“Esme, my God, what’s wrong with you?”
We went into the living room together and sat down and I told them the story, or stories: the breakup, my suspension from UGC, the custody battle, Jay’s kidnapping of Ollie.
They listened sympathetically, exclaiming in the appropriate places, but once again, I felt the stubborn alarmed judgment of me going on just below the surface of their concern—what had happened to me, the protégée, the postdoc star? How had I done this to myself?
Q’s eyes flickered over me again and again: the torn, still-soaked jeans I’d had on for three—four?—days now; the ratty plaid shirt; my damp dirty hair hanging in my face; my filthy fingernails and sandals. He breathed sonorously, filling the room, a sound I remembered well. He looked older to me, but he’d acquired a kind of ruddy gleam, a patina of well-being. They’re good for each other, I thought, startled, and I stared for a second at them as a unit, as if they’d been placed behind glass in a museum: Last Happy Marriage on Earth, Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge.
He stared back at me. God, I remembered those deceptively mild, inquiring eyes: How do you confirm this hypothesis, Ms. Charbonneau? or How do you explain the discrepancy here between your results and the results in the textbook? What an intriguing theory, Esme, but even Mendel does not support you here. I looked back into those eyes, trying to remain unshaken. He wanted to know, I supposed, the exact nature of my pathology. And more important, how could he have miscalculated? He’d bet on me, he’d put faith in me.
“But what I don’t understand clearly,” he said, inhaling noisily through his nose, “is why you stopped going to your lab.”
“I’m going to make some hot cocoa for everyone,” Millie announced gaily. She stood up and hurried out to the kitchen. I noticed that she wiped a tear away with the back of her hand as she rose.
“Professor Quandahl,” I began, and he held up his hand. For one awful moment, I thought he might ask me to call him Dad, and I froze.
“Ken,” he said, “please.”
“How about ‘Q’? I mean, I’d like to call you Q, OK?”
He nodded indifferently. He didn’t care what I called him, he just wanted an answer.
“I stopped going to the lab because I was sick of the pressure on me to perform some goddam miracle for funding. And ... there was another reason. Over the last couple of years, I’ve turned to theory. And theory began to obsess me, I mean, to the exclusion of my other work. I developed, with”—I paused; it was hard for me to say this name—“Lorraine Atwater, a theory of everything, a TOE. And it flew, Q, I’m serious. I’m serious,” I repeated to his amazed expression. “However, it happens that Atwater just scooped me,” I added in a small voice.
He sat, staring intently at me, breathing in loud rasps, his nostrils flaring.
“You’re not shocked at my being scooped, are you? Come on, you know this kind of thing goes on all the time, right? Prof—Q, I mean, people take other people’s research, other people’s ideas, routinely, don’t they? Honcho professors take grad students’ and postdocs’ research and call it all their own as a matter of course, don’t they?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Esme, you were a great help to me on albinism—your research was invaluable. Do you feel I used material you should have been credited for?”
“No—I’m just aware of how it happens, how the hierarchy stays in place.”
We stared at each other in silence for a minute, neither one of us eager to plunge into the swirling vortex before us.
“I’d like to ask you a question, at the risk of sounding rude. What are you and Millie doing here?”
My mother came back before he could answer, carrying a laden tray: a hand-painted china teapot (which Jay had given me for our last anniversary), cups, napkins. The delicious insipid smell of chocolate filled the room.
How did she do it? Cocoa! Goddam cocoa! I almost burst out laughing, but that kind of explosion would inevitably lead me to more weeping, I knew. I restrained myself and smiled at her.
She set the tray down on the coffee table; Q moved to help her. Then she sat down on the couch, lifted the top daintily off the china teapot, and stirred the steaming contents with a silver spoon, looking at me all the while.
“We wrote to you, Esme, don’t you remember? Didn’t you get the letter? Kendall”—she glanced over at him—“had a conference in San Francisco three days ago. We told you we’d rent a car and drive down from there for a visit. We just assumed you’d gotten the note. Luckily the elderly woman next door”—“Mrs. K.,” I murmured—“had a key and let us in.”
