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of these onetime tyrants develop into sensitive husbands w h o remember anniversaries, while their onetime victims grow into confident young w o m e n with high-flying careers and aggressive views on a woman's right to choose.Yet my present position offers few e n o u g h perquisites, and I do have the benefit of hindsight, Franklin, if benefit is the word.
As I shuttled to Chatham last weekend, I considered that I might also benefit from our shy, fragile daughter's example of Christian forgiveness. But Celia's baffling incapacity to hold a grudge from age zip seems to suggest that the ability to forgive is a gift of temperament, not necessarily a trick for old dogs. Besides, on my o w n account, I am not sure what "forgiving" Kevin entails.
Surely it doesn't involve sweeping Thursday artificially under the carpet or ceasing to hold him accountable, w h i c h couldn't be in his larger moral interests. I can't imagine that I ' m supposed to get over it, like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not b o u n d over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense. I can't pretend he didn't do it, I can't pretend I don't wish he hadn't, and if I have abandoned that felicitous parallel universe to w h i c h my white confederates in Claverack's waiting room are prone to cling, the rehnquishment of my private if-only derives more from a depleted imagination than any healthy reconcilement that what's done is done. Honestly, w h e n Carol Reeves formally
"forgave" our son on C N N for murdering her boy, Jeffrey, w h o was already precocious enough at the classical guitar to be courted by Juilliard, I had no idea what she talking about. H a d she built a box around Kevin in her head, knowing that only rage dwelled there; was our son n o w simply a place her mind refused to go? At best, I reasoned that she had successfully depersonalized h i m into a regrettable natural p h e n o m e n o n that had descended on her family like a hurricane or opened a m a w in their living r o o m like an earthquake, concluding that there was nothing to be gained from railing at the likes of weather or tectonic plate shifts.
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T h e n , there is nothing to be gained by railing in virtually every circumstance, and that doesn't stop most of us.
Celia, though. I can't imagine that Celia successfully boxed up or d e m o t e d to cloudburst the day that Kevin, w i t h the delicacy of a budding entomologist, removed a nest of bagworms from o u r white oak in the backyard and left t h e m to hatch in her backpack. Subsequently, she reached for her spelling b o o k in her first-grade class, withdrawing it covered in striped caterpillars—the kind that Kevin squished to green goo on our deck—several of w h i c h crawled o n t o her hand and up her rigored arm. Unfortunately, Celia wasn't given to screaming, w h i c h might have brought rescue more quickly. Instead I gather she seized up—breath whiffing, nostrils flaring, pupils dilating to saucers—and her teacher kept explaining the "hard C" in candy on the blackboard. Finally, the girls in adjacent desks began to shriek, and p a n d e m o n i u m ensued.
Yet however fresh the m e m o r y of those bagworms, the recollection simply didn't feature two weeks later w h e n Kevin offered her a "ride" on his back as he climbed the white oak, and she clasped his neck. No doubt she was surprised w h e n Kevin urged her off to perch tremulously on an upper branch, after which he climbed calmly to the ground. In fact, w h e n she puled,
"Kewin? Kewin, I can gedown!" she must have sincerely believed that, even after abandoning her twenty feet high and waltzing inside for a sandwich, he would return to help her out of the tree.
Is that forgiveness? Like Charlie Brown taking one m o r e running lunge at Lucy's football, no matter h o w many stuffed animals he eviscerated and Tinkertoy cathedrals he felled, Celia never lost faith that deep down inside her big brother was a nice guy.
You can call it innocence or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most c o m m o n mistake of the good-hearted: She assumed that everyone else was just like her. Evidence to the contrary found nowhere to lodge, like a b o o k on chaos theory in a library that didn't have a physics section. Meanwhile, she never told tales, and without a testimonial it was often impossible to
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pin her misfortunes on her brother. As a consequence, from the m o m e n t his sister was born, Kevin Khatchadourian, figuratively at least, got away with murder.
