Good Trouble

by Joseph O'Neill

  From time to time, her children brought back news from the Switzerland of Central America, as Costa Rica was apparently known. It was so humid down there, Breda learned, that a paperback would practically rot overnight. It was also amazing. There were monkeys and colored birds and sloths and waterfalls and rocky beaches. Tommy, who had never been interested in the Californian ocean, allegedly took up surfing. There was a story that he’d saved a woman from being drowned, which Breda found hard to believe. More plausibly, he became a nature guide. He led groups into the forest and pointed out birds and termite hills. He had one trick, Patrick said, where he swung his machete into the bark of a tree, and sap—was it rubber?—came oozing out. When the hike was over, he took the surfers and ecotourists and movie stars (apparently Tommy had rubbed shoulders with Woody Harrelson) for a bite to eat at the Crazy Toucan, which was the restaurant owned by the German woman. Patrick showed his mother snapshots of a wooden house with colored lights strung across the front porch. “See? That’s where the bar is, right there. That outbuilding, that’s the kitchen.” “Nice,” Breda said. “And there’s Ute, with the blonde hair. She’s a great cook. Fusion food.” He pronounced the woman’s name Ootah, as if he were an expert on Germany.

  “Fusion food,” Breda said. “Sounds good.”

  Breda and Tommy did not divorce. For a time, Breda was unsure which was worse: the mortification of divorce or the mortification of being so forgotten about that one’s husband could not even bother to place one’s breakup on a proper legal footing. Then Breda came to think, What difference does it really make, in the end? This question, she discovered, was increasingly applicable to a lot of things. It was true, as her mother had once remarked, that the consequentiality of things became clearer as you grew older, so that actions and especially omissions assumed an importance they never used to have; and so one grew more hesitant. But on the other hand it seemed to matter so much less whether you wound up with outcome A or outcome B.

  Four years into their marriage, Patrick and Judith bought a house in the Bronx, not far from where Tommy had grown up. They held a housewarming party and Patrick made a big deal of it, insisting Breda fly over. “Bring your boyfriend, Mom,” he joked. His father also turned up, with the German woman. When Breda offered to help out with the refreshments, Patrick said, “Just relax, Mom. Enjoy yourself. Leave the cooking to Ute. It’s what she does for a living.”

  For an hour Breda mingled with the young people and played an agonizing game of hide-and-seek with the Costa Ricans. But a conversation with Tommy was inevitable. Emerging from the kitchen, he said jovially, “Hello, Breda.” It was their first conversation since their separation, which also was four years old. He looked quite different. There was a beard and a ponytail, and his hands were cracked and brown. He was heavier, in spite of the surfing and the fusion food. “Good of you to come, Breda,” he said, making her feel like an interloper. They made small talk. Breda noticed that Tommy made repeated use of a new expression. “The roads are kinda funky down there,” he said of Costa Rica; and, “It’s kinda funky meeting up again like this, isn’t it?” No doubt this was beach talk or bar talk or surf talk. He had lost that exact, scientific air she’d once found attractive. A memory suddenly seized her: Tommy’s liking for sniffing and snouting her ass while she took up a position on all fours; even, once, when she was menstruating and blood trickled down her inner thigh. “It’s passion, honey,” he mumbled. “This is passion.”

  * * *

  —

  As Breda ate parts of her in-flight meal, her thoughts circled again around the business with the foreskin.

  It started when Judith learned from the ob-gyn that she was carrying a boy. Judith being Jewish, this raised the question of circumcision. Patrick was very against it. For two months it was all he wanted to talk to his mother about. “I’m saying he can circumcise himself,” he said. “Let him grow up and let him decide.”

  “I guess,” Breda said. She had her own preference, of course, but she didn’t want to get involved.

  “You guess?”

  “No, no. You’re right,” Breda said.

