have done as much or worked as fast as we hoped—not fast enough to save thousands of young lives on both sides of the conflict—but you’d better believe it made a difference. If there’s any purpose to a democracy,” he went on, “it’s to ensure that the voice of the people is heard, and that the will of the people is abided by. That’s not idealism, that’s a fact. And a responsibility. Every one of you in this room has a responsibility to be educated, to form your own opinions based on facts, and to educate others.”

  Mr. Thwaite, a longtime New Yorker, was born upstate in Watertown, near the Canadian border, in 1940. The son of a schoolteacher and a homemaker, he was the elder of two children. He earned a scholarship to Harvard in the late 1950s, where he studied History and graduated in 1961 at the age of twenty. After spending a year in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship studying the French Resistance Movement during World War II, he traveled around Europe for another year before coming back home and settling in New York. He started his journalism career while he was overseas: “I wrote to a man at the Boston Globe, the father of one of my classmates at Harvard, and asked if he’d be willing to look at my work if I sent it. He said yes, and the first piece I sent him was a feature about how Berliners were feeling about the [Berlin] Wall, which was brand new then. After that, I went to England and interviewed striking miners. He published both pieces, and told me to keep ’em coming. Franco’s Spain, democracy in Turkey, I just got going. I went to Sicily and wrote about a Mafia town. It was a great year.”

  I asked Mr. Thwaite if he’d considered staying in Europe and becoming a foreign correspondent: “I suppose I did, for a while,” he answered. “But I thought there was a lot to come home for. There was a lot going on. Once Kennedy was assassinated—that clinched it for me. I came back in time to travel the South and speak to people about the Civil Rights Act. That’s also when I first got involved in the death penalty issue, which is still something I care a lot about today. And of course there was already escalation in South Asia, the war was already in full swing, so there was that, too.”

  Mr. Thwaite, a heavy smoker, kindly agreed to be interviewed after class, and we had our conversation over drinks at Mulligan’s, where he seemed to feel right at home. If he’d been wearing a tie, he would’ve loosened it. At one point, he asked me when I was born, and when I said “1981,” he laughed. “Do you know where I was in ’Eighty-one?” he said. “I was in El Salvador and Guatemala, reporting on what the U.S. government was doing—covertly, of course—down there. I bet you can’t even imagine it.”

  Mr. Thwaite, who married Annabel Chase, a children’s rights lawyer, in 1968 (“I wore velvet pants,” he says, “and she had flowers in her hair”), has one daughter, Marina, who was born in 1970. She graduated from Brown in ’93 and is working on her first book. “I never told my daughter to become a writer,” he said. “Quite the opposite. I figure, if you can do something else, do. Because it’s a stimulating life, but an uncertain one. I did bring her up though to understand that integrity is everything, it’s all you’ve got. And that if you have a voice, a gift, you’re morally bound to exploit it.”

  Mr. Thwaite has most recently used his voice to criticize dishonesty in the Clinton administration. “I don’t care what a guy does with his pecker,” Mr. Thwaite says of Clinton, “but he lied to the American people as though they were his wife, and he lied to her, too. Not to mention his policies. If that’s what liberalism has come to, we’re in trouble. Invading or bombing overseas to distract us, whenever the heat is on at home. What about Sudan, remember that?” He goes on, “The liberals in this country deserve better. Christ, Jimmy Carter was better. This guy has set us back twenty years.” He doesn’t have much patience for George W. Bush, either, whom he calls “our puppet dictator by decree.” The new president “wasn’t even elected” and “has fewer brains than my Abyssinian cat. An exceptionally gifted feline, by the way.”

  Always funny, Mr. Thwaite is also deadly serious: “None of this is a game,” he says of politics and journalism. “It may look like it, it may look like a circus sometimes, but that’s only from the luxurious vantage point of the United States in 2001. Ask people anywhere else—Bosnia, Rwanda, the Middle East, sure, but also China, Algeria, Russia, even Western Europe, and they’ll remind you of what you ought to know: this is life and death stuff. There’s nothing more important than this.”