I confess that during Ceha's early years, Kevin receded for me, taking two giant steps backward like Simon Says. Small children are absorbing, and he had meanwhile assumed a militant independence. A n d you were so good about taking him to ball games and museums in your spare time that I may have handed h i m off a bit. That put me in your debt, which is why I feel especially awkward about observing what, from those two giant steps away, became only more striking.
Franklin, our son was developing the personality equivalent of the black-and-white cookie. It started back in kindergarten if not before, but it kept getting worse. Exasperatingly, we're all pretty m u c h restricted to learning w h a t people are like w i t h the p e r m a n e n t c o n f o u n d of our o w n presence, w h i c h is w h y those chance glimpses of someone you love just walking d o w n the street can seem so precious. So you'll just have to take my w o r d for it—I k n o w you w o n ' t — t h a t w h e n you weren't h o m e , Kevin was sour, secretive, and sarcastic. N o t just once in a while, on a bad day. Every day was a bad day.This laconic, supercilious, u n f o r t h c o m i n g persona of his did seem real. Maybe it wasn't the only thing that was real, but it didn't c o m e across as completely confected.
In contrast to—Franklin, I feel so lousy about this, as if I'm trying to take something away from you that you cherish—
Kevin's behavior around you. W h e n you walked in, his face changed. His eyebrows shot up, his head cocked, and he p u t on a closed-mouth smile high up on his chin, his hps meeting at his upper gum. Altogether, his features assumed the p e r m a n e n t expression of startled happiness that you see on aging starlets w h o have had too m u c h plastic surgery. Hi Dad! he'd cry. How was work today, Dad? Did you take any pictures of some real cool stuff? Any more cows, Dad? Any more fields or big buildings or really
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loaded-people's houses? You'd light into an enthusiastic description of the sections of roadway you'd shot, and he'd enthuse, Gosh, that's great! Another car ad! I'm gonna tell everybody at school that my dad takes pictures for Oldsmobile! O n e night you brought h o m e a copy of the n e w Atlantic Monthly, flipping proudly to the Colgate advertisement that sponsored our very o w n pink-marbled master bath. Gee, Dad! Kevin exclaimed. Since our bathroom is in a toothpaste ad, does that make us famous? "Just a little famous," you allowed, and I swear I remember wising off,"To be really famous in this country, you've got to kill somebody."
O h , you were by no means uniquely credulous; Kevin pulled the wool over his teachers' eyes for years. I still have, thanks to you, stacks of his schoolwork. An amateur student of American history, you were the family chronicler, the photographer, the scrapbook paster, while I was more apt to regard experience itself as my souvenir. So I ' m not quite sure what possessed me to rescue, from among the Stairmasters and egg sheers I abandoned en masse w h e n I moved, the fde folders of Kevin's essays.
D i d I save the fdes just for your tight, slanted cursive, "First Grade"? For once, I think not. I have b e e n through t w o trials, if w h a t preceded t h e m is not to be considered a third, and I have learned to think in terms of evidence. Why, I've b e c o m e so accustomed to abdicating ownership of my life to other p e o p l e — t o journalists, judges, web-site writers; to the parents of dead children and to Kevin himself—that even n o w I ' m reluctant to fold or deface my son's essays lest it constitute actionable tampering.
Anyway, it's a Sunday afternoon, and I have been forcing myself to read a few. (Do you realize that I could sell these? I don't m e a n for spare change, either. Apparently this is just the kind of ephemera that gets au
ctioned on eBay for thousands, along with the passably competent landscapes of Adolph Hider.) Their innocent physical manifestation is disarming: the fat, characterless printing, the fragile yellowed paper. H o w prosaic, I thought at first; I'll learn nothing but that, like a good boy, he
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did his homework. But as I read on, I grew more compelled, drawn in with the nervous fascination that leads one to poke and squeeze at an emerging cyst or a burrowing ingrown hair.
I've concluded that Kevin was prone to snow his
schoolmasters less with that scrubbed-behind-the-ears Partridge-family buoyancy with which he greeted your return from work than with an eerie lack of affect. Kevin's papers always follow the assignment excessively to the letter; he adds nothing, and whenever they are marked down, it is usually for being too short.
There is nothing wrong with them. They are factually correct.
