Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  The street is much more crowded than it was when they entered the store, swarming with people, like zombies in a horror film. The soda and the chips are props, creating a little bubble of privacy and safety as the grandfather and the child find doorways, bus shelters, quiet spots in which to make hasty exchanges of savory and sweet.

  At the top of the subway stairs the grandfather pauses, preparing himself to brave the tricky descent, the noise roaring up the stairwell, the subway riders so intent on their destination that they’d recklessly knock the grandfather down and just keep on plowing ahead.

  In fact the other passengers range from uninterested to tolerant to excessively smiley, wanting the grandfather to see how touched they are by this vision of love across the generations: grandpa and grandchild holding hands, looking out for each other. Does the child know that strangers wish they had a grandpa like his?

  The child looks at everyone they pass, registering and recording. The grandfather and his son-in-law have spent several pleasant Sunday mornings at the playground watching the child ride his scooter up to strangers and stare at them until they noticed his presence, at which point he’d scoot away. Adults and children alike were startled by the steadiness of his attention and the suddenness of its withdrawal.

  The grandfather pulls the child farther from the platform edge and moves to a less crowded area, where a German family—mother, father, a teenage girl, a boy of about ten—are shouting with excitement and all looking in one direction. The father is filming, on his phone, a large black rat scurrying back and forth on the subway tracks. The family is thrilled by this authentic New York experience that they can show their friends at home.

  The child asks the grandfather what’s going on, and the grandfather, just about managing the chips and Coke, lifts the child in his arms so he can see the rat. His grandson sees the rat, then looks again at the family, and winks at the grandfather. The grandfather imagines a future in which the child will say, Grandpa, remember when we saw the family filming the subway rat?

  The child is interested in science, especially dinosaurs. The grandfather has bought the child a set of tiny plastic dinosaurs, which the child keeps, in the grandfather’s apartment, in a wooden jewelry box that once belonged to Jane. Last week, the child divided the dinosaurs into three groups: herbivorous, carnivorous, and omnivorous. “How did you learn those words?” the grandfather had marveled, and the child had turned his face away so the grandfather couldn’t see him smile, despite himself, with pride.

  When the train roars in, the grandfather flinches, but the child doesn’t. Years ago the grandfather witnessed an argument between his daughter and son-in-law about how early was too early to take the baby on the subway. He can’t remember who took which position, or who won, but he recalls that both were briefly worried that the child was deaf or autistic because he didn’t react (as he still doesn’t) when the train arrived.

  When the doors open, the grandfather gently pushes the child in front of him, and a young man gets up and gives them his seat. It’s always the toughest black guys who are courteous that way; somebody brought them up right. The hipsters and the college girls will slither in and steal the seat right out from under you. The grandfather sits, and the child climbs onto his lap.

  Across the aisle, a teenager is sleeping with his head on his backpack, his face so completely covered by his hoodie that he looks like a headless person. The grandchild pokes the grandfather, who has read him The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Everyone else is deeply into some electronic device. It’s just as well. Too often people look at him and the child and grin, as if they are a pair of newborn puppies. An elderly Indian man, his thin arms sticking out of his short-sleeved business shirt, stares at them as if the grandfather and grandson possess the explanation of something that has happened or a warning about something that hasn’t.

  The child reaches into his grandfather’s pocket and takes out the pages that the grandfather vaguely remembers getting from the chubby girl, also Indian, who showed them to their seats. How proud and grown-up it had made the child feel that she gave them each a copy! The grandfather is suddenly eager to read about the cast. The actress in the purple suit—what brought her to Mister Monkey?

  When the child says, “Can I keep mine?” the grandfather says yes. He’ll hold it for the child, and give it to him when they get to his apartment. The child hands over the folded, stapled pages, and the grandfather reaches around too fast when he stuffs them in his pocket. He pulls a muscle, near his armpit. The pain makes him miss Jane and the ease with which she could comfort him, until she couldn’t. Now he’ll have no one to complain to in the middle of the night. He’ll read the program later, then add it to his collection of zoo tickets and theater programs, sentimental souvenirs of his outings with his grandson.

