The Children's Crusade

by Ann Packer

“With awe?”

  “With hope. With need.”

  Robert considered. He knew all too well what his father meant about the difficulty of believing he’d be able to do it at all. His hands on another person’s body. That was the problem. How did you acquire the skill? The nerve? That he’d finally become intimate with a woman made it all the more difficult to imagine. Hands meeting skin: the purpose was pleasure.

  He looked at his father. “You always say children deserve care,” he said. “Like pediatrics would be more noble.”

  “It may be less noble,” Bill said. “It may be cowardly. Children get better. I’m shielded from a lot of pain.”

  “A guy I know was talking about that. Saying you can’t make it in medicine if you feel too much.”

  “Hmm,” Bill said.

  “What?”

  “I’d say the opposite is true. You can’t make it if you feel too little.”

  “But you’re always talking about your colleagues who could as easily be diagnosing and fixing machines as humans.”

  “I am?”

  Robert knew his father liked to think of himself as generous-minded, and evidence to the contrary sometimes disturbed him. Robert could recall few instances of his father being truly upset, and they all revolved around unkind statements he’d made and then regretted. Once, when Robert was home from Michigan on a break, his father came in from work in an uncharacteristically tense mood and brooded for a few hours until, sitting down with Robert while the other kids did their homework, he confessed that he’d spoken harshly to a medical student who was rotating at his office. The student, whose role was to watch and learn, had not only interrupted a mother describing her child’s illness, he’d been dismissive—rude, in Bill’s view. Bill told Robert about this without preamble, without the headline that he viewed himself as the party at fault. He simply narrated it, step by step—“and then I said,” “and then the mother said,” “and then the student said”—and as Robert listened, he thought the whole point was to caution him against crossing any lines during medical training. It was only when Bill arrived at the end of the story and explained that he’d scolded the young man after the visit that Robert realized the upset coming from his father had been generated not by anger but by remorse.

  “I just mean,” Robert said, “it seems like there are plenty of successful doctors who don’t—who aren’t emotionally invested.”

  Bill was silent for a moment. “I guess we’d have to back up and define successful,” he said at last.

  They’d arrived at a row of businesses that included a gas station, and Robert pulled in and stopped at the first pump, then thought of his father’s long-ago instruction always to pull forward in case someone came in behind you and advanced a few yards. While the gas pumped he washed the windshield and then the windows, taking time to rub clean each of the side mirrors. His father looked very serious. He’d been the only man wearing a necktie at the party, and Robert wondered at the conservatism that seemed to define him. Not political—it was a moral conservatism, a personal conservatism. In many ways he stood with his heels dug into the hard ground of an earlier time. This was something Robert thought he might discuss with Rebecca someday when they were both home. Which would happen soon, for Ryan’s birthday.

  He got back in the car and they rode along in silence. On Robert’s mind was a pain he’d developed in his groin, most likely a strained muscle (this was all but certain), but just when he thought it was gone it would come back, nagging at him with its diffuseness, its resistance to description. Was it throbbing? Stabbing? Piercing? Shooting? Cramping? Gnawing? At different times each of these words was right. It was nothing, he was sure. But—but!—groin pain was on the differential for testicular cancer. He was absolutely, completely positive he didn’t have testicular cancer—he had medical student’s disease, it was so obvious, defined as unwarranted anxiety about one’s own health—but there was a small voice that every now and then spoke up and said, Boy, will you feel terrible if you do have testicular cancer and could have discovered it early.

  He also was experiencing a persistent cough that was a nuisance, nothing more, but he had to acknowledge that a persistent cough could be a symptom of something very serious.

  On the other hand, there was no way he had two terrible diseases, which somehow reduced the likelihood that he had one.

  Soon they were home and he hadn’t said a thing about his health.

  James lay on the couch watching TV. “Robbo,” he said, barely looking up. “What’s the matter, no lives to save?”

  “Fuck you, too,” Robert said, but low enough so that their father couldn’t hear him.

  “Mom?”

  “Still at the party.”

  A throw pillow lay next to James, and without looking at Robert he tossed it aside, making space. Robert looked into the kitchen, saw his father at the table reading, and joined James.

  “Good weekend?”

  “Very funny.”

  Robert took a closer look at his brother. His hair lay helter-skelter on his scalp, unwashed, uncombed. He looked as if he hadn’t been out all day.

  “What happened?”

  “Nice try.”

  “James, whatever it was, I didn’t get the report.”

  “A kid at a party passed out and Dad took him to the hospital.”

  Slowly, the story came out. It made sense to Robert that James had turned to Rebecca, since she was close by while Robert was nearly an hour away, especially when you considered how hard parking was in his Inner Sunset neighborhood and how often he had to leave his car blocks away from his apartment. Still, he didn’t like the idea of Rebecca getting to help, especially with something medical.

  Their father came out of the kitchen. “I think,” he said, “that I might go to bed.”

  Robert glanced at his watch. It wasn’t even eight o’clock.

