Don't Worry About the Kids

by Jay Neugeboren

  “But—” He dropped back upon his pillow. “I can’t ever remember feeling this bad, not even—”

  “Shh,” she said. “You shouldn’t talk. You’re tiring yourself more. You sleep for a while and then maybe—” she smiled, “—maybe I’ll come join you and we’ll attempt an old Biblical remedy—”

  He tried to smile. “What they ordered for King David?”

  “Mmm,” she said. “Now close your eyes. Be a good boy.”

  When next he opened his eyes, the room was dark. He called for her and she came at once, wearing a white bathrobe. He remembered Susan Hayward, in a movie version of “The Aspern Papers,” rustling through darkened rooms in a white evening gown. “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “I’m in a sweat,” he said. “I’m drenched.”

  “Good. The fever may be breaking.” He watched her as, wraithlike, she turned her back to him and removed her robe. She let it fall about her feet, and then she stepped away. Her hair seemed longer and silkier to him. She laughed, lightly. “Did I tell you that this morning, when I went to the library to check out some books, they asked me for my student I.D.–?”

  “I’m cold,” he said. “I think I’m getting a chill.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” She stood in front of the vanity table mirror and brushed her hair. “I’ll warm you. But—can you imagine?—that at my age they mistook me for an undergraduate?”

  She turned to him, smiling with a kindness that numbed him. As he watched her move across the room, he found himself beginning to imagine for the first time how other men—in France, in Italy, in Spain, in Greece, in Morocco—might have looked upon her.

  She lifted the covers and lay next to him. “Your skin is so hot,” she said.

  “Maybe we should take me to the doctor.”

  “Never,” she said, gently, kissing him.

  “I’m cold,” he said. “And things seem to be getting dark suddenly…”

  “The darkness before the light?” she laughed. “Don’t talk—you’ll tire yourself. Let me talk. Did you know the one time I doubted?” She stroked his forehead. “The one time I doubted was not when you asked me how we could, afterward, return to our ordinary lives, but when you said what you did about how James might have written the story—about how the point would have been something about acts and consequences, about our not ever being free, not even in our imaginations.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “But if I had, we might never—” She broke off. “And there’s something else I’ve wanted to tell you.” She touched his face with great tenderness. “If I tell you that I haven’t been able to read your story yet, will you forgive me? Oh Mark, I’ve tried—believe me—and I was so happy when you first gave it to me as a gift. It’s just that…”

  He closed his eyes. “It’s all right,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  She kissed him. “I know,” she said. “Because now that I’ve told you, I feel better. I’ll be able to read it.” She rested her cheek against his. “Until now I haven’t felt free to. I’ve been frightened of it somehow, and not because of anything I might find in it, but by the idea that you finished it. Can you understand that? Whenever I’ve looked at it I’ve been frightened by the idea that it has an ending—and yet our life itself goes on and on—”

  “You should have told me before,” he said. “There’s really nothing…”

  “Shh,” she said. “You’ve been sweet never to have asked me if I’d read it. But you don’t have to say anything now. We don’t have to explain to each other anymore—not ever again.” She pressed against him. “And promise me too that you’ll try not to worry about how you look—your age; I’ve always liked older men, haven’t I? Wasn’t that what first attracted me to you?”

  He closed his eyes and let her do what she wanted with him, and while she did—and all the while she talked to him, comforted him, and loved him—he realized that if he would now dare to ask her about her year, and if she would tell, he would not be jealous, either of real acts or of those he might imagine. He believed her. He understood that what she’d said was true—that, now that she had had her chance, now that they had done the great thing—she would be faithful to him forever. And yet being free of the thing he had feared most hardly comforted him, for even as he realized that this fear was gone, and even as Janet ministered to his needs with a kindness and passion he could hardly endure, he sensed that a new and more terrible fear was settling within him and taking hold. He looked away, toward the night table, toward the envelope that contained his story, and he saw, finally, that he had been wrong: his great fear was not that she might reveal her acts to him or that he might be jealous, but that, having revealed herself fully to him—all that she had and had not done—she might look at him with her bright and eager eyes and plead with him to do the same, and that he would have to think then, for the first time, of all that, having at last given himself the chance, he had, nonetheless, failed to do.