  The child says, “I want to bring it in to school. For show-and-tell.”

  He must have liked the play if he wants to tell the class! The grandfather feels joyous. Everything has been worth it. He likes the old-fashioned sound of show-and-tell. When his daughter was in school, they called it sharing time. He would give anything to be there when his grandson talks about the play.

  The grandfather can’t help himself. “What are you going to say?”

  The child shrugs and pretends that the train is making too much noise for him to answer. When it surfaces to cross the bridge the child climbs up on the grandfather to look out the window over his shoulder.

  They exit at the Seventh Avenue station. The grandfather is panting by the time they’ve climbed the stairs, and his breathing catches and sticks as he takes the child’s hand and they walk down the leafy Brooklyn street.

  The grandfather says, “Did you like the play?”

  “Yes,” the child says. “Did you?”

  “Yes,” says the grandfather. He hasn’t lied to child. He was mesmerized by the look on the face of the actress who’d dropped her phone. He could not have been more curious to know what she was going to do, or more startled by her solution. His heart goes out to the woman so obviously at the end of her rope. He understands what that feels like. He’ll find out about her when he gets a chance to look at the program.

  The child likes to push the elevator call button, and then the button for his floor. By the time they’ve reached the apartment door, someone has unlocked it. The child races down the hall to the kitchen, and the grandfather arrives in time to see the child fling himself at the back of his mother’s knees. She turns from the stove on which she is sautéing onions and kneels and hugs the child, who buries his face in her neck. The grandfather suppresses a jealous pang. Of course the child loves his mother. He wants Edward to feel that love.

  His daughter wipes her hands on her jeans. How it used to irk him, when she was a teen, that ragged edge of sloppiness, so unlike her mother. Now he treasures anything that reminds him of the girl she was then. The child watches his mother kiss his grandfather on the cheek.

  “Could I possibly have a glass of water?”

  “Of course, Dad. Sorry. I should have offered.”

  “No need to be sorry.” He hadn’t meant to sound annoyed.

  His daughter takes a bottle of Perrier from the refrigerator, which—again, he can’t help himself—irritates him. How many times has he tried to convince them that city water is safe to drink—and free? She leaves fingerprints all over the glass, but he gulps the water, greedily. How cold and delicious it is, and how well it knows how to open his parched, constricted throat.

  “That’s better,” she says, as if he were the child’s age.

  He and his daughter and son-in-law couldn’t have been more thoughtful or kinder to one another during Jane’s final months. It was only afterward that awkwardness set in, as if he and his daughter are embarrassed by the shared secret knowledge that neither of them has recovered, though it has been seven years, and a child has come into the world. Maybe he is imagining this. Projecting. Jane’s death should have brought them closer, but the opposite ha
s occurred. Grief has sealed him off, and by now it’s too late and too difficult to break through.

  “Where’s Mark?” asks the grandfather.

  “Running,” says his daughter.

  “Running from what?”

  “Hilarious, Dad. How was the play?” she asks the child.

  “Good,” the child says.

  “Good?” she asks the grandfather.

  “Interesting,” the grandfather says, to his instant regret. Wrong word! The child gives him a searching look. Does the child think he is mocking him? The grandfather’s smile is reassuring. He would never make fun of him or expose something he wants to hide. It’s another secret they share, another memory for the child to carry into the future: the time my grandpa lied and said he was interested in the play and didn’t tell Mom that I talked too loud and everybody heard.

  “Heartbreaking, actually.” He’s glad his daughter doesn’t ask what he means. She’ll assume he meant that the play was sad. He doesn’t want to say, in front of the child, how sorry he felt for the actors.

  The child runs off to his room.

  “Say thank you, Grandpa,” his mother says.

