by Avery Corman
“She’s sitting down.”
“Did she tell you?”
“How dare you call with such a thing?”
“Well, maybe I should have written.”
“Joanna left her child?”
“Yes, she—”
“Her own beautiful little child?”
“She said she needed to do this for herself.”
“I’m going to have a heart attack—”
“Wait, Sam—”
“I’m going to have a heart attack. Harriet, you talk to him. I’m having a heart attack.”
“Sam, you don’t have a heart attack if you can say it.” He knew this from his last case.
“Ted, it’s me—Harriet. Sam is sitting down.”
“Is he okay?”
“We can’t talk to you now. You’ve upset us dreadfully with this news. You have a lot of nerve.” And she hung up on him.
DURING THE WEEK, TED was usually home near six; he and Billy would have dinner together, he would give him a bath, they would play for a while, Ted would read him a story, and somewhere around seven-thirty Billy went to bed. It was a fast hour and a half. The weekends, Etta’s days off, represented long, unbroken periods of time, and anxious about filling the time and keeping Billy happy and occupied, Ted was booking up the weekends with what amounted to package tours of New York City. This particular morning he planned to take him to the Museum of Natural History. The doorbell rang, and standing there were Joanna’s parents. They entered quickly, scattering through the apartment like the bomb squad on a tip. Throwing doors open, they discovered one small child watching television and startled him with a cascade of hugs and kisses and coloring books. They moved through the rest of the house, and having determined the evidence firsthand, Harriet announced, “She’s not here.”
Sam prowled through the house again, as though he might find some important clue, looked in at Billy, who had not moved—The Electric Company had arrived with Spider-Man, which took precedence over grandparents, even from Boston. Sam clicked his tongue, “Tsk, tsk,” over the boy and sat heavily on the couch.
They were an attractive couple. She was petite, a young fifty, dark eyes, her hair naturally graying. He had a handsome, craggy face, a physical-looking man with distinctive white hair. Ted had forgotten how striking they were. Clearly, Joanna was their daughter, Billy was of their blood. He would have been mistaken to think they would not care about the boy.
“What have you got to say in explanation?” Joanna’s father demanded in a stilted voice. He seemed to have been rehearsing the line all the way down from Boston.
Ted recounted the circumstances of Joanna’s leaving, trying to do it reportorially, quote her accurately—would you do the same for me?—and they listened, squinting their eyes as though they were trying to follow someone in a foreign language.
“She was never any trouble,” her mother said.
“Well, she is now,” Ted answered, getting in his points.
They did not understand. They had handed over to him a beautiful girl, and this is what he did to her. They began to reminisce about Joanna’s early triumphs, the pre-Ted days, oblivious to Ted sitting there—remember how pretty she looked on the night of … Then they would lapse into long silences. Billy called out from Ted’s bedroom, which had the television set, to know if he could watch Sesame Street. The child, the child. They leaped up and rushed into the room, reassuring themselves that he was still there, kissing and hugging him all over again, as he looked up, confused by why these people kept coming in while he was watching television to kiss and hug him. They went through the house, checking all the guards on the windows. How would Ted manage? He wasn’t qualified to take care of a child by himself. Who was this housekeeper? Did he know about the nurse who abducted the child and murdered it? Why was Billy watching so much television? What was he eating? Who would see to his clothes? He tried to field their questions. They were not listening to the answers. They kept looking through the house. Lollys? You have lollys? the pharmacist asked. Don’t you know sugar is bad for his system, lollys bad for his teeth? They live in Boston, Ted reassured himself. They wanted Mrs. Willewska to submit to their personal investigation on her day off. He refused. They wanted to take Billy to the zoo. He said that would be all right, but could they not “tsk, tsk” over Joanna while they were with Billy and upset him? Now they remembered Joanna again.
“We gave her a good life. I don’t know what you gave her,” Harriet said sharply.
“You may have just said it,” Ted answered. “Maybe she was a spoiled brat, that’s all, and when things got rough for her, she acted like a spoiled brat.”
