“You want to touch something that will make you feel better about what you don’t know?”
“Sure.”
She took my hand, pulled it inside her overalls, and placed it on the smooth melon of her stomach. My father had warned me about strange men touching me, not strange women. Her overalls were so big, I hadn’t realized she was pregnant. “Feel it.”
My eyes widened, and embarrassment turned to wonder as her belly moved beneath my touch. “It’s kicking!” I shouted. She was right; it did make me feel better.
After we talked about whether she thought it was a boy or a girl, and debated names, Zuza gave me a piece of emery cloth and put me to work polishing the rear end of a marble fat woman. When I was done with that, we split her liverwurst sandwich, which tasted much better than I expected. She thought it was funny when I told her I thought they called it “wurst” because it was the worst part of liver. Best of all, when my sisters and brother came downstairs to see if I was having more fun than they were, after saying nice to meet you and shaking their hands, Zuza ordered them upstairs. “Only one studio visitor at a time.”
After lunch I helped her mix clay in a garbage can, and we were up to our arms in clean mud, and I was thinking that there was no place else on earth, regardless of if it were flat or round or balanced on a beast, that I would rather be. Then my brother bellowed down the stairs, “Mom’s on the phone.”
Knowing I didn’t want to talk to her, that I’d feel worse no matter what my mother said, that I wanted to stay and talk to a stranger because there was no history to come between us, the cozy feeling I had found in that basement flew out the window. “Go on, talk to your mother; she misses you.” Zuza patted her stomach. “We’re not going anywhere.” She made it seem like she and her baby were one person.
My mother and I were separated by more than a few hundred miles of long-distance static. She did miss me. I could hear her sniffle and imagined the tears running down her cheeks as she told me, “It’s going to be okay, Zach. We know where he is now.”
How? I wondered. I overheard my sisters talking about how weird it was that my parents went to a medical conference. Were they tracking Casper down?
As my mother reassured me, I began to worry that they were going to do something bad. “He’ll be caught in a day or two, and then we’ll be home, and everything will be good again.” When I didn’t say anything, she asked, “You believe me, don’t you?”
I said nothing and handed the phone to Lucy.
Zuza was waiting for me. She put me to work, helping to knead all the air bubbles out of the clay. But it wasn’t the same. I felt guilty for not wanting to talk to my mother, and, worse, angry at her for asking me a question I had to answer with a lie.
I tried to imagine my mother happy to have me in her stomach the way Zuza was. But all I could think of was the way she cried at my birthdays, and how she got sad when she looked at me because she didn’t see Jack, which seemed doubly unfair, because I was part of her, too. Struggling to find a way to shape all these thoughts that seemed wrong into something that would feel right, I asked Zuza, “Can you show me how to make something for my mom?”
And so I learned how to make a bowl. Her hands on mine, Zuza taught me to roll the clay into long snakes, then coil them around a circular base. Each one slightly longer than the last, to give it shape. She made one for herself along with me, so she could show me each step but not take over and end up making it herself, the way my father would have. And when the curve of my bowl suddenly turned wobbly, and I hit it with the mallet and shouted “Shit!” in English, she laughed.
“Now you know how hard it is.”
“What?”
“To make something out of nothing.”
And so I started at the bottom again and again and again, and by the next afternoon, I had a bowl my mother and I could both be proud of. And the day after that, she showed me how to paint it with glazes that all looked like shades of gray, but which Zuza promised would come alive with color once it was fired.
Around the outside of the bowl I painted my family holding hands. Stick figures, but I knew who they were. And Zuza kissed the top of my head and called me drágám when I included her stomach and Lazlo in the chain of my life. And as she fired up the kiln, I added one more person, and then I was ready to hand it over.
“Who’s that one?”
“Jack.”
When Lazlo came home from work that night, he called Zuza and me upstairs and announced, “Tonight, we all go out to dinner and celebrate.”
