My mother was, in fact, so sure in this belief that in this second spring she flowered overnight in exotic and unexpected ways, intent on making up for lost seasons. She went to a beauty parlor, a first, according to Fiona, and had her hair cut almost as short as Zuza’s. She gave away all her old clothes and bought new ones. My mother looked like someone else when she called the Salvation Army and had them come by and pick up Jack’s old crib.
My mother’s days of going back to bed after my father left for work and we were off to school were over. The same new reenergized ardor she displayed for my father was manifest in the most mundane minutiae of daily life. Dust bunnies were no longer allowed to breed beneath sofas and beds. Bookcases were rearranged according to subject matter and alphabetized by author. The jumble of closets was sorted out and the mess of life was labeled and organized into plastic bins.
My mother, who once took pride in her lack of domestic aptitude, began to clip recipes and arrange flowers and invite my father’s graduate students over for casseroles flavored with wine. She even invited our neighbors, who didn’t like us to begin with, and who still hadn’t forgiven us for Casper and trusted us even less when she served them boeuf bourguignonne.
My father liked her new haircut, the colorful clothes, and the newfound tidiness of our household, and enjoyed being sucked up to by the graduates who suddenly invaded our home in search of an A. He was even able to take a certain perverse pleasure in using his skills both as a bartender and a psychologist to get our neighbors tipsy enough to admit things he knew they’d regret telling him when they woke up with a hangover the next morning. Who would have thought Dr. Goodman and his wife once went to a nudist camp? Or that Mrs. Lutz, head of the PTA, had met her husband at the party his parents had thrown to announce her engagement to his twin brother. Or that Mr. Murphy’s father and grandfather had both shot themselves with the same shotgun that, weirder still, they hadn’t thrown away.
When neighbors were embarrassed or ashamed of what they’d revealed under the truth serum of alcohol and unexpected conviviality, my father would tell them “we’re all complicated creatures,” and then throw them for a double loop with the kind of facts he loved to shock people with. “George Washington suffered from Klinefelter’s syndrome.”
“What’s that mean,” they would ask.
“He had breasts and atrophied genitalia.” No question, my father knew things the rest of the world didn’t. When I was little, I was impressed. But as I got older, he could never resist the opportunity to demythologize anyone more famous than himself.
Gandhi drank his own urine, JFK had a ghostwriter, Winston Churchill was a drunk. Eleanor Roosevelt chewed with her mouth open and was a lesbian. (He’d actually had lunch with her once. He and Mom had met the former first lady at the medical conference I still wasn’t quite convinced they’d actually ever gone to in Philadelphia.) Unable to believe in his own greatness, he couldn’t allow himself to believe in the greatness of anyone else.
My father not only welcomed but made the most of all the innovations my mother instigated in the weeks and months after Casper’s capture. Except for one.
Just after Halloween, my mother woke us all up early Sunday morning announcing, “You’re going to church today.”
“What for?” Except for a second cousin’s wedding, Willy and I had never set foot in a house of God. She handed us neckties and freshly ironed shirts.
“Because faith is an important part of life.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical making us go to church while you and Dad stay home?” Fiona had graduated from “Kumbaya” to “We Shall Overcome.” She slept in black tights and a turtleneck, hoping to wake up in the morning a real beatnik.
“We’re all going to church.” My sisters groaned when Mom told them to put on dresses and hats.
“Why?” I still didn’t get it.
“Because I said so, and because sometime in your life, you’ll need to believe God loves you.”
“Nora, I’m not going to be part of this.” My father was still in his pajamas. He was willing to make peace with the next-door neighbors, but not with God.
“I’m staying home with Dad.” Fiona was still in turtleneck and tights.
“It won’t hurt you to go once.” My mother was tying my necktie.
“Will it hurt you?” my father called out from the other room.
“Mother, can I borrow your pearls?” Lucy was all for any excuse for getting dressed up, even for church.
“No.”
“Can we go to a Catholic church?”
“We’re not Catholic.” My mother slid a Windsor knot tight to my neck.
“We’re not anything,” Fiona protested.
My father was curious. “Why Catholic, Lucy?”
“I’ve always thought that when I’m old and been married and my third husband’s dead, it’d be nice to become a nun and marry God.”
My mother had her pilgrimage already worked out. “We’re going to go to Christ Church.” It was an elegant eighteenth-century Episcopalian Church in what had now become the Negro section of New Brunswick.
“Why there?” my father asked.
My mother smiled. “They have the prettiest graveyard.”
My father stayed home and cleaned out his closet.
The choir sang, the minister gave a sermon, Fiona sulked, Lucy made eyes at the altar boy, and Willy read a classic comic of Moby-Dick until my mother took it away from him. I was pleased to see several kids I knew from school sitting with their brothers and sisters and parents. I held my mother’s hand and craned my neck stiff looking at the light shafting through stained-glass windows of water turning into wine and Jesus walking on water and getting nailed to the cross and coming back from the dead, and compared them to the miracles I’d experienced. A psycho killer teaches me to swim instead of killing me, my parents sleep in the same room, and now, most unbelievable of all, I was sitting in church.
