Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  Irene, Joe’s secretary for thirty years, got up from her position at the phones. “Sammy!” she warned, like an indulgent aunt.

  “Oh, shut up!” Sammy screamed, a spoiled nephew, casually insulting, confident of clemency. “Come on,” he said to Eric. Sammy got up and beckoned Eric to the one private room in the fifteen hundred square feet Joe had leased from Bear Stearns. This private corner room, which had a sweeping view of the southern end of Manhattan, was ostensibly Joe’s, although he stayed in the main room with Sammy and Eric for most of the day.

  “I have to go home,” Eric said, but with hopelessness in his tone.

  “Ten minutes!” Sammy said. “The baby can wait ten minutes.”

  Dutifully, Eric rose. He had been in the chair since lunch. He had to steady himself on the desk for a moment, his circulatory system shocked by the change, and then went into Joe’s office. Sammy shut the door. “You know where he went?” Sammy said, his face in a sneer of contempt.

  “Your dad?”

  “No, Reggie Jackson! Yeah, asshole!”

  “For a walk. He’s gone for a walk after the close ever since I’ve known him.”

  “He goes to get laid.”

  Eric had gotten his first job at the age of eighteen clerking for Joe at Bear Stearns. It was temporary, a summer job, but Joe had adopted Eric, kept him on as his assistant, and taken him along three years later, when Joe opened his own firm. Thus Sammy treated Eric as if he were a brother and Eric felt obliged to listen to his troubles. But he was tired. Eric rubbed his forehead to keep awake. He had averaged three hours of sleep a night since Luke’s birth four weeks ago. He was making trading mistakes right and left. Eric hadn’t come up with art idea for his, or Joe’s, client list since Nina went into labor. He had been passing along Joe’s picks. And Joe was hot, his trades finding fast profits in a sluggish market. Only Joe’s belief in family, and especially in fathering a son, had prevented Joe from castigating Eric and confiscating his commissions. Under normal circumstances, with Eric fallow, Joe would demand half of Eric’s commissions—all on the days Eric had been absent. Instead, benignly, Joe had let Eric mooch off his brain without compensation, asking careful questions about Luke’s health, passing along remedies for colic from his wife, Ceil. Joe’s uncharacteristic benevolence toward Eric, a pardon given because of Eric’s new stature as a father, had turned Joe’s gruff paternal face to reveal a tender profile: he believes in fatherhood, Eric now knew, he really loves Sammy.

  Eric used to feel completely sympathetic to Sammy’s fits of temper about his father, believing that Joe had crushed his son’s self-confidence in boyhood and kept Sammy working in the firm as his final act of sadism. Eric had forgiven Sammy his adolescent behavior toward Joe, the combination of worship and hate, although it was sick in a twenty-five-year-old, because he thought Sammy a victim.

  Now Eric wondered—because of the mewing, unhappy Luke at home—whether Joe hadn’t merely been an unlucky father, and was doing his best to help Sammy; angry, to be sure, at the weak product of his loins, but with a fury that concealed love and protectiveness. Until the birth of Luke, Eric had perceived the son as the victim and given him a moral blank check to write punishing amounts against the father; he wasn’t sure anymore and wished he had never allowed Sammy to confide in him. Eric rubbed his forehead. He wanted to go home. “What are you talking about?”

  “Pop!” Sammy said, happy to be full of knowledge, even if the news was bad. “He goes to a whorehouse every day at four.”

  “You don’t know that!” Eric yelled. Sammy looked surprised. Sammy was used to the reverse: Eric enjoying it when Sammy spat at the idol; hating it when Sammy worshiped.

  “Yeah, I do!” Sammy exclaimed in an aggrieved teenager’s voice. “I followed him when you were out playing papa. He went to the same place every day, a dingy little building by the river. In, out. So I checked. It’s a whorehouse.” Sammy reached into his pants, leaned against the door, and took out a vial of cocaine. “Can you imagine that? Mr. Pious.” Sammy lifted a little hill of powder out of the container with a miniature spoon. A baby’s spoon, Eric thought. Sammy pressed one nostril closed and snorted the drug into the other, replenished the spoon, and repeated the procedure for the neglected one. Sammy offered the vial.

