The Children's Crusade

by Ann Packer

  He’d gone to the pharmacy to get new compression stockings for her father. Penny believed there was more he could do for her father, but he was walking the line between physician and son-in-law as carefully as ever, saying he was a pediatrician—as if he’d never treated old men with heart disease, which he’d done constantly at the Oakland Naval Hospital, where veterans of World War I had made up a good portion of the patient population.

  “Penny,” her mother said, knocking on the open door. “I think you should take the kids downtown. When was the last time they saw the state capitol? You could go out to lunch.”

  “Has it changed? Anyway, they’re busy.”

  “Ryan and James might want to go.”

  “Bill can take them when he gets back.”

  “While you do what?”

  “Mom, I’m a visitor. Pretend I’m a real guest, how about? I’m forty-four. I run a household. Do my kids seem undernourished? Are their clothes torn?”

  Audrey had noticed that Ryan looked quite shabby, his corduroys worn thin over the thighs and frayed at the hem. Probably they had belonged to Robert first—maybe James, too. She imagined taking Ryan downtown herself and buying him some new clothes. Of the four, he was the one most likely to enjoy such an outing. But she didn’t much like going downtown these days. If she could get Penny and the older children out of the house, she’d take Ryan into the kitchen with her and teach him how to make angel food cake, which, she remembered from previous visits, he loved.

  “Oh, Penny, never mind,” she said. “Never mind.”

  She made her way to the kitchen with a glance into the front room to make sure her husband was okay. Describing the uproar he’d overheard during his rest the day before, he’d said of James, “That little son of a bitch will get things done in life if no one kills him first.” He had begun using profanity freely in the last few years, which concerned her nearly as much as his health.

  While Robert and Rebecca worked on the puzzle and Ryan and James played cards with their grandfather and Penny and her mother bickered in one room after another, Bill bypassed the Payless and went to the family-owned drugstore he’d first frequented in 1957, when Penny brought him to meet her parents and twisted her ankle climbing down from the train. Her parents had been waiting at the station, and after the four of them drove to the house and he got Penny settled in the front room with her leg up and ice on her ankle, he borrowed the car and set off in search of some Tylenol, which at that time was being marketed just for children and was absent from most home medicine cabinets.

  The store was called Haskell’s, and it reminded him of the drugstore of his Michigan childhood, with its soda fountain on one wall and its pharmacy opposite and between them shelf after shelf of motley household goods. He found the health aids aisle and located men’s compression stockings in a size large. He bought three pairs, remembering how long they took to drip-dry between washings.

  Back at his in-laws’, he entered the house just as Robert and Rebecca put the final pieces into the puzzle and called for everyone to admire it. “Look, it’s Jim Jones!” James cried, and Bill was startled by a hugely enlarged black-and-white photograph of himself and Penny and the children sitting in front of his childhood home. Years earlier, his in-laws had ordered the puzzle as a gift; he’d forgotten it existed.

  “Shhhh,” Rebecca said to James, “I told you, don’t say that.”

  “Dad,” James said, “look, you’re Jim Jones, you’re Jim Jones! See, you look like him, look at this! I was a baby, see, Mom’s holding me. This is us in Michigan. Did you kidnap us all and take us to Billtown? What kind of Kool-Aid did they have? How could a baby drink it, did the parents put it in their bottles? ‘Waaah, Mama, waah, waah, give me my baba!’ ”

  Everyone was silent, staring at James. Rebecca wanted to roll time back thirty seconds so she could solve the situation instead of making it worse. Robert felt a pang of pleasure at having his worst thoughts about James confirmed. Ryan slipped away and closed himself in the bathroom again.

  Bill took a step closer to James. “How do I look like him?”

  James looked up. He couldn’t see any of Jim Jones in his actual father. “I don’t know.”

  “It would be Blairtown,” Robert said. “Not Billtown. It’s Jonestown, not Jimtown.”

  “What would happen in Billtown?” their father said, ignoring Robert.

