* * *
Teddy, too, was there—but, as always, not there. He was too uncomfortable to stay in my apartment for more than a few minutes at a time. He mostly showed up, paced around, ate what was in the fridge, said he had some business appointments, and dropped Hilts off so our mother could look after him. We were convenient babysitters for the boy; mourning was keeping us close to home, which made it easy for Ted to do whatever it was he did out in the world.
For a week, I spent as much time with Hilts as with anyone else. He was a month or so shy of his eighth birthday so still too young to be allowed to wander off on his own down the mean streets of Manhattan (though I did tell my mother that the meanest thing that could possibly happen to him in my neighborhood was that he’d get run over by a speeding bike messenger). He did his best to entertain himself with video games and DVDs and TV, but the specter of death in the apartment had its own irresistible allure. It was his first exposure to it, and I could see that although it frightened him, it also attracted him, like a somewhat scary magnet. He knew death was something he had to understand and, to his credit, he did try.
Hilts had enough of his father in him to make me uncomfortable; in particular, he, too, had a certain hollowness at his core. When he told me how sorry he was that Aunt Anna had died, he didn’t seem especially sorry. He behaved as if he knew he should be sorry, but he seemed more curious than sad. After a while, I realized that he was also strangely pleased. Not that Anna had died—the boy was not a monster, not even close; he was just a fucked-up kid stuck with a more fucked-up father—but pleased that something out of the ordinary was happening. He got to be in this strange apartment with a sarcastic uncle who periodically burst into tears; his uncle’s friend who drank tequila or beer all day long and talked about despair, bowling, and his favorite porn titles, in no particular order; animals who alternated between a desperate urge to be petted and a languid sadness; a loving grandmother who only wanted to make sure he was happy and well-fed; and eccentric characters who slipped in and out of the apartment at all times of the day, sometimes bringing birds, dogs, or a snail. For Hilts, this was a whole lot better than enduring the endless routine of school, or feeding his father’s neediness, or coping with his mother’s overprotective and almost psychotic sternness, which most likely stemmed from a deep-rooted fear that her son was going to turn out like his father.
I talked a lot with Hilts, which was sometimes awkward because I still didn’t like him much. I felt a little bad about that, but not that bad. For one thing, I had a few other things to feel truly bad about. For another, there was nothing likable or interesting about him. He was remarkably mundane. He could talk about sports and his church (his mother was a churchgoer now, so Hilts was, too) and several other features of his narrow world. But he had no grasp of any aspect of life that fell outside those boundaries, and he had little capacity for original thought.
Hilts was also becoming something of a fantasist. He told me he had ridden a Jet Ski (he hadn’t) and had gone 120 miles per hour (he definitely hadn’t) and that his mother saw him do it (no way in hell). He said he was taking martial arts lessons (possibly true) and could now beat the eleven- and twelve-year-old kids in his dojo (untrue). His Little League coach, he reported, had already told him that he could get him a baseball scholarship when he was ready to go to college. (I could only shake my head and do my best not to scream at this one.) The tree in his backyard, he assured me, was the largest tree in Los Angeles.
No matter how outlandish the claim, Hilts seemed to believe everything he was saying. He simply couldn’t help himself: He leapt at any vague suggestion of something positive and turned it into an absolute truth. My guess, for instance, is that his Little League coach had at some point asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up and Hilts probably said, “play baseball.” The coach then went, “That’s great. It’s a good goal to have, and when the time comes, I’m sure everyone will help you do that.” The coach probably told him how hard it was to make it to the majors and that he should think of high school and college ball. And that became: “I guarantee I’ll get you a scholarship.” It was a slight variation on his father’s fantasies; Hilts wasn’t manipulative, and there was no real gain other than trying to impress. But his reflexive lying pushed my buttons, and for some reason, it was the one about the tree that really got to me. Instead of keeping quiet, I felt an irresistible urge to challenge him, probably because I know that’s exactly what Anna would have done. So I asked him about the tree and how he knew it was the biggest—what were his sources? I wouldn’t let it go and pushed far past the point of reasonableness. Before long I began to challenge him on almost everything he said. He never could verify any of his wild claims. And I could never make him understand the damage that could pile up over the years from believing so strongly in a fantasy.
My mother saw none of this. When it came to Hilts, she had crossed over to the berserk grandmother side—I think it was her loyalty to my father and his obsession with their grandson that did it. She delighted in his every movement and utterance. She thought he was brilliant, funny, charming. If he glanced outside, saw clouds, and said it looked like it was going to rain, she practically burst into applause at his ability to predict the future. One night when Ted came by and picked Hilts up to take him to a friend’s house for dinner, I made the mistake of telling my mother that the kid seemed a bit distant and troubled. She practically whacked me over the head with a frying pan. Under other circumstances I’m sure she would have really torn into me, but in this case she probably chalked up my heresy to the fact that I was in deep mourning.
