A Playdate With Death

by Ayelet Waldman

  Within two minutes, my precious boy and I were relegated to a sandy patch of unpopulated lawn on the far corner of the playground. I smiled pathetically at the mothers whose scowls had precipitated our segregation and called, “I have a really well-behaved daughter.” I swear it wasn’t my fault my son was behaving like a testosterone-poisoned member of the World Wrestling Federation. The mothers shot me final, disgusted looks and formed themselves into a protective circle around their perfectly behaved children, many of whom were boys, no doubt raised by more competent mothers who could effectively resist gender stereotypes.

  Meanwhile, my monstrous son had crawled into my lap and was placing firm but gentle kisses all over my face.

  “You are my darling,” he said to me.

  “You’re my darling, too, but I wish you wouldn’t attack the other kids.” I sighed, kissing him back. His cheeks and neck still had the doughy softness of infancy, and I buried my nose in them. He giggled while I made snuffling noises and buzzed at his soft skin with my lips. How could something so delicious be so wretchedly behaved?

  We played in our corner for a while and then made our way over to the slide. Two mothers promptly grabbed their little girls and carried them to the other side of the park. Isaac, blissfully unaware of his pariah status, clambered up the ladder and whizzed down the slide with a bellow of joy.

  Was it really just a matter of gender? For all her stubborness, for all her temper and propensity to willful behavior, Ruby was, by and large, an obedient child. Sure she had her moments, but they’d never included socking a kid on the head with a piece of playground equipment. Isaac, who had once seemed so tractable and still amazed me with his loving sweetness, had an exuberant, aggressive streak about the length and breadth of the Mississippi River—with the same tendency to overflow. I’m convinced that neither Peter nor I treated them any differently from one another. So what was it? The mysterious Y chromosome? Or maybe it was just Isaac. Maybe that’s the way the kid was, and all my efforts at forcing him to be something else, forcing him to be more like his sister, were not only hopeless but ultimately destructive. Maybe instead of trying to beat and berate out of him that wonderful sparky personality that gave me such joy when it wasn’t being unleashed on unsuspecting children, I should have been helping him figure out how to direct it more appropriately. Like at inanimate objects.

  At the end of our agreed-upon half-hour, Isaac was happy to leave, the attractions of solitary play having worn thin. I strapped him back in the car seat, popped the ubiquitous Coasters into the cassette deck, and set off for the Palisades. It never occurred to me not to bring Isaac on this errand. First of all, I had nowhere else to put him. Peter had spent the entire night working on The Impaler and probably wouldn’t wake up until the sun was dipping back down in the horizon. Equally important to me, however, was a somewhat less innocent motive. There is something about a mother and toddler that inspires the sharing of confidences. Any woman who’s ever taken a baby to the playground can attest to that. Mothers tell things to one another even when they’ve never met before. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been made privy to a virtual stranger’s innermost secrets while our children cavorted on the swing set. I’ll admit that with the Ninja Toddler around, I’d been less often the sounding board for other women’s intimacies than I had been with a sweet-faced Ruby on my lap, but since Susan Sullivan didn’t have a little boy for Isaac to torment, I figured I was safe.

  Either Bobby’s birth mother lived in tennis whites, or it was just a coincidence that I’d caught her on her way to the courts once again. This time Salud didn’t ask me in but made Isaac and me wait on the doorstep. Susan herself looked as though she were about to send me packing, but her face softened when she saw Isaac’s tousled head. He didn’t have his sister’s dramatic red ringlets, but his sandy blond hair still highlighted his deceptively cherubic face.

  “Why don’t you come round to the back?” she said. “There’s a swing set out there. It belonged to my boys when they were young, and I’ve never had the heart to take it down. I guess I’m saving it for grandchildren.”

  She led us around the side of the house. As we walked across the lawns, I was conscious of my clogs sinking deep in the lush, damp grass. The back yard was expansive and as perfectly groomed as the front. Flower beds flanked a large grassy area edged with blue and gray stones. A green climbing structure, complete with swings, tree house, and sandbox, stood in a generous patch of playground bark. As soon as he saw it, Isaac took off for it at a run.

