"This is Celia, Kevin. I k n o w she's not a lot of f u n yet, but w h e n she gets a little bigger I bet she'll be your best friend." I wondered if he k n e w what one was. He'd yet to bring a classmate h o m e from school.
"You mean she'll tag along after me and stuff. I've seen it. It's a pain."
You clapped your hands on Kevin's shoulders from behind and rocked h i m in a pally motion. Kevin's face twitched. "Yeah, well, that's all part of being a big brother!" you said. "I should know, because I had a little sister, too.They never leave you alone!
You want to play with trucks, and they're always pestering you to play with doll babies!"
"I played with trucks," I objected, shooting you a look; we would have to talk about this retrograde sex-role crap w h e n we got home. It was a shame that, b o r n back-to-back, you and your sister Valerie—a prissy girl grown officious woman, consumed by the cut of her drapes, and on our brief visits to Philadelphia determined to organize "outings" to historical homes—were never very close. "There's no telling w h a t Ceha will like to do, any more than you can tell if Kevin may like to play with dolls."
"In a pig's eye!" you cried fraternally.
"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turdes? Spiderman? Action figures are dolls."
"Great, Eva," you muttered. "Give the litde guy a complex."
Meantime, Kevin had sidled closer to the bed and dipped his hand into the glass of water on the bedside table. Eyeing the baby askance, he held his wet hand over her face and let drops of water drip, drip onto her face. Celia twisted, disconcerted, but the baptism didn't seem to be upsetting her, though I would later learn to regard the fact that my daughter hadn't complained or cried out as meaningless. His face stirring with a rare if clinical
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curiosity, Kevin wet his hand again and spattered his sister's nose and m o u t h . I wasn't sure what to do. Kevin's christening reminded me of fairy tales in which an aggrieved relative arrives to curse the princess in her crib.Yet he wasn't really hurting her, and I didn't want to taint this introduction with a reprimand. So w h e n he dipped his hand a third time, I resettled myself on the pillow and, dabbing her face with the sheet, discreedy withdrew the baby out of his reach.
"Hey, Kev!" You rubbed your hands. "Your m o t h e r has to get dressed, so let's go find something really greasy and really salty in those machines d o w n the hall!"
W h e n we left the hospital together, you said I must be shot after being up and down all night with a n e w b o r n and volunteered to baby-sit while I got some sleep.
" N o , it's the oddest thing," I whispered. "I did get up a couple of times for feeding, but I had to set an alarm. Franklin—she doesn't cry."
" H u h . Well, don't expect that to last."
"You never know—they're all different."
"Babies ought to cry," you said vigorously "Kid just lolls in bed and sleeps all day, you're raising a doormat."
W h e n we came home, I noticed that the framed p h o t o of me in my late twenties that we kept on the little table in the foyer was missing, and I asked you if you'd moved it.You said no, shrugging, and I declined to pursue the matter, assuming it would t u r n up.
It didn't. I was a little perturbed; I no longer looked nearly that pretty, and these verifications that we were once lineless and lovely do grow precious. T h e shot had been snapped on an Amsterdam houseboat with whose captain I had a brief, uncomplicated affair.
I treasured the expression he'd captured—expansive, relaxed, warm; it fixed a simple glorying in all that I then required of life: light on water, bright white wine, a handsome man. T h e portrait had softened the severity that marked most of my pictures, with that shelved brow of mine, my deep-set eyes in shadow. T h e houseboat captain had mailed me the photo, and I didn't have
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the negative. O h , well. Presumably, while I was in the hospital Kevin had snatched the print to poke pins in.
Anyway, I was in no mood to get exercised over one silly snapshot. In fact, though I fear that my martial metaphor may seem provocative, when I carried Celia over our threshold I had the exhilarating impression of having reset our troop strengths at a healthy par. Little could I know that, as a military ally, a trusting young girl is worse than nothing, an open left flank.