But there was something off about the kid. Not serial-killer off—he was just too disconnected and too self-protective and too … sad. He was in a sad house, so his demeanor wasn’t inappropriate. But I didn’t think he was sad for Anna or for me. I think he was sad for himself. And for his dad. I couldn’t blame him, either; he was slowly becoming aware that this was the family he would have to deal with for the next sixty or seventy years. He could go to church all he wanted, but his dad was still going to steal dollar bills from the collection plate.
One evening Hilts wandered into my bedroom. I had most of the menagerie in there with me and was focusing on Waverly, doing my best to scratch her ears exactly as Anna used to. I thought I was doing a pretty good job, though she seemed less than impressed.
“Is she sad?” Hilts asked.
“Waverly?” I said. “Yes, she’s very unhappy.”
“How do you know when a dog’s unhappy?”
“Pretty much the same way you know when a person’s unhappy. She’s not eating much, she’s kind of moping around, she’s not very playful.”
“But she can’t say anything. So you don’t really know.”
“No, that’s right. But words aren’t the only way to communicate. Don’t you sometimes feel things that you don’t talk about?”
Hilts didn’t respond. For a moment I thought he was being incredibly clever—not talking about the idea of not talking—but I was giving him too much credit. He was merely thinking over what I’d said, and it was a slow process.
“I don’t know,” he said. “My dad usually knows what I’m feeling and he just tells me.”
“And is he always right?”
“Well, yeah. He’s my dad. He knows a lot more than me.”
I hesitated. This was dangerous territory, especially in my weakened condition.
“Give me an example,” I said, “of something where you’re feeling one thing and your dad tells you you’re wrong.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Try.”
“Well,” he said. “There was one time when he took me out of school.”
“What do you mean, took you out of school?”
“I was supposed to give a book report on this book I really liked. It was really cool—it made me think of you because it was about this guy and his relationship with a cat. But my dad called the school and said the
re was a family ’mergency and he picked me up.”
“What was the emergency?”
“There wasn’t one. He made it up.”
“Why?”
“There was this really cool movie I wanted to see. It was about this killer—he killed people just by thinking about them. It was R-rated and everything.”
“So he just took you to see the movie?”
“Yeah.”
“And what, you didn’t want to go? You wanted to stay in school?”
“No. It was so cool that he took me out. We went to the movie and then we got a hamburger and a milkshake. It was way better than school.”
I tried not to shake my head in exasperation. “So how does this mean he knows what you’re really thinking?”
“’Cause my mom was really mad when she found out. The school called her to make sure everything was all right. She got super pissed off. She had this long talk with me and told me that it was wrong to do what we did and she kinda made me think she was right.”
“Yeah?”
“So then the next weekend I was with my dad and I told him what Mom said. I told him she was probably right and that I needed to do stuff like my book report or I’d get in trouble and not get good grades.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said my mom was wrong. I mean, he said she was right in that I needed to get good grades. But he said that a lot of stuff was more important than school and good grades. He said that family was way more important and that it was good the two of us could spend some time together like that. He said I’d remember that day at the movies way longer than I’d remember giving a book report. And then…” Hilts hesitated.
I said, “Don’t worry. You can tell me whatever you want. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.”
“Grandpa was your dad, too, right?”
I nodded.
“So don’t get mad. He just said something not so nice about Grandpa.”
“I won’t get mad. What’d he say?”
“He said that Grandpa never took him to the movies. He said that people like Grandpa don’t really care about other people and what happens to them. He said…”
“It’s okay. I told you. You can say anything you want.”
“He said you were like Grandpa. You didn’t care what happened to him or to me. He also said Mom didn’t understand what really mattered, so we had to stick together. We were the only two who could understand.”
“And did you think he was right?”
“Not at first. I mean, I don’t know about Grandpa or you. I know my mom would never take me out of school to go see a movie. So I guess he was right. ’Cause I liked it a lot more than school. And a lot more than just doing work, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“You’re not angry?”
“About what?”
“That my dad said something not so nice about you?”
I shook my head. “Nah. I’ve got bigger things on my mind.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. “Where did you pull that phrase from?”
“TV. All the cop shows. That’s what they say when someone dies.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“Do you think my dad was right?”
“You want to know what I really think?”
“Yeah.”