  Eric shook his head no and tried to picture Joe fucking a prostitute: proud Joe, his big head squashed onto a square, stocky body, squinting skeptically at the world, like a Jewish owl commanding a Wasp barn; wise, arrogant, petty, vain, cold Joe—with his pants off, humping a twenty-year-old in hot pants.

  Sammy urged Eric again with the vial. “Keep you up for the baby.”

  “No, I’ll be too wrecked later.”

  “Get yourself some for home, you cheap bastard. Keep you going through the night.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to raise a kid on coke. Besides, I can’t afford it.”

  “Oh, this is gonna be great! I’m gonna get myself another job.”

  Eric thought: ignore him, get up and go. Instead: “Why? ’Cause I don’t want a hit?”

  “You need this stuff. You’re fuckin’ dead on your feet. You haven’t had a decent pick in three weeks.”

  “Fine. I’ll have a hit tomorrow morning. I don’t want to go home stoned.”

  Sammy looked at his watch. “Pop’s probably getting his cock sucked right now.”

  “This is sick, Sammy. Why don’t you go out and get laid? Stop thinking about your father’s prick and take care of your own.”

  Sammy put the drug back in his pocket. “My poor mother,” he said, with eagerness, not regret. “What a husband.”

  Eric left the office before Joe returned. He rode his bike back home; that had replaced swimming as his daily exercise. Near Canal Street Eric began to feel woozy and almost got hit by a cab when he weaved making a turn onto Sixth Avenue. His heart pounded from the fright and he paused before continuing.

  Eric didn’t want to believe Sammy’s story about Joe. Not that he thought going to a prostitute was so bad. The routine, every day at four for half an hour, although ludicrous on the surface, seemed the worst thing about it—treating sex as something which could be regulated, like evacuation, just a necessary daily body function.

  Eric resumed his ride, pedaling slowly, walking himself through the intersections. His body was off: his calves ached and his hand movements came several seconds after he ordered them, as if his brain were making a transatlantic phone call. Nothing was right with him.

  Nothing was right with Luke.

  The thought that he, like Joe, was stuck with a lemon—yes, there was no other word for Sammy—haunted Eric. He thought of himself as loving and kind, very different from the pompous, selfish Joe. Eric assumed his character, his desire for a strong, healthy son, would guarantee him success as a father. He hadn’t considered it a speculation like the stock market—he had gone into the pregnancy confident of a certain minimum of control. He hadn’t believed in that control consciously; he realized the expectation only now, after it had been shattered. Now he could see how foolish he had been. Having children as something you could control: obviously idiotic.

  Absorbed, Eric overshot Ninth Street and had to turn off Sixth at Eleventh. A shopper darted out between two parked cars. Eric swerved away from the pedestrian, scraping his right leg against one of the cars. The shopper hurried on. “Look out next time!” Eric called after him.

  A cabbie who was stopped at the light, snickered, saying through the open window, “You gotta be crazy to ride a bike in the city.”

  “Yeah, and driving a cab makes sense, right?” Eric answered.

  The cabbie’s thick face set, hardened into challenge. “Fuck you.”

  Eric got off his bike. That put his huge frame beside the cab’s window. “What did you say?” he asked grimly. Eric felt his strength return with the flow of his anger. The rage filled his body, air inflating a float, and forced out the limp sensation of abstraction he had felt for weeks—powerful Eric
back in contact with himself.

  “Take it easy,” the cabbie mumbled, looking away from Eric’s body. The light changed and the cab hurried off.

  For a moment, Eric was relieved, rid of the oppressive thoughts, that he was a failure as a broker, and a failure, genetically, as a father. He looked down at his pants. There was a tear on the right leg. He lifted it; a broad line, oozing crimson, made a stripe below his knee. He hadn’t felt the scrape at first. Now it hurt. He walked his bike onto the sidewalk, ignoring the curious glances of several people, and leaned it against a concrete wall.

  Eric held his hand against the wound and studied the block while he waited for the sting to pass. Like the other streets between Eighth and Fourteenth, Eleventh was a row of red brick town houses, interrupted occasionally by a brownstone, a stunted white brick version of the typical postwar high rise, and, an exception to the other blocks, by the tacky glass and concrete structure of the New School.

