The Cradle

by Patrick Somerville

  A man raised his hand and asked her whether she still wrote poetry, and who her favorite poet had been, and she said, “No.” Then she said, “Walt Whitman.”

  Now the people in the crowd sensed something had gone wrong. The children looked concerned. Renee tried to hold her smile in place. Not at all for an army. How could she have been this blind for this long? But that answer was simple, too. She had chosen to be.

  Now a woman was asking a question. She was already asking a question. Had Diane called on her? She didn’t see. Renee tried to focus in on the woman’s mouth as she spoke. She was saying something about dragons. Renee nodded along as the woman spoke, and she even raised her eyebrows now and then at what seemed like the right moments. She tried to gather the question in. The woman wanted to know why children responded so well to stories that had, at one point in time, been the actual stories of cultures, the stories that adults told one another and that held the most meaning. Were thousand-year-old stories the hand-me-down stories children got once the adults had grown tired of them? Arthur, the Lady of the Lake—those had been serious business at one point in time, and the magic that drove the legends had been serious business, too. This was how people lived their lives. This was what they believed. Why, now, was this a game for toddlers? What had changed? Science? Maybe the industrial revolution had played a role. The woman revealed that she had a master’s degree. Then she just said Beowulf, Beowulf, Beowulf. In Renee’s ear the woman said Beowulf four hundred times in a row. Then the woman made a comment that made the rest of the parents chuckle, so Renee chuckled along with them. The woman apologized for rambling. She asked her question one last time. She said, “What I suppose I’m really asking is whether you see children’s literature as an important aspect of our culture in, well, the same way that other literatures can be thought of as important? Should our universities’ English departments be taking these books seriously, right alongside the traditional canon? Right alongside Melville and Hawthorne, if you will?” and Renee leaned forward and said into the microphone, “I wrote every single one of these books for my son.”

  Jonathan died three weeks after he landed in Vietnam. He was incinerated. The image in her mind was almost a cartoon: a large round bomb landing directly on his head. That was her way not to imagine how horrible it had been.

  She had started to read poetry before she met him, but something fused that fall, once she knew she was pregnant and once she knew he was dead. What poetry was seemed to change. It became more than what she was doing and far more than expressing. It became more like architecture of being. The poems she wrote for the book came that fall. Between October and December, she wrote one almost every day. To her it had been a curious, irrelevant coincidence that her teachers actually found what she wrote to be excellent. Most of the other undergraduates in class stared at her poems with confused looks and told her they liked the imagery. Either way, she just wrote. October to December, she wrote seventy-two poems, and her professor picked the best of them and collected them together into a folder and told her, “Just let me send these to somebody,” and she agreed, and before Christmas she was told her book was to be published by a New York press. She just kept writing. Then her father gave her the Whitman, and she stopped.

  It was important to remember the order. Wasn’t it easy, after living fifty-eight years, to let one moment slip ahead or behind the other, and to make a new logic based on the new order? The usual order was this: he died, she had the baby, she gave him away, and then she stopped writing poems. Walt Whitman was only something in the background of it all. But that had not been the case. It was easy to put 1969 in that order, but the truth was she stopped writing before the baby, and before she gave it up. She stopped when she read that book. She used to read it in the park just down the road from her family’s home, a brownstone on Racine. And her feeling, as she read those poems, was something like: if some other person from some other time has done exactly what I would most like to be able to do, then what is the point of doing it at all? It was already here. Someone had already brought it to earth. She knew that other artists felt this all the time, but she had not given up on the thought, and she had followed it to its logical end. She didn’t need to write because everything she wanted written was already written.

  It was not Leaves of Grass. It was not I am the grass and You are the grass and We are the Atoms and I am the dirt and We are lying beside one another but I am Myself and You are also Myself and I Touch Myself and look how it is both I and I here, on the Grass. All that meant nothing to her. The poems her father had given to her were other poems, smaller, kinder. They had less ambition. And in truth, it wasn’t even the words, and it had nothing to do with what was described. It was something invisible behind them. It was tone, perhaps. It was voice. It was that when she read them she heard some other voice in her mind. When she read, “When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, how soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, in the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, look’d up in perfect silence at the stars,” she could hear someone saying it.

  There she was, on the bench, a pregnant girl in Chicago with a voice of her own, but when she read the poems, some alien voice seemed instantly to be there within her, and the voice read the words back to her. It was not the voice of Walt Whitman. There she was, the girl reading the book, but someone else was speaking the words. How, though, could that have been? How could there be a voice that wasn’t your voice? How could it be, unless this other voice was also your voice?

  She stopped. There was nothing else to say.

  Today was April 14, and Lake Michigan wasn’t frozen anymore. There were no swimmers yet and she couldn’t see any boats. It was the blue water and waves and the mucky, empty beaches.

