by Susan Rieger
“Can’t we at least toss the Duplo,” Eleanor asked him when he was six. On most days his room looked as if it had exploded. “What about the Lincoln Logs?”
“No, no,” Sam said. “I’m saving them for Tom.”
“What about storing them in Limbo?” Eleanor asked. Limbo, a large closet off the pantry, was where Eleanor stored old toys and athletic equipment the boys had outgrown but weren’t ready to part with. After three months in Limbo, an item was passed on to another brother, thrown in the garbage, or taken to a thrift shop. Eleanor’s mother disapproved, seeing it as “coddling Collyering.” She thought they should use things until they wore out. “I counted eight tennis racquets in that closet,” she said to Eleanor the year Sam went into middle school. Eleanor refused the bait. “I think you missed two behind the door,” she said. The boys had mixed feelings about Limbo. Sometimes, months later, one of the boys would spot a discarded toy or racquet in one of his brothers’ rooms and express regret at its loss. He’d complain to his mother. “Why don’t you share?” she’d suggest. Harry and Sam didn’t like sharing. Tom insisted he never got anything new, not even new underwear. “Everything I have came out of Limbo,” he’d complain. Years later, Tom came to think of Princeton as one more Limbo pass-along.
“I might change my mind after three months,” Sam said, already hedging his offer.
Shortly before his eighth birthday, Sam gave all his LEGO to Tom. He announced the handover at dinner. “I’m through with LEGO.”
“Just like that?” Eleanor asked.
“It’s all the same. I’d like a microscope for my next birthday.”
“Yes,” Rupert said.
“Can I have a horn for mine?” Jack asked, only six but already possessed. “A real one, not plastic.” Eleanor nodded. “Any other requests?” she asked.
“I’d like one of those steel tennis racquets,” Harry said.
“Me too,” said Will.
“Since when?” said Harry.
“Since Jimmy Connors,” Will said.
“Right,” said Harry.
“It’s true,” said Will.
“Next up,” Rupert said.
Eleanor smiled at Tom. “And you, Tomahawk?” she said. The others all turned to look at him, bibbed in his booster seat. He froze, stricken, then covered his eyes with his hands, silently, hopelessly willing his mother to pick him up and hold him in her lap. She wouldn’t, not at dinner.
“I don’t know what a tennis rocket is,” he said, looking up at the ceiling, blinking back tears. “I might want one. I like rockets.”
Everyone laughed, Jack loudest. Tom put his head on the table.
“I like rockets too,” Sam said.
Tom lifted his head.
“Give me five,” Sam said.
All his life, Tom loved Sam with the passionate feelings of a little boy. “I could do without the others,” he told his wife, Caroline. “Will’s OK.” Caroline shook her head. “You love them all, even Jack.” Tom grunted.
That year, Sam’s scientific career began in earnest. He looked at everything under his microscope: hot dogs, French fries, oysters, LEGO, sand, acorns, dead worms, living worms, mice, moles, lady birds, flies, sticks. He wrote down his observations in three notebooks: Things, Living Things, and Dead Things.
“Is a leaf I just picked living or dead?” he asked his father.
“Dying, I would think,” Rupert said. “So, living.”
Sam was quiet. “Living is dying,” he said. He was quiet again. “I’m going to be a doctor.”
“Yes,” Rupert said.
—
Sam had dreaded the move to the upper school. His father wanted him to play a sport. Over the years, he had joined and quit Little League, Soccer League, and Hockey League. He liked playing games; he hated being on a team. “The coaches are always yelling,” he told his mother. “And they make fun of the fat kids.” He was not a team player, not in athletics, not in life. He had his family, Team Falkes; that was the only team he wanted to play on. Rupert believed in playing sports the way he believed in churchgoing: it was character-building. But I have character, Sam thought, just a different kind. He wished he had Jack’s character. Jack got himself kicked off every team for poor sportsmanship. “I am a soloist,” Jack said.
Everyone at Trinity played sports. It looked good on college applications: Honor Society, Soup Kitchen, Varsity Soccer. Trinity expected it: labore et virtute.