  “You would be the Bill of Billtown!” James said, but everything had changed and he felt like someone who was huffing and puffing and suddenly realized there was no house to blow down. “Billtown, USA!” he cried for good measure. He climbed onto one of the chairs and shouted, “Subjects! Welcome to Jamestown!”

  “James,” Penny cried, “get down from there this instant! Why are we all standing here? Dad, this will wear you out. James, I mean it, now.”

  “Come down, son,” Bill said, and he held out a hand for James.

  He took his youngest son outside. They had an easy kinship outdoors, and they began walking without the need to say anything right away. At home, they alone still went to the tree house, and as often as not it was Bill who suggested they climb up and see how the platform was holding. When it needed repair, James carried the toolbox down from the garage and tapped the nails his father held. “What if I hit your fingers?” he asked, and Bill said he didn’t think that would happen because James was so careful. It was a calculated risk that paid off; lately, when there was hammering to be done, James held the nail and the hammer.

  “Tell me about Jim Jones,” Bill said.

  James felt the cool November air on his bare arms; the sky was a mottled gray. He didn’t want to talk about Jim Jones—he’d said the only thing he had to say, and now that he was with his dad and could look at his face, he knew even that one thing had been wrong.

  “He wasn’t very smart,” he said.

  “In that . . .”

  “He killed himself, too. So he didn’t get to keep the money after all.”

  “The money?”

  “Everyone gave him all their money just so they could go with him. Then he made them live in shacks.”

  “I wonder about that. ‘Made them.’ How do you suppose he did that?”

  James was tired of the conversation. Thanksgiving night the family had come this same way, and he wondered when they’d pass the house with the giant turkey in the front yard. “Where’s the turkey house?” he said. “We should’ve seen it by now.”

  His father said, “Maybe the turkey only comes out on Thanksgiving.”

  “Dad, stop. I’m not a baby. People put it up, it’s a decoration.”

  Bill put his hand on his son’s head. “Let’s keep going, maybe we’ll see it. I need to stretch my legs.”

  “I need to stretch my whole body,” James said, and he jumped as high as he could, extending his arms over his head, and then did it again after he landed. “Imagine if you could swim through air,” he said, circling his arms one after the other. “I’m swimming,” he said. “Dad, swim with me!”

  Bill circled one arm and then the other and tried kicking his feet behind him. “Not much of a swimmer.”

  “Race me,” James said, and he took off with his arms flying—a flailing four-limbed creature ungoverned by pattern unless you knew where to look. When he got to the corner, he turned around. “Dad, do it!” he called, and Bill cycled his arms as he jogged—halfway on board, which he knew would satisfy his son.

  They walked for another twenty minutes. Bill didn’t bring up Jim Jones again. He’d heard that syringes were used to get the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid into the babies’ mouths, and he cringed to think they must have used the same technique he taught parents whose infants required liquid analgesics: squeezing and pulling forward on the cheeks to create a dam against backflow. His nurse, Dorie, a grandmother, had wept when she learned there’d been a nurse in Jonestown handing children cups
of poison.

  His father-in-law was resting when they got back to the house. James joined the other children in the kitchen, where their grandmother was serving turkey sandwiches, and Bill headed for the bathroom only to have Penny walk in behind him, saying, “James is out of control. I hope you gave him a good talking-to.”

  Bill paused, his back to her though he could see her in the mirror over the sink. She wore a necklace of clay beads she’d made herself, and a scowl on her face. He said, “You didn’t like him standing on the chair?”

  “And yelling! Did you? Why do I have to be the one to object?”

  Over the years, as things had gotten worse at home, Penny had become more and more particular about the children’s conduct when they visited her parents. It would have made sense to Bill if she’d been that way from the beginning, but when Robert and Rebecca were small she’d actually encouraged what she called “free expression” on these holiday trips. He remembered one Thanksgiving when she insisted on having the children help in the kitchen, and the meal, when it was finally served, two hours late, bore signs of their overinvolvement: giant hand-torn pieces of celery in the stuffing; a pie with no pastry, as they had shredded it over and over until it seemed best simply to bake the filling in a soufflé dish. Another time, visiting in the summer without him, Penny bought a small wading pool, and her mother’s roses were flooded twice when the children experimented with standing on the pool’s flimsy walls.