Their spelling is accurate. On those rare occasions his teachers jot vague notes about how he might "take a more personal approach to the material," they are unable to pinpoint anything in his essays that is precisely lacking:
Abraham Lincoln was president. Abraham Lincoln had a beard. Abraham Lincoln freed the African-American slaves.
In school we study great African-American Americans for a whole month. There are many great African-American Americans. Last year we studied the same African-American Americans during African-American History Month. Next year we will study the same African-American Americans during African-American History Month. Abraham
Lincoln was shot.
If you don't mind my weighing in on Kevin's side for once, you and his teachers thought all through primary school that he needed help on his organizational skills, but I've decided that his organizational skills were razor sharp. From first grade on, those assignments demonstrate an intuitive appreciation for the arbitrary, for the numbing powers of repetition, and for the absurdist possibilities of the non sequitur. More, his robotic declaratives do not indicate a failure to master the niceties of prose style; they are his prose style, refined with all the fastidiousness that attended H. L. Mencken's. Uneasy intimations to us at parent-
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teacher conferences that Kevin "didn't seem to put his heart into his schoolwork" to the contrary, Kevin did put his heart into his work, his heart and soul. Check out this fourth-grade rendition of the assignment, " M e e t My M o t h e r " : My m o t h e r goes somewhere else. My m o t h e r sleeps in a different bed. My mother eats different food. My m o t h e r comes home. My m o t h e r sleeps at home. My m o t h e r eats at home.
My m o t h e r tells other people to go somewhere else.
O t h e r people sleep in a different bed. O t h e r people eat different food. O t h e r people come h o m e . O t h e r people sleep at h o m e . O t h e r people eat at h o m e . My m o t h e r is rich.
I k n o w what you're thinking, or I k n o w what you thought then. That it was Kevin's surly, remote pose with me that was fake, while with you he could relax and be his sprightly, chipper self. That the pervasive stiltedness of his written w o r k revealed a commonplace gap between his thoughts and his powers of expression. I ' m willing to grant that his closed condescension toward me was an artifice, even if its hiding-time quality, tracing back to my appropriation of his squirt gun, felt true. But neither the Beaver Cleaver nor the w i n d u p schoolboy straight man was any less bogus. Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
I just glanced over what I've written so far and realized that I was being awfully summary about a solid seven years of our lives together; moreover, that the abundance of that summary concerned Ceha. I ' m ashamed of this, I really am, but w h d e I can remember h o w we spent every one of Ceha's birthdays during those years, my memories of Kevin from the age of eight to about fourteen tend to blur.
O h , a few bits and pieces stick out, especially my disastrous attempt to impart the enthusiasms of my professional life by taking you and thirteen-year-old Kevin (you'll recall that Ceha, too young, stayed with my mother) to Vietnam. I deliberately chose that country because it's a place that to any American, at least of our generation, inescapably means something, saving it from the dissociated Just Somewhere Else and W h o Cares feeling that foreign countries so easily induce w h e n you visit them for the first time, and to which Kevin would naturally fall prey. Too, Vietnam had only recently opened up to tourism, so I couldn't resist the opportunity on my own account. But I grant that this sense of connectedness, of guilty intimacy with rice paddies and wizened old women in conical straw hats, would pertain mostly to you and me. I'd marched on Washington in my twenties, while you had actually begged the Draft Board, if to no avail, not to reject you because of flat feet; with Saigon already fallen three years before, we had some bracing knockdown drag-outs over the war when we met. Kevin had no such associations, so maybe despite my intentions to the contrary, I had indeed dragged him to Just Somewhere Else and W h o Cares. Nonetheless, I'll never forget my stinging humiliation when our son—if nothing else, ever a quick study—sauntered through the sea of scooters in Hanoi telling the "gooks" to get out of the way.
However, one other memory rises eidetically above the blur, and it is not, Franklin, one more mean, slanderous example of how our son was heartless from birth.
I refer to that two weeks when he got so sick. He was ten.
For a while, Dr. Goldblatt worried that it was meningitis, though an excruciating spinal tap only proved that it wasn't. Despite his poor appetite, Kevin was generally a healthy boy, and this was my only experience of our son laid so low for so long.