  “He won’t hurt himself,” Susan said. “The bark is about a foot deep. I still replace it every spring.”

  She led me to two Adirondack chairs set at the edge of the huge flagstone patio, and we watched Isaac in silence for a moment or two. He was in heaven, climbing up the rope ladder, sliding down the firefighter’s pole.

  “You came back,” Susan said finally.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Why?”

  “Your husband was stationed overseas, in Vietnam, when Bobby was born.”

  She didn’t answer, simply rolled her diamond tennis bracelet around and around her wrist.

  “I imagine it must have been very difficult, finding yourself pregnant under those circumstances, especially considering who his family was.” I kept my voice gentle, but I don’t believe it was my tone, or anything I said or did, that made Susan Masters Sullivan finally speak. She told me her story because she desperately wanted to talk to someone. Her son was dead, and whether or not she’d ever known him, she felt some kind of grief, and she needed someone to share it with.

  “I’m sorry he’s dead. I really am,” Susan said, without looking at me. Her voice had a huskiness to it, and I wondered if she was suppressing tears.

  “Yes,” I said. “We all are. He was a lovely man.”

  “I didn’t know him well enough to tell. You see, we met just the once.”

  I didn’t speak. I was afraid that if I did, she would stop talking. I realized that I was holding my breath, and I let it out as quietly as I could.

  “I was twenty-six years old when I had him. I had been married for almost three years. My family . . . well, they weren’t much. My dad moved us out here from Chicago because of Santa Anita. You know, the racetrack? He’d been a groom at a racing stable in Saratoga, New York, and he thought he’d make a career out of horse training. But anything he earned at the stables, he’d lose at the betting window or drink up on his way home at night. My mother supported us. She was a dispatcher for a taxicab company.”

  Susan glanced at my face and looked away almost immediately.

  “I’m not telling you my hard luck story because I want you to feel sorry for me. It’s just that all this had a lot to do with what happened. You see, when I met my husband, it was like meeting a prince from a completely different world. And I was Cinderella. He was home from the Air Force Academy for Christmas. We met at a fraternity party at USC, and for the longest time he thought I was a student there. I didn’t ever really lie, I just didn’t correct his misunderstanding. When he graduated and began his service, he came home so rarely . . . I guess I sort of stopped thinking about what he knew or didn’t know. We got married, in kind of a hurry. For the usual reason. It was only then that he found out that I wasn’t a college girl but . . . some other kind of girl. But it was too late.

  “I think his parents always knew that I wasn’t what I seemed to be. They never liked me. Not back then, and not after the kids were born. They set me up in a little house in Beverly Hills while Patrick was overseas. They paid all my bills. Mary-Margaret even took me to her very own obstetrician. They hired a baby nurse for P. J. I almost felt like Mary-Margaret was teaching me how to be a Sullivan—like she was training me to be the kind of wife she wished Patrick had married.

  “I suppose I felt smothered. Or else I was lonely. It’s funny, that you can feel so oppressed by people’s expectations and demands, but still so desperately alone.”

  I
nodded in sympathy. I’d felt something similar when I’d first had Ruby. Sometimes I thought that having a baby was the most lonely thing in the world. There you are, constantly at another person’s beck and call, never by yourself for even a minute, but utterly isolated and alone.

  “I met Bobby’s father at Papa Bach’s Bookstore. I used to hide out there, sometimes, when the nanny came. I was terribly intimidated by her. She so clearly disapproved of how little I knew about being a mother. I just know she was telling Mary-Margaret everything I did wrong. Anyway, I was there one morning, and this nice young man kept watching me. After a while he asked me out for a cup of coffee. I don’t know why I went. Like I said, I guess I was lonely. Anyway, we had coffee and talked. He was a doctor. A pediatrician. He was handsome—I mean, not like Patrick, not blond and gorgeous—but kind of dark and moody looking. He was a Jew, and I hadn’t really known many Jews. I went to Catholic schools through high school, and I never really did go to college.