  People were here on the path. It was one of the first warm spring days, warm being over forty, and in the Midwest that meant wildly inappropriate clothing choices—it was as though they believed that if enough of them wore tank tops or shorts, the earth would think to itself that maybe its own orbital schedule was off and shrug and just decide to go right into summer. Renee had her coat, her hat, her scarf. Her mother, beside her in the wheelchair, was also bundled up. She had a red checked blanket over her legs.

  They moved north, with the water on their right. They had already eaten at a restaurant across the street from Theresa Owen’s assisted-living apartment complex.

  Renee tried to tell her mother what had happened at the reading and managed to say only some of it. Her mother already knew about Hawaii. Renee’s mind was circling and doing some strange work of its own; it felt like she kept going down. The mood made it difficult for her to talk, and for long moments they just moved quietly together. She felt as though something beneath her, something in the floor, was gone.

  “It’s not all true, you know,” her mother said. “You’re a very good writer. Plenty of those stories have nothing at all to do with all that.”

  “With what? An abandoned boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “They all do, Mom.”

  Theresa sighed and looked to the right, toward the lake. Her wheelchair veered right.

  “Mom, look ahead. Just look straight ahead.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  Theresa piloted the wheelchair around the puddle.

  “How well,” Renee asked a few minutes later, “do you remember when I decided?”

  “What? To give him up?” She frowned.

  “I don’t remember it at all,” Renee lied. “Was it spring? Was it just before?”

  “May. Sometime in May. Your father and I both came home and found you in tears. We said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and you said, ‘I can’t.’ And we took you to Evanston a week later.”

  Ahead on the left, Renee saw a young girl jog up to a pull-up bar, jog in place in front of it for a moment, then reach up and take ho
ld of the metal. She was wearing a gray-and-yellow top, tight, and tight black running pants. Her hair was in a ponytail. For a moment the girl just hung, and Renee thought she might be stretching. Then she slowly lifted herself up, once, and slowly lowered herself back down. Again, she slowly lifted herself up, then she slowly lowered herself down.

  “I’m not sure what to do,” Renee said. “Now. This is—I think it’s obvious that I can’t go backward again. Or stay the same.”

  “Looking, finding,” her mother said. “All very mysterious. Did I tell you about my keys?”

  “No.”

  “Just last week. It was the strangest thing. I went down to eat and came back upstairs, and at my door I looked everywhere but I didn’t have them. I went back down to the restaurant and asked them, and they didn’t have them, either. I got the spare set from my neighbor, and she and I went over every single inch of the apartment. Nothing. I spent two days using the spare set, not having a clue. Do you want to know where they were?”

  “It turned out you were wearing them.”

  Theresa frowned, looked down at her lap. She looked up. “Wearing them?”

  “It’s a joke.”

  “How would one be wearing keys?”

  “You couldn’t have been.”

  “If this were a story about glasses, I would understand the joke.”

  “I know, Mom. I see that.”

  “Your humor has always had this certain...confusion to it.”

  “The keys, Mom.”

  “Yes, the keys,” Theresa said. “Guess where they were? All along? You won’t be able to.”

  “Where?”

  Theresa smiled. “They were in Leipzig,” she said. Her eyes glittered. “Germany!”

  Renee looked down, waited. “Okay,” she said.

  “Isn’t that amazing?” Theresa asked. “Isn’t that just amazing? Halfway around the world!” She laughed again and shook her head.

  Renee still waited.

  “Well, how did they get there?” she said finally.

  “I mailed them there,” Theresa said. “I sent a book to Leslie Stewart at the University of Leipzig and I also dropped my keys into the box. I don’t know how. I think maybe I tried to use one of the keys to cut the packing tape. We’ll never know the secret. A few days later Leslie mailed them right back.”

  “I’m not sure,” Renee said, “I understand the point of the story.”

  Theresa shook her head. “I’m not sure it has one,” she said. “I just thought it was the strangest thing.”

  Renee pulled herself back together by the afternoon. She went home to her clean and very warm house in the suburbs and made toast and had a glass of wine. April 14. It was still only 3:30. She tried to watch television, but there was nothing on. There were two messages on the machine from Diane, both thanking her, both asking whether she was okay. Another from Bill.

  Eventually she went upstairs to the office and stood in front of the board. She couldn’t help herself. She had thought, a few times, of trying to use what she had written in the notebook, on the airplane, for the last poem.

  Now that felt hollow. That had been her first attempt and it had not been right. It had just been more words, too many of them. All she was, was words. She couldn’t just keep writing words. In the meantime actual life would be rolling on beneath her feet. She was so tired of all that kind of energy. Write that sentence and make sure the sun looks like it looks. What hand gesture would he make, really? Does the person telling it sound enough like a human being or is there too much there? Too little? Should she stand out of the way and simply let it happen? With children’s books, tone was even more important. The whole idea of the world was in tone. Just a single word could change it, and the child-reader would be pushed out of the dream. She thought of the lifetime’s energy she’d put into making those small choices. Each page of each book had hundreds of them. She thought of all the long days, locked in the office, coffee beside her, hunched forward and staring at the ever-evolving computer screens that had come and gone over the years. It was as though she’d been leaning forward and squinting at the light, hoping to see him inside the pages. Hoping that his actual human form could or would somehow materialize in some previously unnoticed depth a few hundred feet back behind the letters, and he would then step back and look around and see he was surrounded by them.