  “I had a late night Friday night. I’m more tired today than yesterday—like a toddler.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, children tend to show the effects of a late night a day or two afterward.” He raised a hand in farewell and headed for his room, leaving James and Robert looking after him.

  “It’s not my fault he’s tired,” James muttered. “It was his choice.”

  “You’re so self-centered,” Robert said, though he was thinking his father’s early bedtime meant there’d be no discussion tonight about his worries.

  James headed for the bedroom hallway. Robert tried to make sense of James’s TV show for maybe thirty seconds, then turned it off. He’d last talked to Julie Anne Wednesday evening, a phone call that hadn’t gone well. It had been close to midnight in Ann Arbor, and she’d been asleep. She said, “It’s okay, I had to get up to answer the phone,” but without a trace of humor.

  He headed for his father’s room. Bill’s legs were under the covers, but he was sitting up holding a magazine, though the magazine, Robert noticed, was closed. “Son,” Bill said. “I’m sorry to be such an old man.”

  “Hey, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “What?”

  “Geriatrics.”

  “Come have a seat. Now that I’m actually here, I’m not quite so sleepy.”

  Robert sat near his father’s knees. He didn’t know when he’d last seen his father in bed. It had been many years. “James told me why you were up late Friday night.”

  “He hasn’t left the house all weekend.”

  “You grounded him?”

  “No, I’m thinking he grounded himself.”

  “Didn’t see that coming.”

  “It’s hard to be the youngest. He’s got two more years at home after this.”

  “Assuming he goes to college.”

  “He’ll go somewhere—it doesn’t have to be college. I worry sometimes that I didn’t let you kids know how many d
ifferent good paths there are in life.”

  “What, we don’t have to be doctors?” This was the moment for Robert to bring up his groin pain, which he could do lightly, in the context of how school was going—what a joke, huh? But he didn’t. He looked away, and when he looked at his father again, Bill had opened the magazine and was smoothing the pages. Robert got to his feet. He said he should be getting back, and he leaned down and kissed his father’s forehead and headed for the door.

  Bill heard the front door closing, Robert’s car starting, the engine noise on the driveway. He could feel the imprint of Robert’s lips. It made him think of the last time he saw his own father, on a frigid day in 1962. His father was in the hospital, if not at death’s door then halfway up the front walk wondering where the doorbell was. He had the raspy voice of a cigar smoker and the belly of a man who’d lived on a steady diet of butter, cream, and eggs for seven decades. He was only seventy-two, but an old seventy-two, with hypertension, emphysema, and, emergently, an MI. When Bill arrived, having rented a car at Detroit Metro straight off the red-eye from San Francisco, his mother and sister leaped to their feet as if he’d brought with him something far more powerful than love. “I want you to talk to the doctor,” his mother said. He stayed for thirty-six hours, as long as he could be away from his medical practice and his pregnant wife and his twenty-month-old son, and when it was time to go, his father summoned a bland expression and wished him a safe trip. His mother said, “Tell Penny it’s obvious she’s doing a good job taking care of you,” and his father, as if praising the financial practices of someone he’d known for a long time, said, “Yes, you always had sound judgment.” Bill said, “You were a good model.” By then he was at the door, and it would have required a giant shift in his basic life orientation to return to his father’s side and kiss his forehead, though he’d wished ever since that he’d done so.

  He woke less than an hour later when Penny came in the front door. He was still sitting up with his bedside light on, and he quickly switched it off and moved under the covers. He heard her calling for James, and he thought he heard James’s voice, and hers, but he was asleep again before he could be sure.

  Had he stayed awake and listened, he would have heard Penny scolding James for the mess he’d left in the kitchen—not because of the mess, which was minor, but because she’d failed to advance the cause of her career at the Lawson party, and James was a handy target. James said Penny blamed him for everything, and she said that if the shoe fit he should wear it. He grabbed a shoe off the floor and lobbed it, and it struck her—though only because she’d lowered her head into its flight path. They looked at each other in astonished silence. She let out a sound that was both laugh and shriek, and he stepped into his closet and slammed the door. She knocked, and he told her to fuck off. She knocked harder, and he jerked the door open. She lunged at him with both hands up, and he dove to the floor and hit his head hard against the metal leg of his bed. He lay there moaning and writhing in pain, and she fell to her knees and said, “It’s me, it’s me, it’s always been me, it’s me, it’s me.”

  Neither spoke of the incident ever again. For a brief period, James would believe she’d been confessing her guilt, her feelings of responsibility for all the pain he might have felt or might feel as represented by the pain of hitting his head, but this would be too much for him and he would retreat to the more obvious interpretation of maternal self-importance and cement the entire episode to the other pieces of grudge that together formed his rocklike objection to her, which would stay in place for decades.

  • • •

  At dinner the next evening, James had a lump on his forehead and a scowl for his father, whose Friday-night heroics had brought James the wrong kind of attention at school—not the outlaw admiration he’d gotten for wrecking two cars but a sort of sainthood by association that made people talk about him but not to him. Greer came up to him at lunch and said with resentful embarrassment that his parents wanted to thank James’s father, and James imagined a terrible future in which he was the guy other people’s parents encouraged them to befriend. He left the dinner table as quickly as he could.

