The Children's Crusade

by Ann Packer

  He returned to James’s room and sat on the edge of the bed. It was still the room of little boys, with baseball quilts and desks so small that a few books and puzzles rendered them all but useless for homework.

  James groaned and lifted his head a few inches.

  “Good afternoon,” Bill said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Two something.”

  James groaned again and buried his face in his pillow. “Maybe I’ll just skip it.”

  “What’s that, son?”

  “The day.”

  Bill opened the curtain. Bright light spilled into the room. “That’s a lot to skip.”

  James rolled onto his back. “Don’t give me any crap about life being precious.”

  “Check.”

  “Is it nice out?”

  “Very. Good day for a bike ride. I actually just pumped our tires.”

  They hadn’t taken a bike ride together in years, not since an accident that sidelined Bill when James was twelve. They had ridden up Page Mill Road and were heading along Skyline when a squirrel darted in front of them. Bill braked, lost his balance, and hit the ground, all before James knew anything was amiss. He was riding behind his father, and then his father was lying on the shoulder of the road, gasping in pain. James had no idea what to do. He thought—this went through his mind—that maybe if he moved slowly enough, someone would come along to help before he’d gotten to his father. He put down his kickstand very deliberately and then carefully turned his forward wheel to balance the bike. “James,” his father said when at last he’d gotten there and knelt down. “It’s okay. Don’t be scared.”

  What happened after that? James turned thirteen, Ryan turned sixteen, Bill bought the Accord. The bicycles stayed in the garage. James occasionally sat in his closet, held his old stuffed dog in his lap, and listened to Ryan and Sierra in Robert’s bed. It excited him when they stopped talking—he knew they were getting down to business. Sometimes as he listened to their groans and sighs he stroked the dog, and sometimes he stroked himself. That summer he told his father he was no longer interested in father-son bike rides. “You’re a teenager,” Bill said in his kind, understanding way, and James—proving the point?—said, “And you’re a genius.”

  Now, with the possibility of a ride hovering between them, James rested the back of his forearm over his eyes. “It’s too bright in here.”

  “Your pupils are adjusting.”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “I believe she’s doing some errands in service to an art project.”

  James snorted.

  “What?”

  “ ‘In service to.’ It’s like the art orders her around. Do this, do that.”

  “Very commanding, that art.”

  “It’s a fucking five-star general.”

  “James.”

  “You started it.”

  This was true, and it silenced Bill.

  “I’d rather go by myself if I’m going.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Actually, who am I kidding, I’m not going anywhere.”

  Bill patted James’s shoulder and left the room. They came together a little later in the kitchen, where Bill made sandwiches and they ate without talking.

  They heard the Accord climbing the driveway, and in a moment Penny was in the kitchen, shopping bags in hand. She’d been in Menlo Park, at the decorators’ shop that sometimes supplied her with scraps of wallpaper for her assemblages. She looked different—her cheeks a little pink, eyes bright.

  She said, “Guess who I ran into?”

  In the parking lot she’d spotted Mary Lawson, wife of Bill’s old friend and colleague Harold Lawson. It had been a few years since they’d met, but something made Penny call hello, and Mary was warmer than Penny remembered, asking after each of the kids by name. She had grocery bags full of club soda and tonic, and when she saw Penny notice them, she said she was having a small birthday party for her husband the following evening.

  “She invited us,” Penny told Bill. “Six o’clock at her mother’s.”

  “Robert’s coming down for dinner.”

  “I really want to go. She said any and all of us.”

  “You don’t think she was just being polite?”

  “What if she was? Her mother’s an art collector, you know.” Mary’s parents had begun buying in the early sixties, and after her husband’s death Phyllis Grant had become even more active, collecting pieces by nationally known artists as well as up-and-comers in the Bay Area. Penny thought there was a real possibility that Mrs. Grant would be interested in her work. “Please,” she said. “I can’t go without you, and it could really help my career.”

  “You don’t have a career,” James said.

  “James,” Bill said.

  “No, he’s right. I don’t have a career. That’s the problem. That’s why we need to go to the party.”

  Bill took the lunch plates to the sink and began washing up. “Quite the artist, your wife,” a colleague had said to him a month or so earlier, and Bill had smiled wryly, even gratefully, before realizing the other man was speaking with admiration. He was referring to Penny’s annual Christmas card, that year a series of green strokes on midnight-blue paper, with flecks of gold and silver. It was lovely, Bill thought, but was there any more to it than that? She tinkered, she played, but was she an artist? With the children he tried to conceal his doubt, but he knew he’d done a poor job concealing it from her. The thing was, it had all started so—what was the word?—amateurishly. Innocently. A young mother crayoning with her children. The years when Robert and Rebecca were elementary-age and Ryan and James were still at home: he could recall the difference in her on certain days, an ease, a temporary disappearance of the troubled look with which she most often greeted him when he came in from work. And alongside the children’s pictures on those days there’d be one or two created by an adult hand. She’d be relaxed, languid, almost post-orgasmic.