  “He made a scene yesterday, too,” she said. “Dad told Mom and she told me. She was very upset—you know how rigid she is.”

  Penny had said this many times, but Bill found his mother-in-law to be quite flexible—and youthful in a way he couldn’t recall his own mother ever having been. “It’s a small house,” he said. “Tight quarters.”

  “I guess we should have thought of that before we had four children!”

  He nearly bumped into her as he reached around her to close the bathroom door. “Please lower your voice.”

  “Don’t you dare be so high and mighty with me!”

  “All I said was please lower your voice.”

  “Yes, but I know what you’re thinking, and you didn’t want him, either.”

  “Oh, Penny, my God. Please.”

  “You can’t agree with me?”

  “This is hardly the—”

  “Do I have to remind you of the foundation?”

  At first he had no idea what she meant. Then he remembered the three R’s he’d carved into the wet concrete. Eight years after that, when Penny was overwhelmed by James’s birth and he wanted to soothe her, he told her that when they were first married he’d truly been with her in thinking that the right number was three; and that alongside her secret sketches, her childhood drawings of two boys and a girl, he had his own secret physical proof in the form of a daydream etched into hardening concrete. It struck him as dangerous that she remembered this—something she could use against James if she wanted to.

  “Penny,” he said. “You must never—”

  “Oh, don’t worry. Your secret is safe. But he’s a problem, and it’s not fair to leave it all on me.”

  “He’s an active ten-year-old.”

  “You didn’t say anything to him?”

  Bill wanted to sit down with his older children and talk to them about the picture they’d assembled, to ask what they remembered about the trip to Michigan and to answer any questions. He was also hungry. But he didn’t move. He looked at his wife, just yards away from the room where, on Thanksgiving night, for the first time in months, they had made love. He recalled the early years of their marriage, when their bed had served as a treatment room for the ills his separate daytime life inflicted on their relationship; how he’d soothed her with the calm, steady attention, the gentle strokes he recommended for colicky babies. And how, with her emotional hunger sated, a wilder hunger took hold of them both.

  “What?” she said. “Is that an unreasonable question?”

  “I was thinking,” he said, “about the other night.” He tilted his head in the direction of the bedroom.

  Penny’s mouth tightened, and he wished he hadn’t spoken; they made love rarely and had a tacit agreement not to talk about it—the activity or the infrequency. He thought of James, the way he’d swum down the sidewalk, his chaotic curiosity stilled only through action. “I’ll talk to him,” he said. “I’ll make a point of it.”

  • • •

  They left Sacramento at midmorning on Sunday and arrived in San Francisco just as the fog was lifting. Everyone was hungry, and Bill got off the freeway so they could stop for lunch. Ryan, who rarely asked for anything, said he had heard from Sierra about a place called the Magic Pan, in Ghirardelli Square, and because that meant sundaes at the Chocolate Factory might be a possibility afterward, the others agreed. The Magic Pan was a crepe restaurant, which called to mind something small and dainty, so each of the Blairs was surprised to be served a giant lacy half-moon oozing creamy chicken or crab with cheese sauce.

  Robert was not an adventurous eater, and he sliced his open and watched suspiciously as the filling spilled out. Rebecca ate five quick bites and felt a little sick. James scraped and rolled and scraped and rolled until his crepe was free of all but a thin coating of sauce, and he chewed it quickly, saying it wasn’t bad if you just ate the crunchy parts.