We went back the following Sunday. And the Sunday after that I went to Sunday school with Willy, and Fiona and Lucy sat in on a youth fellowship meeting where Fiona got to play the guitar and sing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” while Lucy, I learned several decades later, was paddling to second base with the altar boy in the coat closet. After our third visit, there was even talk of getting us baptized. We were all just getting used to getting up early on Sundays when we heard a sermon titled “What God Expects of Us,” in which the minister referenced the story of Abraham’s hearing God’s voice telling him to kill his child as a metaphor for the hard choices in life.
My mother came out of church with a distracted look on her face. She was in such a hurry to get away from the service that she walked across a grave. And when she got home, the first thing she said to my father was, “Do you think Abraham could have been depressed?”
“Abraham who?”
“The man who said God told him to kill his son.” My father looked worried. His mother had left him for theosophy. Did he think my mother was going to leave him for Jesus?
“Sounds more like a schizophrenic.”
As my mother climbed the stairs, she unpinned her hat. “Maybe depression’s God’s way of testing us, of seeing what we’re capable of. I mean, how weak we are.”
My father was right behind her, and I behind him. “Let’s talk about this another time.” They were in their bedroom now. He knew I was eavesdropping.
My mother didn’t seem to hear him. “Maybe you’re right.”
“How’s that?”
“Maybe we are Druids after all.” I didn’t get it. But when my father closed the bedroom door and turned the latch, I knew a “lie-down” was being prescribed.
The box spring squeaked. My mother giggled. My father growled like a bear who had just been woken up, and then she began to sob. “What’s wrong?” My father’s voice was husky.
“That sermon about Abraham made me think of Jack.”
“Don’t.”
“It was my
fault.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“I should have done something to stop it.”
“We’ve done everything we can do.”
“You don’t understand. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see it happening, but I don’t stop it.”
“The past doesn’t exist.” Friedrich told himself that in the hopes that one day, when he recalled the chain of events that made up his life, they’d be different.
“Do you forgive me?”
“For what?” My father’s voice was impatient. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“You don’t understand.” Neither did I.
There were whispers then that I couldn’t make out. Then I heard my father talk to her the way he spoke to our dog when there was thunder and she didn’t want to come out from under the bed. “All we need is this.”
I heard my mother sigh a groan of painful pleasure. My father gasped. No one had told me sex sounded so sad. I felt creepy for listening. But since all the popular kids in my class bragged about listening to their parents doing it, I thought I, like my mother, was finally figuring out how to be normal.
We were doing it together: She was keeping the house clean, sleeping in the same bed with Dad, I was going to Sunday school . . . I figured Little League would be next. But my mother came out of their bedroom that day with a new resolve. She dropped her infatuations with God and being the perfect suburban mom as quickly as she had picked them up and committed a heresy that made her more suspect than ever in Greenwood—she got a job.
Officially, she worked for the university. Her employment category was “research assistant”—my father’s research assistant. She had always helped him with his work, typing out manuscripts, proofreading galleys, but being paid, having a job title, gave her an excuse to fill up every free moment of her days and her nights, of her life, with his life. The job wasn’t just full time, it was all the time. And that was the point. She went to the office with him in the morning and worked with him into the night. At the time, it seemed like she was sacrificing her life for his. But as I think back on it, I see that she didn’t want time for herself. By embracing my father’s career so completely, she found a way to escape her own nightmare. The circle of their partnership closed into a knot that held us fast—but didn’t include us.
Except for when they went to the bathroom, they were joined as tightly as Siamese twins. They took turns between being parent, child, and lover to one another. My mother didn’t mind that my father got all the credit, that his name was on the book jackets, that the checks were made out to him. My mother didn’t relinquish her ego; she merged it with his. Weaving herself so tightly into the fabric of his being was her way of keeping herself from picking at the past and unraveling her hope for a future.
And because they worked so many nights and weekends, I got to watch them without their knowing I was watching. I’d stand in the doorway and stare at the backs of their heads, wondering how long it would take for them to feel my presence. They didn’t feel it. But when I got tired of waiting, I’d interrupt them, even if I didn’t need anything, ask them to help me with my homework, even when I didn’t need it. How to spell M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i, help me build a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty, and later a plaster of Paris imitation of the Hoover Dam for an imaginary cross-country trip my class was taking.
Both believing now that work was going to set them free, they would always stop what they were doing if my interruption was connected with school. My mother would do all the helping, my father would tilt back in a chair and impatiently call out every few minutes, “If you do his work for him, he’s never going to learn.” Or, if he was feeling funny, “Nora, you’re not being paid to do his homework, you’re being paid to do mine.”