“Don’t you talk that way about my daughter!” Sam shouted.
“Shh. The child!” Harriet cautioned.
More kisses and hugs for a besieged Billy, and Ted sent them off to the zoo and went to a neighborhood movie house, where he watched a Western, which had the virtue of having nothing at all to do with him. They returned late in the day, Billy sticky from a lolly, his shirt stained with pizza. Children—2, Pharmacists—0. They were going to stay in New York another day to be with their grandchild, preferring a motel room to Ted’s couch, which he offered, straining to be polite.
Harriet and Sam were at the door at eight the next morning, ready to run four laps around the city. Billy wanted to go to the zoo again, and off they went to wake the animals. They returned in the early afternoon.
“We’ve got to trot,” Harriet said to her grandchild.
Trot, trot to Boston, trot, trot to Lynne, if you don’t watch out, you’re gonna fall in. A little children’s game Joanna used to play with Billy. It flashed across Ted’s mind. She had taken her clothes and left echoes behind.
“Well, if you hear from Joanna,” he said to them, “tell her”—he did not know what message to pass on—“that we’re doing fine.”
“Are you?” she said. “Do you really think you’ll do fine?”
The investigating team left without a handshake for Ted. Joanna’s parents had reached their conclusion. They had found Ted guilty of ruining their daughter.
In the weeks that followed, as it became clear to people that Joanna Kramer had really left her husband and her child, they began to read into it what they needed in order to feel comfortable about it. Larry saw it as an opportunity to get Ted laid. Ted told him he had no interest in a social life at this time, his mind wasn’t in it. “Who’s talking about your mind?” Larry said. If he could get his buddy, Ted, running and chasing like he did, then running and chasing was justified. It was not so frantic as some of his women friends had been saying. After all, Ted Kramer was running and chasing.
Ted’s parents were on the other end of the social spectrum, The important thing was for him to get married. They could care less if he got laid.
“We’re not even divorced yet.”
“So what are you waiting for?” his mother said.
Legal proceedings were to begin. Ted had sought his lawyer friend Dan’s advice, and he was sending him to a well-regarded lawyer who specialized in divorce cases. A quickie divorce and a quickie marriage to another woman, any woman, would go a long way toward salvaging his Miami reputation, and Dora and Harold’s.
“A divorce, people could understand,” his mother said to him. “I tell them you’re divorced already.”
“I don’t think they’ll recognize it in New York State.”
“This is not funny. As it is, I have to make excuses. I have to say the boy is living with you temporarily while the tramp is having an affair.”
He spoke to his brother, more than miles the distance between them. Ralph offered money, Ted declined. Having offered the only thing he could think of at the moment, he turned the phone over to his wife, Sandy, who said she never liked Joanna anyway. She would have taken Billy for a while if their children weren’t so much older. These amenities satisfied, they all said goodbye and did not speak again for months.
Thelma saw in Joanna an angel of
vengeance for rotten marriages. She stopped by for coffee and told Ted that Joanna’s leaving had forced “certain things” to the surface.
“Charlie told me he was having an affair. He asked me to forgive him and I did. I’m also divorcing him.”
Charlie came by the following night.
“Thelma says I’m free to marry my dental hygienist. Who wants to marry my dental hygienist?” As he left, reeling from several drinks, he said, “If it weren’t for you, I’d still be a happily married man.”
Joanna’s parents handled the situation by sending a continuous supply of toys, trying to make up for their own loss of Joanna with gifts for their grandchild, and by long distance phone calls to a child unimpressed with long distance phone calls.
“Billy, it’s Grandma!”
“And Grandpa! I’m here, too, Billy!”
“Oh, hi.”
“How are you, Billy? What are you doing?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? My, my, a big boy like you must be doing something.”
“Playing.”
“Wonderful. Hear that, Sam? He’s playing. What are you playing?”
“Fish.”
“Fish. That’s nice—fish. What is fish?”
