Some of Isaac’s teammates are gathering in front of the fence.
“I’ve gotta go,” he says to Fowler. “Warm-up time. My bag’s in the car.”
“Can I walk you?” I ask, dying for information.
“No, Mom. It’s okay.”
“It’s open,” Simon tells him. “Coffee, Jim? I’m starting on my second breakfast here.”
“Great. It’s not too hot for coffee.”
In fact, the weather is turning. A cool enough breeze, occasional clouds: September weather a couple of weeks early. I don’t think we could have asked for a nicer day. The two men remind me, minus the wheelchair, the mammoth effort on Simon’s part, of golfers, squinting into the challenges of the course, with goodwill.
• • •
After the coffee, Fowler suggests we move nearer the bleachers between home plate and first base.
“We’ll be over shortly,” Simon decides. “The girls and I need to do a little more eating, I think.”
“You go on and find us a spot,” I tell Fowler, remembering that he may want a chance to motor on his own.
“You bet,” he says. He works the gadgets with ease, turns the chair, and charges off.
“What’s all that?” I point to the flyers.
“Tot Shabbat. The group of little kids at the temple,” he says. “For after the game. See if we can drum up some interest.”
“Nearer my God to thee,” I mutter.
Deadpan, he tells me, “Just because you’ve left the earth, don’t expect us all to follow.”
I look at the gathered families.
“I think he’s very impressed,” I offer, remembering my place on the undistinguished periphery.
“I don’t give a shit about that,” Simon retorts.
The crowd cheers as our team fills the field, Isaac taking up the enviable outfield.
“What I meant is,” I apologize, “I don’t see how you get to it, how you know that this is the thing to do.” I point to the folder.
“At one point,” Simon says casually, “I might have had some interest in talking to you about this.”
He starts over to the bleachers, but I catch his sleeve. “Please. Just tell me how it went.”
“It went,” Simon pauses, “quietly. Jim was all ready to go. He took a good long look while Isaac stood there taking a good long look, and then we were all laughing for some reason—nerves, probably—and the rest was logistics.”
“Hm.” I’m actually jealous, wishing I’d been there.
“What else can I tell you? He’s a man seeing his son for the first time in fourteen years. I can’t blame him for wanting a front-row seat.”
“We can all have a front-row seat,” I say.
“You go. I’m letting them have their day.”
I join Fowler as Isaac’s team, having kept Dobbs Ferry at zero during the first inning, comes in for a turn.
“Come here,” Fowler says, holding out a hand. I perch on a few inches of metal bench beside one of the Ardsley mothers. I keep Fowler’s hand between my two. Isaac’s team huddles and erupts with a howl, bringing their fists high; then Isaac breaks away to start the batting.
His signature walk to bat involves the habitual downward focus and a few thumps on the earth with the bat, a flirtatious glance at the field, several shifts in weight from one long leg to the other, then the utter sobriety he brings to lifting the bat gracefully up behind him in defiant readiness. It happens to be true that he rarely fouls, has never struck out in a formal game, and can be counted on to hit a ground ball through the infield at least once per game. The outfielders run, stumble, scoop up the ball, and throw it just too late to third or home plate, and Isaac, if he’s come in, strides neutrally back to the bench, as if any acknowledgment of his success will detract from it, will mortify his teammates and the spectators, always a small crowd.
The pitch comes in down the middle, fast, and Isaac smacks it, hurls the bat, and bolts for first and beyond.
“He’s got it!” Fowler shouts, rising from his chair, rocking it, falling back.
The Dobbs Ferry fellows do their sorry dance as Isaac lopes around the field and tags home. He catches his breath, doubled over, hands on his knees, by the swearing catcher. Then he looks straight at me and Fowler and laughs skyward, his arms open in the wild questioning gesture my father is famous for, as if to say, “You were expecting something less?”
“IZ-ZY! IZ-ZY!” his teammates chant.
“That’s a kid-and-a-half!” Fowler says, grinning. “He plays ball like a pro!”