  Behind Eric was a curiosity, however: a small triangle of cleared land, protected by a concrete wall made forbidding by the addition of spiked iron bars. At the middle of the open space was a locked iron gate. Eric walked to it and glanced in; the triangle was a cemetery. There seemed to be about a dozen worn tombstones.

  A cemetery in the middle of Manhattan? And so tiny!

  The area inside the wall was no more than ten feet deep and thirty wide. Eric read the plaque on the wall next to the gate:

  THE SECOND CEMETERY OF THE SPANISH

  AND PORTUGUESE SYNAGOGUE

  SHEARITH ISRAEL IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

  1805–1829

  A stillness surrounded Eric. The line of cars honking at the corner, the noise of pedestrians seemed to diminish as he looked into this hallowed strip of land. Against the rear brick wall, covered by ivy, the letters of one of the washed-out and faded white tombstones could still be read: ISAAC HENRY. Beneath the name were Hebrew letters blurred by erosion, and below them, writ large in English:

  SACRED.

  This little plot of land had survived, had endured all this time, and even won out over the greed of New York land development.

  Eric peered at the other stones. He could make out another name: PHILLIPS. He read the plaque again. A chill shivered down his spine. He didn’t know why.

  A young woman’s voice startled him. “Look at this!”

  “What is it?” a young man answered in a southern accent.

  Eric looked at them. Probably NYU students. She was beautiful and tall. She pushed her long blond hair over her shoulder, it draped gracefully down her long, straight back, and she read the plaque out loud in a tone of wonder.

  “My God,” the young man said when she finished. “There were Jews here even then.”

  “Shhh,” she said, glancing at Eric. The young man followed her look.

  “That’s what makes it a great city,” the southerner continued to her, although the apology was for Eric’s benefit.

  “That’s right!” Eric said to him.

  The couple smiled nervously and moved on. Eric watched them until they disappeared, turning the corner at Fifth Avenue. At one point the young southerner looked back, saw Eric, and turned away again. The couple quickened their pace after that. He thinks I’m gonna punch him out, Eric thought, amused. He thinks I’m a New York crazy.

  When Eric got back on his bike, he was almost too tired to push the pedals. He prayed that Nina would be calmer than she had sounded on the phone, that the house would be clean, that there would be something home-cooked to eat.

  But Eric wasn’t surprised when he found the opposite. Nina’s eyes were red, the beds were unmade, the sink filled with dishes, dirty ashtrays were everywhere, the apartment had a vague odor of baby shit, and Luke—Luke was crying.

  “I can’t stand it anymore,” Nina said breathlessly. “I’m just letting him cry. The doctor said—”

  Eric walked past her into Luke’s room. The cries were heartrending. Luke was arching his back, then falling forward, smashing his face into the mattress, trying to escape the weakness of his muscles and the torment of his loneliness. “How long has he been crying?” Eric yelled at Nina.

  “Ten minutes,” she pleaded, tears filling her eyes. “He’s been like this all day—”

  “Lie down!” Eric shouted. “Rest! I’ll take care of him.”

  “Okay,” she said, leaving the room, hanging her head.

  Eric picked up his son. Luke wheezed with gasping cries; his little body flailed in Eric’s arms, so frantic that it took awhile before Eric calmed enough to realize he had what he wanted—comforting warmth and steady motion.

  Luke’s breathless panic slowed. His bobbing head stopped and he leaned back against Eric’s supporting hand to look at his savior. The curious blue circles stared into Eric’s eyes. Although the air conditioner was on, sweat poured off Eric’s brow; Eric’s body wept onto Luke’s clothes. Eric wanted to smile at Luke, but he couldn’t. He was worn out. His back ached sorely, as though he were a field laborer at the end of the season’s harvest. His leg stung from the scrape. His body felt hot and yet he shivered from the chills where the sweat had oozed.

  Eric rocked Luke from side to side.

  Calm down, my son. Feel my love. You are safe. You are safe. Rest with me. Rest with me.