FEBRUARY 1 8 , 2 0 0 1
Dear Franklin,
You know, I was just thinking that I might have been able to handle everything— Thursday, the trials, even our separation—if only I'd been allowed to keep Celia. Nevertheless (and this may surprise you), I like picturing her with you, imagining the two of you together. I ' m glad if, at last, you may be getting to k n o w one another better. You were a good father to her—I don't mean to criticize—but you were always so sensitive about slighting Kevin that you may have overdone it, the reassurance that you were still on his side. You kept her a little at arm's length. And as she got older, she got so pretty, didn't she? In a tentative, bashful way, with that fine gold hair fluttering forever in her face. I think you resented it, on Kevin's behalf—how other people f o u n d her so enchanting, whereas with Kevin they tended to be wary and so overly hearty or false and sometimes visibly relieved w h e n we showed up at their house and hadn't brought h i m along. It wasn't fair, you thought. I suppose, in that big universal way, it wasn't.
Maybe my love for Celia was too easy. Maybe in my o w n terms she was a kind of cheating, since my w h o l e life I had striven to surmount difficulty, to overcome terrors. Celia was plainly lovable. I can't recall anyone w h o didn't find her sweet, though I w o n d e r if she stuck in the mind. Neighbors rarely liked Kevin, even if they were too polite to say so outright, but they r e m e m -
bered him. Both our families copped attitudes.Your sister Valerie 265
was always edgy about leaving Kevin unattended anywhere in her fastidiously decorated house and, just to check up on him, kept bringing our son sandwiches he didn't want; whenever he picked up a candy dish or fiddled with the tassel of a tieback, she'd j u m p up and take it away. Well before Kevin's deficiencies became national news, whenever Giles asked after our son my brother seemed to be fishing for mean little stories to confirm a private prejudice. Kevin was hard to like, much less to love, but in this way he should have been perfectly fashioned for the likes of his mother. Kevin was hard to love in the same manner that it was hard to eat well in Moscow, find a cheap place to stay in London, or locate a commercial Laundromat in Bangkok. But I had moved back to the United States, grown soft. As I would sometimes cave to expedience and order takeout curries with a side of naan instead of simmering chicken in turmeric for hours on my stove, I chose the easy comfort of a compliant, ready-made child rather than break down the stringy fibers of a tough kid with long low heat. I had been rising to challenges for most of my hfe. I was tired, and, latterly, flabby; in a spiritual sense, I was out of shape.
But it is only natural for the current of emotion to follow the path of least resistance.To my amazement, when I put Celia down she slept; I guess we were indeed raising "a doormat." Whereas Kevin had screeched with every conceivable need met, Celia would submit to all manner of material deprivations with barely a mewl or stir, and she could pickle for hours in a wet diaper unless I remembered to check. She never wept out of hunger yet always took the breast, so I was obliged to feed her according to a fixed schedule. I may have been the first mother in history to despair that her baby didn't cry enough.
Kevin's disconsolate infancy had segued to wholesale boredom; Celia was entranced by the least bauble. Every bit as delighted with a scrap of colored tissue paper as with that expensive mother-of-pearl mobile over her crib, she displayed an indiscriminate fascination with the tactile universe that
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would have driven your Madison Avenue masters to distraction.
Ironically for a girl so easy to please, it would grow difficult to buy her presents because she was so infatuated with the toys she had. As she got older she formed such passionate loyalties
to tattered stuffed animals that the gift of plush, fresh-furred creatures seemed to throw her into turmoil—as if, like her second-time father, she feared that to enlarge her httle family was to imperil previous, more primitive commitments. T h e newer animals were only allowed in her bedtime embrace once they had proved themselves by losing an ear or had joined the fallible, mortal world with a baptismal stain of strained broccoli.
O n c e she could speak, she confided to me that she was careful to play with each member of the menagerie every day, lest one feel neglected or jealous. Her favorite, most fiercely defended toys were the ones that (thanks to Kevin) were broken.