  “Please?” she said. “Robert will understand.”

  “You know I don’t like to go back on my word.”

  She sighed and turned to James. “You’re not even dressed. Have you done your chores?”

  In order to get a reaction, James once told a teacher that his mother made him clean the entire house, top to bottom, every weekend, but in reality she asked only that he keep his room and the children’s bathroom tidy and in any case cared more that he obey her than that the work be done.

  He nodded.

  “Well, you better have,” she said, gathering her bags. “I’m going to talk to Robert,” she told Bill as she left. “I’ll call him.”

  Because when else might she meet an art collector? As she headed down the driveway she thought again—she’d been thinking about this a lot lately—of how the inequities of the patriarchy extended through every realm. Male artists got far more attention and gallery representation than female artists, especially female artists working in a purely feminine idiom, as she did. All of this had become clearer to her after she encountered the work of Judy Chicago. With The Dinner Party, Judy had said women mattered, women’s lives mattered, women’s bodies mattered and were beautiful. If Penny was entirely honest with herself, she would have to admit that on first consideration the giant ceramic vaginas at the center of The Dinner Party had made her a little uncomfortable, but she understood now that was the point. What was disturbing was powerful.

  Her own work was not disturbing, at least not in the same way. It disturbed assumptions. It said the tossed-away artifacts of daily life could illuminate life. Surprisingly, Robert seemed quite interested in what she was doing. When he drove down from the city, he always asked what she was working on, and he was the reason she’d started using cellophane egg noodle bags. One morning she had a pile of things on the kitchen counter and he walked in, saw what was actually a
piece of garbage on the floor, and said, “Here, don’t forget this.” “Very funny,” she said, but she took it anyway, and now those homely bags were integral to what she was doing.

  • • •

  Robert might have been surprised to discover that his mother found him supportive, but he would not have minded, not in the way he might have at an earlier age, when it seemed that to be in favor of her was to oppose the rest of the family and therefore himself. He didn’t think much about what she did in the shed, but he had adopted a bemused attitude, and he often stopped in to see her latest efforts.

  But this was never his reason for going to Portola Valley. More and more, he had something on his mind that he wanted to discuss with his father. On the Sunday of the Lawson party he had something particularly pressing, and when his mother called that morning to ask if they could reschedule, he said he’d come down anyway and meet his parents at the party.

  It was dusk when he arrived at the Atherton mansion. There were four or five cars parked ahead of him along the driveway, but the Accord wasn’t among them, and he sat and waited and remembered the bright April afternoon when he’d last been at this house. The woman who’d spoken to him that day had seemed so much older than he, but he guessed now that she’d been in her early twenties and that the age difference between them had been no greater than the one between him and Julie Anne, the woman he’d left in Michigan.

  Like a mildly uncomfortable physical state that ebbs from consciousness in the face of more immediate concerns only to reassert itself later with extra force, his yearning for Julie Anne emerged from behind the mundane problems of the day, and he began to ache for her. Medical school left him no time for any kind of social life, but somehow it offered plenty of opportunity for loneliness.

  His parents were suddenly at his window. He got out of the car, hugged his father, and kissed his mother on the cheek, a son-to-mother greeting he’d seen in an old movie and decided to adopt for himself. Penny always laughed when he did this, which he took to mean that she approved or at least didn’t mind.

  The Lawsons and their guests were in a large white living room—painted white but also full of white furniture, white vases, calla lilies. White silk drapes hung in front of eight-foot windows. In contrast, the art on the walls was bold and dramatic and included what Penny recognized as a Franz Kline.

  She had worn a simple navy silk blouse and matching slacks, and she felt good about her choice, which blended well with what the other women in the room were wearing.

  But there weren’t many of them. Nor men—just five or six other couples in all. Bill felt awkward and murmured to Robert as they were offered drinks that they’d stay thirty or forty minutes and head home. Then Harold Lawson came over with a great, wide smile, and Bill felt a pang over not having seen his old friend in so long. The truth was, people didn’t have parties the way they used to. Bill and Penny had abandoned their annual party a few years earlier.

  Bill occasionally saw Harold at medical staff meetings, but somehow seeing him out of the work context enabled or forced him to see how much Harold had aged. He was significantly Bill’s senior and must be approaching seventy. Mrs. Grant, his mother-in-law, appeared to be in her nineties.

  Mary Lawson steered Penny to an empty spot on a sofa, and as Penny settled back she let herself study Phyllis Grant. Tiny and extravagantly wrinkled, she wore an expression of dazed curiosity that it took Penny several moments to chalk up to a long-ago face-lift. She was seated in a high-backed chair on the far side of the room, dressed in a pink tracksuit and bright white Keds.

  “Wouldn’t consider another outfit,” Mary said, pushing a dish of cashews closer to Penny. Mary was tiny but smooth-skinned, with the neck of a woman in her thirties. “Do you still have your mother?”

