Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  With this parental “agreement” in place, thereafter you and I worked through the mail. Without the hit of seeing you, our correspondence took on a chill. The fact that I was getting screwed dawned on me slowly. The many visitations I was initially promised were scratched down to every other weekend. These impersonal negotiations unsettled me and began to absorb restless nights.

  I took a stand and arbitrarily demanded that in addition to my weekends, I’d get Meadow every Wednesday. After this request was received, Meadow was curiously unable to make it over to my place for an entire two weeks. I called many times; no one answered. I visited our hippie; he was powerless. And then I returned to my new home—the water-damaged ranch I was renting off New Scotland Ave.—and sat paralyzed, listening to the sump pump labor away in the basement. It was the sort of week in which the clock’s ticking seems recriminatory (Look how you’ve been imprisoned by your unwillingness to kill yourself!). I drank, but that failed to bring about worldwide revolution. So I sat at my kitchen table to think, and I thought until my mind became raw from thinking, and for the first time in years I became aware of my essential conundrum. I was Eric Kennedy. I knew it, and I had decided it, and it was true. It had been true for too long. But whenever I ventured out into emotional and physical joint space—that is, society—my identity became predicated on some sort of collective agreement. In other words, I was Eric Kennedy only inasmuch as I could secure a consensus that I was. And suddenly I saw that achieving a total consensus, a unanimity, was a campaign for which my life was too short. For example, I had no legal recourse. I couldn’t get mixed up in a custody battle! It would be only a matter of days before someone went digging for old records, looking for someone who knew me in high school—hell, looking for Twelve Hills on the map. After all, I had written my life story at the tender age of fourteen. It wasn’t a very sophisticated one.

  You may be surprised to hear that until then, I rarely worried about being found out. Maybe I didn’t worry about it because I am insane (as most people who’ve read about my case now assume). But I’ll tell you: I think that I didn’t worry about it because I had become Eric Kennedy so long ago and with such appreciation that I was, years later, truly and squarely him, more than I had ever been anyone else. More than most people are themselves. Because where other people are accidentally good or bad or upbeat or pessimistic, I got to shoot for a deliberate self, a considered, researched self. And that self was a good guy—I really thought so, and a lot of other people did too. And I assumed he would be granted the rewards and allowances given to good guys (e.g., Clebus & Co. Realtor of the Month, February 2007). But during that stretch of days, denied access to my daughter, sleepless, unshaven, dehydrated, the true flammability of my life became clear to me.

  I saw that my love for Meadow would be the last thing to burn.

  Just as I started to dream about throwing myself off a cliff in Thatcher Park, I received, in the mail, your act of kindness. You had granted me my Wednesdays.

  Of course, there were limitations. I would be allowed only to pick her up from school (that Catholic academy we used to fight about), returning her to your home by six p.m. sharp. Net time of togetherness: three hours and twenty-three minutes.

  Giddy, exhausted, I signed.

  Our parental agreement floated through the courts of Albany to be stamped into officialdom.

  Meadow arrived that very afternoon, bearing oatmeal cookies the two of you had made together. I can’t quite describe my happiness at seeing her step from her grandfather’s SUV. It was as good as all the best moments. As good as when I first held her as a newborn. As good as the moment I discovered she’d defaced all of my professional stationery with her newly mastered alphabet. I hugged her and let myself believe there were better times ahead. Times of healing and beginning again. She seemed happy to see me too. We ate the cookies in one sitting.

  Restored to insanity, I once again harbored notions that you still loved me.

  After that, well, I suppose I was my one remaining enemy.

  Winter came. The first winter of our separation. There was a horrendous slowdown of real estate sales, the first baby step of what would become the Great Recession. I tried again to further my research. Instead, I ended up catching a virus that left me delirious in bed, clinging to your old body pillow. I watched Animal Planet on mute and tried to think of what the animals were really saying. I tried to remember the folk remedies of my primitive childhood. I tried to forget it was almost Christmas. It was at this juncture that I began having difficulty making child support payments.

