The Children's Crusade

by Ann Packer

  “Me, too.”

  Off in the distance, a dog began to bark. It was the six o’clock bark—the bark of their neighbor Mr. Pope arriving home from work. The Popes’ dog alerted the neighborhood to every move his owners made, and on days when there was no barking it was assumed that the Popes were all home sick.

  “It’s starting right now,” Rebecca said. “And we’re filthy.”

  They climbed to the top of the driveway, where there was already an unfamiliar car parked behind the Valiant, and circled the house to the laundry room. Rebecca turned on the water in the soaking sink. “Here,” she said, reaching into a basket of towels and holding a washcloth under the stream. She found a bar of soap, rough and harsh-smelling, and rubbed it against the cloth until it was soapy.

  Robert took off his shirt and washed his face, his chest, his arms. He got out of his shorts and underpants, turned around for modesty, and washed his privates and then his legs. “How am I going to do my feet?” he said, and she looked around, uncertain.

  “Climb up here,” she said, patting the washing machine, and she had him sit with his feet dangling in the sink and washed them for him, which reminded her of something, maybe a book.

  “What about you?” he said. “You’re dirty, too.”

  She unzipped her dress and took her turn. When she was done with her body, she turned the water hotter and stuck her head under the faucet. She sloshed water through her hair and used the bar to soap it up. After she dried off she looked at her dress long enough to determine that she couldn’t put it back on.

  They heard party noises through the closed laundry room door.

  “I know,” she said, and she opened a cabinet and found a box marked “Too small.” With younger brothers, Robert’s clothes never made it into this box, but some of Rebecca’s clothes could pass for something a boy would wear, and, giggling a little, they both pulled on checked shorts so tight they looked like underwear and T-shirts that exposed their belly buttons.

  She held her finger to her lips and reached for the doorknob.

  “You should see your hair,” he said.

  She didn’t care. If satisfied was the best you could feel about how you looked, then dissatisfied was the worst, not nearly as bad as upset or embarrassed. She had squeezed as much water from her hair as she could, but already the shoulders of her shirt were soaked through, and she knew there’d be a huge wet spot on her back.

  She opened the door. The party voices swelled, and she gave Robert a shrug.

  He followed her up the hall. They’d decided he should wait until tomorrow to tell their father about the watch, and his stomachache had changed from the knife-stab type to the empty type. He was hungry, and he realized he’d never had lunch.

  Standing in the living room were a dozen adults: holding drinks, talking, and laughing, already seeming to fill the space despite the fact that eventually there would be several dozen more of them crowding the room and spilling onto the patio. Their mother was there, too, wearing a black dress and black high heels, her hair in a twist on top of her head. For decoration, she had added a fake red rose. “Kids!” she called. “It’s the party! Come say hello! You can help me entertain!”

  They recognized her elation and kept going, both of them aware that they were disappointing her. In the kitchen Robert pulled the plastic off a tray of cheese logs and stuffed three into his mouth. Rebecca poured them each a glass of juice and said, “What do you think happened to Ryan and James?”

  Robert went to the sliding door. Outside, their father sat on the grass with the two younger boys, cradling James on his lap while Ryan leaned against him and rested his hand on his leg. Their father was in the clothes he’d worn all day, though his tie was missing and the top buttons of his shirt were undone. He looked up at Robert and Rebecca and smiled. “There you are,” he said. “Now we’re all together.”

  “Except Mom,” Ryan said.

  “Well, that’s true, but you know how she feels about the party. I think she’s where she wants to be right now.”

  James’s face was smeared with tears and dirt, but there were Band-Aids on his knees and he was quiet, his thumb in his mouth and the side of his face pressed to his father’s chest. Robert and Rebecca sat down.

  “Quite a day,” their father said.

  Ryan lifted his badger. “Badger is feeling better.”

  “That is one good thing.”

  “And Dog is,” Ryan said. “Wait, James, where is he? You just had him.”

