At their direction, a landscaping company has cut the grass and pruned the shrubs on either side of the flagstone path that leads from the driveway to the front porch, leaving the cuttings in an existing compost heap behind the garage. For a moment Nathaniel wonders if he should carry Julia over the threshold, but his back would never manage it and Julia would protest even if he tried. They have never been that old-fashioned kind of couple, nothing like Nathaniel’s parents, who did not allow Julia to stay in their house until she and Nathaniel were married. In any case, there is no longer time for gallant silliness: once again rain is slashing and bucketing and blanketing down, and although they are dry in the shelter of the front porch, the three of them rush indoors.
PAUL IS IN THE KITCHEN when the new people arrive. The cleaners nearly caught him yesterday, clattering their equipment against his floors. He was in Carson’s old room as the brigade of six women in red and white uniforms surged shouting through the front door. When he heard them, he crept down the back stairs, angling through the kitchen and into the basement before anyone knew he was there.
Car doors slam. He ducks below the height of the windows but not before catching a glimpse of brown hair under a green hood. Keys in the front door, the rush of sound when it opens, rain on the pavement and roof. Crouching in the kitchen, he listens as the man and woman talk in loud voices, and then hears a third set of footsteps.
No-ales. No-els. No-ills.
Three of them: two vocal, a silent third.
Trying to decide what to do, he waits while they stand just feet away from him in the hall. If he coughed they would hear him. If he squeaked his heels they would know they were not alone.
“God, it’s so dark in here,” he hears the woman say. “I’m going to check the kitchen.”
Holding his breath, he hears her weight against the boards. She’s coming down the hall rather than through the dining room. He can smell her perfume—roses, like his mother—as he slips out of the kitchen and down the stairs to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs he hides behind the banister, looks up, glimpses shoes and slacks, and ducks away before he can be seen, dashing into the pantry, wriggling through the hatch, easing it closed as all three of them stomp around his kitchen. Without closing the containment door he stretches out the length of his body along the floor, his ear grating against the wooden hatch, listening to the intruders.
MARCHING AHEAD OF HIS PARENTS through the house, Copley is making his odd noises, the whirring, whistling, churning sounds that unnerve Nathaniel, seeming, as they do, to suggest that his son may be not merely an eccentric child but a disturbed one. The noises only started in the last few weeks, after boxes began to appear, clothes and ornaments packed, trifles given away. The noise-making began with chirps in place of “yes” or “no,” birdlike trills that evolved into more guttural mechanical sounds, which in turn replaced other words and phrases: “maybe,” “uh-oh,” “not now,” “good morning,” “goodnight,” “please stop,” “leave me alone,” “I’m hungry.” Julia kept what she called a “lexical and syntactical score,” writing musical notation keyed to the meanings of the sounds so far as she understood them.
“This is just acting out,” Nathaniel told her as the pace of the noise production increased in the days leading up to the move. “It’s attention-seeking behavior.”
“It may be, but it’s not random. He’s consistent. It’s all very considered,” Julia said.
Since leaving Boston it has been noises instead of speech most of the time, but in place of the intricate sonic vocabulary of recent weeks, there has been a marked regression: beeps and shrill ascending notes in affirmative answer to questions; descending ones if Copley means “no”; a flat, staccato zzzhhh if he feels noncommittal or unwilling to express more complex meaning. There are times when Nathaniel wants to throw something at his son—a glass of water, an apple, a vase—and tell him to knock it off and act like a human being. Nathaniel’s own father had done this very thing, once throwing a cup of coffee in his face over breakfast when he judged Nathaniel’s responses to questions were somehow inadequate: too monosyllabic, too churlish. “Speak when you’re spoken to,” Arthur Noailles had snapped. “Don’t be a goddamn savage.” The coffee had been sitting in the cup for ten minutes and was no longer hot but it was warm enough to hurt for a moment, and the act so violent that Nathaniel had fled from the dining room and locked himself in his bedroom for the rest of the day. It was not the only time Arthur had done such a thing.
When Nathaniel now feels himself moved to throw something at Copley, he retrieves that memory of coffee splashing in his face, how he chucked out the clothes he’d been wearing, putting them in a neighbor’s trashcan the next morning on his way to school with the note from his mother pressed into his hand while his father was glowering in the other direction, a note explaining he had been sick the previous day. If he happens to smell the mass-produced brand of coffee his father drank, he invariably feels a passing surge of nausea.
Until the last few months, Nathaniel and Copley have had a happy if sometimes challenging relationship—challenging because Copley is so intelligent and, at the same time, even before the mechanical noise-making began, not the most natural, the most human, communicator: a boy late to speak and willing to converse only ever on his own terms. The joy of having a child, Nathaniel always imagined, would be in reaching the point when said child could reason and have intelligent conversations. Copley learned to read at three and should, at the age of seven, finally be at that stage. To Nathaniel’s growing frustration and distress, however, when he now asks Copley a question, his son often looks as though the terms of the query are so illogical that he does not know how to respond and out will come the mechanical zzzhhh, the sound of an older computer processing itself to the point of smoking exhaustion. In a particularly good mood, Copley might shrug in silence, but most of the time the boy acts like his father has said nothing at all, paternal speech a thing his neural circuits cannot interpret. Even though she is opposed to the idea, Julia has agreed it might be worth taking the boy to see a psychiatrist: “The books say it’s the move. He needs to adjust. He will adjust. But yes, I agree,” she says, “it’s getting a little out of hand.”