  “She passed a couple years ago,” Penny said, then immediately wished she could take it back and say “died” rather than “passed.” She didn’t want to be someone who would say “passed.” That was someone who’d say “down there” rather than “vagina,” and no artist influenced by Judy Chicago should do that.

  Another woman, seated next to Penny, began to talk about her mother, and Penny let her mind drift to the question of what kind of opening statement she should make to Mrs. Grant. She would have to circle the group to get to her, and as she was working out her route, Harold Lawson came over.

  “You must be so proud of Robert,” he said, lowering himself onto the arm of the sofa. “And how nice that he’s back in California. But I hear you’re down to one child at home now. What are you doing with yourself?”

  “Oh, I was never one of those women.”

  Harold’s eyes widened slightly, and he ran his hand over the smooth dome of his head.

  “I mean,” she went on, “it was never all I did. Your mother-in-law is looking well.”

  “Isn’t she?”

  They sat in silence. The conversational possibilities seemed to have been exhausted, but apparently Harold was too polite to leave. At last Penny mumbled something and got to her feet. Someone had just vacated a white silk ottoman next to Mrs. Grant’s chair, and Penny made a beeline for it. Once she was settled she smiled and introduced herself, and Mrs. Grant smiled and said nothing.

  “My husband,” Penny said, “is a pediatrician. That’s him over there, see? Standing with our son. We met Harold and Mary when we first moved here from the city in 1964.”

  Mrs. Grant continued to smile.

  “Your granddaughter is older than our children. Mary says she just got engaged?”

  Nothing from Mrs. Grant, so Penny explained that Robert was in his first year of medical school, and then moved on to Rebecca and Ryan. “And our youngest,” she said, “is in high school. I was just telling Harold, I have all this time on my hands these days.”

  Still Mrs. Grant said nothing, and Penny began to think she must be deaf. “I love this room,” she added, louder.

  Now Mrs. Grant leaned forward. She patted Penny’s knee and said, “You’re a good girl.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I never should have told him. I’m truly sorry, dear.”

  Penny felt someone’s eyes on her and looked up. Mary was mouthing something and shaking her head.

  Penny turned her palms upward and shrugged slightly.

  Not all there, Mary mouthed, pointing at her head.

  Penny hesitated and then rose and crossed the room again.

  “She’s gone,” Mary said. “Did she say she was sorry? She thinks all women are me and all men are my father, who by the way died during the Ford administration. For the last two years she’s been apologizing for something that happened in 1953.”

  “Oh, dear,” Penny said. “I was going on and on.”

  “Sorry, she’s purely ornamental at this point.”

  “I was going to ask her,” Penny said, and then she paused. “I was going to ask her if she might want to take a look at a piece of mine.”

  “Oh,” Mary said. And then, with an entirely different and comprehending tone, “Ohhh.”

  Penny looked around the room and wondered what she should say next. She caught Bill’s eye and watched unhappily as he whispered something to Robert and the two of them headed over. She could tell they were ready to leave.

  “Really?” she said. “But I’m so enjoying myself.” She cast a desperate glance at Mary, who seemed to be eyeing another conversation.

  “Well,” Bill said, “we have two cars. I’ll catch a ride with Robert and you can come when you’re ready.”

  And so Robert and Bill left by themselves, Robert wondering a little at his father leaving his mother when she obviously wanted him to stay. His car was a limping old Nissan he’d bought from a guy heading for a residency in New York, and he apologized to Bill about the stale-air-freshener smell and greasy seat belts. Julie Anne had always said he cared more about n
eatness than cleanliness, and now that he was truly living alone for the first time in his life, he had to acknowledge that this was true.

  He cleared his throat, ready to tell his father what was on his mind. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he wanted to and substituted that old standby, his long-term career goals. “I definitely want to do primary care,” he said, “but children or adults? Pediatrics or internal medicine? I really can’t decide. I feel like I’d probably be okay at either.”

  He waited for his father to say, as he generally did, that Robert would be good at either, good at anything, but Bill shifted in his seat and looked at him.

  “Which would you enjoy?”

  The question took Robert by surprise, and he was embarrassed that he’d never wondered. Which would he enjoy? He had no idea. “How do you know?”

  Bill smiled. “I guess you don’t, son. The whole thing is a leap, isn’t it? Thinking you’ll be able to do it at all? I remember my grandfather’s waiting room, I’d sometimes be there when I was quite young, left to sit with the folks waiting for him. This was 1932, 1933—before I started school.”

  “What do you mean ‘left’? By whom?”

  “My mother. She suffered from headaches—migraines, I suppose, though she just called them headaches, or ‘sick headaches’ more often. On her bad days we would go to his office and he’d give her ergotamine and put her in a dark room for an hour. I’d sit and wait for her. He came into the waiting room to greet each patient, so I’d see him every fifteen or twenty minutes. He was always a very powerful figure to me, but I don’t think it was because he was my grandfather—it was because of how the people in that room viewed him.”