W h e n he first started coming down with it, I noticed that the spirit in which he turned up his nose at my meals was no longer sneering; he'd look at his plate and slump, as if in defeat. In fact, since he was accustomed— hke his mother—to battling his own impulses as much as outside forces, he struggled to stuff down one
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of my lamb sarma before giving up. He didn't lurk in shadows or march martinet-style d o w n the hall but began to wander, sagging against furniture. T h e rigid set of his face went limp and lost that smirking sideways skew. Eventually I found h i m curled helplessly on my study's ink-stained Armenian carpet, and I was astonished that w h e n I helped h i m up and lifted h i m to b e d that he offered no resistance. Franklin, he put his arms around my neck.
In his bedroom, he let me undress him, and w h e n I solicited w h i c h pajamas he wanted to wear, rather than roll his eyes and say I don't care, he thought for a m o m e n t and then whispered in a small voice,"The spaceman ones. I like the monkey in the rocket."
This was the first I'd heard that he liked a single garment in his possession, and w h e n I discovered this was the one pair in the laundry hamper, I was distraught, shaking them out and hurrying back to promise that the next day I w o u l d wash t h e m to be nice and fresh. I expected, " D o n ' t bother," but instead got—another first—"Thanks."When I tucked him in, he huddled gladly with the blanket to his chin, and w h e n I slipped the t h e r m o m e t e r between his flushed hps— his face had a bright febrile blotch—he suckled the glass with gende rhythmic contractions, as if finally, at the age of ten, having learned to nurse. His fever was high for a child—over 101°—and w h e n I stroked his forehead with a moist washcloth, he h u m m e d .
I cannot say whether we are less ourselves w h e n we are sick, or more. But I did find that remarkable two-week period a revelation.
W h e n I sat on the edge of his bed, Kevin would nestle his crown against my thigh; once I became convinced that it wouldn't be pushing my luck, I pulled his head onto my lap and he clutched my sweater. A couple of times w h e n he threw up he didn't make it to the toilet; yet w h e n I cleaned up the mess and told him not to worry, he exhibited none of the self-satisfied complacency of his diaper-changing phase but whimpered that he was sorry and seemed, despite my reassurances, ashamed. I k n o w that we all transform one way or another w h e n we're ill, but Kevin
wasn't just cranky or tired, he was a completely different person. A n d that's h o w I achieved an appreciation for h o w m u c h energy and commitment it must have taken him the rest of the time to generate this other boy (or boys). Even you had conceded that Kevin was
"a little antagonistic" toward his sister, but w h e n our two-year-old tiptoed into his bedroom, he let her pet his head with damp litde pats. W h e n she offered him her get-well drawings, he didn't dismiss them as d u m b or take advantage of feeling bad to tell her, as was well within his rights, to leave him alone, instead exerting himself to say weakly, "That's a nice picture, Celie.Why don't you draw me another one?" I had thought that dominant emotional tone of his, so extravagant from birth, was immutable. Call it rage or resentment, it was only a matter of degree. B u t underneath the levels of fury, I was astonished to discover, lay a carpet of despair.
He wasn't mad. He was sad.
T h e other thing that amazed me was his curious aversion to your company.You may not remember, since after he'd rebuffed you once or twice—imploring w h e n you popped in that he'd like to go to sleep or laying your present of rare collectible comics silendy, wearily on the floor— you were injured enough to withdraw. Maybe he felt unable to muster the Gee, Dad boisterousness of your Saturday afternoon Frisbee tosses, but in that instance he clearly regarded this rah-rah boy m o d e as compulsory with his father. I comforted you that children always prefer their mothers w h e n they're sick, but you were still a litde jealous. Kevin was breaking the rules, ruining the balance. Celia was mine, and Kevin was yours. You and Kevin were close, he would confide in you, and lean on you in times of trouble. But I think that was the very reason he recoiled: your insistence, your crowding, your wanting, your cajoling, c h u m m y Daddishness.
We Need to Talk About Kevin Page 29