I glanced guiltily at a far corner of the room; somewhere in that direction was a cardboard box containing stacks of unopened mail. From the last few weeks. She was watching me closely.
“That’s weird. I don’t remember a letter like that.”
“Well. I think it’s weird too, Esme.” She put the top back on the teapot and shook her head. “I find ... all of this ... very weird. Very disturbing.”
She carefully picked up a cup and poured hot chocolate into it in a steady stream.
I felt anger, a spool of red shadows, unwinding fast in me. I stopped the spool.
“What exactly is weird, Mother?” She held out the cup to me and I took it. My hands were shaking so badly again that the cup rattled noisily in the saucer.
“Esme. Kendall and I are shocked to find you in this ... condition. You look like a ... derelict, your marriage has fallen apart, our grandchild has become the pawn in this dispute between you and Jay ...”
“Pawn? Wait, Mother, that implies that both Jay and I are playing a game.” I set my cup down with a bang and she jumped. “Jay may be trying to play a game. I’m not. I’m not playing a game. This is Ollie we’re talking ...”
I started to cry again. Goddammit, I thought, but the tears cascaded down. I shook my head and dabbed at my eyes with a napkin.
“This is Ollie. He took her from me. He lied and told his lawyer I’d ... hurt her.”
Q sat forward, setting his cup down.
“What is he claiming you did to her?”
“He’s saying that I ... hit her. She had a little bump where she hit her head on the sink and he said I did that. Prior to that he said I was irresponsible because I didn’t agree with him that she needed to be treated like a dysfunctional kid.”
“Dear, is there a chance that he’s right about Ollie? I don’t mean the bruise, I mean the ... dysfunction.”
I looked back at her in fury.
“Of course there’s a chance that he is right. There was also a chance that I’m right. Who knows? All I know is that my daughter has always seemed like herself to me. She just needs time to grow and let the world get used to who she is.”
“But there were ... problems? In school, with other children, language development—isn’t this right?”
“Yes and no, Mom. Mostly no. I don’t know how to say this so that you’ll stop looking at me like I’m some kind of fucking child-abuser, but I know my kid, OK?”
Q frowned at me. “Esme, please don’t speak in that manner to your mother.”
I stood up. “Please don’t speak like that to my mother? You’re going to tell me how to address my mother now? It wasn’t enough that you ran my life for five or six years and made me think I had to be fucking Joan of Arc, now you’re going to tell me how to talk to my mother? Jesus, how arrogant are you? And by the way, my mother and I never talk at all, so there’s really no precedent. She and I have never been close, have we, Mom?”
She just looked at me.
I sat down again, talking to Q, who was glaring at me.
“I’ll tell you what really sucks about all this. She could have helped me so much this last year when I was debating what to do about Ollie. I wanted to know about my own early childhood, of which I remember little. I thought it might shed some light on Ollie’s behavior. I wrote her letters, but she never told me anything. Isn’t that right?”
“It’s hard t
o know what you want, Esme.” She put her cup down.
“Yeah. Hard for you. Your mind’s been elsewhere for my whole life!”
“Esme, I’m not like you. You want answers to everything; that’s how your mind works. When you were in therapy, in graduate school, you bombarded me with letters too. I don’t like supplying you with evidence for some theory you’ll derive to justify your own behavior.”
“What behavior?”
“Like now, the way you’re acting now. Finding excuses. If Ollie needs help, Esme, get her help.”
“Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. I mean any of it, having a child like Ollie, any of it,” I said. I took a breath. “I was finding a way, on my own, trying to discover the right place for her. I’d written to a teacher, Gloria Walther—she was Ollie’s first kindergarten teacher but was transferred—to ask if she knew of a school that would recognize Ollie, help her develop. I’m waiting to hear from her. In the meantime, I’m all alone. Jay took her away from me, Mother. I can’t really grieve and I can’t let my life go on. I know that she’s alive and not that far away but I can’t get to her. Do you have any idea how that feels?”
