Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  ERRATUM

  For the record: The groom never told the bride that he was related to the Kennedys of presidential fame. This has been reported in the papers, and the groom categorically denies it. No, it was simply the word “Kennedy” plus the words “near Hyannis Port,” and everyone started rushing to conclusions. The groom will admit that once or twice late at night with his female peers at Mune College, he did not sufficiently debunk the rumor of himself as a second cousin twice removed to the Hyannis Port Kennedys. And he does not deny that the name often greased the gears of bureaucracy, making what would otherwise have been dull encounters with bank loan officers, traffic cops, etc., slightly charged, even when he denied any family connection.

  The bride, however, never seemed much interested in the groom as a “Kennedy.” If the bride was impressed by the name, that day they met in Washington Park and all the days thereafter, she never talked about it. The bride was a serious and moral woman, not easily wowed. She was also a woman who acquired (by the way), in the period of years in which the groom loved her, an incredible, inflationary beauty, and the groom just wants to mention that here and to put it here in words in case either of them forgets it. The truth is, she stunned the groom whenever he saw her. I mean whenever he saw her. Just the simple fact of her. Whenever she came into one room from another room. For example, stepping out of the kitchenette in Pine Hills with a plate of scrambled eggs. The groom was in love with her. That was no lie. And when he was in love with her, a minute no longer seemed like the means to an hour. Rather, each minute was an end in itself, a stillness with vague circularity, a gently suggested territory in which to be alive. This trick that love did with minutes endowed hours and days with a kind of transcendent wishy-washiness that encouraged an utter lack of ambition in the groom and was the closest thing he had ever felt to true joy, to true relief, and he still wonders what would have happened if they could have kept up with it, if they could have stayed in love like that, if maybe they could have crawled through a wormhole to a place where their love could find permanence. Because in the end, the great warring forces of our existence are not life versus death (the groom has come to believe), but rather love versus time. In the majority, love does not survive time’s passage. But sometimes it does. It must, sometimes.

  APOLOGIA CONT’D.

  Anyway. Soon after his wedding, the groom became a real estate agent, but not by his own choice. It wasn’t a bad choice. It just wasn’t his. The bride’s father had started to bug the couple about the groom’s future plans. He suspected that the groom made little money as a medical translator and even less on his “independent research” (see here). The bride resented this intrusion on the part of her father. She did not think the groom needed to conventionalize his lifestyle. She liked the idea of him at home, deep in thought, and she liked finding him sitting in the same place she’d left him when she returned from her teacher training. In fact, the bride maintained that if the groom abandoned his research, he would be selling out. He would be selling out his dreams, which deserved a chance. In retrospect, it seems that the groom was an exemplar of the kind of suicidal integrity toward which the bride liked to encourage her middle schoolers.

  So the bride told her father to back off. She told her father that the groom’s independent research would come together. The bride told her father that her groom was working very hard, that he might even be a visionary, a term that must have alarmed her father, visions sounding an awful lot like hallucinations.

  Still, the man was her father. He remained concerned. Soon after the pair returned from their honeymoon, the father-in-law came over for a tête-à-tête. The groom remembers this interview very well. The father-in-law—let’s call him Hank, because that’s his name—sat across from the groom on their used sofa in Pine Hills, knees cracking arthritically, and the two of them spoke at length about the number of automotive accidents occurring on a low salt stretch of Hackett Boulevard, before they fell into an awkward and loaded silence.2

  “Eric,” Hank finally said. “I’m not sure how to say what I want to say, so instead I’m going to tell you a story.”