We all knew what that meant. Fiona and Lucy and Willy cheered and jumped up and down like the home team had just won a football game. “Did they hurt Casper?” I asked.
“No more than they had to.”
The next day, Lazlo took off from work and drove us home in his convertible Mercedes Benz. Top down, radio blaring, Fiona and her guitar squeezed in the front. I sat in the narrow backseat between Willy and Lucy, clutching the bowl I’d made for my mother with both hands as if it might blow away in the excitement of our return. Zuza had wrapped it in blue tissue paper. It was my mom’s favorite color.
My parents were sitting on the front steps holding hands when we drove up. My mother was resting her head on my father’s shoulder. They looked nervous when they saw us and jumped up, like we’d caught them doing something they didn’t want us to see.
Willy leaped out of the convertible first, shouting, “Did you get me a microscope?”
Fiona held her guitar aloft and announced, “I wrote a song.”
Lucy laid claim to newfound sophistication. “Lazlo took us to the Plaza for dinner. And I drank champagne.”
They were all hugging and kissing as I walked toward them with the bowl. My mother pulled herself away from the reunion and ran down the walk to greet me. “It’s all over, Zachy.” I was glad because she was glad. Mostly, I was looking forward to surprising her with the bowl.
She missed me so much, she didn’t hear me when I said, “You’ll never guess what I made,” as she pulled me into her arms. Hugging me to her chest, I shouted, “Don’t!”
It was too late. I was the only one who heard the crack. My mother pulled back from me when instead of “I love you,” I shouted, “stop!”
“Aren’t you glad to see me?”
The bowl fell from my hands onto the sidewalk and shattered inside the blue tissue paper. I wept as she unwrapped the disaster and collected the pieces. “It’s beautiful. We can put it together again. We’ll get glue. We can fix it.”
“No, we can’t.”
We had supper early in the dining room. Normally, we only ate there on Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. My mother said this was a kind of Thanksgiving. She prepared our favorite meal: roast beef, mashed potatoes, fresh corn on the cob, and apple brown betty, a feast to welcome us home from our time in the wilderness and celebrate the incarceration of our oppressor.
The typewriter that usually sat at the head of the table had been excused, and the papers and manuscripts and abstracts and stacks of computer printout that normally monopolized the tabletop and sat in the chairs had been hidden out of sight and mind. As my mother and Lucy billowed out a tablecloth that had been embroidered by her great-aunt Minnie, Fiona and Willy and I set the table with china and silverware that were traditionally only brought out to impress strangers.
And just as we were about to dig in, my mother did something else she didn’t normally do. She said, “I want us all to say a prayer.”
From the expression on my father’s face, you would have thought she’d requested a blood sacrifice. He gave us a look that begged us to do whatever she asked. Then she made everyone hold hands. There was a long moment of silence. I wasn’t sure whether she had forgotten how to pray or was uncertain what she had to say to God. “Dear Lord, thank you for giving our family this chance.” Everybody closed their eyes, except for me and Lazlo. “And forgive us if we have offended you.”
“Amen” was followed by a ser
ious silence.
Then Lazlo solemnly raised his martini glass and toasted, “L’chaim,” adding sarcastically, “Whatever the hell that means.” Which made my father laugh. Then he lit up a Lucky and announced, “I hope you don’t mind, I taught all your children to smoke this week.” He even began to pass out cigarettes, which my mother thought was funny until Lucy lit hers up.
“You’re lucky I’m in a good mood, young lady.” My mother snatched the cigarette from her hands and smoked it herself.
Willy spooned a crater into his mashed potatoes, then reached across Fiona for the gravy. “Dad, why didn’t the police just shoot Casper?”
My father had already told us how the police had tracked Casper to Baltimore and arrested him in a medical library in Johns Hopkins. “He surrendered, Willy.”
“If you were there, would you have shot him?” Willy emptied the gravy boat, turning his crater into a greasy brown lake.
“Hey, Willy, thanks for saving some gravy for the rest of us.” Fiona was big on manners.
