The Children's House

by Alice Nelson

  Sitting on Ben’s bed, she wished that time could wind itself backward, to all the other summers. To the forts made of logs and the fireflies caught in jars and the walks into the holly forest to search for deer. All of it – the cottage, the summer, Fire Island itself – seemed somehow tarnished now that Ben had turned his back on it. His distance from them was like an ambush. There was something so complete and alarming about the way he had stepped out of his own life. ‘I have no idea,’ he said candidly, inflexibly, when they asked him what he was planning to do, whether he would return to his studies. There was such a singularity in his refusal of the future.

  Through the window she saw Jacob cycling home along the sea road, his hair whipped back from his face by a squall that had blown in from the Atlantic. Soon he would be walking up the front steps, looking for a cup of coffee, a piece of the ginger cake she had made that morning. He stopped to pat the neighbour’s cat, a tentativeness in his knee as he bent down, an old tennis injury.

  When she had first met Jacob she wanted to hear the catalogue of every wound, everything that had marked his body before she had known him. The tiny scar at his temple, the faded brand of a dog bite to his calf, which had needed seven stitches, the appendicitis that had struck him when he was sixteen.

  But it was the things that hadn’t left marks on the body that had caused the greatest damage. The death of his father, Max, when Jacob was in his final year of medical school, the terrible sound of his mother weeping behind her closed bedroom door at night. ‘Oh,’ his father said when the heart attack had seized him at the dinner table. Then, ‘I’m sorry.’ Decorous to the last.

  And there was the more complicated grief of his first marriage. Marina could only imagine it was his father’s death that had propelled Jacob into that early, misguided entanglement; that he fastened on to Leni because there was no shadow to her, no yellowing bruise of mourning. She was an escape from the grief of his parents’ home, the door to his father’s study tightly closed, his mother and sister quiet and sorrowful. A picnic in Central Park, a drive to the Jersey Shore, a winter coat on sale at Bergdorf Goodman: the ordinariness of Leni’s desires must have been a reprieve for Jacob. It was in his power to make her happy then.

  Jacob had met Leni in the first year of his psychiatry residency, the spring after his father died. She was a typist at the hospital; the only daughter of a wealthy businessman from Ossining. A spoiled girl, Rose called her, ruined by her father’s indulgence. ‘That girl, she wanted too much from the world,’ Rose once said sadly, shaking her head. Marina thought at first that it did not seem a bad thing – to want too much from the world. Surely it was better than wanting too little. But Rose made it clear that the things Leni wanted were the wrong things. She was dishearteningly beautiful, no one could deny that. Marina had seen the photographs of Leni as a young woman that remained in Rose’s albums; her long dark hair, her startlingly blue eyes. There was a fickleness to Leni from the very beginning, Rose had told Marina, a tricky sort of restlessness. She was prone to long sulks and fits of annoyance, seeing slights where there were none, falling out with her friends for no real reason. She would turn her back on Jacob in silence for whole days if he did something to offend her. She was so young, still emerging from her childhood, still finding her feet as an adult, as a wife. Yet Rose and Leah had thought that Leni and Jacob might find a way, that the couple could remake themselves to fit each other, and they tried hard with her. All the invitations to art galleries and concerts, to Rose’s WIZO fundraisers, to Leah’s book club. They tried to include her in their preparations for the Jewish festivals, coaxing and tending her for Jacob’s sake.

  Leni cooperated in the beginning, smiling indulgently across Rose’s dining table as Jacob recited the Friday night prayers, trying for the inflections he remembered in his father’s voice speaking those same words through the years of his childhood. It was a sweet but faintly ridiculous novelty to Leni, all this archaic tradition and commemoration. Still, in the early days of their marriage she listened politely to Rose’s careful explanations of the rituals, like a wilful but temporarily obedient child. She admired the embroidered challah cloth from Israel, the candlesticks that had been carried in Rose’s grandmother’s trunk all the way from Warsaw.

  Leah appointed herself as Leni’s historical guide, horrified at the glaring gaps in the girl’s knowledge of Jewish history, of any history. She printed out articles for Leni, borrowed books from the library at Columbia, where Leah was in the final year of her social work degree, marking the pages she particularly wanted Leni to read with strips of coloured paper. Her conversation with Leni took on an educative flavour, which made the younger girl uneasy and petulant.