“I think it’s extremely complicated. I think that sometimes family’s more important than school. But I think everything has to be thought out on its own. And I think what your dad did was wrong.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think he did it for you. I think he really did it for himself.”
“Because he was lonesome?”
“Yup. And needy. He needs you to like him and love him.”
“I do. I mean, he’s my dad, right?”
“Right. I’m glad to hear you say that. Try to remember that as you get older. ’Cause sometimes he makes it kind of hard.”
It’s difficult to know what registers with an eight-year-old. But I think he took note of what I said because I saw something flicker in the back of his eyes. He was a kid who expressed almost no emotion, and at that moment I thought I understood why. If he’d allowed himself to deal with all the emotions that were whirling inside him and all the responsibilities and all the psychological burdens that were being piled on top of him, he probably would have exploded like the human piñata he was becoming.
* * *
Dealing with Ted and Hilts wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t my biggest challenge. The person who worried me the most—who had the most potential to rip open the wound I was trying so hard to keep stitched together—was Anna’s mother, Ruby. One of Anna’s brothers, Lawrence—the short one who couldn’t get a football scholarship—wrote me a lovely note, saying that I was lucky to have had Anna as long as I did because she was such a special and wonderful person. He said I should be at peace with the knowledge that I had made her so happy, something her own family had never been able to do. It was touching and perceptive, particularly because that was the only communication I had from her family, the only acknowledgment that Anna had been a part of their lives but was no longer—except for the barrage of calls from Ruby.
“My life is now unbearable,” she told me over the phone in her first call. “No one has any idea how much I loved my oldest daughter.”
“I can’t go on living without Anna,” she said in her second. “You have it easy. She was with you these last few years. She ignored me. I don’t have anything to fall back on.”
During the third call, the last one I took, she said, “You can’t keep me from coming to the funeral. She was my child. I was there when she was born. I have to see her buried.”
“I’m not going to keep you from coming, I’m just asking you not to come. Anna wouldn’t want you there.”
“You’re a hateful, hateful man,” Ruby said to me, two days after my wife had died. “I know she wanted to be with me, only you wouldn’t let her.” Before I could say anything, not that I really had any kind of comeback for that, she reversed field completely. “And Anna was a hateful daughter, if truth be known. She treated me like shit, and I never deserved that. She’s gonna rot in hell for what she did to me.” Then she burst into tears, saying how much she loved Anna, how much she loved me, even though she’d only been allowed to meet me once. She insisted that she was totally misunderstood and then told me that she might kill herself, since she had no reason to live without Anna.
After that, I had my mom deal with her. The two mothers-in-law spoke several times—Ruby called every two hours or so—then my mom told me that although Anna’s mother was obviously mean and deranged, she was coming to the funeral and I was just going to have to deal with it. My mom said she’d shield me as much as possible but that the woman had a right to grieve for her own daughter, no matter what we thought of her. I was in no condition to argue or disagree, but I did feel a little more at ease when Marjorie answered the phone the last time Ruby called, the day before the funeral, and told Anna’s mom that if she bothered me in any way or made me feel worse than I already felt, she would cut her heart out with a scalpel and let the rats eat the rest of her on the streets of New York. She ended the conversation by saying that if Ruby didn’t believe what she had just said and came to the funeral anyway, she should keep an eye out for the woman with the scalpel.
I had a lot of trouble deciding where we should hold the service. A church or a temple was out of the question. God had not been a part of either of our lives. Nor were rabbis, priests, or religious groups of any kind. I basically thought the whole idea of religion was absurd. Just because Judaism and Christianity were old, burning bushes and turning water into wine and miraculous births without sex were no less absurd than the angel Moroni delivering his message on tablets with the handy provision that men could have sex with as many women as they wanted, or that spaceships we
re supposed to meet mass suicides up in the sky to take them to whatever heaven existed for insane idiots.
I tried to imagine what Anna would have wanted and soon began to panic, overcome by a strange kind of helplessness when I couldn’t come up with anything that would have pleased her. I felt a sudden disconnect from her, as if she were already fading from my life, something I was not remotely prepared for. The panic turned into a full-fledged attack around four A.M., the second night after she died. I woke up sweating, my forehead and neck soaked, the pillow wet through. What flashed through my mind was that I was unable to do the very last thing I needed to do for the woman I loved. I told myself that I hadn’t really known her. And that I had never deserved her. I lay in bed shaking, clammy, trying to stay silent so as not to disturb the humans and pets who were trying their best to see me through these impossible hours. All I could do was lie there, breathing heavily, eyes wide open, paralyzed, feeling as if I were having a heart attack.
Ask Bob: A Novel Page 17