  Mr. Thwaite, who has taught in the past at NYU and at the journalism school here, may be coming to teach again at Columbia sometime soon. “I’d love to,” he says, flashing a broad grin and lighting another cigarette. “I love to teach.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  An American Scholar

  Frederick Tubb lay in the bath, carefully holding his book above the water with both hands. Borrowed from the library, it was encased in plastic and so better protected from his inevitably damp fingers than had been many other books similarly handled, but it was a heavy volume and he had already imagined letting it fall wholesale into the tub, where it would swiftly encounter the floating white bulk of his torso, though not before being soaked and ruined. The book was a novel: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. He was about a hundred pages in, and he couldn’t tell what he thought about it. Bits of it made him laugh, but he couldn’t seem to keep track of the broader premise, or plot (was there a premise, or plot?). He often found this, in one way or another, with novels, but with this one more than with many. He didn’t much like reading novels—he preferred history or philosophy—or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem “spoke to him” it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul. Larkin had this effect—but he had heard a lot about this one, first from kids at Oswego whom he didn’t particularly respect, but then from people on the Net, and in particular from this book discussion group that he’d sort of joined. They weren’t reading Infinite Jest now; they’d read it last fall while he was wasting his time in microeconomics along with two hundred other duped freshmen, or trying to stay awake in Professor Holden’s composition class full of jabbering fools. But a few members of the online discussion kept referring to it, like it was the Bible or something. A definition of the zeitgeist, one person had written, a particularly lively female correspondent on whom Bootie had a virtual crush. So he was reading it to catch up. He was reading it to be educated, which was, along with self-reliance, his current great aim. To be able to comment knowledgeably on one of the voices of his time.

  The bathroom around him was steamy in the early afternoon sun. Its fixtures, mustard yellow, were oddly small for the space: a pedestal sink and a low toilet and the bathtub in which he lay, barely covered by water, his knees bent up so he might keep his toes submerged. The blue linoleum, flecked with iridescence, was largely covered by a fringed blue rug, and another, U-shaped, decorated the toilet’s base like a Christmas-tree skirt. His mother had made the frilled blue curtains at the window, and the now-balding towels—also sky blue—had been chosen, long ago, to match the color scheme. It was the bathroom he had always known, with its knocking pipes and frosted glass, its white tiles laid, not quite straight, by his father before he was born. Bootie looked around him, sighed, feeling at once safe and oppressed in his bath, wanting to stay there all afternoon and wanting to escape forever at the same time.

  If only it weren’t quite so long, he thought as the water around him cooled. He lifted the plug chain with his toe and let some run out, even as he flicked on the hot tap with his right hand to rebalance the temperature. His left wrist wavered under the full burden of the book, but he did
not drop it. Maybe he could read just half of it? Would that be enough? Because he had a stack of several other novels he’d assigned himself to get through by June, and they were long, too: Moby-Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow, War and Peace. The very thought of them made him sleepy.

  His mother was mercifully out at school this afternoon, explaining to her students about the rice crop in China or the still shifting borders of the former Soviet countries, information they weren’t listening to and had forgotten before the day was out. Bootie himself had sat in her classroom, not so many years before, and once the class was done with, he’d asked his sister, Sarah, also a graduate of Mom’s Geography, a few years before Bootie, what had stayed with her over time. She’d said, “Jeez, Bootie, I don’t know. I remember that we did South America and the countries were totally confusing to me. Doesn’t some place down there speak Portuguese instead of Spanish? But mostly I remember being embarrassed for Mom, when somebody like that Jody guy—remember him?—would act out and Mom would turn really red and seem like she might cry. Or like in winter, when we had class first period, and her nose would always run, and I didn’t know which was worse, seeing that glistening drop hanging off her nostril, or the really geeky way she had of rubbing it with a Kleenex all the time. That’s what I mostly remember, Bootie, is being embarrassed.”

  At least Judy Tubb didn’t know that her kids had been embarrassed by her. It was but one of the many facts she didn’t know about her children. Like the fact that he was angry, too: angry with her for expecting so little of him, for holding him so close. For being someone who couldn’t see the wider world, the world beyond Watertown, in which anything might be possible. She thought her brother, the extraordinary Murray Thwaite, was a man of little consequence, while she revered the memory of Bootie’s father, a man Bootie, too, had loved—a gentle, mild man, good with his hands, the man who as a schoolboy had been universally liked and infrequently remembered. But he had known, even on the cusp of adolescence, before his father grew sick, and gentler, and quieter, and above all sadder (so that sad and sick were horribly what most remained, for Bootie, at least), that Bert Tubb was not a man who could fathom his son. A subscriber to Time and National Geographic, he had been a reader of neither, a man who lived for his family, for the football thrown in the yard of a Saturday, and the reassuring ritual of six o’clock supper in the paneled dining room (meat loaf with gravy on Sundays, always), and who eyed his plump, fumbling, bibliophilic boy with loving alarm. He wanted Bootie to be good enough at everything, just good enough, to get out and play, and even near his death had expressed the strange (to Bootie) worry that without a father, Bootie would be stuck all the time in his books. You couldn’t disagree with his mother’s love for such a man—he’d been a very good man—but Bootie couldn’t understand, quite, in what scheme of things Bert Tubb was elevated above Murray Thwaite, his mother’s own brother, alive, for one thing, and, in every admirable way, extraordinary.