  The story was about Hank as a young man of twenty. The story was about how, back in Troy, New York, when Hank first married his then-slender wife, he had been lectured by his own father-in-law in an apartment not unlike this one. In the story, Hank had to sit and listen to his father-in-law drone on about responsibility and the future and savings and the importance of being heavily insured, adding such stress into the mind of young Hank that he almost wanted to take the whole thing back, the whole marriage. He swore to God that he would never be like that. He would never pressure his own future son-in-law. Because a newly married man, Hank said, was like the captain of a rudderless ship. Out there, at sea, with no compass, no stars, no crew, no sight of land. But in the end—and this was the story’s moral—young Hank had followed his father-in-law’s instructions, albeit with a lot of resentment, and only after the old man passed away did Hank understand that he had been right about things, and that maybe he’d even loved Hank. Hank missed him sometimes, this unasked-for father, on certain bracing winter mornings.

  The groom had listened, laughing gratefully, wincing with sympathy, his bride blending ice angrily in the kitchen, but all the while the groom kept thinking: What stress? What rudderless ship? The groom had never felt happier in his life. Never more carefree. In that modest hotel on Virginia Beach, both of them hilariously pale with northern winter, they had honeymooned for five days. Every night, they ate mounds of food garnished with pineapple, and every morning, they arrived at the beach early, when the tide was still out, and they placed their two chairs straight on the sandbars, which they called the cheap seats. Those honeymoon mornings seemed to be suggesting something to the groom. The suggestion was this: Be happy. Decide to be happy. If you want to be happy, be happy! No one cares if you’re happy or not, so why wait for permission? And did it really matter if you had been deeply unhappy in your past? Who but you remembered that? It was really one of the groom’s most standout moments, and it liberated him. After realizing that he could be happy, that he could thrive, it seemed to him that there was no one powerful enough to make him unhappy again, and thereafter his happiness would always belong to him, even if he lost everything else. His body braced, his heart roused, he finally got it—the American secret—that the only person who could obstruct a man was himself.

  So there is no other reason for why he would continue his elaborate and ultimately disastrous deceit re: his bogus identity except that he was just firmly and sentimentally committed to it. His decision to be happy seemed only to invite him to rededicate himself to his made-up past. On the final morning of their honeymoon, he watched the children on the beach, and he watched his bride watch the children, and he thought, No, I will not tell you. I will never tell you. I’ll cut out my tongue first.

  Then he pointed into the distance. “Hey, Laura,” he said. “Look over there, at that old lighthouse. There was one just like that outside of Twelve Hills. Total déjà vu. Huhn.”

  The bride smiled. “Tell me about it.”

  “About the lighthouse?” He lifted his sunglasses and smiled. “Well, you could climb all the way to the top of it. Up these old stone steps. No rail. All very spooky and dangerous. Once you got to the top, you could see for miles. And there were those viewfinders that open up when you put a quarter inside. You could see all the way to Boston. Tiny Boston. Tiny mother, waiting below in the shade. Huhn. It’s funny what you remember.”

  The bride closed her eyes. “That’s beautiful, Eric,” she said. “You’re lucky. You’re lucky to have memories like that. What a sweet childhood.”

  “It was,” the groom said. “I am.”

  Her eyes widened. “We should go there sometime,” she said. “To your lighthouse on the Cape. Do you think it’s still open? Could we go? I want to see what you saw. I want to see where you grew up. Twelve Hills, and everything.”

  The groom’s
eyes lit up, he was so touched.

  “Let’s!” he agreed.

  Her smile was so loving, and the beach so breezy, his happiness so incontrovertible, that for a moment the groom believed that he actually would take the bride to the lighthouse, and that he actually had climbed it as a boy, and that there actually was such a place as Twelve Hills, and his mother really did stand waiting in the shade. Closing his eyes, he even saw distant Boston as if through two little portals of memory, sitting in petticoats of mist.

  By the time the groom had returned from his daydream and back to his father-in-law on the sofa, the moment to make objections had passed. In fact, explicit plans had been laid for his future. Plans had been made, and the groom took no objection. Good. His father-in-law was nodding at him. Then I’ll have a talk with Chip Clebus, and he’ll show you the ropes. I’m glad we understand each other. By sheer coincidence, the men did understand each other. Apart from his research, and loving his wife, the groom had few ideas for how to organize his time on earth. And so within days he was sitting in a classroom with a bunch of other unfocused extroverts, preparing for his real estate certification by studying the contractual nuances of sale-leasebacks.