  How Jacob hoped that Leni would learn to love them, that she would be a fourth in their close circle. They would have given her their hearts, his sad mother and his earnest sister, but Leni did not want them. He saw the barely perceptible rolling of her eyes when Leah would bend towards her with a confidence, the way she would pick at a flake of her nail polish while Rose was speaking to her. Catching the train home from Rose’s house on Friday nights, Leni would make a game of parodying Leah. ‘Did you know it was Heinrich Heine who said that since the Exodus from Egypt freedom has always been spoken with a Hebrew accent?’ she would intone, her voice mocking his sister’s solemn, professorial inflection. Leni was a good mimic, quick and sardonic. Leah, with her flushed face and her wild spill of curls, her rucksack weighed down with books, was easy game for Leni’s sharp tongue.

  A few months into their marriage, Leni and Jacob stopped going to the Shabbat dinners at Rose’s house. Leni wanted to meet friends for dinner, to catch the train to parties in Brooklyn or walk to the jazz club down the street from their apartment. Jacob would sit in the corner of the noisy bar, exhausted from the week of work and study, his foot on the table leg to stop the wobble and spill of their drinks, and watch Leni flit around the room. It had caused him enormous sorrow, Marina knew, this abandonment of his mother and sister. Those Friday evenings were something hallowed in their family and his absence was a terrible betrayal – not only of Rose and Leah but somehow of the memory of his father, too.

  Leni resigned from her job at Beth Israel soon after she and Jacob were married. The work was unglamorous and dull, she told him. She wanted to do something that would stimulate her more. She could apply for college, or take a photography course. She flipped through course booklets from the New School and Cooper Union, lying on her stomach on their unmade bed, her long legs flicking up behind her. Her friends had been mostly secretaries and nurses from the hospital, or girls she had gone to school with in Ossining, but soon she began to court the wives of Jacob’s medical friends, arranging lunches at the Boat House in Central Park or afternoon tea at Barneys. He could see the vague shape of the life Leni was imagining for them, the moneyed glossiness of it. She complained that their apartment on East Second Street was too small, too ramshackle to entertain their friends. She railed at him over the buckling linoleum floors and the swollen window frames, the disconcerting shudder of the pipes at night through the old tenement building. Often her rage over the apartment was so unreasonable that Jacob felt there must be something else behind it, some other way he had failed her.

  In the second year of their marriage, though they could barely afford it on his resident’s salary, Leni convinced Jacob to buy a summer share in a house on Long Beach. He had refused for a long time but succumbed to her one afternoon late in the spring, dipping into the savings fund he had started to buy an apartment. He remembered her sheer crackling joy that day, the press of her slim arms around his neck and her lips against his. ‘Do I tell you enough how much I love you?’ she whispered in his ear. The truth was that Leni rarely told Jacob she loved him. Her feeling for him was something confounding and slightly mysterious; he could never entirely get a handle on it. ‘Ditto,’ she would murmur distractedly when he professed his love to her. ‘Ditto, darling.’

  Once, when Jacob an
d Marina were walking around the reservoir in Central Park, he told her that during his first marriage, when he had stumbled home from an overnight shift, sometimes instead of falling into bed immediately, he would catch the train to the park with Leni and watch her running around the reservoir. He would sit on a bench beside the bridle path, frayed with exhaustion, and stare after her as she made her way around the track. He was so tired that the world would waver a little, and he would focus on Leni’s tanned legs, the pale-green silk of her running shorts, the slap of her braid between her slim shoulder blades. Leni seemed her most serious and concentrated self when she was running, her gaze fixed on some point in the distance, her mouth slightly open, her gait graceful and constant, like an elegant racehorse.

