The stations flew by, and Peter recalled their order from the irreverent sentence Bryn Mawr College girls had used for decades: “Old (Overbrook) Maids (Merion) Never (Narberth) Wed (Wynwood), And (Ardmore) Have (Haverford) Babies (Bryn Mawr) Rarely (Rosemont).”
Every week a young mother or father killed their newborn, unable to restrain their frustration over the baby’s crying, unable to address the true causes of stress in their lives. “A baby,” Detective Nelson had once testified in court, “is an easy target.” They had been discussing, he recalled, a dead boy found by a garbageman in North Philadelphia. The baby, stuffed in a whiskey carton, had been frozen solid. Each year perhaps one hundred newborns died mysteriously in the city. It was the norm, expectable.
He watched people get on and off the train, half-attentive for attractive women, aware that he had no plans for the evening. He missed the many parties he and Janice used to attend, for the best nights with Janice had often been after a large dinner party, after they had mingled and smiled and talked and laughed with other young professional couples, discussing with fraudulent intimacy any number of topics—politics, the city, the problem of the homeless. Then they would drive home and undress and Janice would complain about the smell of cigarette smoke in her hair and he would brush his teeth and realize he had eaten too many fat cocktail sausages or chips with avocado dip and then they would get in bed and lie there and gossip happily about the other couples. About who was saying what and why, speculating about the couples who were not happy and why it was they were not happy and what it was that would make them happy or forever keep them from being happy. For years this went on—in his mind the parties blurred into a generic tinkle of laughter and music, and they lay, all those nights, in that protective cocoon of smug and innocent certitude that their lives were more complete and happier than so many others’. Wherever they turned, so many people seemed to be unable to love happily, and the fact that he and Janice were happy then had made them feel unusual. Sometimes Janice had held him and said, “That will never happen to us, will it?”
And then of course it did—the habitual arguing and then the creeping readjustment of the definition of happiness; it was no longer contentment but relief at the absence of conflict. Then—part of the organic continuum of rot—the real unhappiness came, the palpable misery of always worrying about when he and Janice would fight next. He would see her bang the colander in the sink, or hear her sigh with a particular tone of public suffering, and he would know with the same conviction of knowing his own name that within an hour or so their carefully spontaneous conversation would conform to the groove that led to argument, resulting in a Machiavellian catalog of argumentative technique: verbal assault, denial, denial with counteraccusation, primary accusation with secondary retroactive accusations, rejection of opposing version of reality, admittance of one’s own colored version of reality, accusation disguised as denial, guilt trip as apology, accusation as therapeutic analysis, apology as discouragement, and finally, recanting of apology in disgust, anger, and bitterness until he reached a moment of soul-engorging hate that made him need to lie on his back lest the ticking pains in his chest explode. Yet still he would shake his fists above his head and let the tears drain laterally across both cheekbones. Meanwhile, Janice, whose reaction was always to flee, roamed the South Street cafés trying to look happy, walking briskly in anger, wishing her life might suddenly change, hating herself for apparently not being lovable, and also for the stupidity of such insecurity, and then simultaneously comforting and punishing herself by eating some overpriced, revoltingly sweet confection. Eventually, perhaps hours later, she would return, and he would berate himself before her, hoping she would take mercy on him and offer forgiveness. But Janice, despite all of her professional training, was not good at reconciliation. Everything she had learned growing up suggested that truces were temporary maneuvers of the aggressor, and perhaps she was right. And so there was no real momentary happiness, only a waning, flickering, ever-thinner flow of affection. They ceased to make love every night, dropping off perhaps to once every several weeks. He coped during these dry spells by miserably masturbating in the shower in the morning—savage, soapy strokes before washing all evidence into the shower drain. He found he concentrated on his work rather well on those days. Eventually Janice would drink a couple of glasses of wine, becoming glossy-lipped and heavy-lidded, allowing of his advances, enjoying the confused fusion of nostalgia and present reality. On such nights they made love with a reverence for their past, a vengeance toward the present, and to feed their trust in a more loving future—kissing, sucking, squeezing, whispering darkest truths and deepest affections, knowing that they alone were loved by and did love the other, experiencing a drunken, lust-driven synethesia of sheets and skin, breath, shadows, fear and joy. He had made love to enough women—way back when—to know that with his wife it was best.
HE CAME TO HIS STOP. There he stepped down to the platform and the smell of carbon from the train brakes lingered in his nose. The train cleared the station, and the low, cold afternoon sun sprawled across the bricks.
His mother stood at the edge of the outbound parking lot. She appeared to be exactly what she was, a sturdy-hipped sixty-year-old woman in wool coat and running shoes who had dropped off and picked up husband, sons, relatives, husband’s partners, friends, and strangers many hundreds of times.