“Fish is I lie on my bed in my pajamas and I make my penis stick up like a fish.”
“Oh.”
WHAT KIND OF BOY was he? Billy was an enthusiastic child. He could say, as he did from time to time, without guile, “What a nice day, Daddy.” He was a lovely boy, Ted decided. He was not very aggressive, though, in the tough games children played with each other, and Ted wondered if this were a pattern, his own pattern? Was Billy going to be unaggressive, like his father?
He was astonished by the child’s imagination, tales of flying rabbits, and Oscar the Grouch taking a subway to Paris, sticks which became rocket ships, pebbles which became motors, make-believe so vivid Ted asked the pediatrician if he should worry about it. The doctor said it was to be cherished. Relieved of the anxiety, he cherished it, as he did their dialogues on The Nature of Existence.
“What did you do, Daddy, when you were a little boy?”
“I played games like you do.”
“Did you watch Sesame?”
“There was no Sesame. There was no television.”
He attempted to grasp that.
“You didn’t have television?”
“It wasn’t invented yet. Nobody thought up the idea of television.”
Something that was as real as television had not existed. The child tried to understand it.
“Was there apple juice?”
“Yes, we had apple juice.”
What is it like, Billy, to be four years old and trying to sort out the world, Ted wondered.
They came out of Burger King, a special Friday night treat for Billy.
“Did they have Burger King when you were a little boy?”
“No, Billy, no Burger King.”
“What else didn’t they have?”
“Well, there were no McDonald’s. No astronauts. No ice-cream pops you could keep in the house, because the freezers weren’t big enough.” And no mommies who ran out on their husbands and their little boys, he said to himself.
THE FIRM OF SHAUNESSY and Phillips had been recommended by Dan, the lawyer and football Giants fan, who included in his recommendation that John Shaunessy was also a Giants fan. For the first fifteen minutes, Shaunessy, a tall, distinguished-looking man in his fifties, discussed Giants ball clubs over the years, presumably to establish rapport with his prospective client. Then they got to Ted.
“I’d say mine is sort of an open-and-shut case.”
“Nothing is. I could tell you twenty cases—open and shut, like you say—rattle your teeth.”
“Spare me, please. Did Dan fill you in?”
“Your wife took a walk. She sent on some papers and she’s ready to sign away everything.”
“Tell me how it works. How long does it take? How much does it cost?”
“Okay, the first thing you have to know is, we handle both sides of the street. We’ve got husbands as clients, we’ve got wives. We’ve seen it all. The second thing is, divorce can be tricky. Right away I would say to you, you live here, you file here. Forget what she’s doing. You can go two ways—abandonment. It’ll take about a year. Too long. Or cruel and inhuman treatment—should be a few months.”
“Cruel and inhuman—”
“You’ll see a doctor. He’ll say you’re tense. You’re tense, aren’t you?”
“Well …”
“You’re tense. As for the last part of your question, two thousand dollars.”
“Ouch.”
“I happen to be, as they say, an old pro. I teach at St. John’s. I publish. I’m not that cheap. People charge less, people charge more. It pays to shop around, and I’d say you should.”
“I don’t think I have the stomach for it, frankly. Okay, what the hell. Let’s do it.”
“Fine. The thing is, Ted, you’ve got to have a good lawyer. Breaking up a marriage has to be legally clean and decisive. What we’re dealing with is only your life.”
He was confident about the lawyer. But $2000 … He figured he got stuck by Joanna with the bill after all.
BILLY’S NURSERY SCHOOL WAS running an inexpensive summer play group on weekday mornings, and Ted enrolled him with his nursery school teacher. The woman had been sensitive to Billy during the first period of adjustment and she told Ted she felt the boy was handling it very well. “Children are more flexible than we think,” she said. Ted had slackened the pace on weekend sightseeing junkets, no longer feeling the need to book up every hour of Billy’s day. A park playground a few blocks from their house had climbing equipment Billy enjoyed, a sprinkler pond, a view of boats along the East River and a truck waiting outside, ready to serve every canned soda, ice cream and Italian ices need. Ted sat by himself reading news magazines, while Billy would make individual requests for a turn on the swings, for ice cream. Ted did not wish to encourage him to play only with his daddy, but over the course of the day they would play together, with Ted the tallest person in the tree house or on the seesaw, or he would involve himself in one of Billy’s games of imagination. “Let’s play monkeys.”