  She looked at the dark monitor of the computer. Screen saver, stars. She heard the furnace all the way down in the basement creak to life.

  The high-pitched pulse of the doorbell startled her.

  She looked over her shoulder, then turned and went down the stairs, thinking it was probably Diane, here to check on her. She’d stayed with her in the back room at Butterfly, even though Renee had not told her what it was, exactly. She assured Diane it hadn’t been any of the questions, it wasn’t her fault. Only that she hadn’t been right since Adam had left. Diane had made her a cup of tea.

  The doorbell rang again when she was halfway across the living room, and she said, annoyed, “Hold on, hold on.”

  She turned the knob and pulled the door open.

  She stood for a long time, looking at the boy—not boy, teenager—who stood in front of her.

  Strands of his black hair peeked out from beneath his gray wool hat. He wasn’t very tall—he was shorter than she. He had on a black sweatshirt and jeans, and his eyes were patient and calm but also piercing. She had seen him before.

  “Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  “You’re Renee Owen, right?” he said. “I mean, I know you are. But I’m just asking anyway.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You don’t know me at all,” he said. “This is weird.” He held out his hand. “I’m Joe.”

  10

  It was early in the morning when Matt showed up at the house again, clean-shaven and rested. He’d ignored the mess of destruction in the bathtub when he’d stood at the sink with his razor and shaving cream, both bought at the drugstore down the road. He had the same clothes he’d been wearing since Thursday morning, but they weren’t too ripe yet. They weren’t not ripe, but they weren’t too ripe. In the office, as he checked out, he told the man he’d slipped in the shower and had reached forward to hold himself up on the showerhead. Good enough. The man had stared back, unconvinced, and Matt had turned away from him.

  At the front door, Darren’s mother was also tidied up; Matt again thought of the masterful skill professional alcoholism required.

  It was overcast today, not quite so orange and rosy. Matt sensed the air was pregnant with moisture, and above, the clouds slid by too quickly and too low, lurking and nearly apocalyptic in their altitude. Darren’s mother looked better than she had last night. She was dressed in some sort of business suit and had changed her hair; now it was down lower and wrapped around in a few perplexing knots at the back, which he saw when she turned to look over her shoulder after she opened the door.

  “What did you decide?” she asked him when she looked back.

  “This all seems very easy for you,” he said, holding his hand out, palm down. “Slow down. I just want to talk.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s that I knew you were coming.” She smiled and showed Matt her yellow-stained teeth. They did not seem to fit properly with the rest of her.

  “Right,” he said.

  “When all is said and done, Matt,” she said, adopting a tone Matt found to be excessively familiar, “don’t you think this is better?”

  “I’m sorry. Do I know you personally?”

  “No.”

  “You’re talking like this has been an ongoing discussion.”

  “I’ve certainly had this discussion with myself,” she said. “Although I don’t think that’s what you mean.” She smiled. Had Matt not known any better, he would have said she was flirting with him. Her makeup now appeared cracked and grotesque on her cheeks and her forehead, and he could see the lines of age beneath the creams and the foundation.
The mascara, too, was thick and gelatinous on her lashes.

  “I met him last night,” Matt said. “In his underwear.”

  “Well, that’s absolutely irrelevant,” she said. “He’s always in his underwear.”

  “The point is, no, I don’t think it’s better. If you’re asking me if I think it’s better for him to live with me than you, then no. I am a stranger. You are trying to give me a child. In a different life where I’d known him since the day he was born, and when Marissa had known him, maybe that would be better. Like this—this would not be better. This would only make it worse for him.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “What?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m here because I just found out my wife’s mother had another baby.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I also found out his father and his grandmother don’t seem to give one shit one way or the other.”

  “But you didn’t have to come,” she said.

  “Of course I did.”

  “No. You didn’t. You found what you were looking for at Darren’s house.” She nodded over his shoulder, toward his truck. The cradle was strapped in the front seat. He looked at it, too, then turned back to her. He didn’t recall telling her about it yesterday evening.

  “You could have gone directly home and never said a thing to her,” she continued. “That’s not lost on you. Don’t pretend it is—I can tell you notice these things. It’s not lost on me.”

  “I didn’t have to go get the cradle, either,” he said.

  “But you did anyway,” she said, smiling. “See?”

  “No.”

  “See?”

  “How do you know this?”

  “My psychic is very good.”

  “You’ve been talking to your son on the phone.”

  “Not true,” she said. “I’m sorry to say that my son and I neither talk nor correspond.”

  “What you’re talking about now,” he said, “me driving away from here with a boy and bringing him back to my family—it’s not the same. What about the documentation? What about the law? What about Darren? This is not pickles. This is not a cradle. This is a life. This is a human life that’s going to go on for years. And remember everything. You can’t just pick up a kid and walk away with him.”