“We’ll talk about it after dessert. Right now, I’d like to enjoy my meal and not have to think about anything having to do with Casper.” My father pushed his hair off his forehead and asked me for the salt.
“What happened to your head?” There was a crescent-shaped scab just at his hairline. Still unconvinced they ever really went to Philadelphia, I imagined Casper and my father fighting on the edge of a cliff, like they were in a cowboy movie and one of them was a bad guy and had to die.
“I hit it on the door of the medicine cabinet getting some Pepto-Bismol for your mother in the middle of the night.”
“You had diarrhea?” Willy was always getting diarrhea.
“Yes, if you must know. Now can we change the subject?”
“I had diarrhea for six months after the war.”
“Lazlo, don’t encourage them.”
“What’d you do?” I asked.
“I found an apartment with a bathroom that had the most beautiful view in Prague. Sometimes I’d eat my dinner there, invite my friends over, play cards . . .”
“Gross.”
“Once, I won thirty thousand ducks on that toilet.”
“What’d you want ducks for?”
“Ducks is Czech for how you say bucks. Greenbacks, dollars. Only by the time I tried to spend them, they were worth like three cents.” Lazlo worked hard to keep us from thinking about Casper.
After Lazlo left for New York, and the plates were cleared and the leftovers were divided between the fridge and the dogs, my mother got out a tube of Duco cement and put newspaper down on the table, and we began to try to piece the wreckage of the broken bowl back together. My mother did most of the gluing. Her fingers weren’t as clever as Zuza’s, but there was a grace in her determination to make things whole.
And as I watched her struggle to figure out how the pieces fit together, I listened to my father in the adjoining living room reassuring my sisters and brother that Casper would never bother us again: “Casper Gedsic is in a place he can never escape from.” My father’s voice was tired. He sounded like he was reading from a script.
“That’s what you said back in Hamden.” Fiona looked up as she tuned her guitar.”
“He’s not in Townsend anymore.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“In a high-security facility at Needmore Mental Hospital.”
Lucy stopped studying her split ends. “He’s in New Jersey? That’s just great.”
Then Willy chimed in, “Whose dumb idea was that?”
“Mine. He’s in a special new kind of cell. Monitored twenty-three hours a day by TV cameras.”
“Why not twenty-four?” Willy didn’t feel sorry for Casper.
“He gets an hour of exercise in a yard enclosed with a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire.”
“What’s razor wire?”
“It cuts you if you touch it.”
“Cool.” That was Willy.
“On the way to and from his exercise session, his ankles and wrists will be shackled.”
“What’s he going to do all day?” I asked.
“He’ll have a television he can watch, radio, books to read.”
“He doesn’t get to see or talk to anybody?” I could tell Lucy felt sorry for him, too.
“Outside of the psychiatric staff? No.”
“He’ll go crazy,” Fiona said matter-of-factly.
“He is crazy, stupid.”
“I would rather be dead than locked up like that.” Lucy began to pick ticks off the dogs.
“If he can’t get out, why watch him with the TV cameras?” That was Fiona.
“There are new drugs we’re going to try on him, and we need to watch to see if they work.”
“You think you can cure him?”
“No, I don’t. But I think we can learn from him.” Not knowing anything about GKD, we were spared the irony of the life my father had sentenced him to. “My hope is that we can use the tragedy of his life to discover something that might possibly help others lead productive lives.” My father chose his words carefully. My mother never looked up from the broken bowl.
“So even if you cured him, you wouldn’t let him free?” Lucy burned a bloated tick. Its skin popped and dog blood fizzled.
“They’ll never find a cure for what’s wrong with Casper.”
“But what if they did?” I protested. “What if the medicine you gave him worked and he got well and he wasn’t crazy and he promised not to hurt anyone?” Fiona fretted a minor chord and glanced at me, and then my father.
“Would you want me to take that risk, Zach?”