  “Dad,” Rebecca said, “Robert had a good idea.” She explained about the old patio table in the shed and how it would have been good to have it at the house for the party. “We should remember for next year.”

  “That is a good idea,” Bill said. “But I wonder what became of the key.”

  “The keys,” she said. “We couldn’t find either of them.”

  “There’s only one that I know of. In the junk drawer in the kitchen. If it’s gone we may have to cut the padlock.”

  Robert had been silent until now. “No, Dad,” he said, “there’s supposed to be a key down there, remember?” He described his search, the careful way he, and then he and Rebecca, had crawled around the shed, feeling every inch of the way for the gap between the foundation and the wall.

  “I’m confounded,” Bill said. “I just don’t have any recollection of that.”

  “It’s there, Dad. It’s supposed to be. On the foundation.”

  “On the foundation,” Bill said, something tickling at his memory, a June day in 1961 that began with the infant Robert standing on his father’s thighs, pushing downward with his soft wedge feet as Bill held him under the arms, his small body rigid with excitement. Or so it had struck Bill, who departed reluctantly, leaving the baby and his mother to wait for him while he drove to the Portola Valley property and poured the foundation for the shed. In the hardening concrete he scratched a capital R, and then, for no good reason, a second R and a third.

  “Maybe so,” he said, “but I think that’s something to solve some other day. I have some hosting to do and I suspect I’d better change my clothes.”

  “There he is,” Ryan said, reaching behind Bill and retrieving James’s dog. “Here, James, don’t forget to hold him.”

  James held out his arms for Dog. “He got a new collar,” he said proudly.

  “He certainly did,” Bill said, lifting James from his lap and setting him on the grass. “I guess you loaned it to him, did you, Rob?”

  “I borrowed it,” Ryan said.

  Around Dog’s neck was Robert’s watch, and Robert put his face in his hands and began to cry again. This time he didn’t feel so bad. It was a free, easy kind of cry, gentle as a stream. Bill watched his oldest, puzzled by the tears but aware that he needed to get into the house. He stood still for another moment and then told the children he’d see them inside. Halfway to the door, he turned and looked at them. Rebecca wondered if he was going to ask what had happened to her dress, but instead he came back and lifted James in his arms. “James James Morrison Morrison,” he murmured, and he pressed his lips to James’s silky hair.

  3

  ROBERT

  When I was in medical school, much was made of the need for compassion, and we talked about it as if it could be learned, like the names of the cranial nerves or the ability to detect pneumonia on exam. This made sense to me at first. My father—the doctor I knew best—was full of compassion, not just for the children he treated but for everyone: their parents, his own children, a stranger at the side of a highway waiting for a tow truck. At last I had to recognize that he hadn’t picked it up in class, and I was afraid I’d never measure up.

  But I needn’t have worried. As it turned out, I pity the sick; I feel for them. In my group internal medicine practice, I’m the doctor new patients request most frequently (a statistic I did not seek out; such is the state of
managed care that gathering data like these has become an integral part of our operation). According to our scheduling staff, people are always calling and saying, “I saw Dr. Blair when my regular doctor was out, and I want to switch” or “I’ve heard Dr. Blair really cares.”

  And yet. How do you care without feeling each grim diagnosis, each death, as a drop of grief making its way through your bloodstream? How do you continue to care?

  For two decades I was all kindness and concern, and then suddenly, as I hit my mid-forties, I wasn’t. I dawdled over charts in my office while the sickest of my patients waited for me; I postponed phone calls to deliver bad news for hours or even days, berating myself the longer I waited but unable to pick up the phone. I didn’t know what was wrong. I felt I had lost my feelings. A broken heart can masquerade as a cold one.

