That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

  Three hotel rooms were a not inconsiderable expense, but nonnegotiable. Jacob smelled, as boys that age did, some admixture of sweat and hormonal by-product (she did the laundry; she knew precisely what stage of development he’d reached), while Andrew would want to share a bed with her and she’d wake up with the boy’s feet in her face, or his hand clutching that part of her bicep that he loved to clutch. This had to be a vacation for her, too.

  They had done the Statue of Liberty and snapped a photo of the kids in front of the bull on Wall Street. They ate a fancy lunch at Windows on the World, but the view (it wasn’t natural, to be so high) frightened Rebecca. They went to look at the old ships at the Seaport, they walked in SoHo and Rebecca was vigilant about her purse. They went to the Met and Jacob was begrudgingly fascinated by the mummies; they went to the Museum of Natural History and Andrew was worried that the people in the dioramas were real. They took a yellow taxi, bought hot dogs on the street, ordered frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity, rode the subway, ate at the Oyster Bar, and stared at the backward zodiac on the ceiling of Grand Central and Rebecca remembered the late Mrs. Onassis and, again, blessed her. If you didn’t know otherwise, you’d have taken them for a happy family with one black kid. The truth was stranger still.

  The brokenness of the family unit made parental cooperation simpler: Rebecca was going to have a coffee with her editor at The New Yorker, but she and Christopher were accustomed to handing off duties. Still, Christopher was flummoxed when Rebecca told him the boys would not be interested in the Guggenheim (no reflection on Meret Oppenheim) and suggested a carriage ride in Central Park, FAO Schwarz, dim sum in Chinatown, that kind of thing. She didn’t want to waste energy worrying about them; she wanted to worry about herself.

  A part of Rebecca hoped the woman would invite her to the Algonquin (wouldn’t that have been perfect?), but Alice Quinn suggested they meet at the Bryant Park Hotel. Rebecca entered the dark lobby, running through the list of possible topics of conversation she’d come up with the night before.

  “Rebecca Stone?”

  “That’s me!” Rebecca had studied this one particular gesture of Diana’s—she couldn’t afford couture, but she could learn something—that entailed dropping the chin and raising the eyes. It made you look (well, it made Diana look), appropriately, regal. “That’s me.” She said it once more, revising, removing the exclamation mark.

  “I’m so happy we could meet.” Alice was a mannish, small woman, with a nice smile. She looked like the sort of woman who took a class in pottery, owned a large cat or a small dog, had a well-worn Moosewood at home. She smelled of soap and had wrinkles at her eyes. “Sit, sit.”

  Rebecca was disappointed by the hotel’s simplicity. She’d imagined something elegantly fussy. There was little grandeur and there were lots of tourists coming and going. But she was a tourist, too.

  “You live in Maryland. What’s that like?”

  Rebecca had that desire to impress that she would on being interviewed for a job, or when chatting with Terry Gross. “It’s a nice enough place to be from. A place that’s no particular place. No defining characteristic. Not even much in the way of a cuisine, if you think beyond crabs. I never eat crabs. I mean, I don’t sit at a table and hit them with a mallet and rip them apart. It seems savage to me. Or like eating spiders, which is quite horrifying.” She sipped her Darjeeling. She was talking too much.

  “I grew up in Connecticut. There’s a similar lack of . . . specificity to the place. I used to wish so badly that I was from somewhere interesting. Of course, the older I get, the more I find my definition of interesting changes. I suppose I thought it would give me, you know, something to write about, something to have to feel about.”

  “Right.” Rebecca put her cup in the saucer too forcefully, so fully did she agree. “Maryland aspires to be Washington, D.C., but that, too, is a place that’s not actually a place. Potemkin. All those white façades and that suggestion of authority. It’s sometimes moving but often very silly. Nothing I’m interested in writing about.”

  “You know, I’ve worked with Walcott. And I remember, specifically with him, thinking that the place, that had to have made this huge difference. You can hear it, I think, in the work. But of course, it’s silly to be jealous of a place. You don’t accrue more material, simply being from a specific place. It doesn’t make the work come any more easily. I suppose envy is always useless. Of course, St. Lucia must be quite beautiful.”