“Hey, Mom.”
He put his arms around her for a hug that became lost somewhere in the thick coats they both wore. The sight of his mother’s face comforted yet pained him; it was his mother whom he had wished to please as a child, it was his mother who had been his first great love, whom he had lost as a boy and then painfully rediscovered as a man. The longer he knew her, the more fragile she seemed. Someday, perhaps in ten years, he would have to care for her, and with this future in mind, and the anxiety over her operation, he looked appraisingly into her face. Her eyes remained clear and bright, but overall she was not aging well, time pulling sharply at her cheeks and the skin under her chin, her hair—once thick and dark like his own—now gone to that short, shapeless gray that most women, it seemed, eventually adopted in their fifties or sixties, when darkly dyed hair finally looked so painfully artificial that the guise was given up once and for all.
She was aware of his detached scrutiny, just as he was aware of her awareness of it—mother and son knowing each other too well—and she spoke to break the silence: “It’s about time, you know. I’d just about given up.” Her affectionate complaint comforted him. They got into his parents’ car, which after their sons had been gone awhile, was no longer a station wagon. “I feel very sad for the mothers of that black Penn student and girl who were murdered. Don’t you get tired of all this? I don’t know how you get any kind of rest, Peter.”
“I don’t rest, Mom, I slowly decompose.”
She pursed her lips in quiet reproach. “Your father said Ed Cohen told him the Democratic Party has you on some list now. Dad says they like what you stand for.”
“The law and order issue is a no-lose issue, that’s all.” Eddie Cohen was part of the local Democratic machine, a burbly family friend who was always glad-handing at Peter’s parents’ Christmas open house. Sometimes Peter wondered if he was becoming a Republican, along with the rest of the country. “What do I stand for, anyway?”
“You better ask him. I want to know why you took that terrible, terrible case. That young man was so talented. They said he was one of the brightest biology students in the university. Can you imagine who would have done such a thing?”
“I didn’t have much choice. I was ordered to do it.”
“You always have a choice, Peter, you know that.” She found her keys in her purse and started the car, as usual racing the engine unnecessarily. “I saw you on the six o’clock news the other night. Your forehead was wrinkled.”
“I was probably trying to sound intelligent, Mom.”
“You only do that when you’re scared.”
“I’m not going to say any more, Peter. You always wrinkle your forehead like that when you’re anxious.”
He looked over his shoulder and saw three fifty-pound bags of peat moss and potting soil in the backseat.
“Dad hit a sale?”
“I think the sale hit him.”
His father was the type of benevolent man who would lovingly fertilize all of eastern Pennsylvania if only he could. Like many men in their early sixties, he had given up on understanding the problems of the world and had retreated to symbolic yet satisfying acts, such as trimming his hedges faithfully and growing exact, healthy rows of tomatoes each summer.
“Right. I’ll help him move them.”
He cringed at the questions his mother was likely to ask. Better to divert her to another topic. “Mom, when Dad and I talked on the phone the other day, he said you’re going to have an operation.”
“Oh, I wish he hadn’t mentioned that,” she complained. “It’s a small thing.”
“You don’t have to be demure about this, Mom. I’m used to stuff that’s worse.”
“Well, several of my friends have had it.”
“Did you have tests yet?”
“Let’s not go into it.”
“I want to know, Mom. I need to know.”
“I’ve had some. Early Monday I have the surgery.”
“I want to know if you’re feeling scared, Mom.”
“Don’t be silly,” she told him. “I was more scared by your father’s hernia operation two years ago. These are very routine things for people who are more than one hundred years old, people such as your father and me.”
She did not look at him and smile, which meant that these words were not just a mildly sarcastic rebuff—perhaps she was angry about his lack of contact. But how was he to get his mother to talk about her feelings? For years she had swallowed her own self in sacrifice to her children, and as he grew older he appreciated this more—his mother, he had come to see, was one of those many intelligent, overeducated women who came of age in the fifties and who could have done almost anything with their lives, knew it, but had no answer to their frustration. Of course, she had finally gone back to work with what amounted to a real vengeance, and he and Bobby had suffered both her frustration at having to care for them and her guilt for not doing so. It had been a chaotic childhood, with his mother’s motherliness a changeable presence. He could not help but think his being such a difficult child had something to do with her unhappiness. When he was twelve and finding that the ability to be obnoxious was growing in along with his new pubic hair, he had once run into their house, screaming that Bobby had been hit by a car outside. His mother, who rarely lost her composure, had dropped a cookie pan on the floor and raced outside, leaving a smear of Crisco on the glass of the storm door. He had watched her frantically search the road for the body of her second-born, her eyes watering in frustration and anxiousness. Then she heard the steady whack of Bobby hitting a tennis ball against the garage. The horror on his mother’s face did not come off when she looked back at Peter. He had not needed to be slapped for his act—such was the sudden power of his mother’s gaze upon him—and yet later he had wished for severe punishment from her. Because he had never been punished, he felt he had never been forgiven. And yet, why had he needed to test his mother’s love, see her reaction? He had always understood his mother’s vulnerabilities in a way Bobby hadn’t. He and his mother were harsher and more direct with each other than she was with Bobby. Bobby could be angry, but Peter had learned how to be cruel to his mother. Age fifteen, dancing in the kitchen like a speed freak, screaming at his mother, I hate you categorically and wish you would die; age sixteen, telling her she had failed as a mother and he did not want her coming to his basketball games; age seventeen, on the day he entered college, insisting she leave as soon as she had arrived, not allowing her to enjoy the moment (this while other mothers did things his mother would never have put him through, such as laying paper down in drawers and spraying the dorm room with air fresheners); age nineteen, missing a dinner with her downtown in order to hump some now-forgotten freshman girl, knowing his mother had made a special trip into the city and was sitting in the restaurant checking her watch patiently. It was no wonder, he decided guiltily, that she did not allow him to comfort her.