In ninth grade, Sam went out for squash. He played for the team intermittently and listlessly. His game was a tennis player’s game. He attacked the ball with a wide swing that enraged his opponents. “Do I have to play on a team?” Sam asked his father as the next school year began. They were listening to music in the library, Schubert’s songs.
“What about running?” Rupert said. “You’re fast.”
“I always come in second,” Sam said. “It makes me cross. I get like Harry. I hate losing.”
The next weekend, Rupert took Sam to see Chariots of Fire at Lincoln Plaza, around the corner from their apartment.
That summer, Sam joined Road Runners. He got stronger, faster. Junior and senior years, he competed in the 400- and the 800-meter. “Tailor-made for neurotics,” he said to his father. Sam was built like a distance runner, as were all the boys when they were young. Legs and lungs, Eleanor thought, like me. At Princeton, Sam took up squash again. He paid attention to the coaches and learned to whip his racquet. Exploiting the runner’s advantage, he regularly beat Harry.
—
Eleanor never listened to music. It made her anxious. When Rupert proposed, she told him, as a warning, that she couldn’t be made to attend concerts. “I’d rather listen to news radio,” she said. She knew music was important to him. He had told her it had saved his life.
“We don’t have to like the same things,” he said. “I can go by myself.”
In middle school, Eleanor had been made to suffer through Saturday-afternoon concerts at the New York Philharmonic. She had a subscription, a birthday gift from her mother. In the beginning, her nanny went with her. “I expect you to appreciate what I’m doing to cultivate your musical taste,” her mother said. “I pay for Nanny’s tickets too.”
Sitting in her stiff, scratchy taffeta dress, not knowing what to do with her face, Eleanor found the concerts more boring than church. Music made no sense to her. She couldn’t remember melodies unless they had words. She never knew when to clap. When she was twelve, she was allowed to go by herself. Realizing that a good portion of the audience stayed only for the first half of the concert, Eleanor started leaving at the interval and going to movies, taking the concert program to show her mother. The year 1950 was a spectacular one for movies, a lucky break for a good girl on the lam. She saw: Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, Born Yesterday, A Streetcar Named Desire, Strangers on a Train, Rashomon. She also saw duds: Father of the Bride, Cheaper by the Dozen, Cinderella, King Solomon’s Mines, Quo Vadis, Harvey. Harvey almost put her permanently off Jimmy Stewart. The others confirmed her early prejudices against Technicolor, toga sagas, domestic comedies, and Disney. Dud or hit, she always stayed till the end, as a rebuke to the Philharmonic, a “counterpoint of honor.”
The boys, musically, ran the gamut. Harry and Will liked the Stones, Patti Smith, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, the Police, Dylan, Springsteen. Mostly, they listened; occasionally, they went to concerts. Tom liked country, the Doors, the Stones, Motown, and the Beatles. He took guitar lessons for two years but gave it up. “I’m no good,” he said, comparing himself with Jack. Jack heard the album Bird and Diz when he was five, at a friend’s. He came home and said to his mother, “I need you to buy me all of Dizzy’s records. And all of Bird’s. I also need a record player and a horn.” At six, he started lessons. He played the trumpet, he later explained, because he loved Coltrane and Parker too much to play the saxophone. “I cry when I hear a great sax. It’s like a human voice,” he said. “Chet, Dizzy, Miles, Louis, they make me glad to be al
ive.” Sam was the only one who loved classical music. It started early. He would toddle unevenly into the library, where his father was reading, and point to the stereo. Rupert would put on a record. As the music filled the room, Sam would sit on the floor leaning against his father’s legs. He never fell asleep. Songs and chamber music were his favorites. His father bought him a Cambridge Soundworks radio for his sixth birthday and tuned it to WQXR. Unlike Harry, Will, and Tom, Sam couldn’t listen to music and read or do homework. He was like Jack that way. “Music invades my brain,” he said. He hated background music. All music was foreground. When he hummed, as he often did while working on some project, he didn’t notice he was doing it. “My brain does it by itself,” he told his mother.
For his eleventh birthday, Sam asked his father if he could have a subscription to the opera. He had heard Carmen on the radio and was transported. Over a late dinner at his in-laws’ a week later, Rupert mentioned it.