Suddenly her demeanor changed; the erect posture, the carefully held face, altered. She shook a little, as if an electrical surge had passed through her; then she began to cry.
“Yes!” she cried. “I know how that feels.”
I stared at her, astonished, and Q put an arm around her and patted her hair. He looked over her head at me and something blazed from his face: righteousness, anger, fierce protectiveness? I couldn’t tell.
She sat up and dabbed her eyes with her napkin. She looked at me. God, I hated that look. She was always reasonable. After she expressed an emotion, she limited it, cauterized it, quickly, perfunctorily. I remembered the mothers of kids I knew: shouting, laughing, weeping. Millie wept a little, now and then, for form’s sake.
“Esme, I’ve avoided telling you this because I didn’t want to give you fuel for your theories about Ollie. I was an outsider when it came to your upbringing. When you began to exhibit certain tendencies—yes, yes, like those you describe in Ollie—your father panicked. He thought that you were disturbed. We took you to the psychiatrists and child-development people and the advice at that time was always: Give her a normal upbringing, force her to be like other kids.”
She stopped. We waited, and after drawing a long breath, she went on.
“I disagreed. When you began to ... move around in circles and talk to yourself, it didn’t seem like a disturbance to me. I thought you should not be ... treated like a disturbed child. But your father ... You know, Esme, before your father got so sick with emphysema, he was a strong, stubborn man. Your father insisted that he could help you, change you. He thought that I was a bad influence.” She stopped here and said nothing for quite a while. Q wheezed away like a squeezebox and I sat staring at her, as she sat erect, her body slightly turned from me. “You know that there was a popular theory among psychiatrists at that time that autism could be caused by the mother? James thought that our bond, the bond between you and me, was ... He broke it. That bond between you and me.” She put her head down. “Do you know what it’s like to try and withdraw emotionally from your child?” She looked up again. Her face was naked, grief-stricken.
“That’s what they asked me to do. Your father. The therapists. So. Then your father worked with you. Every time he caught you spinning in circles he ... shook you and brought you back. He insisted that you do regular kid things. He bought you comic books, he taught you to tell jokes. He was funny, your father, remember? He tried to make you laugh. When you started to withdraw he went after you. He followed you into that world and he turned your face around and brought you back. He made you talk to him, he made you use words that made sense. ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he’d say. ‘Say it again, Esme, say it again, until you make sense.’ Then, you know, not too long after that, he started drinking. He lost his job at Fann Hydraulics and he worked for a while as a toll-taker on the Triboro Bridge. Do you remember that, honey?”
“No,” I whispered.
“Well, he worked the night shift and he used to take you with him sometimes.”
“No,” I said. Then: “Maybe I do remember, but I never knew where I was.”
The memory washed over me. I must have been four or so, maybe Ollie’s age. ... I remembered being in a tiny space with him. When I remembered it, I always thought that I was recalling a dream, because it appeared to me that we were in prison, my father and me, in a cell, behind bars. Beams of light swept over us. I’d always thought the beams were from a nightmare prison watchtower, but now I realized they were headlights. Now I remembered him talking to me, telling me to ask for the toll, fifty cents, to hand the change back from a dollar. “Talk to the people,” he’d say. “Say ‘Good evening, sir.’” “Esme, make sense. Answer the lady, Esme, speak up, what do you say?” “Thank you.” “Please.” “Pardon?” “Your change, ma’am.” And I remembered too, suddenly, how he bragged about me. I could make change fast, I picked the math up, even at that early age. He wanted it both ways, I thought. “Here’s my smart little kid. Fast as lightning, nobody’s fool. But look at her, just like all the other kids. Smart as a toll-taker’s daughter, making change (you say the right word, you pay the toll), handing out the tickets to those who complied, stamped PAID, you can pass.”
“I remember it now,” I said.
