The Laws of our Fathers kc-4

by Scott Turow

  'But it's important in the lives of other people,' Lucy answers. 'And you did that. As a woman. I know what that means, how hard that was. When Michael told me you were a judge, I actually felt proud. Does that sound ridiculous? But I'm very proud of all of you, the women I knew who did all these things that their grandmothers or even their moms couldn't even dare to consider. When we started college, if you think about it, we were so vague. So many women were. I was. We didn't have any sense of what we could do. And what you did, you, all our women friends, they did for themselves. Together, I mean, hand in hand. I don't think Sarah can really understand the imagination that required.'

  The reaching trees rush by in reflection on the windshield. Sonny tips her head.

  ‘I can't take credit,' she says. 'My mother gave me that.'

  'Really?'

  'It was very unusual for the time, but a wonderful gift. I owe her so much for that.' 'You are great,' Zora whispered. 'You are a treasure of the world.' Day in, day out, the message was repeated, with a passion that left no doubt it was true. At instants, that unrestrained praise of her abilities seemed more a burden than a benediction, but in the end, Sonny thinks, it's a lot to have, to reach back to.

  They park at Drees, a small brick building, retooled three or four times for various municipal uses. Rush hour, sometimes madness on University Avenue, is light today and they are early. At Sonny's suggestion they walk down the block to a gourmet coffee shop, the Seattle franchise which has America mainlining caffeine. A native, Lucy knows all the code words. 'Grande, macchiato, double shot.' They sit on brushed-steel stools across a granite table. Shoppers, mostly female, pass on the street. A woman with a baguette from the French bakery across the way turns in the midst of conversation and nearly knocks Lucy from her seat. There is a brief scene, much laughter, and a flurry of apologies. When they are alone once more, Lucy hunches over her coffee cup and lets her tongue slide forth kittenishly to lick the foam.

  'So, is it love?' she asks. Sonny, who had not contemplated such directness, feels her chest rock when she attempts to draw a breath.

  ‘I know Seth's in love with my daughter. I'm not as sure about me.'

  'Oh, I think he's always been hung up on you. What's the term? With the torch? As a child it made me think of the Statue of Liberty. But it means love is never finished. Don't you think that's right? I think love is never finished.'

  Sonny sees how this will be, one of those oblique, neurotic dialogues, saying one thing and, in some lost recess, meaning something else. If love does not quit, where does that leave Lucy and Seth? Registering Sonny's discontent Lucy apologizes. She didn't mean to pry, she says.

  'It's hardly prying,' Sonny says. 'It's natural. You wonder about Seth and me, I wonder about you and Seth.'

  In response, Lucy stirs her coffee, her eyes nowhere in the room. 'Life is messy,' she says suddenly. 'Isn't it? People have these messy little corners that you can't get to with one another.' Is it Seth and her she means? Or is she talking about the fact that even decades ago Sonny and she were not especially close?

  ‘I don't need explanations,' Sonny finally says, then, after an instant's reflection, murmurs Isaac's name. Lucy cannot contain a small, tense reflex.

  'Naturally,' Lucy says. ‘I mean, that's the biggest piece of it. Isaac. Michael won't give it up. Resolve. Let go. God, I don't know the word. But he won't. The sadness won't leave him. And I empathize, I think I'm a sympathetic person -'

  'Of course you are,' offers Sonny, realizing it's foolish to reassure someone she hasn't seen for twenty-five years, but still certain she's right.

  'But it's me, too. He was my child, too. I can't live with this silent accusation that I've forgotten Isaac and he hasn't, that he suffers and I don't. I can't bear that.' She has started crying now. The liner goes at once, and settles on her cheek, a trail of greying sludge. Lucy stares at the traces on the paper napkin grabbed from the stainless dispenser and shakes her head. Why did she bother with makeup? she asks. She's been crying and redoing it all day.

  Having touched this great pain so quickly leaves Sonny uneasy. It's like digging in a garden and inadvertently exposing the root of a plant, a white, awkward thing never meant for light. As she watches Lucy regather herself, the day presses in on her amid the hubbub of the store. The place is filling. Women and men, on the way home, with time to grant themselves a few minutes of relief, queue before the bright chrome-and-brass fittings at the counter. A few little ones grind against their mothers' thighs. The steam machines whir, spilling out sensational aromas, while the young clerks bustle about, enjoying the frenzy and performance of the rush hour. For a moment, it seems to Sonny that she can recover some recollected kinship to every person in this store: young and unknown to herself; at loose ends with spare moments; mom with babe in arms. She surmounted all that. Why can she see the arc backward so clearly, but nothing ahead?