  Your Child Has Been Towed

  WHEN I WAS A BOY growing up in Brooklyn during the years after the Second World War, my favorite place was our local library. On Saturday mornings while my parents slept late, I’d sneak out the door, then run the three blocks from our apartment house until I came to the squat white stone building. The children’s room was on the right side, a large rectangle with enormous windows that ran along its three outside walls. The windows were high up above the shelves of books, and when I sat inside the room, I used to look up and imagine there were machine gun nests perched just outside the glass, machine gunners in camouflaged helmets firing down on me and the other children—spraying us with pellets of brilliant sunlight.

  I loved going to the library on Saturday mornings because that was when Mrs. Kachulis, my fourth-grade teacher, was there. Each Saturday morning she came with her daughter Demeter. Mrs. Kachulis always called her daughter, who was in the third grade, by her full name of Demeter. At school, Demeter’s girlfriends called her Demmy and sometimes, if no teachers were around, boys would circle around her and call her Dummy. The first time I met Mrs. Kachulis at the library was by chance. I’d gone to synagogue with my father, a block from the library, because he had to say Kaddish for his father. Otherwise, since my father was proud to be what he called a godless Jew, he never went. On the way home we stopped at the library so I could get some books to read over the weekend. He had taken me with him to synagogue because I was, he said, his kaddishel, the person who would say Kaddish for him all the years after he died.

  My favorite writer during those years was John R. Tunis. I knew the names of the ballplayers on his imaginary teams as well as I knew the names of the players on the Brooklyn Dodgers. I’d read all his books several times each and I was looking through The Kid from Tomkinsville again when Mrs. Kachulis found me. She grabbed me by the arms, helped me up from the floor, smiled at me as if I were the one human being in the world she had most hoped to meet. This is what she said:

  How wonderful to see you here, Jason! I come here every Saturday morning with Demeter. We’ll meet again. You know Demeter, of course. Demeter, come here, please, and meet Jason Klein. Demeter, this is Jason Klein, the most brilliant and generous student I’ve ever had.

  A blast of air entered my mouth and shot down my throat. It breathed heat into a bundle of dry twigs that lay waiting just below my chest. The twigs burst into flame.

  Hello, Mrs. Kachulis. I’m pleased to meet you, Demeter.

  Mrs. Kachulis asked to see what I was reading. I offered the book to her and I wondered if she would know what I loved most about holding the book: that the straw-colored binding made me imagine what the sun felt like on the Kid from Tomkinsville’s back when he was out on the ballfield somewhere in Florida, far from home, on his first day of spring training.

  My father came to get me. You must be proud to have a son like Jason, Mrs. Kachulis said. I’ll tell you a secret—he makes my days worthwhile.

  Jason’s a good boy most
ly, my father said. Especially when he sleeps. Look at the books he’s reading, a boy his age.

  Sports books. Always sports books, my father said. Athletes and horses and grown men chasing little balls. When I was his age, I read books by Ralph Henry Barbour, but I read other things too. On Saturday afternoons I studied Talmud with my father. Jason should be interested in the world, in history, and in how things work. He should read about President Roosevelt and the Depression and the internal combustion engine and why we won the war.

  Ah, but he does—he reads everything. He devours books, Mrs. Kachulis said. I’ve never met a boy more curious.

  He’s a strange one, my father said. That’s true enough. You never know what goes on in that beautiful head of his, behind those golden curls. He certainly doesn’t think like you and me.