“Should I press you for facts or should we just pretend that you’re not undergoing major surgery?”
“Why is it that people must fuss over this?”
“Maybe you don’t want to believe this is a serious thing, Mom, and maybe all this attention is impinging on your carefully constructed version of the facts. That what’s happening? Mom?”
He watched her blink.
“Why must you push me?”
“Because I know you. You’re my mom. I know just the way you’re going to deal with this. Bobby’s in Arizona, Dad’s solemn but totally unable to talk about fears, and so I’m the guy who’s supposed to ask these questions, right? Work this stuff to the surface. Brought in for the job, the number-one draft choice, the specialist in getting his mother to talk about—”
“Oh, Peter.” She was laughing and crying at the same time. “Your father has tried …” She smiled, loving his father, crinkling the crow’s feet by her eyes.
“He’s scared.”
“He started cleaning the house, the poor man. The doctor said it wouldn’t be unusual for me to be depressed afterward and that there are often aftershocks—I mean aftereffects. How silly. I guess I do mean shocks. It will be very different.”
This would be about as well as he could do, to get her to admit this. They drove on, past what once was prime Pennsylvania farmland, now infected by a plague of real-estate developers, condo contractors, and the like. Once-fertile cornfields, farmed with contour plowing and crop rotation and dotted by old stone farmhouses, had been divided and subdivided into gentrified tracts of boxy three-bedroom homes and strange multi-level condo apartments that rose over hills like an advancing geometric wall. The growth outside the city was absurd, chaotic, and ugly: Historic old highways had been transformed in twenty years—within his memory—to schlock technoburb corridors of fast-food joints and office parks. He rode with an expression of disheartened disgust on his face, for he remembered what had been lost in his own life, past bull-dozered swatches of denuded land with tiny red surveyor’s flags flickering in the breeze, erosion gullies filled with a flotsam of plastic lids, foam burger boxes, man-made scum. His mother turned off the main road and passed old horse farms splintered into tract housing. He knew the back roads of the Main Line with a sad longing, for he had learned them as a boy. They passed the few old estates not yet broken up, coming from time to time to a crossroads, then down the lane past the house where the Declaration of Independence had been hidden from the British, and on toward his parents’ home. He enjoyed the dark, wet woods as they blurred by, the warmth of the car. One of the bags of peat moss had a tear and he smelled its dark sponginess.
They parked in front of the large stone two-story house his parents had purchased when they moved out of the city proper twenty years prior, getting with the house an acre and half a dozen sizable elm and red oak trees, and enough lawn for the neighborhood boys to play tackle football on. His mother went in while he lingered outside. The yard had been the patch of the world he and Bobby had known better than any other. He had mowed it hundreds of times, knew where the grass grew in smooth, tall blades, where the plantain weeds thrived, where the clover had choked out the grass, where the mower had to be raised. For a short lifetime, he and Bobby had littered the bushes around the house with old tennis balls, Frisbees, broken tennis racquets, forgotten outfielder’s mitts, punctured soccer balls, sneakers, tools their father had been unable to find, toy trucks, bicycle parts, skis, and pots stolen from their mother’s kitchen. A special place, that irregular quadrangle behind the house. Many times Peter had found coffee cups his father had left behind while wa
lking around the yard at dusk, listening to his boys holler at each other and at him—Dad, watch!—musing privately about his vegetable garden and the other things fathers thought about—not that Peter now knew what those fatherly things were. Perhaps someday he’d have an opportunity to find out. He liked to believe he would make a good father.
After eating a sandwich in the kitchen, he found his father in his study with neat piles of papers on the floor circling his desk.
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