  “My husband is from London. My ex-husband. But I remember feeling that, the first time he took me. I spent all afternoon at Sir John Soane’s and I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful place in the world. There was nothing like that, there is nothing like that, in this country.”

  “But you have the Smithsonian, of course.” Alice’s tone had changed from conversational to prosecutorial. “And you’re teaching at Hopkins now, aren’t you? Isn’t Baltimore where the Walters Museum is?”

  Rebecca had wanted to tell a joke, about Connecticut and Katharine Hepburn’s odd way of speaking. Now it was too late. “Yes. The Smithsonian. And the Walters. I try to go, when I can. I have two small children.” This had nothing to do with anything.

  “Ah yes, you mentioned once. There was something, in Folly, about the fingers at the breast.” The woman did not even hesitate; she recited the line in question.

  Rebecca had never had her work quoted back to her. Alice’s recall was astonishing, flattering even if she had just reread the thing at her desk as preparation for their meeting. “Yes. We changed breast to duct.” Rebecca knew the words because they were her own. “I can’t believe you remembered that. You must read so much.”

  “It’s very memorable.” She pushed her empty teacup forward. “I thought of Ted Hughes, if you don’t mind that.”

  Rebecca did not mind. She loved Hughes’s hard sounds and dark ideas, had wanted forever to be regarded as what she regarded him as: muscular, insistent, proud, unapologetic, deft. The woman across the table from her knew a Nobel laureate well enough to bring him up in casual conversation. This woman knew the lines that Rebecca had written, had taken those lines and improved them and given them her most prestigious seal of approval. Rebecca was a poet in a midtown hotel lobby on a muggy afternoon. In most ways, Rebecca had not ended up the person she had planned on being. Not in this. She had always seen herself right here, with an important woman—and wasn’t she an important one, too—making conversation about art. “How kind of you to say.”

  “How old are your children?”

  Oh, but not this. They had gone from Walcott and Hughes to this? Rebecca didn’t care, at that moment, where in the world they were, what they were doing, if Andrew was tired, if Jacob was moody, if Christopher was suckling on Nicorette and trying not to lose his temper, if their lunch turned out to be too expensive, if they got turned around on the subway, if a pickpocket relieved Jacob of his wallet. She didn’t want to be that kind of mother, the one who can’t stop talking about her children, can’t stop thinking about them. Surely there had to be another kind of mother for Rebecca to be. “They’re seven and four.” But no, this was not right. “Oh. I’m sorry. They’re ten and seven. Hm. That’s funny. It just came out of me, like that, so quickly. Time’s passage. I wonder if in some corner of my mind that was the ideal age, that’s where I have them fixed, at seven and four. Seven and four. I wish I were into numerology. There might be something there.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Rebecca panicked. “Speaking of seven and four. Eleven. When I was a girl, probably eleven, now that I think about it, I had a strong feeling about the number eleven. It started because one day I found a dime and a penny. Not so noteworthy, right, but then the next week, again, I found another dime and another penny. Eleven cents, twice in a row. I started testing myself. I’d look at the clock, just glance at it, and it seemed like it was almost always eleven minutes past the hour. We had this digital clock in my science classroom, that counted down the seconds, too, and once I
did this and it was at eleven past the hour and eleven seconds. What did it mean? It drove me crazy.” Rebecca wanted Alice to think her interesting but she was babbling.

  “Either everything means something, or nothing does.” She nodded her head as though the matter was settled.

  Rebecca did not know what to say. “Isn’t that how the mind works, though? It shows its own bias toward organizing experience. Toward teasing out something, some moral, some lesson. It’s all got to be for something. Or else otherwise everything is so frustratingly random.”

  “You’re talking about God, then?” Alice had a small smile. “Is this something you’re working on?”

  They were back to the question of her work but if Rebecca had failed to impress Alice Quinn, she was still impressed with herself. As if to prove a point, she glanced at her wristwatch and it was—well, of course, it would be, it had to be: eleven past three. She didn’t point this out. It was interesting to no one but her own eleven-year-old self. “I’m working on something else. It’s nice to be old enough to know the starts are false. I can turn my back on them. I can push myself past them.”