  Turns out the groom had a talent for making money in real estate, and for the three or four years in which his larger dreams were totally and effectively repressed, the groom made a shiny pile of commissions. These commissions took the young couple through the birthing and infancy of their daughter, Meadow. The money bought the baby a cradle that swung via a mechanical arm, and it bought calendula oil for her bottom and pretty music and as many spins on the carousel as someone who would never remember any of it could wish for. And they were happy years. Seriously. If the groom could have wrung all the necks of his lies and eccentricities, he would have done it. There is no explaining—and it pains me to think he will never be believed now—how much the groom loved his life then. How grateful he was. Once, looking out over Poestenkill Gorge in winter, the baby asleep in her sling against her mother’s chest, he watched the new-fallen snow glitter at the base of the trees, and he watched the naked branches form an overlapping lace through which he could see down onto the church spires and chimney smoke of the valley, and he felt as if he’d been walking for a long time—years—and had finally arrived at his intended destination.

  Oh, Laura. If I had lived my life as one man, one consolidated man, would I have been able to see what was coming? Would I have guessed that it was all bound to fail, and that within five years, we would separate? Would I have been able to prevent it—I mean that night when, your face streaked with tears, you asked me to get out? You’d had it with me. You’d felt for years—you’d explain this later—like you were living in a house with tilted floors. We’d gone wrong.

  Pine Hills. We were in the kitchenette. You were facing away from me, leaning with both hands against the sink basin. We’d been arguing for some time. Arguing and washing dishes. Meadow was asleep. She was four by then, old enough to hear raised voices, and so we tried to keep disagreements strictly late night. What were we fighting about? You name it: your increasingly fervent Catholicism, my laziness, your need for order and structure, my lack of discipline, your martyred reticence, my tendency to talk too much. We had a mouse infestation. I’d caught one of the rodents and, without the heart to kill it, had given it to Meadow for a pet. As we argued, I watched this mouse tunnel in the infinite corner of its plastic box.

  “Is this about school?” I was saying. “Fine. I’ll be better about school. I’ll get her there on time, and it’s a negative on the spontaneous field trips, OK? Effective immediately. I don’t love the school—you know all this, hon—the bloody Jesuses hanging all over the place. It’s just not my idea of a place for children. You know, ‘sweet childish days, as long as twenty are now’?”

  You said nothing.

  “But OK, OK,” I said. “I’ll be better. I’ll work on my attitude. You know, you told me you were Catholic when we got married, but I didn’t think you were serious.”

  Finally, you turned around. I could see now you’d been crying. This astonished me. I’d been trying for a joke.

  “Oh, Eric,” you said, crying. “We’re so far apart.”

  My hands were still poised to dry the dish you’d been washing. Palms up, a damp cloth draped over one forearm.

  One thing I’m sure of is that despite the late-night arguments, despite our differences, despite the way the light in our marriage had dimmed, even to my blind eyes, I never thought of leaving you. Not once. But there was a gap between how bad I thought things were and how bad you thought things were, and our life fell into that gap.

  “We are?” I said.

  TENDER YEARS

  We may no longer remember that until the mid-nineteenth century, children and their mothers were viewed as a man’s property. When marital strife led to that carnival we now call divorce, the child was whisked away to the father’s arms, leaving the mother sobbing in the street, without recourse. We have all read, or been told abridged versions of, Anna Karenina, yes? But it did not take long, you see, for the custody pendulum to swing in the other direction. By the late 1800s, a maternal preference in divorce cases was supported by the “tender years” doctrine. This doctrine held that children of “tender years”—that is, younger than eight—should be raised by their mothers. Therefore, men who wanted custody of their children appeared not only misled, but also slightly skeevy. But the issue of custody did not arise much, because divorce itself was fairly rare.