I fell asleep that night wondering what my father would do if one of us got crazy like Casper. Would he lock us up in a room with books and TV for company? Have us watched over by cameras and strangers? Try out medicine on us, knowing that even if we said it worked and weren’t crazy anymore, he would never believe us?
When I woke up in the morning, the questions bothered me even more than they had the night before. Overnight, my unanswered and unasked queries raised more and more questions; so many it seemed as if I could feel them pressing against the inside of my skull. But when I ran downstairs in search of my father and the answers I hoped he’d give me, I found his seat at the breakfast table empty. “I need to talk to Dad.”
“He’s upstairs. And tell him his eggs are getting cold.”
When I went back up to his bedroom, I found him sitting on the edge of the bed. “What would you do if one of us got crazy?” I waited for him to say something that would make me feel better. But he said nothing. He had one shoe on and a sock in his hand.
“Dad?” He looked right through me. Again, I waited for an answer that would reduce the unknowns that were crowding my brain. Unable to stand it a second more, I finally shook him. “Dad, answer me.”
He blinked twice and looked at the sock he was holding as if it belonged to someone else. “What’s going on, Zach?”
“What would you do if one of us went crazy?”
“We don’t have to worry about that.”
I did, though.
My father’s first Sock Moment was a harbinger of other changes that Casper’s capture wrought on our family life. Not all of them were as spooky as Dad’s shoeless catatonia. In fact, some of them gave me hope that the low-grade fever of unacknowledged melancholia that afflicted my family might have finally broken.
Later that day, my mother asked me to help her move her things out of the little room under the stairs where she had slept since my birth back into my father’s bedroom. I never knew how lonely I felt, knowing they slept alone, until I experienced the joy of having a bad dream and being able to snuggle into the soft darkness that lay between them even in sleep. My mother said she came back to Dad’s bed because he’d stopped snoring. I knew it wasn’t true, because when I snuck into their newly conjugal bed, I was surprised to discover they both snored. But I liked the idea that they were in love.<
br />
That was the biggest change of all. I didn’t fully understand what had been done with Casper. But whatever it was, it had an immediate, startling, and profound effect on how my parents interacted. If they weren’t holding hands, my mother was sitting on his lap. And I heard her tell him he was handsome, and my father answer, “That’s because I have a beautiful wife,” and he’d kiss her on the mouth right in front of us; they’d wrap their arms around each other when my father left for work in the morning like people did in movies when they were saying goodbye forever.
Their public displays of affection made Willy stick his finger down his throat and make barfing noises.
Fiona’s explanation for the sudden onslaught of intimacy was more clinical. “Mother obviously wants to have another baby.”
Like all youngest children, though I did not like being referred to as the baby of the family, I enjoyed being a baby. The thought of being replaced would have caused me more anxiety if Lucy hadn’t set the record straight: “Don’t worry, Mom’s taking the Pill.”
Thinking of the giant antidepressant that kept the papers on my father’s desk from blowing away, I thought of the mood change I had witnessed in Zuza. “Mom’s taking medicine to make her like Dad again?”
“No, silly. She’s taking the Pill. It lets you have sex without having to worry about getting pregnant.” In 1962, in twenty-two states it was still against the law to take G. D. Searle & Co.’s synthetic progesterone for contraceptive purposes, but not to imbibe it for “menstrual disorders.”
“Why does Mom want to have sex if she doesn’t want to have a baby?”
“Because sex is the most beautiful thing in the world.” Lucy’s voice was solemn.
“You’ve had sex?”
“Sort of.”
Before I could ask her what that meant, Lucy announced dreamily, “Mom’s having her second spring with Dad. I’m happy for them.”
“Me, too.” I was, at first.
Unlike the rest of us, my mother did not wonder if Casper, with his demonic genius, might still, like Spiderman’s nemesis, Green Goblin, have enough superpowers in hidden reserve to short-circuit the TV cameras, trick his psychiatrists, kill his guards, and break the grip of the cure that could not be trusted, even if it worked. She believed my father when he told her Casper could never touch us again.
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