“Esme, he did all this because he wanted you to be happy, he wanted you to be normal. I know you think that there is no normal, I know that. But he believed it, you see. You and he used to trade jokes back and forth. Then you just got too fast. He couldn’t keep up. And in school, though he’d tried to keep you out of accelerated classes—you took off. You started winning all those prizes with your science projects. He just gave up, you know. But by then, he was so sick.”
She started to weep again. Then stopped herself. Then wept again.
“Why would you want this to happen again, Mom?” I noticed how Q silently reached over and took her hand.
I couldn’t imagine how she could have lived through that, conditioned herself, to be the person she’d become to me, day after day. “No, sweetheart, not now.” “No, Mommy can’t help.” “Mommy has to go now.” “Let go, Esme.” I stared at her: Who would we be now, had we been allowed to love each other?
“I don’t know. You said yourself we’ve never been that close.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Why would you want me to do to Ollie what he did to me?”
“Because she has to live in the world, Esme. She can’t keep talking just to herself and you. You must see that.”
“I know she has to live in the world and talk to other people. I do see that. But I’ve made a lot of people angry trying to protect her,” I said. “Because I don’t believe that some expert can tell me about my own daughter.” I paused. “She needed this time in her life to be safe: She needed to know I was her mother, that I wouldn’t go away.”
I got up, walked over, and sat between them. They shrank back a little, both of them, nervous. I sat down between them.
I put my arm around my mother. Then I put my arm around Q. They seemed so old to me, suddenly, so fragile.
“You came because of the letters I wrote, I know that. It wasn’t really the conference, was it? You talked to Jay and you were worried. It’s all OK, really. It’s OK.”
After a while, my mother stopped crying and I touched the side of her face with my hand. She reached up and took my hand and held it. Then as if that were all the maternal intimacy she could bear for the moment, she let it go. She smiled brightly at me and got up. She went into the bathroom and shut the door. I cleared my throat.
“You know, Q, it’s so funny. For the longest time, I did think that I was in love with you. You know that. Well, I wasn’t in love with you. But you had such power over me—the power that parents have, totemic power. In some ways, everything I’ve done in my field w
as in reaction to you. Except the theory. That’s mine. Or was. It freed me of your power over me.”
He nodded his head slowly, in time with his labored breathing.
“I’ve made mistakes,” he said finally. “Mistakes of judgment. I was a very lonely man when we worked together and in my loneliness, I confused my work with an emotional life.”
He wheezed violently, then caught his breath. “You were right, Esme, about some of the things you said that day in my office. Not all. Not all. I am not invested in biotech futures; you were wrong to suggest that. And I find the genome project ... pretentious. It’s true, you’ve always been impulsive in your judgments.”
Still so arrogant I thought, still Q. But this no longer bothered me. In fact, it made me feel a little stronger.
“I am impulsive,” I said. “But you are, too. You just act on your impulses a little slower, so it looks like measured judgment.”
He looked at me, shocked, then amazingly, he laughed a little, hoarsely. “The way you talk to your mother,” he murmured. “I don’t like it, Esme.”
“You don’t have to like it, she’s not your mother.” I stared off into middle distance; the bathroom. “She’s my mother,” I said. Then we sat in silence for a time.
“Hey,” I said after a minute. “Do you remember a medical fellow named Jesse Falbo? He worked at Harmon-Tannen with us?”
“Maybe,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Wait ... Oh yes. Jesse. Yes.”
“I liked that guy,” I said, and thought of that other life, like a dream. “I really did.”
Chapter 26
I STOOD IN the shower, letting the hot water pour over me. I reached up and turned a lever on the shower nozzle and the pour became a spin; the droplets spiraled over and around me and I leaned languorously against the tiled wall, my hair streaming down my back, and I shut my eyes and saw her—the familiar dark figure. She was spinning in the arc of the spray, then turning slower and slower, almost stopping now, and I could see as she slowly rotated—back-of-head to profile, to front—it was no surprise to me that she wore my mother’s face. And what I felt, even in the wake of Ollie’s loss, for a split second was gratitude. Then I reached for the soap and began to wash myself.
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