“He does?” I ask, because, in fact, I don’t know this.
Fowler looks at me, disappointed. “Open your eyes, Mom. He’s God out there. He’s where everyone’s looking.”
Of course, Fowler would notice this. I have always looked only at Isaac on the field, letting the other players drift, helpfully or drastically, in and out of my vision, their names and heights and hair color sliding away with their actions. It’s Fowler’s first time out, his first time looking at the only thing worth looking at, that being his own child.
To my left, in a clump of mothers and dads, is my husband, gingerly offering the printed news of the temple, his place of refuge from me.
• • •
The victory over the Dobbs Ferry team, subtle and well played by both sides, is cause for further celebration. Garland and Travis, who caught the final inning, are our first arrivals. I steal Travis away for a conference and some help in the kitchen.
“You didn’t tell me Isaac was such a Romeo,” I scold.
“Fool. This is just the beginning of the nightmare. But you don’t need to worry with her, darling. The car’s a total deception. She’s a doll. It’s like she just came out of her house for the first time this summer. I’m surprised they didn’t home-school her. She’s a five-year-old with breasts. And speaking of the Aidinoffs—”
He pulls me over so I can peer out the window at a couple older than ourselves, standing at the edge of it all, with Alex. Mrs. Aidinoff has on muted madras trousers and an ivory blouse, an outfit I might be seen in ten years hence, and her husband, like Simon, wears pressed jeans, loafers, and a tennis shirt.
“I think it might be a good idea if you went out there,” Travis says. “Garland’s beating you out for the big shmooze. Here’s to arranged marriages!” He raises a cup of iced tea. “I’ll stay here and remove Saran Wrap. You go on, get out there, before Garland takes over.”
“Hard to believe, of a guy who never says anything!”
Eliot sweeps in, studies me, then Travis, trying to discern the cause of the laughter.
“Eliot, Travis. Travis, Eliot.”
“Is she being wicked?” Eliot says sweetly. “Pay no attention to her, Travis. She’s the world’s most ungrateful woman!”
He’s got a canvas bag of books for me and two bottles of Chardonnay. “I brought the Bemelmans for their majesties. It’s a loaner, though.”
Travis relieves Eliot of both packages.
“She is a bitch,” Travis says. “Come help me with these barbaric salads. You’d think there wasn’t enough mayonnaise on earth. Have they ever heard of oil and vinegar?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Eliot says, laughing.
“Men,” I cluck. “Hello!” I shout from the doorway.
“I’m Ruth,” Mrs. Aidinoff says and holds out her hand in the same graceful, pitying way that Alex did last night.
“This is my dad,” Alex says, one arm around the tall man.
“Seth,” he says pleasantly.
“We just love your boy,” his wife says. “He’s so polite, such a gentleman.”
I try to hide my dismay in disclaimers, but it doesn’t work.
“Really!” she assures me. “But all children are different at home!”
We’re joined by Fowler and Isaac, still ushering, as if he’s been hired as an attendant.
“Hi, everyone,” Isaac says. “I’d like you to meet my dad.”
Fowler lifts a
hand in greeting. There’s no question that arm control is now a thing of the past.
“Good to meet you.”
“Spitting image,” Seth remarks.
“Jim, this is Alex,” Isaac says.
“A pleasure,” Fowler says. Alex approaches Fowler, on this our sacred ground, and rests her hand on top of his.
“Isaac says you make movies,” she says. “I’d really like to see some.”
Jane, who’s been spying from the side, grimaces and trods off to join her abandoned father at the grill. Even in the grave, I believe, Fowler will possess a magnetism. Something on the tombstone, or in the landscape where it stands, that lush, foreign landscape, will work as an invitation and a warm welcome, will draw the women to him.
• • •
Isaac and I sit in bumper-to-bumper on Broadway, after dropping Fowler home.
“This sucks.”
I try to defend my choice of this route over the clogged parkway. He says we should have taken the Deegan.