  Under the terms of their summer share Leni and Jacob were entitled to three weekends a month at the house in Long Beach; an upstairs bedroom in a sprawling shingled cottage by the shore. The lease was shared with five other couples and the place had the riotous feel of a summer colony. The crunch of tyres on the gravel driveway as people arrived and departed, the blare of a record, bursts of laughter and doors slamming, endless games of tennis, the clatter of feet up and down the stairs. Jacob found it overwhelming: the noise and the late nights, the clamour of voices and music on the deck below their bedroom window, the kitchen full of empty champagne bottles every morning. Often he would stay behind when the household repaired to the beach in the mornings, lying on the sofa with a book in the sudden silence of the empty house.

  A few weeks into the summer, his roster at the hospital changed and he had to work Saturday and Sunday evening shifts. There was no reason for Leni to miss the weekends on Long Beach just because he could no longer go with her. He would watch her pack, tying a silk scarf carefully in her hair, the glossy mass of it falling down her back, sliding the diamond earrings her father had given her on their wedding day into her small, perfect earlobes. Someone’s car would pull up on the street outside their apartment, the sharp blast of the horn startling him, and she would be gone.

  The tiny apartment seemed filled with the most cavernous loneliness on those weekends. A dread would take hold of Jacob as he walked slowly home from the hospital at dawn, stepping out into the blue hush of Union Square. The only people there at that hour were stallholders setting up for the farmers’ market and the vagrants who had spent the night in the park. Sometimes he would stop and buy a cup of hot apple cider and a bread roll, and linger on one of the benches, reluctant despite his exhaustion to return to the empty apartment. Walking back through the East Village he would see the last of the late-night revellers stumbling out of bars, weaving towards the subway station. Everyone seemed impossibly young. The city, his home for his entire life save those early years in Israel, suddenly felt desolate and pallid. As if it were not his home at all, but some other, unloved place he had to endure.

  He started going to Shabbat dinners at his mother’s house again. Rose and Leah tended to him, cooking his favourite dishes and packing little parcels of leftovers for him. Nothing was said about Leni’s absence. It was almost possible to pretend sometimes during that summer, Leah told Marina once, that Leni did not exist. That another, more expansive future still awaited her brother; an accomplished, enduring love.

  The following winter, Ben was born. Jacob was a father. Leni had given him that. In spite of everything that happened afterwards, Jacob told Marina, he could not for one minute imagine a life in which Ben did not exist. He would race home from his shift at the hospital, almost jogging down Broadway to see his son. The separation from the baby in those long hours of his working day was something he felt viscerally, he said, a tightness in the chest, a persistent, panicky pain.

  Ben’s birth made everything clear for Jacob. The boy was a little flare to lead them on. He would give weight and shape to their lives, which had previously seemed somehow unguided and insubstantial. He hoped Leni would feel the same; that motherhood would coax her into becoming a more acceptable person. Her love for the child might transform her. Such redemptions were possible.

  They worried all through Leni’s pregnancy, Rose and Leah told Marina, that the baby wasn’t Jacob’s, but the moment they saw Ben they knew. Even as a newborn, he looked exactly like his father; it was like holding Jacob in her arms again, Rose said.

  When Ben was two months old, Leni left him with Jacob to go skiing in Aspen with some of the wives from the Long Beach summer house. The baby wasn’t breastfed, and he would be perfectly happy with Jacob, she argued. It was only five nights, hardly an epic separation. Ben wouldn’t even notice she was gone. Jacob didn’t have the heart to fight with her. He took leave from the hospital and stayed home with the baby. Ben screamed so violently that Jacob was terrified he would do some damage to himself. Jacob walked around the dark apartment for hours with the baby in his arms, rocking, patting, soothing, staring down at his son’s tiny face, contorted with rage. Every night felt endless. In the mornings he fell asleep on the couch, the baby resting against him, his tiny chest rising and falling as he drifted into sleep at last. Sometimes he would wake to find Ben staring up at him, almost studying him, something knowing in his eyes.

  Jacob had once heard another doctor at the hospital speak about the irrational jealousy he experienced with the arrival of his first child. The intimate world he had lived in with his wife was taken over by the baby’s enormous needs, his friend told him, and he felt cast out. His love for the child was never in question, but he missed his wife. She and the baby were bound together in an exclusive, fleshly union and he could only stare in from the outside. For Jacob it was the opposite. He and Ben were closeted together in an intimate cocoon; it was Leni who was the outsider. When he saw the cab pulling up outside the building on the sixth day and Leni stepping out on to the sidewalk, it seemed that she did not belong to them at all.