“I got tickets for us both to Rigoletto, Traviata, Madame Butterfly, Billy Budd.”
“Sam’s a little fairy, isn’t he?” Mrs. Phipps said. “Too bad. I wonder where it came from.” She looked at Eleanor.
Rupert turned to his father-in-law. “You’ll excuse me, Edward,” he said.
Rupert then turned to his mother-in-law. “You stupid cunt.”
—
The Falkes boys all had a wide streak of single-mindedness; it made them successful and, to varying extents, self-absorbed. Jack’s single-mindedness was extreme, crossing over to obsession. Unable to think about anything other than jazz, he talked about little else. No family occasion passed without Eleanor’s mother remarking in his hearing, “All play and no work makes Jack a dull boy.” She would laugh as she said it, pleased with her joke. “Is it worth a Granny slap-down?” Rupert said. “Do you mind when Granny says that?” Eleanor asked Jack. “Granny is not nice. We all know that,” Jack said. “She picks on Sam more than she picks on me. It’s OK.”
In their single-mindedness, the boys were like their father. Rupert could do multiple things: litigate, negotiate, sail, sing, read, but he could only do one of them at a time. If he was interrupted in the middle of a task, even an unpleasant one, like bill paying, he grew testy. “Is it important?” he’d ask. Father and sons thought that multitasking was for the butterfly-minded. They made a permanent running joke of it. Harry said he could eat and read at the same time, but not pie and economics. Will said he could breathe and argue. Sam could hum and titrate. Jack said he could fart and chew gum. Tom said he could barely do one thing at a time, let alone two.
Eleanor could make a sandwich and do LEGO, sing and drive, push a stroller and settle a quarrel, listen and wipe a nose. Testiness wasn’t an option. Is constant and instant availability to the needs of boys the same thing as multitasking? she thought.
In eleventh grade, Harry read Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox. For his class project, he devised a ten-point scale, running from 1 (hedgehog: knowing one big thing) to 10 (fox: knowing many things), as a test of the two categories. The night before his project was due, he did a pilot study on his family, plotting them along the axis: he was a 5; Will a 4; Sam a 3; Jack a 1; Tom, hypothetically, then only eight, a 5. He presented his results at dinner.
“This is very interesting,” Rupert said. “Where do your mother and I go?”
“You’re a 5, I think, like me. We don’t like interruptions, but we cope,” Harry said. “Mom’s an 8, maybe a 9. A fox.”
“Is that your way of telling me I’m a multitasker?” Eleanor asked, always aware she had been raised to be good at nothing.
“It’s not an insult,” Harry said. “You’re always doing at least two things at a time. You don’t mind being interrupted.”
“How do you know I don’t mind?” she asked.
The boys stared at her. Rupert stared at her.
“No,” she said. “I’m not an 8 or a 9. I’m a 1, a purebred hedgehog, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle herself. All I do is all of you. That’s what I know. One big thing. Boys.”
Harry considered her objection. “The extremes meet. Is that it?” he asked.
“No,” Eleanor said. “Synecdoche.”
“I don’t understand,” Harry said.
“All the things I do are simply parts of the whole,” Eleanor said.
Later that evening, catching her alone, Sam asked his mother whether she ever wished she were something other than a mother. Eleanor winced inwardly. None of the others would have asked that question; none of the others would even have thought of it. She felt her old sense of guilt about Sam rising. Breathing slowly to tamp it down—what use was guilt, after all?—she unexpectedly felt a wave of irritation with his brothers.
“Not ‘other’ than a mother. Never. Perhaps ‘in addition,’ ” she said to Sam.
“What would you do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’m almost forty,” she said. “I’ve never worked.”
“Is that why you had five children?” he asked.
“I had five children because I was lucky. I could afford five children. I had household help. I thought it was a good idea. Dad thought it was a good idea. I was an only child; he was an orphan. We like having all of you around. Dad would have had more. I think his fantasy was eleven, a cricket side.”
“What do you do during the day when we’re not home?” Sam asked.
Eleanor didn’t answer at once. Sam waited.