“There was a game,” I remind him. Yankee Stadium will be emptying in a few minutes.
“How’d it go today? Before the game?”
“God, Mom, give it a rest.”
He’s right, so I give it a rest, and we listen to the glum traffic reports and inch along in the dark.
“Just tell me one thing,” Isaac says finally. “Tell me what you did that made him leave.”
Ever the hero, Fowler.
“I had you.”
Isaac guffaws, unbelieving. “Had to be something worse than that, Mom.”
“No, I don’t think so,” I say firmly. “He just didn’t want to deal.”
Isaac looks straight at me. “As long as I live, I’ll never believe that.”
I get us over into the passing lane, not that any passing is possible. “And I’ll never believe that while you sit there listing my crimes, you manage to forget that I was the one who didn’t leave.”
chapter eleven
Fall is always a hard season, asking for so much smoothing over, assurance, happiness through change. We do our errands for fall clothes, our back-to-school cut-rate shopping at the stationer’s, our preschool trips to the school for signups, book purchases, and scheduling. I’ve put Daisy in nursery school two mornings a week; even Daisy requires a shoe box full of supplies in the event of rain or a cold snap. Simon faces a load of work, as early fall is the panic season in the schools, when none of the scheduling software behaves as promised by the manufacturers, and he makes double overtime, by his own standards, to troubleshoot. Isaac has remained silent on the subject of Alex, packed off to Brandeis three weeks ago, focusing instead on private weekly visits with Fowler. I don’t know what they do other than eat dinner, which I supply in a picnic basket, and when I drop Isaac at the apartment, I’m not permitted to go in and say hello. Jane, in heaven because she and Adrienne have been assigned to the same lunch period, is my slightest worry.
I see Fowler on Wednesdays, when Daisy and I come in to help with the shopping and the work for his class. He can’t stop thanking me and boasting about his son as we have our lunch in the living room.
I drive and work. I wait for a signal to stop and rest from one of them, one of my boys or one of my girls, but they are content to have me on the periphery making sure things go smoothly and working quietly on this book about mythical women who actually lived, these prolix angels who did not believe in the public worth of their words, words that are now cause for Barry’s delighted surprise. I work early in the morning and late at night.
“You’re burning the candle,” Simon tells me, day after day. “You need sleep. It’s going to catch up with you.”
“I’ve never been a good sleeper.”
It’s Simon’s way, this concern over sleep, of letting me know I’ve brought enough to this household. We speak only of the details now, not of the disease or the person it has afflicted or the inevitable outcome.
Until one night in late September when Isaac comes out of Fowler’s building to the car, where I’m waiting with coffee and reading, and he is crying.
“You should go in there, Mom,” he says. He draws his forearm across his face.
I expect to find Fowler compromised in some specific new way that can’t be helped by our summer attempts to rig his apartment with mechanical aids. He is in front of the TV; the remote rests on the arm of the wheelchair, and his fingers dance over the buttons. Images flash and vanish, flash and vanish. The sound is off. Fowler glares at the set, his chin low, supported by his sloping chest. For all his original height, he looks tiny this way, further diminished by the trance the rapid channel fire has him under.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“I’m watching television,” he says neutrally.
I snatch the remote from him and shut off the set. “How dare you?”
He presses a button on the chair and spins to face me. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve got a crying boy outside in my car who could be home studying now but has chosen instead to bring you dinner. Maybe you could have saved this performance for later, after he’s left.” My voice is a contained scream.
“Maybe these efforts are a little wasted on me now,” he says. He’s so slumped in his chair I can’t help thinking it’s intentional, a posture meant to inspire pity.
I wait a beat, to head off a furious outburst.
“That may be. But I’d prefer that you take that up with me privately. Isaac’s a child, and he doesn’t know from his own wasted efforts yet. You’re the last person on earth who should be informing him about same.”
“Spare me the random insult, Leigh.”