“What’s monkeys?”
“You’re the daddy monkey and I’m the baby monkey and we climb on everything in the playground.”
“Not everything.”
“The slide.”
“Okay. I’ll climb on the slide.”
“And you have to squeak like a monkey.”
“Your daddy doesn’t squeak like a monkey.”
“And you have to crawl on the ground.”
“Why don’t I be a standing-up monkey?”
“That’s not a monkey.”
They had reached a delicate point in the negotiations.
“All right,” Ted said, “You do the squeaking and the crawling, and I’ll do a little scratching.”
“That’s good. The daddy monkey scratches.”
And they climbed the slide somewhere in Africa and were monkeys, or in Ted’s case, a modified monkey.
ON A JULY SUNDAY, the day was hot, they had gone to the playground with a picnic lunch, and Billy had spent most of the afternoon at the sprinkler, Ted joining him for a while with his pants rolled up and his shoes and socks off, as some of the other parents had done. Ted was sitting to the side reading while Billy ran through the playground, sprinkling water, skipping and chirping away, delighted to spend the day in his bathing suit. “Be my water man,” Ted said, and Billy would fill a plastic cup with water, bring it back and pour it over Ted’s bent head, which gave Billy the giggles. They stayed late in the playground, and as the day cooled and the shadows grew longer, the park was especially beautiful. Ted was feeling a true sense of well-being, Billy was still giggling, dancing through his day. They had it all together, children were more flexible than we think, perhaps grownups also, he was thinking. He looked
around and realized he had suddenly lost sight of Billy. He was not at the sprinkler or at the sandbox, not climbing, not on the seesaw. Ted began walking quickly through the playground. Billy was not there. “Billy!” he yelled. “Billy!” Ted ran toward the entrance of the playground where the water fountain was located, and he was not there either. “Billy! Billy!” And then he saw him out of the corner of his eye. The boy had left the playground and was running along a walk in the outside park. Ted raced after him, calling, but he did not turn around. He kept running in his jittery gait. Ted ran faster and finally got a few yards behind him when he heard the boy calling, “Mommy! Mommy!” A woman with dark hair was ahead strolling along the walk. Billy caught up to her and grabbed at her skirt. She turned around and looked down at him, just a woman, strolling along the walk. “I thought you were my mommy,” he said.
EIGHT
LARRY SAID IT WAS the bargain of the season, a full share in a group house on Fire Island, a distress sale, the shareholder had had a nervous breakdown.
“From being in the house?” Ted asked.
“I don’t know. It happened July Fourth weekend. She didn’t meet anybody, and when the weekend was over she couldn’t get out of her chair.”
Ted had qualms about exploiting someone else’s mental condition as well as taking a share in a house where the occupants had nervous breakdowns. Under Larry’s urging he decided to call the house organizer, an interior decorator Larry was dating, who had a ten-year-old boy.
“We’re all parents without partners,” she told Ted over the phone. It made him uncomfortable to hear how casually she used that. He was in a category. “We don’t want any singles in the house,” she said. “You’d be perfect. And you’re a man. We want another man.”
On Friday at five-thirty Etta brought Billy to the information booth of the Long Island Railroad. The station was crowded with people fighting to get out of the city, onto the next train, to the suburbs, to the shore, and Ted rushed along with the rest. When he saw Etta and Billy waiting for him at the booth, the sight was so startling to him, he broke his pace and just stopped Billy, this person who loomed so large in his life, this dominant figure to him, seen in scale in a crowded railroad station, surrounded by the world at large, was so incredibly tiny. He was holding Etta’s hand, a very little boy.