  Well, time passed and for reasons I will not go into here, divorce lost its edge. Somewhere in the bowels of the 1970s and ’80s, some people started to see divorce as an act of empowerment, for stifled men and women alike. Marriage became the problem, and divorce, the solution. Soon, everybody wanted one. Divorces became much easier to obtain. They might as well have passed them out on street corners. You could get divorced on a boat, or on a train, or in a mall, or in a box with a fox.

  Coterminously—and I’ll be done with this soon—those decades lent the field of divorce litigation some new and exciting ideas. For example, the no-fault divorce, in which a marriage was alleged to have malfunctioned somehow on its own, independent of its participants. And even though the concept of a divorce with no fault is oxymoronic, and a better term might have been fault-fault divorce, as a legal category, it caught fire. The upshot to no-fault divorces and my point at present is that they presumed neither maternal nor paternal preference in matters of custody. What’s more, when parents were encouraged to settle custody disputes prior to a hearing, via the quieter process of mediation, divorce lost its inherent staginess. Gone were the exciting, perjured testimonies of one family member against another. This enabled a legal preference (in twelve states) for the concept of joint custody.

  You and I picked a hairy little folknik as our mediator, an MSW from Cornell who wore shorts and huaraches even in cold weather. You sat across from me at his table, your eyes downcast, your shyness on display, the lonely, bookish girl beneath your righteous exterior, as you struggled to defend your desire to deep-six our union.

  Is it damaging to my case to say that I looked forward to seeing you at divorce mediation? I shaved, I aftershaved, I picked out shirts you had once bought for me. The mediator worked out of a cottage near the thruway. In the backyard he’d created a pleasure garden full of autumnal dahlias, and two chairs tilted hopefully toward one another on a slate patio. Our separation was still very fresh. I still didn’t understand why we were separating, and I’m fairly sure you didn’t either. We’d been living separately for a couple of weeks, and this apartness gave our meetings an air of courtship. I missed you, OK? Even though you had been granted temporary custody of Meadow, you always let her come to see me at my whim or hers. It felt like we were still on the same team. She would arrive to my new place in North Albany in the backseat of your father’s immense black Chevy Tahoe, looking rather glamorous through the tinted window. Your father’s friendliness contri
buted to my sense that the situation was, like the custody arrangement, temporary. If I handled it well, you would come to your senses.

  If ever there was a man who deluded himself with dreams of reconciliation, I was that man. How much legal leverage I lost in the effort to win you back! I chronicled your talents as a mother, as well as the faithful way Meadow loved you back. When allegations were cast my way—that I was insensitive, that I had ignored numerous warning signs, that my behavior was occasionally “erratic” and my parenting style “unpredictable,” that my research interests were “esoteric” and finally just tedious and maybe even make-believe—I accepted these criticisms and heaped a couple of fresh ones atop the pile. You’re right, I said. You’re so right. I wanted to persuade you that I was flawed on purpose. Because if I was flawed on purpose, then I was just as capable of being perfect as I was of being flawed. I was in total control of who I was. I was capable of change.

  You blushed and barely looked at me. I see now that you were embarrassed for me. You were embarrassed for me that I knew so little of the cold nature of the law. Only after I found myself the noncustodial parent did I realize my error, my wasted sacrifice.

  In one of our final meetings, when I finally sensed the sour turn my fate had taken, the mediator assured me that if I had objections in the future—if I were to change my mind—I could do so within the court of law, during a hearing. In the meantime, it seemed to him that there was a lot of good in giving one parent sole physical custody and that this arrangement would still provide me with a bounty of visitation rights. For some children, especially young ones like Meadow (our hippie said), it was better to live in one home. My new place could be Meadow’s sleepaway home. An exciting change of scene.