“My boyfriend—”
A knock came from the door. Miss Fuchs asked who it was. One of the interns poked her face in and asked for a word in the hall. Miss Fuchs went outside and closed the door.
“You needn’t feel I’m judging you,” the priest said.
“And yet you are.”
“What makes you so sure?”
One side of her lean face hid behind the long hank of white hair in which a few blue and green streaks ran, curving under the chin and framing it. Most of her was wrapped in an elegant sweater, handmade, a flea market purchase, old and coming apart at the shoulders from holes that had been stitched along their edges, not to mend them but to keep them artful holes.
“I see the calculation in Willy’s posture,” she said. “He’s so alert. He’s so sure he’s done something wrong to be here. Who else would have given him such an obscene idea but you people?”
“There it is,” the priest said comfortably, nodding. “Your contempt. Tell me about it.”
“Sir, I don’t need your assistance to make sense of my feelings.”
The priest moved aside an amaryllis planted in a bowl of sphagnum moss from the space between them and looked nakedly on the woman who was asking to be Willy’s mother. An understanding seemed to pass between them, a potential unrealized, that having each sincerely sought an enemy in the other, they might as sincerely find the ally they had been looking for. Her stomach growled audibly. A queer, contrary emotion began to trouble him. He tried with a spiritual muscle to resist its temptation. It seemed to be the wish, in spite of his earlier misgivings, in spite of her mistrust of him—or because of it—that she was indeed the parent God intended for the boy, and that the judge would let her take him in.
“I hear you don’t believe I was in the airport,” she said.
“Then you hear incorrectly. If you say you were in the airport I have no cause to disbelieve you.”
“Walther had just left me and I was flying back to Amsterdam to ask my husband if he would have me back. You imagine I was smeared in my own shit.”
“If you weren’t ashamed, who am I to shame you? You must have been very sad.”
“Very sad,” she said. “Your years of loving-kindness give you remarkable insight. I was ruined.”
“I didn’t mean to minimize, only to avoid presuming too much. To love and to be rejected is”—he nodded, resisting a glib impulse—“to shed your skin and then to be thrown in a briar.”
“What would you know about it?”
“Grandfather used to say he was married, not dead.”
“And you’re married to the Church?”
“That’s right.”
“And your eye wanders?”
“Of course.” He laughed. “Less than it used to.”
“And you fall in love sometimes?”
“I have, yes.”
“But you never surrendered yourself to your boy hustler, did you, and prayed for him to love you back?”
“I’m exerting effort not to respond to your provocations, Mrs. Wolbert, but I hope you won’t mistake that for an attempt to be more-genuine-than-thou. I’m often sarcastic myself. I don’t want to fight with you. In fact, I’ll tell you something personal. Often, but not always, when someone else is judging me, I feel a strange calmness. Psychologically speaking, I’ll confess I feel momentarily relieved of the burden of judging myself.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Does it sound familiar?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Maybe we can have a treaty anyway. I’ll respect that you have suffered in ways I can’t share, and you might respect that I have suffered likewise. And you can go on with what you’ll tell the judge.”
“What is it she’ll want to know?”
“The judge will be a man.”
“Do you know him?”
“Unfortunately I know him well.”
“Is he one of your—what do you call them—communicants?”
“No, he’s—how would he describe himself? He’d probably say he was a secular humanist, but humanism implies an allegiance with one’s fellow man that he’s never experienced. And a high regard for consciousness, don’t you think? But he’ll never possess the self-awareness to know how disappointed he is that his career has stalled in the guardianship court. I’ve played racquetball with him. He will die of a coronary playing racquetball someday. The competition going on inside him manifests itself as savagery in any venue where he can find a prospect of winning. In his professional position, he has no obvious adversaries. Therefore he will cast you in that role and he will flay you. He’ll believe he’s questioning you in the service of the Civil Code but he’s really serving the torturer inside him.”
“You mean the sufferer?”
“They are the same entity.”
“All right.”
“The first of the two considerations that the Civil Code requires him to hold paramount is the child’s best interest. The second is that it must be expected a parent-child relationship will develop between the adopter and the child. That is the language. In your case, he will most likely go after what appears, forgive me, to be the capricious nature of your interest in the boy. I could try to argue that if not you and your husband, no other qualified couple would likely step forward, especially in light of the boy’s age and what the court psychiatrist will likely conclude is a severe emotional injury incurred at the airport, if not before, resulting in the boy’s refusal to speak and unknowable future problems for the adoptive family. He’s a damaged person, and we’re lucky to find anyone willing to brave him.