  “Anyway, we met at Papa Bach’s a few times, and then, one afternoon, I went home with him. I don’t know why. I never could figure out why. I just did. It was stupid. But it was 1971. People did things like that. Or at least, I thought they did. It would have been nothing, I would have forgotten all about it.” A deep red flush crept up her neck and into her cheeks. “The . . . the rubber broke,” she whispered.

  I nodded again.

  She paused for a moment, cleared her throat, and continued in a stronger voice. “And there I was. Pregnant. I really didn’t know what to do. I thought for a while about trying to lie to Patrick and his family. Mary-Margaret and Pat Sr. had flown me out to Japan for a week a month or so before all this happened so that I could meet Patrick for his leave. I suppose I could have pretended I’d gotten pregnant then. But, you see, I knew that chances were I’d be found out. I just knew it.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why were you so sure?”

  She flushed again and looked out across the yard to where Isaac was lying on his stomach on the bark, digging a pit with his toes. “Well, for one thing, the dates would have been all wrong; the baby would have ended up coming a whole month late. Although he ended up coming a week or so early, so I guess I could have worked it out somehow. Maybe I could have gone away to have him and just lied about his age by a couple of weeks. But there was something else.”

  “What?”

  “Well, like I said, the man was . . . Jewish. And he looked Jewish. You know. Dark.”

  I was waiting for her to remark on the size of her lover’s nose, but she refrained. I suppose it had occurred to her at some point that Applebaum wasn’t exactly a WASPy name.

  “You didn’t think you’d be able to get away with it?”

  “No. I thought for sure Patrick would be able to tell.”

  “It’s ironic,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “Well, that Bobby was so blond. He looks just like his half brothers.”

  She nodded. “He did, didn’t he? They all three favor me. But, then, I couldn’t be sure that he would. Favor me, that is. What if he’d looked like his father?”

  I nodded.

  “And thank God I did it, given what happened,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, that Tay-Sachs. The Jewish disease. Even if I’d been able to keep it a secret from Patrick, he would have found out, because Bobby had that Jewish genetic disease.”

  “Well, chances are that you wouldn’t have found out about the Tay-Sachs,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Bobby only got tested because he was Jewish. If he’d been brought up as your child, there never would have been a reason for him to be tested. Unless he married a Jewish girl.”

  “I doubt a son of mine would do that,” she said and then stiffened as if suddenly remembering who or what I was. “I mean, they don’t meet many Jewish people. They went to Catholic schools. Like my husband and I did. But even so, we would have found out.”

  “How?”

  “Because we were all tested for it a few years ago.”

  “Excuse me?” I was flabbergasted. She’d have had no reason in the world to be tested for Tay-Sachs.

  “My sister’s granddaughter has cystic fibrosis. Her doctors at UCLA asked the entire family to participate in a genetic study. We were all tested.”

  “What do you mean? What does being tested for cystic fibrosis have to do with Tay-Sachs?”

  “Because the test they gave us was what they call a panel. It looked for three diseases at once, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, and something else, caravan? Canavan? I can’t remember the name. Anyway, they used that panel for the entire study, and even though we weren’t in a risk group, we had to be tested like everyone else. My test came back positive for cystic fibrosis, P. J.’s and Matthew’s tests were negative. Of course none of us had the Tay-Sachs gene or the one for that other Jewish disease. If Bobby’s had come back positive for Tay-Sachs, then Patrick would have found out he wasn’t his child, that his father was someone else, someone Jewish.”

  “I guess you’re right, then. You were lucky.” I glanced over at Isaac, who was digging a hole in the wood chips. He looked happy, so I turned back to Bobby’s mother. “How did you keep your pregnancy a secret?”

  “It was surprisingly easy. Even though P. J. was already a year and a half old, I was still carrying quite a bit of my pregnancy weight. I just kept wearing the same clothes and tried not to eat too much. I didn’t end up gaining more than twenty pounds or so.”

  I stared at her jealously. Twenty pounds? I gained that much in the first trimester!

  “No one really noticed,” she continued. “At the end, I stayed in bed a lot. I told the nanny that I was having migraines. Mary-Margaret made me go to her doctor, and I was terrified that the jig would be up, but he didn’t look at me past my neck. He just prescribed some sleeping pills and sent me home. It was only in the very last month that it was really obvious that I was pregnant. I sent P. J. off to Mary-Margaret and Pat Sr. I told them I was going to Arizona to a spa to try to lose weight once and for all before Patrick came home on leave again. They bought it. I think they were glad to have me gone for a little while.