  Too late. He was off again, yelling. This business had turned him into a yeller. Sometimes she had to move the phone away from her ear. “There’s no guessing here. It’s either a yes or a no. Can he or can he not decide to become a Jew when he’s older? Yes. Can he or can he not at that point have a circumcision if that’s what he wants? Yes. If he grows up and decides to be a Christian, can he get his foreskin back? No. Case closed. End of discussion. But apparently not. You know what? I’m going to the doctor right now and I’m going to get it done on myself. I’m going to demonstrate it can be done, and then I’m not going to hear one more fucking word about it.”

  When Patrick came to the phone in a calmer mood, he was able to state Judith’s case. “She’s saying, what is he, a Jew or a pagan?” Maybe this is something they should have thought about earlier, Breda thought. “I’m saying, leave the kid alone. Then she says, It’s more complicated. You have to carve out a Jewish space. There isn’t any Jewish space out there. You have to carve it out.”

  Really? Breda felt like asking. In New York?

  “I see,” she said.

  “Then there’s her dad, of course. She says she doesn’t know how he’d take it.”

  The dad, Harry, had spent three years as a little boy in a camp for Jews in Romania. But did he actually count as a Holocaust survivor? Breda wasn’t a hundred percent sure. Unless she was mistaken, nobody in that camp got gassed or anything. It wasn’t Auschwitz. But you could understand why he might take this issue seriously. And it made some of her son’s arguments look a little lightweight, especially the ones having to do with penises. “Circumcision means loss of sensitivity,” Patrick said. He’d looked it up on the Internet. He also said, “My son’s dick should look like my dick. It’s a father and son thing.” Breda’s judgment was that, come what may, Harry would live. Parents are a pretty sure bet.

  She tried to inform herself. Her best friend in Atherton, Stacey Levingstone, who was Jewish, explained vaguely that cutting off the foreskin was all about removing a barrier to God—“impediment” was the word she used. Another friend, a Christian, told her that sometimes the mohel—the fellow who carried out the operation—cut the membrane beneath the foreskin using a long, sharp fingernail grown especially. Breda did not know what to make of this. Then Dr. Kentridge, one of the doctors at the practice where she worked, told her that Jewish circumcision was really a form of ritual bloodletting: Jewish law, he said, provided that a Jewish boy born without a foreskin must nevertheless have a drop of blood drawn from his penis. “Blood sacrifice, Breda,” he said ominously, as if this should mean something to her.

  Then everything suddenly turned upside down. Patrick saw it from Judith’s point of view. His son would be named Joshua and would be a Jew. He could always convert to Christianity if he didn’t like it. There would be a bris.

  This was where Breda got into trouble. She e-mailed Patrick and Judith that she wouldn’t be able to make it over for the bris. She gave no reasons.

  Patrick replied:

  I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR THIS.

  Terrified, Breda telephoned her son on three consecutive days. Each time he hung up. On the fourth day he consented to speak to her. “What?”

  “I’m so sorry, my love,” Breda said, in tears. “I’ve bought a ticket. I’m going to be there.”

  “We don’t want you here. You’re not welcome. Judith agrees.”

  “But why, honey? I’ve said sorry. I want to be there. I didn’t know it meant so much to you.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Do have any idea what’s going on here?”

  Breda said, “Don’t bully me, Patrick. Please.”

  “Bully? Is that it? You’re calling me a bully?” The line went dead.

  Breda rang her daught
er. Siobhan, to whom impatience and certainty came easily, said, “Mom, it’s totally his fault. He’s just acting up.”

  “You really think so?” Breda gladly asked.

  “Of course,” Siobhan said. Breda heard a child screaming in the background. “Can’t you see what’s going on here? He still hasn’t grown up. He’s still the baby of the family. He still has these infantile expectations about your responsibilities and your power. He has to have this big dramatic relationship with his mother. That’s what you get if you treat him like a baby.”

  Breda was familiar with the complaint: how unfairly arduous Siobhan’s life had been by comparison with her younger brother’s, how Patrick always contrived to take the benefit of freebies—loans, airplane tickets, gifts—denied to Siobhan, how Patrick was the apple of her eye. “I guess,” Breda said.