  “That’s okay,” the grandfather says. “He doesn’t have to thank me.”

  “He does have to thank you,” his daughter says, and turns back to the stove.

  “Why so many onions?” the grandfather asks.

  “Friends are coming for dinner.”

  “I should go,” the grandfather says.

  “We want you to stay. Mark told you about it. We assumed you were staying.”

  Did his son-in-law mention it? The grandfather can’t remember. In any case, he’s disappointed. He’d imagined a relaxed, intimate family dinner. What convinces him to stay is that his daughter says the guests are the parents of his grandson’s friends; the kids are coming too. The grandfather can’t resist the offer of information about the child’s life in the larger world.

  His daughter is making tomato sauce: pasta for the kids, eggplant Parmesan for the adults.

  She says, “I can never remember which parents are vegetarians.” She’d said friends, but now it’s parents, which makes the grandfather think that maybe she does want him there as a buffer against strangers. She was always shy. She used to make him and Jane ask questions for her. Where is the bathroom? Can I play with your pail and shovel?

  Now she says, “Dad, why not rest until the guests arrive? Stretch out on the sofa.”

  The grandfather doesn’t feel like resting. He doesn’t see enough of the child, doesn’t want to waste a moment. He leaves the kitchen, intending to go to the child’s room and read to him or play one of the picture card games with simple rules which the grandfather needs explained to him, every time.

  On the way, he passes the couch. It’s been a long afternoon. Why not lie down for a minute?

  The grandfather dreams that he and the child are in the subway station. This time the child has fallen asleep on the platform and refuses to move when the train pulls in. The grandfather tries to lift him, but the child is too heavy. How will they get home? In terror, the grandfather calls for his wife. He knows she is coming to help him.

  The grandfather wakes to find himself surrounded by children staring down at him. This must be how Goldilocks felt looking up at the three bears. He reaches out to touch his grandson’s face, but the child gives him a feral look and shoots off to his bedroom. The other children pause, as if sniffing the air, then turn and follow his grandson.

  Their parents have gathered around the kitchen counter. The grandfather tries to remember if he has met any of them. His daughter is cooking, his son-in-law opening a bottle of wine. It’s restful to stand back and watch them, but he can’t, not for long. When he approaches, the parents’ stares match their children’s, precisely.

  “I’m the grandpa,” he says, and everyone smiles, as if he were a child saying something unexpectedly grown-up. Then they return to their conversation about the children’s cooperative grade school, and its German director, Hugo. The grandfather has heard about Hugo from his daughter and son-in-law. Mark says that Hugo is pretentiously spiritual, overly crunchy, and Teutonic. His daughter says he’s a bully.

  The grandfather realizes that what his daughter has described as an informal gathering is in fact a meeting to plan a coup to overthrow Hugo. The parents take turns heaping abuse on Hugo, on his arrogant laziness, on his disregard for the children as individuals, on his humorlessness, his habit of sending kids home with another child’s hat or mittens and then not only refusing to acknowledge his mistake but also insisting that it was an intentional lesson in sharing. And what about his completely inappropriate ideas about dance? Teaching hip-hop to the kids, who have shocked their parents by shouting and crouching, grabbing their crotches and stabbing the air with overhand hooks.

  And don’t forget those odious fund-raisers that Hugo made the parents organize and attend, teeth-rotting, hard German cookies repackaged in silver foil and sold for exorbitant prices, the recycled picture books—some scribbled in, one with teeth marks—they’d been strong-armed into buying. And who, in this day and age, would still imagine that a goldfish, gasping and dying in a plastic sandwich bag, was an appropriate prize for the child who won a ring toss? Surely not Hugo, so outspoken in his concern for animal rights?

  Hugo’s deficiencies hadn’t seemed quite so problematic last year, when the kids were in pre-K, and their days mostly involved luxury babysitting and finger painting, but now that they’ve started kindergarten, which actually matters, when their education has in theory begun, the parents can no longer ignore the fact that Hugo is not a confidence-inspiring teacher.