“Perhaps that’s all true, but the judge won’t care. He will want to rationalize his first impression, that you are using the child as a bandage on your humiliation. Once you feel better about this Walther, you might resent the boy and even drop him. You must know that happens sometimes. The child refuses to bond, or the adopters come to regard the child as an alien presence in the home. Even if you escape that, most children despise their parents for at least part of adolescence. A biological mother, or at least a mother who’s cared for the child from infancy, retains a helpless love that usually gets her through the child’s contempt at that age. You may believe you love him, but under extreme pressures, the bond breaks at its weakest place. And that weakness, in the eyes of the judge, is the fact of your relationship having its origins in a choice, rather than in nature. A married couple begins with a choice too, but their choice is mutual. Therefore it’s twice as strong. Even if the young child assents to live in your home, he hasn’t reached the age of real choice.
“What I’m trying to say, Mrs. Wolbert, is that the judge views the animal bond as true, and the chosen bond—because it is revocable—as false. I don’t share this view. In fact, if you’ll allow me an opinion, I think this view ought to be repulsive to anyone calling himself a humanist. I think the choice you’re making can be definitive. The judge does not. He assumes you can’t love the boy on purpose. And the only true love is the one that strikes you down without your choosing it.”
She flicked her hair with the finger adorned with a plastic mantis. “What I saw in the airport,” she said uncertainly.
“Go on.”
“Yes, I saw him and felt attached to him crying there.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“But it wasn’t love in an instant. I’m forty-seven years old. I know better.”
“Love is referring to a number of days,” the priest said.
“You don’t mean I can love him just by sticking with him awhile.”
“No.”
“I saw him, and I want to do this,” she said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“I’d say it’s almost everything,” the priest said.
“Okay, but what I saw in the airport . . .” She seemed to concentrate. She put he
r hair behind her ear—her ears were so prominent it seemed she might have begun wearing her hair over them as an adolescent to disguise them, but at some point during adulthood had shaved the one side of the head in order deliberately to call attention to her ears and conquer her repugnance. “I also saw a man. Late thirties. Shivering, bug-eyed. Maybe he was strung out. I saw him go into the bathroom. People get worked up at airports all the time, right? Visibly stressed. I remember saying to myself, I hope I don’t look that bad. And I took out my compact and fixed my eye makeup and I felt better. I’m not certain I saw him with Willy. I think I saw him go into the bathroom with a little boy, but maybe I made that up. I remember seeing a child in a black parka, a sporty little ski jacket. And that’s what Willy was wearing later when I saw him crying. But was there really a boy with that man, and was he the same boy I saw crying later at the ticket gate?”
“You didn’t tell anyone.”
“I’m almost certain I made it up. There were so many people. And Walther was gone. I thought my life was over.”
“When you saw the boy later—”
“Yes. I wondered right away if he was the same child. But I decided, what if he was, what difference would it make? At the time I thought, what difference does anything make?” she said. “Does the judge really need to know about all this?”
“Don’t call him a judge.”
“You call him a judge.”
“He is a judge, but the law also invests him with the care of the parties within the case, so he’s a kind of social worker.”
“What do you call him?”
“If you call him a judge, even though he is a judge, he’ll think you’re making fun of him.”
“Does he need to hear about the bathroom?”
“You are describing a suspicion. The judge—but he is also not a judge—prefers to do the suspecting himself. It’s you who’s on trial, not some man you maybe never saw.”
“I sat there on my luggage telling myself, Let the airport people worry about it. Let the police find his parents.”
“I told myself the same thing,” the priest said. “I won’t tell you the police investigator was completely indifferent, but when I pester him for updates he lectures me about the agony that he imagines drove Willy’s mother to do this to him. It’s not as though she left him in the woods, he says. She left him where the state couldn’t fail to find him and take care of him.” The priest believed he saw a smug and slanted smirk flash across the woman’s mouth as he said, “The investigator considers it a crime of mercy.” But Nora had not smirked; he had smirked, and he reproached himself.
“Don’t you agree?” she said earnestly.
“I think we all have a right to come from somewhere and know it. To come from some people and know who they are. And I think that information is slipping away from Willy. So no, I don’t agree. I admit I got angry with the investigator. He asked me, ‘Do we really want to spend time and money tracking this woman down—’”
“Or man.”
“Or man, I suppose—‘and putting her on trial?’”
“What will I be on trial for?”
“How will it look at its worst? I’d say you were an adventuress who had her fun, and now she’s lonely and too old to get pregnant without a lot of hassle, but she wants a child because now that she’s destroyed her marriage she’d like someone to keep her company. The husband’s still loyal enough not to stand in her way. So he’ll testify to their continued home life, when in reality they intend to divorce soon or at least to live separately.”
“That isn’t so bad, I suppose.”
“And not too far from the truth?”
“I wouldn’t like to say,” she said.
“Were there any questions you’d like to ask me?”
“I guess I didn’t expect we’d go so soon before a judge.”
“Not a judge.”
“What do I call him?”
“He is a judge, except something less than a judge. He is a judge manqué. Better not to call him anything.”
“I didn’t expect we’d have a hearing so soon. I mean before Willy’s even lived with me.”
“Who told you it was a hearing?” The priest bristled. “A hearing is a contest. It is not a hearing. It is a chat.”