  Penny had spent the day prowling the house for items to use in her next assemblage, and she felt the restless exhaustion of having worked without really working. Her failure with Phyllis Grant had put her exactly where she’d been Saturday morning, before her stop at the decorators’ shop, though she felt as if she’d been moved backward in life, unfairly.

  “I could use some help, you know,” she said to Bill once the two of them were alone in the kitchen, and for a moment he thought she meant with the dishes, which was confusing because he was already doing them.

  “What can I do?” he said once he understood.

  “Ask around? There must be lots of people in the medical community who know people in the art world.”

  “I’m not sure I have the opportunity,” he said, and she lifted her palms beseechingly.

  “Make it. You have to make the opportunity.”

  “What happened at the party?”

  “If something had happened at the party, do you think I’d be talking to you?”

  Bill turned off the water, methodically wiped his hands on a kitchen towel, and turned to face her.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Where do we go from here, Penny?”

  “We don’t go anywhere. I go to my studio, as I do every evening.”

  “That’s my point.”

  “You don’t even want me here. Think about it. All you care about is the kids.”

  Bill sighed. They’d been married for twenty-five years, and there was little about their current situation that had not been true for a long time. Nonetheless, the past several months had brought him anguish of a new order. Ryan was gone, his kindness was gone, and Sierra was gone, too. Together with the two of them and James, Bill had felt some peace, the safety of numbers.

  In a few days everyone would be home for Ryan’s birthday, and Bill thought about the last time they’d all been together, over Christmas, when even Robert spent a few nights at home. For the previous few years, Ryan and Sierra had occupied Robert’s room, but now that he had returned from Michigan and lived close enough to come home fairly frequently, it was not quite so obvious who should sleep where, and in the end Robert got his old room, Bill shared with James, and Ryan and Sierra took the master bedroom. Falling asleep in Ryan’s old twin bed, knowing his children were all under one roof, Bill had the familiar and much mourned feeling that all was right with the world. And in the morning, up early and not wanting to wake Ryan and Sierra, he showered in the children’s bathroom for the first time in his life and decided he could make do with anything, any small corner of the house, if only his children would stay there with him.

  Penny saw this and almost pitied him. He was so dependent: as she’d once been on him. What she wanted now was much less than what she wanted originally. Just a little help, a gesture of support. A phone call or two. He had to know people who cared about art. She wasn’t asking for a handout; she just wanted a chance. An opening. She was ready for the next step.

  She had not let go of the idea several days later, on the evening of Ryan’s birthday celebration. Everyone was in the living room after cake, chatting idly about playing a game or possibly going to a movie, the conversation itself the only activity they needed, though the occasion necessitated that they contemplate doing something more. Penny came in from the kitchen and said, looking first at Bill and then at the rest of them, “Have you asked yourself, has anyone asked himself or herself, what it would mean if I began selling my art?”

  Sunk deep in an armchair, James plonked his bare feet on the coffee table, belched loudly, and said, “What about ‘itself’?”

  Penny ignored him and focused on Bill. “I’m not getting the support I need. That’s not unusual for a woman artist, of course, but I’ve
asked and you’ve essentially said no.”

  “What kind of support do you need?” James said. And then, seized by righteousness, he leaped to his feet and shouted, “What more do you want from him? God!” He crossed the room and took a small watercolor of hers from a shelf where it leaned, unframed, against a row of books. It was a picture she’d done years earlier, of the front of the house in the late afternoon, with the low sun reflected in the narrow panes of glass that flanked the front door. “You think someone would pay for this?”

  “James,” Rebecca said.

  James looked around the room, at the smug, aloof faces of his family, none of whom understood what life was like for him, how boring and pointless, and he held up the watercolor and ripped it in half.

  “No!” Penny cried.

  Robert felt a twinge in his upper thigh, the first pain he’d felt in several days. Rebecca looked at her father and imagined leading him to a quiet white room that she understood, thanks to an emerging ability to think about what she was thinking, to be a combination of heaven and a mental hospital where someone might go for a nice long rest. Ryan thought ahead to the moment when he and Sierra would be in bed together and he would rest his head on her shoulder and his middle finger on her clitoris and they could begin to return to each other. Sierra felt Ryan press his thigh against hers, and she pressed back and wondered what it meant that she loved the Blairs more than she loved her own mother. Bill knew it was up to him to speak, but he was pinned to his chair by a combination of denial and astonishment and couldn’t say a word.

  “That,” Penny said, “was a favorite piece of mine.”

  “Piece,” James said scornfully.

  “That’s what artists call their work.”

  “James,” Rebecca said. “Do you think maybe—”

  “Piece of shit,” James said.

  Penny touched her fingertips to her throat. She said, “Does no one in this family have a single thing to say to James?”

  Everyone stayed silent, and James was seized by an idea, only half-formed and therefore all the more powerful, that she was excluding him yet again. “Fuck you!” he cried.