  For our history project, he did a report on lend-lease, Mrs. Kachulis continued. He made marvelous drawings of battleships and destroyers and fighter-bombers. He made a meticulous chart showing how u.s. industry mobilized miraculously for the war effort. I put his work on display for the entire school to see.

  He’s no slouch, my father said. His hand moved toward my head as if to ruffle the curls. Then, without touching me, his hand retreated to the back of his own head, to the spot where all the hair began, and he scratched himself there. We have to get home, he said. Your mother will be waiting for lunch.

  Demeter was the goddess of agriculture and fruitfulness, the protectress of marriage, the mother of Bacchus. I liked the name Bacchus because it had two c’s in it. I liked the name Demeter because it was the name of a rookie outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers—Don Demeter—I’d been following since he came up from Fort Worth in the Minor Leagues. Despite his frail gifts, I hoped Demeter might someday become the heir to Duke Snider’s centerfield kingdom. In his first at bat in the Majors, pinch hitting against Don Liddle, and the very first time he swung a bat, Demeter blasted a home run.

  Each week when we met in the children’s room of the library, Mrs. Kachulis asked me what I was reading. Each time she found me there, sitting at one of the low blond wood tables, or on the wine-colored carpeting near the far wall, she seemed as surprised and delighted as she was the first time. On the third Saturday we met, she told me to come with her to where the grown-up books were.

  And after that first time, she took me with her to the stacks every week. The stacks were positioned directly behind the squared-off area where you checked your books in and out, there for you as you entered or left the library. The stacks were dark—you could switch lights on yourself for whichever aisle you were using, and Mrs. Kachulis would walk along, singing to herself in Italian—she loved opera, would sometimes stop class, clap her hands, and proceed to tell us the story of one—taking down books and handing them to me even while she kept walking and singing. Try this one and tell me what you think of it, she’d say, and pass the book backwards to me as she moved forward.

  I had often become attached to ballplayers simply because of the way their names sounded or were spelled: Ramazotti, Lavagetto, Med-wick, Jorgenson, Loes, Mikses, Cimoli, Roebuck. Now it was the same

  with names of authors: Shellabarger, Undset, Fuchs, Yerby, Zugsmith, Slaughter, Ullman, Wouk, Buck, Brace, Cather, Saroyan, Baasch, Jewett, Bemelmans, Lagerkvist…

  In class, when I’d finished my work before others had, I’d tell her about the books—not about them really, for what I did was simply to retell the stories. When I was done, or when we had to stop so the class could continue, she’d smile at me and say, Oh you’re such a careful reader, Jason. I love having you tell me stories.

  I never thought Mrs. Kachulis was a beautiful woman, but I loved her smile more than any smile in the world, since when she offered it to me I felt that no least part of it was meant for anyone else. Some of the students called her Mrs. Horseface because of how large her teeth were and the way her long jaw quivered slightly when she laughed. I loved her more because they mocked her. Had I been strong enough to defend her with my fists, I would have, but knowing that I could not defeat all the boys who made fun of her, and that, therefore, when the fight was over they would only mock us both, I did nothing. Except to imagine a time when my mother might die, when my father might, in his grief, despair, and when I would be put up for adoption. Then Mrs. Kachulis would put out her arms and embrace me. Of course I’ll take you as mine, she said.

  Mrs. Kachulis never told me what she herself thought of books or which ones she liked more than others and I never asked. This was so partly because I was afraid I might discover we disagreed, and partly because what she preferred to do was to tell me about the lives of authors, of what they did when they were not writing. Most writers, even if they were doctors or statesmen, explorers, gamblers, or scientists, had had ordinary and lonely childhoods, she said. What made them different was how much time they had spent living inside their imaginations. That was why she thought I might be a writer someday, for despite all the words and energy I summoned up to retell the stories of others, she seemed to know what I dimly perceived—that I had worlds of my own inside me I’d never told anyone about, and that they were as terrifying as they were beautiful.