  “Well, that’s what editors are for, too, Rebecca. Don’t forget that. I do hope you’ll send us something new when you have it. It was such a pleasure to work with you on Folly. And such a joy to see it in the pages.”

  This had the air of leave-taking. Rebecca let the woman pay the bill and embraced her tentatively on the sidewalk. She hurried away as though she had some place pressing to be. She stopped behind a parked van and watched the small woman disappear into the cityscape.

  Rebecca found her ex-husband and her sons lingering in the hotel lobby, the Grand Hyatt aiming for grandeur, with cascading fountains and an impossibly high ceiling. Jacob was sprawled on a leather sofa, and his legs seemed so long. Christopher looked exasperated. Only Andrew seemed happy to see her, hugging her tight at the waist. She placed a hand on top of his hair, so thick and curly that sometimes, after his bath, she’d discover that his scalp was still dry, untouched by the water she’d poured over the top of him. “Mommy.”

  Christopher had disregarded her advice and taken the boys to the United Nations. Andrew was diverted by counting the flags, but Jacob had been bored, and they were all irritated. “I’m here,” she said. “Mommy’s here.”

  The next day was hotter still. Maybe it was the tall buildings, holding the wet air close. They’d chosen New York thinking it would have so much to offer, but they mostly just wanted to go swimming, and there was nowhere to go swimming. The woman at reception advised them to try a playground on the East River. There, she promised, were fountains to play in.

  Rebecca sat on a bench beside Christopher and they watched their sons, slender as sylphs, screaming and splashing among clever concrete animals, seals and whales spewing water that Rebecca was sure was dirty. “Don’t drink it! Close your mouth!” Rebecca reclined in the sun. Sometimes this was nice, punishing heat on the skin. The playground was crowded, the relief of all that water. Rebecca tracked the movements of her boys through the scrum of bodies, bodies of every shape and color, but they were hers, so it was always easy to pick them out, Jacob’s long torso, the girlish pink nipples, the prominent stalk of his throat, the balloon of Andrew’s tummy, joyous and round in contrast to his thin arms. The look on the younger boy’s face was joy; so, too, on his brother’s. The older boy had set aside the pretense of disinterest. He was running with abandon. He lifted his brother onto his back and she worried about Andrew’s grip on Jacob’s wet shoulders. It was one of the best feelings possible to have, wasn’t it, to watch two children at play, or maybe it was only thus when they were your children, and you had this evidence of their bond, and it was so profound it was impossible not to imagine it lingering, persisting, that someday you’d be dead but they’d have this, one boy’s hands clinging to his brother’s back, a metaphor, but real.

  “That’s better, then.” Christopher’s sigh was a long exhale.

  Rebecca knew that he breathed thus to simulate smoking. She let it pass. “It’s nice to just sit. This is supposed to be a vacation for us, too.”

  “You should have seen the kids’ faces on the UN tour.” Enough time had passed for the insult to mellow into something else. Christopher laughed. “Poor lads.”

  “They spend so much time trying to be grown up, or Jacob does, and Andrew tries to imitate him because that’s what little brothers do. Then you take them to a playground and they run around like this and you see they’re just boys. I want to tell Jacob, but he doesn’t understand, or he doesn’t care. Growing up isn’t some great privilege. It’s awful. How much better to run around half naked than to have tea with an editor or see how international diplomacy is made.”

  “Or not made.” Christopher enjoyed bringing the subject back to the things he cared about. His job required diplomacy (what job did not?), but he missed the proximity to power. Now, he mostly did paperwork.

  “You miss it still? The embassy, the bank?” To sit and have a conversation proved something about who she told herself she was. It was so silly to make a life (a human being) with another person, then divorce and be unable to speak to them. There had been no betrayal, just a change. Maybe she was lonely.

  “The world is run by people whose names most of us never learn. They know the people whose names we do know. I used to be one of those people, didn’t I? The nameless.”

  This was Christopher’s philosophy. “You do important work, still, Christopher. Your children will admire you, when they’re older.”

  “I’m a middleman. I convince lawyers from Boeing to be forthright with lawyers from the Department of Transportation. Just another person in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., who spends his days talking to lawyers.”