  Ryan fell in love. He ate slowly, arranging each forkful to contain a stamp-size piece of crepe and a single sauce-coated piece of meat, the combination of which struck him as almost magically balanced between crisp and soft, dry and creamy. He understood why the place was called the Magic Pan and imagined telling Sierra about it in the morning, and how maybe they could come back together, maybe toward the end of the school year, when their time at Sand Hill Day was running out. They would be attending the same high school, but it was so big that Ryan wasn’t certain he would be able to find her at recess and lunch. At this thought a tear seeped from his eye, and he stuck out his tongue and caught it, pleased when the extra salt made the food in his mouth even more perfectly savory.

  Bill didn’t care for the food, but he smiled encouragingly at the children. “Crepes,” he said, “are particular to a certain region of France called Brittany. That’s where Mont Saint-Michel is. Do any of you know about Mont Saint-Michel?”

  “It’s a fortress on an island,” Robert said. “When the tide comes in, you can’t get to it. Then the tide goes out and a natural bridge comes up again.”

  “There’s actually a road,” Bill said. “But that’s the general idea.”

  “Have you been there, Dad?” James said.

  “He hasn’t been to Europe,” Rebecca said. “Only Korea. And Japan.”

  “Let’s go someday,” Bill said. “Shall we?”

  “Mom, what do you think?” Ryan said. “Would you like to go to France? To Paris?”

  Penny looked around the table. She once harbored a deep wish to go to Paris, just as she once wanted nothing more than to sit with her family on the porch of her husband’s childhood home. The jigsaw puzzle, its old photograph transformed into a warning about the danger of desire, had upset her more than she’d expected, and her response to Ryan was brief and bitter. “I’d rather go nowhere. Then I’d never be disappointed.”

  For the next several minutes, everyone was silent. Forks scraped over plates, milk was sipped. Bill asked for the check and paid with two fifty-dollar bills.

  James still wanted the Chocolate Factory, but he was overruled and they got back into the car. Bill made his way to Van Ness. “There’s city hall,” he said as they passed the back of the giant domed building. He wondered if there might be a memorial inside to Congressman Ryan, whose body had arrived in San Francisco a few days earlier. Bill had seen footage of Mayor Moscone weeping at the funeral.

  “It’s beautiful,” Ryan said.

  “The front is better,” Ro
bert said, “if you like that grandiose sort of thing.”

  Back in Portola Valley, Penny disappeared immediately, and the children settled into their rooms, happy to spread out. All except Robert, who drove to Gina’s without calling. He couldn’t wait to see her. Parked out front, he waited for a moment, looking at her house. It was incredible that he’d known her for less than three months.

  When he knocked, she came to the door and spoke to him through the screen. Her mother had a headache, so Robert couldn’t come in. “Can you come out?” he said, disappointed by her expression, which conveyed a not altogether happy surprise at the sight of him.

  She hesitated before disappearing briefly and then reappearing with a pair of tennis shoes dangling from her fingers.

  “How was Sacramento?” she said as she joined him on the porch. “Did you miss me?”

  Robert had expected to have a lot to say, but now that they were together, now that he was finally looking at her soft, kissable mouth, he was stupid and tongue-tied. She was still barefoot, and this struck him as a bad sign: if she wanted to spend time with him, wouldn’t she have put on her shoes?

  “I missed you,” she said.

  “I’m sure.”

  “I did.”

  He shrugged and then stood there.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “Why are you being so weird?”

  “I’m not.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that!” she responded playfully, but he quickly dismissed the playfulness as an attempt to deny the terrible awkwardness that had sprouted between them.

  “My grandfather,” he said, “is very sick.”

  Gina’s face grew serious, her small brown eyes narrowing.

  “He has congestive heart failure,” he added.

  “Your mom must be upset.”

  “She doesn’t give a shit.”

  “Robert, I’m sure that’s not true!”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, she doesn’t care about anyone but herself.”

  Gina sat on a low wall at the side of the porch. Absently, she brushed off the bottoms of her feet and put her shoes on. Leaning forward, she put her forearms on her knees like a boxer resting in his corner between rounds.