  'I mean, Isaac's not our whole thing,' Lucy says. 'We're like any other married couple. We've done some bad stuff to each other over the years.'

  'I was married,' Sonny says.

  'Right,' says Lucy, and smiles quickly, tentatively, not certain it's polite to agree. 'But for Michael, for me – you know, the issue is how much disappointment you can embrace before you say, "I have to start again." I mean,' Lucy says, 'it turns out there are some things you can't say. In a marriage? You can mess up a relationship in a sentence. You don't know it for sure until ten years later. But that's how it turns out.' Lucy, whose dark eyes are flighty, seldom loitering, now land directly on Sonny. 'He's never told you, has he?'

  Trying to find the thread, Sonny does not answer. Lucy leans on the tiny hand she has brought to her forehead, the nails short but carefully trimmed in red.

  'God, I need a cigarette,' she declares. Lucy takes her paper cup and moves to a table in the corner. She has lit up, wreathed in smoke, by the time Sonny arrives. And her mother died of emphysema. Sonny recalls Seth's stories of this woman, with a ruined face like Lillian Hellman's, smoking behind the oxygen mask, and her family screaming, begging her to consider the fire hazard, if nothing else.

  'This, you know, period, whatever you call it,' Lucy says, 'this is like our second Big Crisis. We had a first Big Crisis. About ten years ago. Did you know that?'

  'A little,' Sonny says.

  'Michael's mother was dying. And he was having a hard time with that. Alzheimer's. They just disappear right in front of you, it eats the soul before the body. And he was becoming very successful at the same time. And he was having a hard time with that, too, you know, people were different with him now that he wasn't just some weird guy ventilating a lot of crazed private thoughts. It was like the commercials that were on then about "Everybody listens"? That was his life all of a sudden. The room would go silent. Everybody listened. And so he was pretty nuts with all of it, and he started sleeping with some girl around the paper. He was traveling with her and telling me nothing was going on. His assistant. But you could just about see sparks when they even said hello. And men never will get it, will they, that women know! And I put up with stuff, that's one of my problems, I always take way too much – but this? Finally, after a party, I threw a fit. I realized I was entitled. I was so hurt, savagely hurt. And he was kind of a skunk about it. He said all of the usual incredibly dumb things, but the one that got me was "You don't understand, this doesn't mean anything," and I said, "No, I do understand, and don't say it doesn't mean anything," and, I don't know, I just said, I said, "For Godsake, I was still sleeping with Hobie a year after we were married." So I'd said it.' She waits an instant, considering only the ember at the end of her cigarette.

  'Even when that was going on,' Lucy says, ‘I didn't understand much of it, but I told myself, "If you do this, this is for yourself and only yourself and he can never know." And he hadn't. They were two completely different spheres, like sleeping and waking, or stoned and straight, it seemed completely implausible they could even touch. But they did. They had.

  'I
mean, the whole thing was like ancient history. It had been over years and years before, Hobie and I had both seen it was crazy and absurd. And one of the problems – I mean, now I was a mom, we had a home; we had, you know, our customs, our things, furniture and breakfast cereal, and honestly, one huge problem was I couldn't even understand it anymore myself. I looked back and it seemed like being with the Moonies. I mean, ho w can I even explain what I used to think when I was twenty-one? We forget what we used to be like, what everything was like. It seems like there weren't the same categories, you know? I mean, everything wasn't in this sort of place. Who understands what an adult commitment is when you're twenty-one? I thought I could sleep with Hobie and be Michael's wife. It sort of made sense, and then eventually it didn't. I mean, that's life, that's reality, I can't apologize for that.