“I go to movies,” she said.
“I thought you shopped,” Sam said. “I thought you were bored.”
“Mothers are often a mystery to their children,” Eleanor said.
“Do you go to movies alone?” Sam asked.
“Sometimes I go by myself, sometimes I go with a friend,” Eleanor said.
“Do you have a favorite movie?” Sam asked.
“Smiles of a Summer Night, The Third Man, Casablanca, The Sorrow and the Pity,” Eleanor said. “I don’t run to favorites. In anything.”
“Not even Harry?” Sam said. In a family of five boys, there was a lot of jockeying for attention, and Harry had a way of elbowing to the front.
“Cheeky boy,” Eleanor said, ruffling his hair. “Only his first two years.”
“You’re not a pure hedgehog, are you?” Sam said.
Eleanor shook her head.
“My favorite movie is Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Sam said.
“Not Star Wars?”
“ ‘He says the sun came out last night. He says it sang to him,’ ” Sam said.
—
Lea called Sam. “What do we do about Harry?” she asked. “He’s stuck on being right. As if that mattered more than being decent. What did you say to him? He won’t tell me.”
“I said if he didn’t pull himself together, he’d wreck the family, and I’d never forgive him. I was very angry. I’m still very angry,” Sam said.
“I’m sorry,” Lea said.
“I loved my father,” Sam said. “He never for one minute wanted me to be straight. He wanted me to be me. In the world of parents of gays, that is so rare. Andrew says he was the snow leopard of dads.”
“Is this only about your father, not your mother?” Lea said.
“Both. I don’t understand why he’s so mad at her. He wasn’t close to Dad but he loves Mom,” Sam said. “He’s always believed he was her favorite. He’s always acted as though the rest of us were superfluous. Case in point.”
“He’s trapped himself. It’s reached a state of imminent mortification with him, backing down, that is. He was expecting Lana Turner; she gave him Bette Davis. He was sure she would confess; he still can’t believe she didn’t.”
“I don’t understand how he could have done it. He led the charge against the Wolinskis because their lawsuit was an insult to our parents. But he can insult them, is that it?”
“What do we do?” Lea said.
“He needs to apologize to Mom—a clean apology, or as clean as he can manage,” Sam said. “He
can think whatever he wants, but he can’t talk about it to her. Or anyone. If he keeps on, there will be civil war, with Jack the only one on speakers with him.”
“Could he be right?” Lea said.
“Oh, Lea,” Sam said, “don’t go there. Don’t join him.”
“I love him. It’s been hard,” she said.
“Is something else going on with him?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. She was silent for a few moments. Sam waited. “Freud for dummies. All this displaced anger. Is he going to blame me for something he’s done, something he’s doing? It’s always the woman’s fault, isn’t it, ever since Eve?”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said.
“Unlike him, I can’t ask,” she said. “I might have to leave him.”
“Dad dies, and we fall apart,” Sam said.
—
Sam had never seen his parents fight. When he was nine, he asked Harry and Will if they had. They hadn’t. “They don’t fight and they don’t hug or kiss,” Harry said. “They’re WASPs.” “Do they love each other?” Sam asked. “Of course,” Harry said. “They’re married.” Watching them sitting side by side on the library sofa, reading the paper or looking at TV, Sam longed for his mother to rest her head on his father’s shoulder, his father to lay his hand on her knee. He offered up his comic-book collection. Neither moved, though his father looked at his mother in a way that Sam thought was like an invisible hand on her knee. There were other signs too. They went to bed at the same hour and locked their bedroom door. He knew; he had tried the handle.
Sam had never seen his grandparents fight either, but he didn’t need to consult Harry. Their politeness to each other was guerrilla warfare. Every “please,” every “thank you” bristled with hostility. They couldn’t stand each other. It was a secret everyone knew and no one mentioned. At the holidays, Eleanor served buffet dinners so her father could sit in the living room, her mother in the dining room. At the end of an evening, Granddad would send Gran home alone in the car. He liked to stay on to smoke a cigar, an activity forbidden at home. The driver would come back later for him. No one liked Eleanor’s mother, but no one except Rupert was allowed to be rude to her.