It's possible that she was too m u c h of a girl-girl for you, and her feminine diffidence and delicacy were foreign to me as well. You might have preferred a boisterous, fearless tomboy w h o made you proud by conquering the summits of jungle gyms, arm-wrestling boys, and declaring to visitors that she planned to be an astronaut—a rough-and-tumble hellion w h o sauntered about the house in cowboy chaps covered in motor oil. I might have enjoyed that kind of girl, too, but that was not the daughter we got.
Instead, Celia loved to don lacy frocks and dab on the lipstick I rarely wore. But her girlishness wasn't limited to captivation with jewelry on my dresser, to wobbles in my high-heeled shoes.
It expressed itself in a larger weakness, dependency, and trust. She had so many lovely qualities, but she didn't have guts. She was full of terrors, and not only of the dark, but of the vacuum cleaner, the basement, and the drain. Eager to please, she began to use the potty well before the age of two but into kindergarten was still mortified by venturing into the bathroom by herself. She watched me open and throw out a moldy Columbo container once and for weeks thereafter would not come near the refrigerator, nor
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touch any substance, like vanilla pudding or even white poster paint, that resembled yogurt. Like many children, she was supersensitive to texture; though tolerant of mud, she reviled what she called "drydirt," pronounced as one word: fine silty soil, dust on linoleum, even plain flour. The first time I taught her to roll a pie crust, she stood stricken in the middle of the kitchen with her floured hands held out from her side, fingers spread, eyes popped wide. Celia always expressed horror in silence.
As for food, it took me a while to discern what turned out to be fierce aversions. Loath to seem choosy, she would force herself to choke down whatever she was offered, unless I attended to her indrawn shoulders and stifled litde gags. She was revulsed by anything with "lumps" (tapioca, pumpernickel with raisins),
"slime" (okra, tomatoes, sauces thickened with cornstarch), or
"skin" (a rubbery bottom on Jell-O, the cooled brown surface on hot cocoa, even an unpeeled peach).While I was relieved to have a child with tastes at all—I might have fashioned Kevin's meals from colored wax—quaking before these comestibles, she grew so pale and moist that the food might have been poised to eat her. For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul.
I know it was frustrating, always having to remember to leave the hall light on or getting up in the middle of the night to accompany her to the toilet. More than once you accused me of coddling her, since to indulge a fear was to feed it. But what was I to do on discovering a four-year-old trembling in the hall at 3 A.M., chilled in her nightie and clutching between her legs, but beg her to always, always wake one of us up if she needed to pee? Besides, Celia was frightened of so many different things that it's possible she was, in her own terms, courageous. Of what a variety of dreadful textures or murky corners might she have been terrified and quietly faced down by herself?
But I drew the line when you despaired that Celia was
"clingy." It's an ugly word, isn't it, that describes the honey of the heart as a sticky, pester-some substance that won't brush off. And
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to whatever degree clinginess is not simply a mean appellation for the most precious thing on earth, it involves an unacceptably incessant demand for attention, approbation, ardor in return. But Celia beseeched us for nothing. She didn't nag us to come see what she'd built in the playroom or paw and tug at us while we tried to read. Whenever I hugged her unbidden, she returned my embrace with a thankful ferocity that implied unworthiness.
After I went back to working at AWAP, she never complained at my absence, though her face would turn ashen with grief w h e n I dropped her at preschool and would light like Christmas w h e n I came home.
Celia was not clingy. She was simply affectionate. She did sometimes wrap her arms around my leg in the kitchen, press her cheek to my knee, and exclaim with amazement, "You're my friend!'Yet whatever difficulty you may have had with her arrival, you were never so hard a man as to find such demonstrations anything but touching. Indeed, confirmation that we were her friends seemed to entrance her far more than broad, rather abstract protestations of parental love. Although I k n o w you thought Kevin the far smarter of the two, Kevin entered this world utterly stymied by what it was for and what to do with it, where Celia arrived with unshakable certainty about what she wanted and what made life worth living: that goo that wouldn't brush off.
Surely that constitutes intelligence of a kind.