  Luke leaned his head against Eric’s shoulder and sighed. The plump baby legs stretched out; the small feet dangled.

  You are with me. You are safe.

  Eric reached into the crib and picked up Luke’s pacifier. He put it to Luke’s lips. They opened greedily. Luke chewed, rested his head against Eric, and sighed.

  Eric sat in the rocker and began the movement that had become second nature, losing his self to the motion, his arms pressing Luke firmly, not tight, but close.

  Eric’s body ached. It told him: you can’t keep this up.

  I will.

  You will lose your clients.

  I won’t.

  You will get killed on your bike.

  I won’t.

  This will make no difference. Your son will always be like this.

  He won’t.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Eric saw Luke’s eyes begin to close, the lids rocking open and shut with the motion, each time, shutting tighter, opening less.

  No matter what it does to me, Eric said to the fate that tormented him, I will fight to make this work. I will give every drop of my soul to rescue my son from your evil.

  Eric vowed to himself: he will never cry again. I will rock him even if I drop dead doing it. He will never cry again.

  In the silence of the room, he rested his thoughts, his worries. He felt his son’s warmth and relaxation. From time to time Luke started in his sleep. Eric yearned to let go of him, to be free to sleep himself. Eric’s stomach cringed for food. The sun went down, darkness seeping into the apartment. There were no sounds from Nina’s room. Luke’s body finally went so limp that his head slid gradually down into the crook of Eric’s arm.

  It was night. Hours had passed.

  Eventually Nina began to make noises. He heard sheets rustling. Then footsteps. Dishes loaded into the machine. The garbage can being lifted, a bag tied, the front door opening. Finally she appeared at the doorway, peering cautiously into the dark room.

  “Is he asleep?” she asked.

  Eric couldn’t speak to her. He nodded.

  “Why don’t you lay him down?”

  “You know why,” he said.

  “I can’t handle it,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m going to need some help.”

  “Fine. Hire someone.”

  “We have the money?”

  “No. But I’ll get the money.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Maybe my parents—”

  “I’ll get the money.”

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  “No.”

  Nina stood there. Eric felt nothing but rage at her. “Are you angry?” she asked.

  “Don’t ever let him cry
like that again.”

  “I just couldn’t—”

  “Don’t!” he shouted. Luke started in his arms. Eric began to rock again. “Don’t!” he whispered from the darkness to his wife. “Call me if you have to. But don’t ever let him cry and be alone again. Don’t ever leave him alone and unhappy.”

  Nina covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God,” she said.

  “That’s all I ask. You can get help, you don’t have to cook. You don’t have to even think about me. But he must never be left to cry.”

  In the night of their apartment Eric continued to rock his son. Nina slumped to her knees slowly. He heard her sob.

  He didn’t care.

  PETER LAY on the couch in his study, the book for a new musical in his lap, and listened to his just purchased compact disk player, a clever machine hardly larger than the disk itself, through his new earphones. He had on a recording of the Follies concert and was enthralled.

  There was so much genius in the world.

  Writers, actors, composers, designers, painters, dancers, directors—geniuses everywhere, it seemed to Peter (at least sometimes), even though the arts were dying financially, even though serious work was rarely popular. But that sad fact was what made Peter necessary. And important. And worthwhile.

  Peter was today’s commissioning Borgia, today’s Pope ordering Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, today’s Theo supporting Vincent. He stood, like a breaker wall, against the surf of mediocrity, the foam of vulgar nonsense. If Peter hadn’t funded The Titan, its brilliant score might never have been heard, certainly not on Broadway, and then there would have been no Pulitzer, no big-budget movie. That gem, that work of genius, would never have shone so bright without Peter’s quiet support. Quiet? Invisible, rather. Oh, to be sure, there was a little note in the program: the producers thank the Stillman Foundation for its help, blah, blah. But no Peter Hummel was identified as having talked the foundation into writing the check. Among his colleagues, Peter was credited. To the theater producers, to the major artists of today, Peter was known to be an angel, a true angel, his money not a lien against future success, nor an unthinking pretension of a rich widow. But of course—and recent cutbacks had made Peter feel this fact keenly—the money wasn’t Peter’s.