Nathaniel watches his son march out of the hall and into the kitchen. Cupboard doors open, accompanied by new sounds, as if the little machine were curious or surprised or disappointed by what he finds. Whatever else Nathaniel may feel about this behavior, Copley undoubtedly has a sense of humor, and that in itself must suggest he is something other than a psychopath, sociopath, or any of the other psychiatric diagnoses Nathaniel fears might be applicable given what he knows about the history of mental illness on Julia’s side of the family.
“Does it still feel the same to you?” he asks his wife as they stand in the dining room looking at the walls and wooden floors. The rain outside strengthens, pinging against the panes, and a gust of wind sideswipes the house, rattling the windows along the north and west sides, howling drafts through the chimney, while the top of the building groans as if gearing up to twist off its axis. The air conditioning has been left on and the house is frigid and dry. The word sepulchral comes to mind, but this doesn’t seem quite right. Surely a house can’t be sepulchral.
Although it might have seemed spacious and characterful on first glimpse, back in the middle of summer, it now feels exactly like what it is: vast, empty, and dark, the corners thin and sharp, as if the whole structure were caught in an enervated spasm. There is a quality to the space, the arrangement of rooms, the proportion of wall-to-window, the heaviness of the crown molding and baseboards, that makes Nathaniel feel claustrophobic. A shiver ripples round his shoulders and down his back. Despite the rain, he tries to open the windows in every room he enters, but they are all locked. He loosens his collar, unbuttons his shirt another notch, ruffles his hair to get the sense of a breeze moving through it. I’m having a panic attack, it’s just a panic attack
. There’s nothing wrong with the place. Calm yourself. Breathe in and out, there’s plenty of oxygen. Catching his reflection in one of the windows, he thinks for an instant that someone else is in the room.
“Do we have keys to the windows?”
Julia is taking notes, squinting into dark corners. “It must be one of these,” she says, pressing a ring of keys from the realtor into his palm. None of the keys is small enough to fit into the window locks.
“We’ll have to get a locksmith. We have to be able to open the windows. We can’t spend our lives in a house with windows that don’t open. It has to be some kind of fire risk or health violation.”
“There are lots of things to do. Calm down,” Julia says, making a note on her clipboard. He can see the word, LOCKSMITH, but it doesn’t help. Staring at the empty patterned walls in the dining room he is unable to move, catching his own reflection every time he turns to look out a window onto the dark gray world. All this space! Endless, suffocating, all-consuming space! Maybe it isn’t too late to pull out. Of course it’s too late. Everything is signed, transferred, transacted. The keys and the house are theirs, the mortgage their burden, the structure and the land it sits upon their new responsibility. God, what a mistake!
As Copley returns from the kitchen, marching across the room, Nathaniel recognizes the steps from the dance recital: the woman taught his son to march like a tin soldier in The Nutcracker. The dance class was another mistake. Soccer would have been better—or more swimming lessons. His son had excelled at swimming and there was no expectation that the parent should be involved except as a spectator, no pressure to run and pass balls, to attempt footwork impossible for a body that knows nothing about sports. It is not as if there is anything suspect about a boy with an aptitude for swimming in the way there is with a boy inclined to dance. Nathaniel saw the way friends raised their eyebrows when they heard about the dance class, when Julia invited some of them to the embarrassing recital—embarrassing because Copley was such a natural, convincing and fluid and not remotely self-conscious in his movements, so incredibly fey and graceful. That was the real horror. If only the physical intelligence could be channeled into a more masculine discipline, not that Nathaniel cares what kind of person Copley becomes. If he happens to fall in love with men later in life, Nathaniel will of course accept it, but he does not want a son who prances.
The three of them walk circles around the ground floor in the way they did with Elizabeth the realtor, who was so persuasive even as her spiel set Nathaniel’s mind racing along a fast-branching trajectory of horrific complications and hidden flaws in the structure. He agrees with Julia that the reproduction Morris wallpapers and painted moldings have to go; the place will look better, more like them, when the walls and ceilings are uniformly white.
“You still love it, though?” he asks her. She jerks back her head, looking surprised.
“Of course I do. It’s about the house, Nathaniel, not the way it’s been decorated. You’ll see. This house really has something.”