  So I said I would write a book for her. At night, after my parents and sisters were asleep, I sat up in my bed and, writing by flashlight, I began. When I wrote, I felt as exhilarated as I did when I read my favorite books, except that when I was done writing I felt both happier and more exhausted. My story was about a young baseball player who contracts an incurable disease, leaves the Major Leagues after one glorious season in which he’s both Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player—and journeys around the world on a boat he builds himself, having dangerous and splendid adventures at various islands, and in exotic ports in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, and Greenland. Pursued by envious enemies, his great desire is to meet as many worthy people as he can and to tell them the story of his life—of all he’s learning in the time left to him before he must die.

  Each Monday morning I brought in a new chapter and each Monday morning, after the Pledge of Allegiance, Mrs. Kachulis said: And now it’s time to hear Jason read to us from his book. Then I’d rise from my seat and walk to the front of the room and read. When I was done my classmates applauded—some even whistled—and afterward, when we had conversation time, or at lunch, or recess, or after school, they’d come up to me, always wanting to know the same thing: what happens next?

  Some promised to be my best friend if I told them—Tell me, tell me, they’d implore—but the truth was that until I sat up in bed by myself, picked up my pencil, watched the scenes begin to take place in my mind and began to translate what I saw into words, I myself never really knew the answer.

  Now I am a grown man. I still live in Brooklyn, within walking distance of my childhood home and library. I am forty-eight years old, divorced twice, a full-time single parent. My one child, Carolyn, is nine years old. I am presently involved with a woman, Lynne Douglas. She is thirty-seven years old, also divorced twice, the full-time single parent of a seven-year-old boy named Timothy.

  We met in the children’s room of the library. Things happened quickly, with great heat. On Saturday mornings we came, regularly, to leave Carolyn and Timothy in the library and to adjourn to her apartment or mine, for this was the only time all week when our apartments were available to us—the only time when our children were not at home while we were not at work.

  The first time we went to her apartment and she mounted me, this is what she said: We can do anything we want, Jason—anything we can imagine—anything at all.

  Lynne is a lawyer specializing in property law. She teaches at Brooklyn Law School, is a consultant to a public television series about citizens’ legal rights. I am a science writer, executive editor of the textbook division of a large publishing house. In addition to the writing I myself do, I oversee a staff of nine writers. We write of recent discoveries about why and how things are: about plate tectonics, neurobiology, black holes, th
e origin of the universe, punctuated equilibrium, frozen stars, the structure of matter, neural plasticity, the chemistry of the brain. My own special interest, about which I have written a short and well-received book, is grand unification theory, a theory that gathers into its ken all the phenomena of physics, excepting gravity: from the squealing of tires to the shining of the stars, from radioactivity to the blazing of the sun, the fuel-injected engine, the compass needle, the magnetic cartridge, the microchip, and nuclear fission.

  After the first time we made love, when Lynne said to me that she had but ten percent of her brain left, I found myself talking to her of the major prediction of grand unification theory—that the proton, a subatomic particle out of which all matter is created, will decay, and its consequence: that all substance dissolves into light.

  I’ll say, Lynne said. She glowed. The brain, I told her, contrary to popular belief, was not at all like a computer. It was anything but binary. A given neuron may have several thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. And if, as we believe, it has 1011 neurons, then it has at least 1014 synapses. The number of possible synaptic connections among nerve cells in any human brain, therefore, is virtually without end. The number of possible interconnections between the cells in a single human brain is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

  Are you done? she asked, and when I said that I was, we went at each other again, on the carpeting beside her bed, until she whispered that what was left of her brain had melted to pure heat and light, to the beginning of time.

  While she slept I lay awake, my fingertips caressing her forehead, circling the bones around her eyes. I thought, with pleasure, of quarks, which make up the proton, of how they combine into a new particle, survive briefly, and decay, either into original elements or into something else: an anti-electron. And here the strange and wonderful thing occurs, and that it does had never occurred to me in precisely this way before.