All right, she didn't do well in school. But that's because she tried too hard. She became so caught up in wanting to get things right, so seized by the prospect of fading her parents and teachers, that she couldn't get down to the task itself. At least she didn't hold everything they tried to teach her in contempt.
I tried to drill into her: You just memorize that the capital of Florida is Tallahassee, period. As great a believer in mystery as her namesake, Celia couldn't imagine it was that simple, that there wasn't a magic trick, and she doubted herself, so that taking the state capitals test she would immediately question "Tallahassee"
for the very reason that it popped into her head. Kevin never had any trouble with mystery. He ascribed to the whole world the same terrifying plainness, and the question was never whether he was able to learn something, but whether to bother. Ceha's faith, as emphatic in relation to others as it was deficient in relation to herself, assured her that no one would ever insist that she study the manifesdy useless. Kevin's cynicism equally assured him that a malign, sadistic pedagogy would pitch him nothing but chaff.
I don't mean that Celia couldn't exasperate me as well. Like Kevin, she was impossible to punish, though there was rarely reason to punish her aside for something that, as it turned out, she didn't actually do. Still, she took the least admonition to heart, so that any remonstrance was hke killing a fly with a sledgehammer.
At the least suggestion that she had disappointed us, she was inconsolable, pouring out apologies before she was quite sure what we'd like her to regret. A single sharp word would send her into a tailspin, and I admit it would have been a relief once in a while to be able to bark out, "Celia, I told you to set the table!" (she was rarely disobedient, but she was absent-minded) and not have my daughter melt into a time-consuming puddle of remorse.
But my primary exasperation was otherwise. Judiciously applied, fear is a useful tool of self-protection. While the drain would hardly leap out and bite her, Celia was sufficiently replete with dread to have plenty left over for dangers that could. There was one thing in our house of which she might have been justifiably afraid, and she adored him.
On this point I'm brooking no argument, and I intend to take ruthless advantage of the fact that this is my account, to whose perspective you have no choice but to submit. I don't pretend to know the whole story, because I don't think that's a story that you or I will ever fully know. I remember uneasily from my own childhood that on Enderby Avenue, where the alliance between my brother and me was far more fickle, Giles and I conducted the main of our lives below our mother's line of sight. O n e of us might run to her to argue our side (frowned
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u p o n as cheating), but for the most part our collusions, battl
es, and mutually inflicted tortures took place, if not out of view, in code. So total was my own immersion in the world of other short people that my memories before about the age of twelve are largely depopulated of adults. Maybe it was different for you and Valerie, since you didn't like each other much. But many, perhaps most siblings share a private universe tropical with benevolence, betrayal, vendetta, reconciliation, and the use and abuse of power of w h i c h their parents k n o w practically nothing.
Still, I wasn't blind, and a measure of parental innocence is stark disinterest. If I walked into a playroom to find my daughter curled on her side, ankles tied with knee socks, hands b o u n d behind her back with her hair ribbon, m o u t h duct-taped shut, and my son nowhere in evidence, I could work out for myself what her whimpered explanation of "playing kidnapping" amounted to. I might not have been privy to the Masonic passwords of my children's secretive sect, but I did k n o w my daughter well enough to be confident that, despite her claims to the contrary, she would never hold the head of her favorite plastic horsey over the flame of the stove. And if she was alarmingly compliant about forcing d o w n foodstuffs I hadn't realized she couldn't abide, she was not an outright masochist. Thus w h e n I discovered her strapped into her booster chair at the dining table covered in vomit, I could reasonably assume that the bowl before her of mayonnaise, strawberry jam, Thai curry paste,Vaseline petroleum jelly, and lumps of balled up bread had not followed a recipe of her personal concoction.
You would assert, of course—since you did at the time—that older siblings traditionally torment younger ones, and Kevin's petty persecution remained within the range of the perfectly normal. You might n o w object that I can only find incidents of typical childhood cruelty in any way forbidding with benefit of hindsight. Meanwhile, millions of children survive families rife with roughhouse bullying, often profitably the wiser about the Darwinian pecking orders they will negotiate as adults. Many
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