After living for so many years in only a few rooms, Nathaniel has to admit feeling relief in finding himself at last with the kind of space he knew as a child—in fact with a larger house than the one in which he and his brother Matthew were raised. He has always worried about Copley growing up in an apartment, fearing that high-density living and separation from nature might be having a kind of distorting effect on the boy’s mind. The behavior of recent months has seemed to bear out this hypothesis, as Julia is fond of saying. Here, in this new town and this new house, the boy can run free in the fenced backyard, lie down under trees and find a way of relating to the world as Nathaniel did in his own childhood. He will teach Copley to climb, perhaps even hire a carpenter to build a tree house. On weekends, the three of them can unlock the back gate and step right into the woods, a portion of which now belongs to them, and from there hike straight into the nature reserve and all the way to the great broad river, sit on the bank, fish for hours, pack a picnic, pretend they are wayfarers rafting from one side of the country to the other, and at the end of the day they will walk home tired but relaxed and ready again to face the challenges of the week. Nathaniel knows it is going to be a much healthier kind of life than they had back east. There will be time and space and freedom to be noisy in ways apartment living prevented. Too many years have been spent lowering the volume of their stereos and televisions, too many years cautioning Copley to use his “indoor voice,” too many years not vacuuming or doing laundry after six in the evenings. Now they no longer have to worry about neighbors: they can make as much noise as they want and no one can complain.
After completing their survey of the first floor, they all go upstairs, Copley whirring and churning as he tries to climb the steps with his knees locked, legs girder straight. Nathaniel fights the urge to say something, knowing that if he makes an issue of it Copley is bound to burst into tears and hide in a closet, hammering his fists on the floor as he has on several other occasions when Nathaniel’s frustrations got the better of his desire for familial peace and he shouted at his son to knock it off.
“Cop—”
“It’s the adjustment,” Julia whispers, taking Nathaniel’s arm. “Give him time to auto-correct. He needs to do it his way. The soldier thing is a point of continuity between here and Boston. If it goes on too long, then we’ll say something.”
“We have to find a therapist—a psychiatrist. He should be evaluated.”
“Please, Nathaniel, don’t rush into it. Let’s see if it works itself out.”
“But you agreed,” Nathaniel says, words spurting through clenched teeth; his own sudden rage surprises him. Julia drops his arm and looks almost afraid.
“I agreed to consider it, Nathaniel. I think we should consider it, but I’m not prepared to make a decision at this very moment, when so many other things are happening.”
A thumping sound comes from the hallway. Nathaniel looks out to find Copley, as though an insect confused by glass, marching headlong into the oriel window.
“Copley. Enough. You’re going to hurt yourself. You could go straight through that.” Nathaniel puts his hands on his son’s shoulders and swivels him around, although the windows are triple-glazed and there is almost no risk. In their Boston apartment Copley would go nowhere near the sealed windows, terrified of the dizzying twenty-story drop to the street.
The boy walks across the hall and into one of the other empty bedrooms, churning and stomping until he meets another immovable obstacle. Thumpa thumpa thump. Nathaniel fears that whatever is going on will require more than just therapy to correct.
“What are we going to do with him?” Nathaniel says as Julia raises a finger to her mouth.
“What do you mean?” she whispers.
“After school. Who’s going to take care of him? And what about during vacations?”
“Day care?”
He shakes his head. “Too many horror stories.”
Copley gives up, turns around, and walks naturally from the bedroom down the hall into the room Nathaniel has chosen as his study.
“Well, we’re not getting a nanny, if that’s what you’re thinking. It seems elitist,” Julia says.
“An au pair, then.”
“As if that’s any better than day care. Just as random.”
“At least he’d be at home. At least we’d have some control over the kind of environment he’s in, the kind of values—”
“God, Nathaniel, you sound like a fundamentalist.”
“All I mean is you don’t know what you’re going to get in a day-care environment, who’s going to be looking after your kid, what they’ll be saying and doing that’s going to plant ideas in his brain that maybe we don’t want there. And anyway, you said—”
“Lower your voice.”
“You said the university day-care center doesn’t take school-age kids, and my company doesn’t
think kids exist outside of the regular school day. So it means finding something else, some private center, and how do you know it’s any good? We don’t know anyone in this city. We don’t know whose recommendations to trust. I just—it seems like it would be safer to have him at home. It won’t be forever. Four or five years, and then he can be home on his own.”
“A latchkey child. Remember the moral panic about latchkey children when we were kids?”
“I was a latchkey child.”
“Your mother worked at home, Nathaniel. Not the same.”
“But she didn’t supervise. I might as well have been home alone. It did me no harm.”
Julia studies him with her problem-solving face, benign and curious and measuring, weighing all the factors.
“We have to do this the right way, Nathaniel.”
“Stop saying my name. You always pepper your speech with my name when you’re trying to get your way.”
“What’s wrong with you today?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Moving is stressful. Aren’t you stressed?”
“No, Nathaniel, just—”
“You see?”
“No, I’m not stressed, and I’m not trying to get my way.”
A toilet flushes and a moment later Copley returns to the hall, having run wet fingers through his hair to plaster it against his head, the rough surfaces of nature smoothed down, making him look manufactured, poured into a mold and enameled. Marching back into one of the empty bedrooms he turns to face his parents. “Hear this. I will have this room,” he says. He blinks twice and rolls his eyes back in his head, rolling them so far that only the whites show and it seems as though he has no eyes at all.
Fallen Land Page 10