“Does my husband have to be there, for just a chat?”
“Wouldn’t you want him to be?”
Nora looked at the drab scones.
“The standard interpretation of the guidelines issued by the Working Group results in a de facto requirement that the child be placed into the home of a married couple.”
“I know that,” she said.
“Or of a same-sex couple living as legally registered partners, whatever one might think of such arrangements.”
“I know.”
“But not in the hands of a woman living alone, especially a woman born more than forty years prior to the birth date of the child. And your husband realizes that a married couple must adopt jointly? Married couples, at whatever stage of marriage, may and must adopt jointly.”
Nora wiped her eyes and nose with her tissue. “Damn it,” she said. “Sorry.”
“I’m not judging you.”
“If you say you’re not, who am I to say you are?”
“That’s clever.”
She inquired of the ceiling, “How much more am I prepared to ask of this man?”
“What’s his name?”
“One more thing I left out.”
“All right.”
“His name is Kees, my husband. But I left something out and I should just tell you, you’re a priest.”
“I am a slave in the mines of sin. Whatever you say, I’ve heard it before.”
“You assume it’s a sin.”
“You’re right. Forgive me. To the carpenter everything is a nail.”
“Jesus was a carpenter.”
“I surrender. What did you leave out?”
“Doubt this all you want. But the moment I saw Willy crying at the gate and wondered if he was the same boy I’d seen earlier, I also knew right away that all of this would happen. All of it. I knew that when I got to Holland, Kees would refuse to have me back. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get the boy out of my mind. I knew I would come back here. I knew I would get some dismal job just to stay in Hamburg. I knew no one else would claim him. I knew Kees would agree to be the father at least for legal purposes. I’ve been living for almost a year in a vision I saw unfold for me all in a moment. I even remember seeing that Miss Fuchs would leave the room just now and then I would get angry with you. And then I would trust you somewhat, and be more candid.”
“Quite a vision you’ve had.”
“But that’s the end of the vision. You make it sound like we can’t win.”
“Yes, you can. He will try to make it a contest. If you don’t compete with him, he’ll see there’s no one to defeat. We could send Willy home with you in a week.”
“I saw it all, right up to now, but I don’t know what comes after this.”
“A chat comes after.”
“Not a hearing.” She ruffled her hair and smiled. “I so hope this will work,” she said.
With a rush he recognized that so did he. “Was there anything else you wanted to ask?”
“What happened to your head?”
The priest said, “I was attacked by a wild animal.”
“Really?” she gasped.
“A hawk.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“It is because my vocation demands that I espouse a love of truth that no one believes I’m telling it. We live in an era of disenchanted irony. We say we can’t believe, when we have not even tried to believe.”
Nora picked up a scone and put it back down.
“I saw the hawk flying toward me, but I di
dn’t realize that I myself was the threat it feared until it knocked me over.”
“You knew you were innocent of the threat, but how could the animal have known?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t wrong,” the priest hypothesized.
“What do you mean?”
“Perhaps I had intentions intolerable to my conscious mind and therefore invisible to me. Perhaps the savage animal in myself was rising up to do something of unspeakable wickedness. And being helpless to stop it, I instead unconsciously invented other, acceptable intentions. Of course I can’t know, by definition: as they say, the unconscious is really unconscious. But the hawk that came after me saw only another animal and knew only its animal plot and acted to stop me.”
“Stop you from what?”
“What were my acceptable intentions? Or what did the hawk think it saw me about to do?”
“Both.”
“There was a fawn at the edge of the woods. I thought I needed to protect it from the hawk. So I threw a rock to startle it into running away.”
“And what did the hawk think you were going to do?”
“It probably thought I intended to kill its children.”
Part Two
The New Country
11
He had driven the Electra up to Bobby Heflin’s house in the desert and had got out shading his eyes from the afternoon sun with his hand, and the woman he mistook for Sally came to one of the doors wearing an extension cord and a can opener like jewelry around her neck saying the house had no phone. “Bobby run off,” she said. The others had gone too about the same time. The place was for sale. The bank owned it all.
Her name was Louisa. And while the knowledge penetrated him that the future he had come here for had already ended, she was introducing him to the boy, and they shook hands. She asked if he was hungry, and he admitted that yes, he was a little hungry. He didn’t admit that he hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast yesterday in Liberal, Kansas. She insisted he come inside. He followed her and the boy through the door. Piñon wood burned in the cookstove. A new smell to him at the time. The smell was never to lose its mythy power of turning whatever the moment into an eternity. And a pot of meat simmered on the cookstove in a foreign green sauce, not unpleasant smelling. She put some of the meat on corn tortillas, on an earthenware dish, and spooned a little of the cooking sauce over it and showed him how to fold the things up. He’d never eaten a taco before. He opened his teeth. And the combination of the flavors in his mouth was like music. Then he swallowed, and the moment was gone.
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