  And yet Jacob did not doubt that Leni loved Ben. ‘Sweet pea’, she called him, bending down into the crib to tickle his stomach or stroke his hair. It was the same name, Jacob realised, that her own mother sometimes used for her. Leni had never been adequately parented. She was trying the best she could, but the model that she was attempting to replicate was flawed. She had no sensible women friends who could guide her. He suggested that perhaps Rose could come and spend time with her and the baby when he was at work. Leni was furiously affronted. ‘I don’t want your mother here, interfering,’ she yelled at him. ‘He’s my child.’ Her refusal was so vehement, her rage so uncalled for. Jacob began to wonder if the child’s birth had unbalanced her.

  When Ben was two years old Leni announced that she was starting a new job. One of the doctors who had been part of the Long Beach summer share, a surgeon named Michael Hadley, had offered her a position as a receptionist at his consulting rooms in Gramercy Park. Jacob was surprised that Leni wanted to return to secretarial work. She had complained often about how dull she had found the administrative work at the hospital. She was going even crazier being stuck at home all day, she told Jacob. She wanted to be in the world again, and day care would be good for Ben; she had found a centre just around the corner from them. There was nothing Jacob could say – everything had already been arranged by the time she told him.

  Six months later Leni was gone. This part of the story Marina knew well. The letter on the kitchen table, propped up next to the fruit bowl; the apartment empty of everything that belonged to Leni. Nothing but some strands of her long hair left curled into Jacob’s brush, an empty perfume bottle on the bathroom shelf. She had left for London. Michael had a fellowship there and she was going with him. She would be in touch about seeing Ben; perhaps she would come back and visit at Christmas time. Jacob had no idea how long Leni’s affair with Michael had been going on; whether it stretched all the way back to that summer on Long Beach or if it had only begun after she started working for him. It didn’t bear thinking about, he said.

  From the kitchen of the beach cottage, Marina watched Jacob turn down the front path and make his way up th
e wooden stairs to the deck. The rain had made an early dusk and there was a sudden edge of cold to the day. The glittering sunlight of the past few weeks had given way to an unseasonal grey. Jacob stamped his feet on the mat and came over to kiss her.

  ‘I thought we could make soup tonight. It feels like the weather for it. There’s that roast pumpkin left over from yesterday.’

  ‘Yes. And champagne in the fridge.’

  ‘Soup and champagne. Sounds like a fine combination.’

  Marina slipped her hands under Jacob’s shirt. There were times when a visceral ache rose up in her at the knowledge that he had suffered. There was a whole tract of his life he still could not enter with safety. It merged with her desire for him, this fierce, protective urge. She pressed her lips to his neck. The taste of his skin was different in summer, a layer of salt to it.

  ‘It’s good weather for a siesta, too,’ she said, leading him into their small bedroom at the back of the house.

  Later they lay in bed together. Jacob slipped his arms around her, his head resting on her shoulder. The sound of the ocean floated through the open window, a rhythmic heave and suck. Rain splashed against the boards of the deck. Marina could feel Jacob’s breath on her neck, the slow unloosening of his body as he drifted into sleep. There was a magnolia in a green enamel vase on the bedside table. How strange, Marina had thought when she came across the small tree, that such a blowsy, wintery flower should grow here in the sand dunes. The bloom looked like an enormous soft butterfly.

  Several weeks passed before Jacob told Rose and Leah that Leni had left. He disguised her absence, taking leave from work and spending the days at home with Ben. He would take the little boy to Tompkins Square Park in the afternoons, the two of them sitting on the benches by the dog run. Ben was almost inconsolable during those weeks. He adored his mother with a love that was ardent and hopeless in its enormity. He was transported by the sight of her, lovesick and quivering in her presence, anxious when she was away from him. In the days after she left, Ben asked for her again and again. The longer Leni was gone the more he wanted to see her, waking up in the night sobbing, trailing around the apartment, peering into every room as if she might suddenly materialise. There was nothing Jacob could do to comfort him. No word came from her. She did not call or write.