  “I hate to say it, Mom, but you reap what you sow. Clark, stop it!” The boy kept on bawling. “Look, I’ve got to go,” Siobhan said, and she hung up.

  When Breda phoned Tommy in Costa Rica, he said, “I spoke to the kid already. He seemed kinda devastated, to be honest with you. You know, being here, surrounded by all these forests and wild places, it teaches you something. You learn to value the spiritual world.” What junk! Breda silently shouted. You fraud! You and that fraud slut! “I kinda see why Patrick might have gotten worked up. The Jewish thing, Harry, the bris, Judith…You got to admit,” Tommy said, “it’s kinda funky.”

  Breda was upset. She, not Tommy, had always been the one Patrick spoke to when he needed to talk something over. And why hadn’t Tommy gotten into trouble when he’d said he couldn’t go to the bris because Ute would be in Germany and he had to look after the restaurant? Were employees nonexistent in Costa Rica?

  She rang her son again. He said, “I’m not changing my mind. I want you to admit what’s going on here.”

  Amazed by his vengefulness, she said, “This is a very emotional thing. You’re very upset. I understand completely.”

  “Yeah, right,” Patrick said.

  “Patrick, please, it was an honest mistake.”

  “Yeah, like the Holocaust was an honest mistake.”

  “I don’t understand,” Breda said. She felt ill. She had no idea how to extricate herself from this. “What am I supposed to be admitting? What have I done that’s so wrong?”

  Patrick became excited. “It’s what you didn’t do. You never took this thing seriously. You kept your distance. You stood by. I know why now. It’s super-clear. You never liked it when I married Judith and you can’t accept that Joshua is being brought up as a Jew. You resent it. That’s what this is all about. Anti-Semitism. It killed six million people. It would have killed my own son. I can’t live with that.”

  And so, using the phrase “persona non grata,” he banned her from having dealings with his family. After the bris, it took Tommy’s far-off intervention to set up an encounter at the office of Dr. Goldstein, in New York. (At Breda’s expense. Patrick said, “I really, really don’t see myself picking up the tab here.”)

  Patrick repeated his accusation of anti-Semitism in the second of the three sessions they had with Dr. Goldstein. Breda denied it but, seeing that Dr. Goldstein and Patrick were not going to let the matter drop, and dreading any prolongation of the discussion, she quickly stated that maybe at some level she was opposed to Patrick’s marriage to a Jewish woman and that maybe she had found the whole business with the foreskin distasteful and that maybe this did have something to do with what had happened. Dr. Goldstein said, “Well done, Breda. That must have been hard for you.” He explained, “Because of the Holocaust and slavery and everything we now know about prejudice, there’s a kind of taboo about acknowledging group preferences. But actually everybody is naturally biased in favor of their own kind and their own traditions.” A further session and a half were devoted to this subject and to Patrick’s “feelings of disappointment.” (God, how sensitive men were—on the subject of themselves.) Undertakings of mutual compassion were exchanged, and Dr. Goldstein privately suggested to Breda that “a gesture of reparation” might be a good idea. And that, it appeared, was that. The crisis was over. Speaking for himself, Patrick said, he would forgive and forget. “But, Mom, I’ll just say one last thing: one day, your grandson will know that you never came to his bris. That’s something you’ll always have to live with.”

  Well, Breda said to herself on the plane, if Joshua at some point in the future cared to think about the episode at all, he would no doubt understand that she was not in any way to blame.

  * * *

  —

  It was around ten PM California time, and dark outside. Ordinarily they would have been landing right about now, but their departure from New York had been delayed by thunderstorms. Breda closed her eyes. She was on the point of falling asleep when the fat woman, reaching for an overhead button, jolted her. “Excuse me,” the woman called loudly to a flight attendant. “Excuse me.”

  “Myra, stop it,” her husband hissed.

  “Well, I’m not like you. You’d wait years.”

  “You have to learn to be patient. And I wouldn’t wait years. That’s an exaggeration.”