  “Instead, I went home to my mother in Pasadena and had the baby at Haverford Memorial Hospital. I registered as Susan Masters, and that was that. I gave the baby to Jewish Family Services and went home.”

  “Why did you go through Jewish Family Services and not through one of the Catholic agencies?”

  “My mother wanted me to go through a Catholic charity. In fact, she tried to convince me to go to Saint Anne’s Maternity Home, this home for unwed mothers in Los Angeles. But I wasn’t unwed. I didn’t belong there. And I had to give the baby to the Jews.”

  “Why?” I asked again.

  “The baby was half-Jewish, wasn’t he? It didn’t seem fair to try to give a half-Jewish baby to a Catholic family.”

  “Fair?”

  “Well, because they were sure to assume he was from a Catholic family, because of me, because of my name. But he’d be part Jewish.”

  I didn’t get it. “So what?”

  “Well, they’d end up with a Jewish baby. That wouldn’t be right.”

  I stared at her for a moment, not sure what to say. Was she really saying that she couldn’t stomach the idea of foisting off a Jewish baby on an unsuspecting Catholic family? As if they’d be getting inferior goods?

  My discomfort didn’t seem to register on Susan in the slightest. She gave me the name of Bobby’s birth father, Dr. Reuben Nadelman, and told me that she’d given it to Bobby, too, but had never found out whether Bobby had contacted him.

  While I was writing Bobby’s birth father’s name on a scrap of paper, I heard Isaac squeal. I looked up, and my heart caught in my throat. For a moment, I thought that the handsome blond young man pushing my son on the swing was Bobby. Susan Sullivan followed my gaze.

  “My son, Matthew,” she said fondly. “I remember when he was small
, like your boy. I used to push him on that very swing.”

  “He and Bobby look so much alike,” I said.

  She smiled faintly, and her lip trembled. “Like brothers,” she murmured.

  “Well, I guess that only makes sense,” I said. I felt bad as soon as the words escaped my lips. It seemed cruel to remind her that Bobby had been hers, her son just like this man was. Something about Susan Sullivan inspired me to want to protect her, she seemed so delicate, so fragile. And yet, this was a woman who felt such clear distaste for who I was.

  As Isaac and I drove away from the Pacific Palisades, I felt a kind of listless disgust. As the most assimilated of Jews, married to an indeterminate Protestant of vaguely Anglo-Saxon heritage, I gave little thought in my life to anti-Semitism. I’d never been called a kike or a hebe. As far as I knew, I’d never failed to get a job or make a friend because I was a Jew. My life had been blessedly devoid of prejudice. So much so, in fact, that I’d sort of forgotten that there were people in my own country, my own city, for whom my status as a Jew meant something more than that I hung a few Stars of David on our Christmas tree. Susan Sullivan had given away her baby because his father was a Jew. Despite the fact that a conveniently scheduled leave in Japan meant that she might have been able to convince her husband and his family that he had impregnated her, she gave her baby up for adoption. She was that sure that his Jewish blood would give him away, that it would mark him, as surely as a pair of horns on the top of his head. I angled the rearview mirror so that Isaac’s sleeping face was reflected back at me. Did he look Jewish? Half the blood that flowed through his veins could be traced back to the Jewish Pale in Poland, and farther, if the biblical stories are true, to the rocky, desert sands of Israel. Did his face bear indelible traces of generations of hook-nosed moneylenders?

  My son’s sand-colored hair stuck to his damp, sweaty forehead. His blue eyes were closed, and his thick lashes rested on round, pink cheeks. His soft lips formed the shape of the nipple he was probably dreaming of. If I were totally honest, I would allow that his nose was perhaps a little large for his tiny face. But the fact was, he had inherited that from his father, whose own visage bore the craggy sail of an oversized schnoz that could easily have graced the pages of a Nazi caricature. And there wasn’t a Jewish bone in Peter’s body.