“No. You spare me. Don’t allow Isaac to feel that his efforts in your direction are wasted. He’s never put himself so far into an effort before, and considering what you dealt him, I think it’s pretty extraordinary.”
I pick up the picnic basket and slam out of the apartment. On the ride home I ask Isaac, through rage, “How long was he doing that?”
“The whole time I was there.”
“The whole hour and a half I was outside in the car? Why didn’t you come out sooner?”
“I thought he’d stop. Then I thought he was going crazy.”
“He just sat there like that for an hour and a half? Did he say anything at all?”
“He said he can’t lift his head. I said we should take a walk and he just laughed. He said why go for a walk if all he can see is his lap.”
I keep talking, but I’m running out of schemes. I’m running out of ways to look at this thing and reasons for dragging my husband and children through it with me.
• • •
I’m back at Fowler’s the next day, after a midnight call, in apology and admission of the need for more help. It’s late morning, and again he hasn’t eaten. His teeth and hair want brushing, but somehow he’s dressed himself and begun reading the student manuscripts that have accumulated over the first month of the course. The pages he’s read lie at his feet in the nightmarish arrangement some of the Hastings teachers got us to imagine when they described their methods of evaluation. “Whatever lands on the top stair gets the A.”
“Which means,” Pam said, “that I have a chance of passing.”
“How are they?”
“Pretty demonic. Such attractive people, and all of them with murder and sexual abuse on the brain. At least they’ve steered clear of terminal illness.”
“I called Sherman, and he says he’s got a neck brace and head support that we can attach to the chair. I thought we’d go get it and then I could take you to lunch.”
I’m crouching, picking up the pages, and ordering them, sparing myself the actual reading. This way he can see me and not be reduced to talking to my feet. Daisy’s glued to Barney.
“You’re going to need a sweater. And a comb.” I find a navy pullover in his bottom drawer and bring out the comb and toothbrush and a cup of water.
First we do hair. I draw the comb throu
gh, without incident.
“Later you’ll give me the honor of washing this.”
“Heaven.”
Then we do teeth. I scrape around, remembering, in horror, Dr. Peterson’s drilling. He drains the cup and spits back into it, disgusted. “I’m impossible. How can you bear me?”
“Good question.”
I put the sweater over his head, smooth his long arms through it, stay with my hands on his chest, my head resting next to his. “It’ll be good, to get the brace. Looking at the ground all day sucks.”
“I love your optimism, Jolly Hockey-Sticks.”
I ask about the bathroom, but he says he can manage on his own. “Thanks to our elaborate rest room rigging.”
“It’ll save you, that humor.”
“So I’ve heard. Say, did you read about the guy who was afraid to laugh because he might literally laugh his own head off?”
“It was one of the first articles Eliot found for me.”
“You’ve done good work.”
“Meaning.”
“You’ve always managed to surround yourself with decent people. How have you done that?”
“I don’t know. Certainly not by being decent myself!”
He smiles into his lap, then motors into the bathroom. On screen the big purple dinosaur is gathering children under his short arms and mouthing the words to the famous song that Daisy has memorized and that cynics like Isaac and Jane ape. Won’t you say you love me too? Barney and his entourage wonder. Jane and Isaac have made up violent replacement lyrics, and we’ve laughed and laughed. But here we are, as odd an assortment of creatures as that on the set, trying to gather our spirits into one common effort. Who are we to deny Barney?
• • •
I try to take comfort later from the letters of Hadewijch: Try and remain inwardly detached in all that happens to you; when you are troubled and when you enjoy peace of mind. She was a Beguine; she chose to give up material wealth in service to communal peace. Of my situation she may have said that to react personally to hardship is to behave selfishly, to ignore the divine. But I am not a religious woman—how could I be?—and tonight the words of my wise women don’t comfort me. I look past them at the specifics: at my dutiful, aloof husband, at my distressed son, defiant daughter, wondering parents, and at my baby, forgiveness incarnate. Then at Fowler, who cannot continue on his own, no matter what his mind has made up.
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