  Breda opened her eyes and closed them again. Now her neighbors were talking about the wife’s recent visit to a doctor.

  “I’m so fat,” the wife said, “they couldn’t draw my blood.”

  “Sometimes they have problems finding a vein in a person with more flesh on their arm,” the husband said.

  “I feel like I don’t have any blood,” the woman wailed.

  “Myra, that’s stupid,” the husband said.

  “I didn’t know I didn’t have a vein there.”

  “It’s not that you don’t have a vein. It’s that they can’t find it. Come on, baby, you know that.”

  “Yes, well, I don’t like it.”

  Wholly sleepless, Breda thought about the question of reparation. She didn’t like the word one bit. It made her sound like a war criminal. But an idea nonetheless came to her: why not commission a special wooden bench for her son and grandson? They could sit on it, talk, whatever. It could be their spot. A bench would be easy to maintain. They could place it in the garden or, better still, in a public space—like Van Cortlandt Park, where Tommy and Grandpa Pat had walked together. The bench would have an inscription, of course, recording a grandmother’s gift. That way three, maybe even four generations would be united. The idea came to Breda from what she’d seen in London, where the parks and squares seemed to be filled with benches donated by Americans who had fallen in love with that city. The benches evoked long-gone people and times—the war years, so often—but in their beautiful English setting they seemed indestructibly romantic. Breda, whose one trip to London had taken place in the aftermath of her father’s death, had considered dedicating such a bench over there to his memory, but she eventually decided that it wouldn’t make much sense since Dad had only been to London for two business trips and had no real ties to the place—Dad, who now lay with Mom in a treeless Boston graveyard.

  But to where, or to what, do we have ties? Breda wondered. The world seemed more dreamlike by the day. Mornings were fine: waking up, driving to work, applying herself to her work, eating lunch. But then, sallying on through the afternoon and into the evenings, she would find herself doubting the solidity of everything around her. Each moment, it seemed, was barely distinguishable from some past or even prospective moment. And during her visit to New York, she had been persistently attacked by a sense that the family scenes taking place around her, each an intense variation on some previous scene, were no more or less substantial than a TV rerun. She found herself depressed by Joshua’s musical plastic turtle, which, its batteries dying, emitted a slow and gasping and terrible rendition of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” When her son and grandson and daughter-in-law kissed her goodbye at the airport, she heard herself blurt out
, “You’re here now, and yet in a minute you’ll all be gone.”

  Breda, eyes closed, found herself thinking of a childhood friend, Cynthia Byrne, who not long ago had gone back to college to take a Biblical Studies course. Cynthia had been a churchgoing Catholic all her life, and Breda was a little shocked to hear her announce, a year into her studies, that the Bible was a relatively youthful, and certainly plagiaristic, set of myths. Breda could not remember the details of Cynthia’s statements, but it came down to this: much of the Old Testament was derived from preexisting Syrian or Assyrian or Babylonian sources. The Jews never fled from Egypt and had always lived in Israel. Moses was as make-believe as Mickey Mouse. King David, too, probably. The great stories of the Old Testament had been dreamt up in order to boost certain Jewish tribes at the expense of other Jewish tribes. “Like so much history,” Cynthia told her, “those myths were essentially an exercise in self-glorification and self-legitimization. Beautiful, yes; powerful, yes; but factually bunk.” “Well, if you say so,” Breda said. “I’m not saying anything,” Cynthia said sharply. “This is standard scholarship. Ask anybody who knows anything about it.”

  Although Breda’s capacity for belief in God had long since abandoned her, she was troubled by Cynthia’s dismissal of the ancient faiths. Then again, she had always felt that there was something fishy about Judaism, a religion that, unless she was mistaken, offered little or no prospect of life after death. The Jews were supposed to twist up their lives with prayers and wig-wearing and food rules—for what? Christianity and Islam were strange, too, but at least they promised heaven. Of course, any confidence in heaven began to crumble once you gave it thought; but then everything crumbled once you thought about it, everything you’d been led to believe was true and transcendent.