  At home, I avoided my wife and our two boys. I thought I was very, very tired, and I took naps before dinner, after weekend breakfasts, on holiday afternoons. I used my fatigue to justify all kinds of low behavior. I snapped, I growled, I sank into silence. The boys fought over which of them had caused my bad moods. “You yelled and woke him up!” “Well, you didn’t try your cauliflower!” Jen scowled at me when they weren’t looking, but after a few months, when nothing had changed, she slipped a mask over her expressive features and presented me with a single multipurpose half-smile. “Daddy isn’t going with us this time,” she would say to the boys without asking me. It was true. Daddy wasn’t really going anywhere.

  This might have gone on indefinitely had James not shown up unexpectedly. He was living in Eugene, Oregon, the only one of us not to settle on the Peninsula—though the truth was, he hadn’t settled anywhere. After dropping out of college—just seven months shy of getting his degree, which was so typical—he began drifting from one job to another, one life to another; and now, at thirty-eight, if he wasn’t actually drifting, he was nevertheless living what seemed to the rest of us to be a pretty unstable life.

  He arrived on a Friday night, knocking on Rebecca’s door without advance notice or explanation, and within days he’d established a kind of pattern, dropping by my house every second or third evening for dinner, or at eight in the morning so he could “keep the boys company at breakfast,” his term of art for freeloading.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. That first Sunday, Rebecca and her husband had us all over for brunch: me, Jen, and our boys; Ryan and his wife and daughter; and of course James. The house was on a shady street in north Palo Alto, all unfinished concrete walls and steel railings, the yard full of river stones and carefully managed wild grasses. Jen said the house was as elegant and severe as Rebecca herself, not exactly a compliment but I knew what she meant.

  James came to the door in his boxers that morning, unshaved, hair matted. “What?” he said as I looked him over. “I’m not ready.”

  I gave this the response it deserved.

  The boys pushed past me to their uncle, and he held out his palm so they could give him some skin. No matter how long it had been since they’d last seen him, they were always ready for some James-style fun, and he always delivered. It was easy enough for him, I suppose; he was still a child himself.

  Rebecca and Walt were in the kitchen setting out fruit and bagels. The boys went for a pink bakery box, Jen poured herself coffee, and I shook hands with Walt because we always shook hands, even if it had been only a day or two since we’d seen each other. James followed behind us and helped himself to a slice of cantaloupe. I tried to get a notion from Rebecca of how things were going with him, but she stayed busy with the fruit, fanning melon slices, mounding strawberries. As I watched, she took a step back, tilted her head to the side, and then stepped forward again and made a micro-adjustment to the grapes. She readily admitted to being a perfectionist, but, also being a psychiatrist, she couched it in the lingo of her profession and referred to it as a characteristic defense. At our father’s funeral, a few years earlier, his sister Irene had made a point of telling Rebecca how sad he’d been that he never had the chance to walk his one daughter down the aisle, and Rebecca said, “Oh, Aunt Irene, I think he felt worse about not getting to be a pallbearer at your funeral.” Irene laughed, but Rebecca told me later that she’d felt terrible, having allowed those words to escape from her careful mouth.

  Licking his fingers, James leaned against the refrigerator door, all six-four of him. He had a way of being in a room that was at once provisional and accusatory. He might leave at any minute, but until then everyone should back the fuck off. His naked chest was smooth, almost hairless, his body joining in the argument that he shouldn’t be held to the standards of adulthood yet.

  The doorbell rang, and Ryan and Marielle came in with loads of fresh flowers, the kind of disruption that can take a minute if everyone already present is engaged in conversation or ten if they are desperate for distraction. It took us ten.

  At last the hubbub died down, and Marielle looked around and said, “This is so nice.” She was from Montreal, one of those angular French brunettes with no belly fat and intensely muscular lower legs. She’d come to California on a vacation with three girlfriends and met Ryan at a sandwich shop in Palo Alto. They had the kind of effortless-seeming relationship that you assume belies great effort, except theirs didn’t. “We just click,” Ryan always said, and for those of us who found the human conversation to have its difficulties, this was annoying and enviable and also somehow consoling—it could happen, it wasn’t impossible; it had happened to Ryan, who deserved it if anyone did.