  “By that metric, I’m a housewife who occasionally publishes a page or so.”

  “You’re respected, though, aren’t you, now? I’m a casualty of someone else’s corruption.”

  “It still bothers you?” Rebecca didn’t understand why. “You’re an honorable man, people know that.”

  He corrected his posture, squinted from the sunlight. “I don’t begrudge the secretary getting off. He’s an old man. No matter how many millions you end up with, you’re going to die. But Bob—he’s a crook.”

  “They are. You’re not.”

  “I told you, once, how someone’s cousin came and sat in my office and made small talk.”

  She barely remembered that morning’s breakfast, yesterday’s meeting with Alice. “You told me.”

  “I guess that’s what I’ve learned. Maybe the only thing. That everything is connected. The Indian Ocean ends up in the Mississippi River, eventually.”

  “Maybe you should be the poet in the family.”

  “If Gaddafi was enriched by BCCI, and my bank was BCCI—it’s a syllogism. The Libyan state’s greatest achievement was, of course, Lockerbie. I just don’t know what this says about me, you know?”

  Rebecca didn’t want to think about Lockerbie on a sunny day at the playground. Violence had no place in the American idyll. “You feel guilt by association. It’s not like we got rich.”

  Christopher’s house in Rockville was nice enough, but a government salary only went so far. Rebecca had taken the job at Johns Hopkins because she was flattered to be offered it and also because she needed to, hellish commute notwithstanding. They sent both boys to public school now. They were just middle class enough to be able to joke about their poverty. “True enough. Six million dollars, they earned? Six million dollars.”

  “We’re better off.” Rebecca washed her hands of it. “If you had—done something, made dirty money. Think how you’d feel then.”

  “Quite so.” He was thoughtful. “I feel something, even so. Disappointment. Some sense that life doesn’t turn out as you plan.”

  “That’s why.” Rebecca had wanted to say this to him for a long time. She knew that people organized their lives around symbols they’d invested with meaning. They had
to. Life was too scary otherwise. “That’s why the NTSB. You want to feel like you’re doing something, when people fall from the sky. Like you’re helping to figure out why. But sometimes people do terrible things and we are not to blame.”

  “Or the list of people who are to blame is so long that we’re surprised to find ourselves on it.” Christopher looked at her. “Anyway, I took the job because it was the only offer. I sit in conference rooms. I make telephone calls. I’m a chaperone. A father. If I wanted to atone, I’d have joined the Peace Corps.”

  Rebecca didn’t believe this. It was too convenient. But it was interesting to learn that Christopher saw himself as nothing more than a father. Perhaps no one felt like they’d accomplished anything or perhaps that was the only interesting thing to accomplish in life. Who thought about investment banking or cardiology or selling real estate or animal husbandry on their deathbed? “You’re hard on yourself, Christopher.”

  “That may be.” He looked at her again, more intently. “They did a bad thing, whatever the jury says. But you know that I did not.”

  “Of course, Christopher. Look at us. How many divorced couples take their children on vacation and have a good time? I’m having a good time.”

  “I am, too. Who’d have thought?”

  There was music, loud, that grew louder: the Jackson Five. A family across the park, with tablecloths, large aluminum containers of food, a big portable stereo. Rebecca knew this song well, but everyone did, their songs were a part of the American way of life; you knew the words and had no recollection of having learned them. She loved this song’s plaintive longing, which was so romantic it had to be at least somewhat sexual. It was strange to think of a preteen Michael Jackson singing with such passion. Of course, he had that kind of voice, a gift from God or an otherworldly accident. Rebecca played those Jackson Five songs at home, because she thought it useful for her son to hear America’s son, and understand, Oh, we are both black. Andrew was her angel and what was Michael Jackson but a manifestation of the divine? True, he had ceased being recognizably black, but Rebecca tried to ignore that. Andrew, with his perfect Afro, the spread of his nose, his dancing eyes, was like the little boy that Michael Jackson had been, back when he’d been a little boy electrified by joy and singing with the passion of a grown-up woman that he must not be left, that he’d be there to comfort you, so glad that he’d found you. Across the park, some children were dancing.