  'And you know, the shrinks, the counselors, they pointed out the right stuff, about how complicated it is between Michael and Hobie anyway, and why did Michael – Seth – why did he want to hook up with Hobie's girlfriend in the first place, and we all played a part. But it was still a major mess. Not that he ever wagged a finger, because he's done more than his share of shitty things and he knows it. But he couldn't even talk to Hobie for a couple of years. And I mean Hobie prostrated himself, he absolutely begged forgiveness, which I frankly didn't even think Hobie would know how to do. And you know, I forgave Michael and Michael forgave us. He's a forgiving person. Except for his father. I'd had trouble getting pregnant again, secondary infertility, and we did in vitro and we had Isaac. And we went on. But there's that term "sadder but wiser"? That's a terrible phrase, don't you think? When you really hear the words? And he was sadder but wiser after that. And our marriage was sadder but wiser. And with Isaac suddenly, maybe it was too sad and too wise. And what's the way out, you know? Is there one?'

  Lucy, boiling in shame, closes her eyes and crushes out her cigarette. The store is emptying out. As the customers pass through the doorway, a touch of cooler air, swifter movement, the simpler smells of sundown and spring cross the cafe. Through her bleared eyes, Lucy dares to look again at Sonny. She says, 'So now you know.' Seth

  The day, like some lingering sweet lament, lolls toward a close. Seth and Nikki sit on the grey stairs of the back porch, facing the failing stockade fence his father years ago erected along the property line of the tiny city lot. The birds twitter urgently, and a block or two away a power mower thrums, as some citizen tries to liberate the weekend with an hour's labor after work, rushing through the first cutting of the year. In magnificent hue, the sky loses light about them. Lucy and Sonny have gone together to pick up takeout for dinner. Inside, Sarah, who just led a minyan in reciting the mourners' prayer, is whiling with the last of her friends. Nikki watched in awe as Sarah chanted and now has asked Seth to hold a conversation in a foreign language, albeit one of her own invention. They have gone on quacking and gargling at each other for some time.

  'You know what I was saying?' the little girl asks. She is in jeans and a pilled turtleneck adorned with corny, small flowers and two smears of fingerpaint. ‘I was saying, "Yes, I want to go on a horse ride." '

  'Oh, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying, "Thank you, Seth, for hanging out with me, you're such a swell fella." I could swear that was what you meant.'

  'No-o-o!' she exclaims and in mock-reproof squeezes his cheeks, stopping to comb her fingers through his new beard, which all three of them – Seth, Sonny, and Nikki – privately refer to as 'Nikki's Whiskers.' Her laughter rollicks momentarily, then her dark eyes grow serious again, reverting to what was on her mind. 'Why was she talking Spanish, anyway?'

  'Spanish? Who?'

  Nikki waves a tiny hand desperately toward the living room. She cannot recall Sarah's name or otherwise describe her. He has told her a thousand times Sarah is his daughter, but Nikki seems to find it impossible that a daughter is not someone her age.

  'You mean when Sarah was praying?' he asks. 'That was Hebrew. Span-ish,’ he mocks and grabs Nikki about the waist momentarily, jostling her in delight. She throws herself deep into his arms, and the compact feel of the little girl, with her mysteriously sweet aroma and innocent seductiveness, enters the core of him. Isaac was such a handful, so haunted and inconsolable, that Seth had half-forgotten the spectacular buoyant pleasures normally part of this age. Around Nikki he has often been called back with a throb to those times, when he was in his late twenties and Sarah was little. She'd been a surprise in every aspect, her conception first, and then, upon arrival, the way her needs dominated Lucy and him. Every meal, for instance, was a task. She was allergic to milk products and, worse, for years would only take her food disguised in baked beans. Each day was a thicket, planning for her, working, scheduling. Lucy was trying to finish college. He had been hired at a daily in Pawtucket, and one day one of his columns was picked up by a real syndicate, fifty papers, which kept asking for more. He'd write. Research. Do interviews. He'd keep endless notes on different ideas and work on them with no particular consistency, free-form, a renegade enemy of order in his writerly role. But with all the pulling and heaving, at home, in the office, he found suddenly there was no activity in the course of the day which did not feel imbued with deep purpose – Lucy, Sarah, what he wrote. And where it all was going, who knew, who knew, but he was laboring toward something, if only perhaps the creation of the self he was, after long wondering, seemingly meant to discover all along. Good years, he thinks now. Good times.