  Ryan nodded eagerly in response to his wife’s comment. “It is nice, it’s really nice, I wish we could do this more often, all of us getting together.” He looked at James. “So how’s it going, J? How long can you stay?”

  James smirked and stared at his hands, examining his nails, the backs of his fingers. He looked up and said, “Dunno, Ry.”

  I saw, or thought I saw, a flicker of hurt cross Ryan’s face.

  “Yeah,” I said to James, “talk to us. We’re all dying to know what’s up.”

  James looked at his hands again, perhaps this time in contemplation of using them as fists. Even if he wasn’t going to strike me, it was obvious that he was pissed off.

  “I’m making eggs,” Rebecca said. “When everyone’s ready. James, do you want to get dressed?”

  For a moment it seemed he might refuse, but he gave her an easy smile and left the room. He had been the most ingenuous child, a sweet enthusiast for any promising plan. In the late nineties, during a stint in Boulder, he’d come up with an idea for a new business and presented it to me over dinner as if I were an investor, complete with spreadsheets and projections and a firm handshake. I was in Denver for a conference, though I probably wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t meant a chance to check up on him. Basically, the idea was AAA for bicycles: he was going to pass around flyers with his name and phone number, and if you had bike trouble “anytime or anywhere,” he’d show up and service your ride on the spot. It wasn’t a terrible plan, though he didn’t seem to understand that AAA succeeded by charging its customers in advance, insurance-style. We sat in an overpriced steak house near my hotel and he talked his idea up until I took out my checkbook and gave him three thousand dollars to get started. “It’s an investment,” he said, and for purposes of face-saving I didn’t argue. I debated whether or not to tell Jen and finally knocked the amount down to five hundred so I could maintain the idea that I didn’t keep secrets from her—just details.

  He came back in a wrinkled T-shirt and jeans and over Rebecca’s eggs proceeded to entertain the kids with stories from the Blair family almanac. My boys liked hearing about the time I went looking for a lost tennis ball and instead came face-to-face with a skunk. But what, they asked James, did our dad do while Penny went to get the tomato juice? Where did he wait? How bad did he smell? They wanted to know how many cans of tomato juice I’d bathed in and what had happened to the jui
ce afterward.

  Ryan’s daughter was only four, too young to believe in a childhood for her father. The story James told failed to engage her, and he fell silent and began poking through his eggs as if there might be something valuable hidden in them. “So what should we talk about?” he said at last, looking around the table. “Robert’s misery?”

  Ryan’s eyes widened. Marielle licked the corners of her mouth. My boys stared at their plates, and Jen put a steady bead on me. I could feel Rebecca’s medical interest stir from deep within its weekend resting place.

  “You people,” James said, “are so dishonest. Wishing doesn’t make it so, remember? I don’t think I’ve heard one real thing from any of you since I got here. It’s all ‘how nice,’ ‘how nice.’ You guys are so corrupt.”

  Rebecca was motionless, the only sign of distress a twitch below her left eye. She had our father’s strong nose and our mother’s narrow chin. She was sometimes called handsome, which Jen said was worse than nothing as compliments went, but I saw beauty in her: in the straightness of her back and in her heavily lashed gray eyes.

  “It’s okay, James,” Ryan said. “We know things might be complicated.”

  “That’s it?” James said. “Can you go further, Ry? One little step? What ‘things’ might be complicated? And who is ‘we’? You and your lovely French lady, or you and your esteemed older siblings, Dr. and Dr. Blair?”

  I was experiencing a kind of basement-level rage overlaid by a number of competing urges—to say something funny, to say something lacerating, to pretend nothing had happened, to leave the table. Perhaps because none of these was within my reach, I said, inflecting it into a question, “ ‘Wishing doesn’t make it so’?” though I knew the answer. Our mother had been famous among us for her pointed and yet strikingly unhelpful proverbs. I think she believed such comments fulfilled her maternal duties, for she rarely had anything to add in the way of empathy or even consolation.