  They should have suspected him from the start, after the fuss he made about what to name the school, e-mailing the parents twice a day, soliciting suggestions, taking votes, doing surveys till the exhausted parents agreed with Hugo’s idea: The Sunflower School: Growing Toward Learning.

  “We should have called it the Xanax School,” a mother says.

  “The Hitler Jugend School,” says one of the dads, and they all fall silent, looking at the grandfather. Do they think he is a Holocaust survivor? A World War II vet? He was born nine months after his father returned from the war.

  Last week, there was a serious problem. Alex, the Brazilian boy, has a life-threatening peanut allergy, but Hugo consumed, at lunch, a carob and peanut bar, discovered only when the parent on cleanup duty found the wrapper in the trash. Even then Hugo refused to own up. He’d insisted that the candy was 100 percent organic, so the nuts weren’t processed in the way that would endanger Alex.

  The grandfather checks to see if any of the children are listening and is disturbed to see his grandson eavesdropping just outside the kitchen. His daughter and son-in-law underestimate how much the child takes in.

  The grandfather says, “Just yesterday I was thinking that these allergic kids are the victims of one of those plagues that mysteriously appear and disappear throughout history. Like the bubonic plague. Like all those hysterical crippled Viennese girls coming to Freud for treatment.”

  The parents stare at him, then direct grimaces of sympathy, even pity, at his daughter and son-in-law. Look what they have to put up with! An old geezer with dementia! The grandfather sees his son-in-law wipe his hands on his pants, a nervous tic that his wife and son tease him about.

  One of the fathers says, “Plague is still endemic in many regions of the Third World.” The grandfather has no idea why he said that about peanuts. He has tried his theory out on Henri-Jean, the elevator operator in his building, when Henri-Jean complained that he’d gotten a letter saying he wasn’t allowed to eat nuts within two hours of coming to work. Henri-Jean had said, “You are right, sir,” but now the grandfather wonders how much Henri-Jean understood. For years he tried to make Henri-Jean stop calling him sir, but he’s given up.

  In any case, the violence directed at Hugo subsides. The parents agree they should step back, take a collective deep breat
h, and reconvene next weekend to decide what to do next.

  Conversation falters. Mark refills everyone’s glass. The party fractures, and as the grandfather drifts from group to group, the circles expand just enough to make room for him but without interrupting the conversation which, no matter where the grandfather goes, is about the children: their character, quirks, strengths and weaknesses; how they’re adjusting to school, what they need from school, this school or any school, what the school isn’t providing, where else they might apply, which school is a better school, more project oriented, more progressive, more likely to give their child what their child needs. The effort required to break into these heated discussions and tight circles reminds the grandfather of some girls he watched jumping rope in the schoolyard near his apartment; what dexterity and courage it took to join the rope-dancers without tripping or breaking rhythm.

  The grandfather takes advantage of the brief lulls in these conversations to introduce other subjects, like a host offering hors d’oeuvres, tidbits of current events, morsels of a TV series he’s been watching and imagines the parents might have too. But no, they haven’t. It’s too violent, or it’s on the air before the kids’ bedtime. Nor have they seen the films he mentions, nor read the new books he thinks they might know. They don’t get out all that much, and at night, after putting the kids to bed, they’re too tired to read or even watch TV. Their heads hit the pillow, lights out. They glare at him as if he is Satan tempting them into sin—the sin of talking or thinking about anything besides their kids.

  They are obsessed with their children, just as the grandfather is obsessed with his grandson. But they have a right to be obsessed. They are young and vital and sending their precious darlings out into the world, children whose existence attests to their sexual viability. Whereas his obsession is pitiful, sweet, and sad: the tenderness between generations, one of which has recently entered this life while the other hovers near the exit.

  “Well,” says his daughter with panicky cheer. “Let’s everybody eat!”