My mother knew all the tricks of being a good student. But as my father waited impatiently for her to get back to his work, their work, I sensed I was stretching the invisible membrane of interdependence, gossamer and slightly spooky, that connected them. Like a spiderweb against your face, even though you knew you couldn’t see what connected them, you knew you were caught in it, and it would be rewoven as soon as you left the room.
Amazingly, the friction of living and working together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year didn’t diminish their post-Casper ardor. Their flirtation was at times by nature of their research unfathomably academic. Late at night, for fear of waking us, they’d whisper words like “meprobamate,” “diazepam,” “chlorpromazine,” as if they were speaking a secret language of love. As I got older, watching them go at it day after day, fertilizing each other’s minds with ideas beyond my interest and understanding, I realized they were having intercourse even when they weren’t.
The closest I ever came to hearing them argue over work occurred when my father was dictating to my mother at the typewriter. Like most scientists, he had a weakness for the run-on sentence. Adding commas on top of colons on top of parentheticals, and mixing in both dependent and independent clauses, my father would have to take three breaths and seventy-five words before he finally got to the end of a sentence. My mother, meanwhile, would listen without bothering to strike a single key; then when he finally said “period” she’d nod appreciatively and think for a moment, before quickly typing fifteen, rather than seventy-five, words. My father, eventually tiring of waiting for her to put down the other sixty-odd words on paper, would come around to her side of the table to see what was holding her up, and, seeing what she had written, would protest, “Nora, that’s not what I said.”
She’d look up at him innocently and reply, “I know. It’s better.”
It was, for them. With my mother sitting beside him, serving alternately as audience, critic, and groupie, my father’s career experienced a second spring. With my mother’s help, twice as many articles were written; Dad cranked out a new book in six months. With her sharing the load, he took on more consulting jobs. Invitations to give speeches and attend conventions and colloquiums and conferences suddenly began to pour in from all over the world. And with no Casper to fear, there was no reason for them not to attend.
Or as my father put it to my mother one evening when I was eight, “Nora, it’s time for us to start making the most of our lives.” It was just after dinner on a Saturday. As usual, they and their work were at the dining room table. We ate in the kitchen. Lucy, Fiona, Willy, and I were having dessert.
“I didn’t know I wasn’t making the most of my life.” My mother had spent the previous half hour scurrying back and forth between our dinner and my father and his deadline. She was back at the typewriter now.
“Nora, don’t be obtuse, you know what I’m talking about.” My father had been invited to read a paper in France and then fly on to Geneva and give a speech. He’d been trying to talk her into going with him for days. My siblings had urged her to go; two unchaperoned weeks was their idea of heaven. Willy, thirteen, wouldn’t have to do his dreaded French homework, and Fiona, age eighteen, and Lucy, now sixteen, would have a brief respite from the shame of my father telling the teenage boys who mustered up the nerve to ask them out on a date, “I want you to enjoy yourselves, but I also want you to know I expect you to return my daughters on time, and, more important, in the exact same pristine condition in which you found them.”
We listened in the kitchen as my father hammered away at my mother in the other room about the trip. “Your tickets are paid for. There’s nothing to keep you here.”
“Nothing but our four children.” I alone was relieved to hear my mother say that.
The kettle on the stove whistled and my mother hurried back into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.
“Nora, it will be good for them,” my father called after her. “The girls can look after the boys.”
Dad stood in the doorway and looked at us with the same exasperation that surfaced on his face when he was stuck in traffic behind a stalled car. “Fiona in particular might benefit from looking after a househo
ld, caring for children. See what she’s turning up her nose at by insisting on going to college in New York City.”
Fiona had passed on Vassar to go to art school at NYU. Worse, she had thwarted him by winning a scholarship so he couldn’t accuse her of making him pay for her mistakes.
Fiona took offense. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Simply that in New York City, you’ll never find a husband interested in providing you a home like the one you grew up in.” My father had a farm boy’s mistrust of the big city. He also felt cheated that she chose to go to a school he couldn’t brag about.
“That’s why I’m going there, Dad.” Fiona knew how to give as good as she got.
My father was momentarily relieved when he glanced over and saw Lucy’s head buried in the SAT study book. When he looked closer, she closed the study book quickly. The copy of Confidential that she’d hidden in its pages slipped out onto the floor. She’d been reading an article about Chuck Berry’s getting arrested for taking a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl across state lines for immoral purposes. All my father said as he handed it back to her was, “Planning for your future?” Lucy’s cheeks flushed like she’d just been slapped.
Willy laughed. That was a mistake when my father was in one of his moods. He picked up one of the six Oreos Willy had stacked next to his ice cream. “Willy, do you know how many calories are in each one of these belly builders?”
Willy split one of the Oreos and licked the creamy center before he answered, “Fifty-five.” Willy was smart.
My father threw up his hands and went back to work. “I give up.”
But he didn’t. Not ever. As soon as my mother sat back down at the typewriter he started in. “Nora, just give me one reason why you’re fighting me on this trip.”
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