  In this mood, he clings to Nikki. Her long dark hair, pigtailed today, spins around as he lolls her back and forth. He is always self-conscious about handling her. Welcome to our era. But a six-year-old needs to be hugged. When his children were little, he enjoyed nothing more than lying down with them for a nap, clinging to their small hands, losing track in sleep of where exactly their bodies and his began and ended. He finally lets her go so he can explain what Sarah was doing.

  'Sometimes people feel that they have to try to talk to God. That's praying. And Sarah was praying about her grandfather. Remember that real, real old man? I showed you his picture? I used to go visit him? We're remembering him.'

  'Did he get dead?' Seth knows Sonny has gone over this at length, but no doubt they'll be repeating it for days.

  'He was more than ninety. He was almost ninety years older than you.' He was the century, this benighted, amazing century, Seth thinks. He has not cried yet, but he's been on the verge once or twice, and with this new thought, he stifles a sob. It would upset Nikki. If she was his kid, it would be all right if he upset her. He would just cry. He'd be willing to say this is life, too. No truckling before the altar of tiny vulnerabilities. But she's not his.

  'Is he in the ground already?'

  He tells her what he can. That it's all right, the way it's supposed to be. Yet that is no comfort. Lurking here, Seth suspects, is the fact that neither Sonny nor he has ever told Nikki that Seth had a little boy, not much older than Nikki is now, who passed. Even if Nikki were only a third as bright as she is, only partially possessed of that remarkable insinuating intelligence in which she is forever assessing the adult world, she would sense, would know. Who after all does she think this person is to whom Sarah and he are always referring? If things go on, he thinks, they will have to deal with this forthrightly. He will not do what was done to him, create a home poisoned by a secret terror, never to be mentioned.

  'So that's what Sarah was doing. She was praying. And when Jewish people pray, they talk in Hebrew. See? Sarah and I are Jewish people, so she talked in Hebrew.'

  'Am I a Jewish people?'

  He ponders this. Her grandfather, Jack Klonsky, according to family legend, was Jewish. Among the Reform that might be sufficient.

  ‘I don't think so, Nikki. Your mom isn't. Usually, people are what their moms are. Or their dads. And Charlie and your mom don't really like to go to church. Some people don't like to pray. I'm not crazy about it, to be honest.'

  'Jennifer 2 goes to CDC In Nikki's kinderga
rten class, there are three Jennifers, all of whose last names start with G.

  'Right. So she probably likes praying. And Sarah likes it.'

  'Well, how do I tell?'

  'What?'

  'If I like it. Duh,' she adds, with noble six-year-old contempt.

  'I'm sure your mom will help you. Maybe you can go with Jennifer 2 sometime. Or, you know, you could go with Sarah. Then you and Charlie and your mom can talk about it. Maybe you'll want to be Catholic like your Aunt Hen, or you could be Jewish like me. Probably you'll decide you want to be like Charlie and your mom. That's what most people do. But whatever it is, you don't have to worry about it now.'

  'I do.'

  'What?'

  'Want to be a Jewish.' She laps her hand over Seth's. And moves a trifle closer on the stair. Sonny

  'Well, we're all together again,' says Hobie with an ironic glimmer, as he glances about the old mahogany dining table to Sonny and Nikki, Lucy, Seth and Sarah. The visitors have departed. A few may look in later, but given the spare connections in Mr Weissman's life, the family decided to limit visitation to the afternoon and early evening. Lucy has a late plane to Seattle. On the table, the cartons of Chinese – the food of Jewish anguish, as Seth puts it, one of those jokes of his Sonny will never really get – leave the room savored of foreign spices and fried oil. How can anybody be hungry again? she thinks. The Jews are like the Poles, chewing their way through any meaningful event. But the energy of high emotion and the drain of the crowd this afternoon seem to have had a ravening effect. They eat speedily, on paper plates. Large foaming bottles of soda pop, dimpled from being grasped, stand amid the cartons. Nikki picks at an egg roll, then draws her hands inside her sleeves and tours the table telling everyone a pair of chopsticks are her fingers.

  Sonny sits beside Sarah, discussing Sarah's plans for next year. Teaching was Sonny's final career before she lit on the law, and she recounts some of her experiences. Everything was wonderful until she got to the classroom, where she was done in by thirty-eight third-graders, all of whom wore their deprivations as visibly as wounds. She laughs now at the memory of a girl of eight with a variety of behavioral disorders.