  The tender years.

  No kidding they were tender.

  What do I remember of my own tender years, long ago? The wheezing of the kettle. My mother and myself deep in parallel silence. The pleasure of a banana. The friendship of a dog. A song about Lenin’s forehead. Flurries of pollen in springtime, steam tents, a cream-colored Trabant that suffered frequent mechanical breakdowns, searchlights, salted caramels in wax paper, the unique humiliation of being dressed in a bow tie. That’s it. So little, and so much.

  FEBRUARY

  But let’s move along. You want to know how I arrived at what is universally regarded as my catastrophic decision regarding our daughter. There’s been some embarrassing and poorly researched news coverage, and I know that this is exactly the sort of easily misunderstood intrigue that could find its way into the tabloids or the lesser glossies, so I will hurry up and try to address several of the most common questions about my case.

  #1. Were the actions of the accused premeditated?

  In order to answer this question, I really have to start with a description of North Albany in February:

  In North Albany in February, the flora and fauna are dead, the traffic turns the snow the color of tobacco juice, the children are shuttered away in their schools, and the long days are silent. The cats grow wet and skinny, and the rain grows hard and bitter, as if it is not rain but the liquid redistribution of collective conflict; it’s a frigid rain, a rain that pricks the skin of any upturned face, a damning rain that makes men eke corks from bottles. O February, you turn our hearts to stone.

  Now, at every other time of year, Albany is a delightful city. With its magnificent state capitol, cribbed from some Parisian design, and its city hall based on that of our sister city, Ypres, Belgium, and the thirty-six marble pillars along the colonnade of the education building, Albany surprises the casual tourist. How, the tourist wonders, in the middle of upstate New York, did he stumble across this European metropolis? He walks out into the wide open of the Empire State Plaza and is awed by the scale, the towering buildings—even the one that resembles an immense egg—doubled in the reflecting pool, which is itself end to end the length of three football fields.

  I took to walking this plaza in February, looking for a way out of my situation. I could not get a good critical angle on my life. Since our separation that fall, I’d hosted Meadow every other weekend at my ranch, and these visits seemed to be meeting expectations. Two days of puzzles, glitter, screaming, and contraband Hostess products. Two days of soaking up her prattle, of being her stooge in games of house or school. And Wednesdays were sweet, when we snatched them. But Meadow’s entrance into kindergarten was a passage into a new life for her as a distinct person, and occasionally I only sat ignored, watching her play with a friend we’d run into at Washington Park. Or worse, I’d receive news that preparations for a competing event meant there would be no Wednesday visit at all.

  Besides, there was the underlying problem of days. Between every allotted weekend visitation sprawled the weeks themselves. Worm-eaten, heartsick, exaggerated days bookended by conciliatory Saturdays and Sundays in her presence. Then, every other weekend without her. Grief made those weekends drag. I sat like a teenage girl by the telephone hoping that some scheduling conflict would necessitate my services as a babysitter. As the cycle went on relentlessly, I found myself getting tired from it. Anticipating her arrivals, I would pace the marshy
carpeting of my ranch for hours, but when she’d finally pull up in the back of her grandfather’s Tahoe, fatigue would hit me. I had exhausted myself waiting. In the end, the hardest thing about having once been screamingly happy is that after your life takes a turn for the worse, you wish you’d never known anything different. Watching her emerge from the car, I’d wonder if it was all worth it, worth these few days. Meadow herself wore the same optimistic smile she always wore walking up to my stoop. She would not have approved of my self-pity; no soul of a shop girl had she; she was always the best of the two of us, Laura. I knew that the moment she was born.

  And yet you and I were still not divorced. You had not filed for divorce. I began to wonder why. Was it on religious grounds? Or did you want me to pull the trigger? Or were you genuinely considering coming back to me? I’ll never know. I rarely saw you. I rarely spoke to you. You were protected by your parents and your diplomatic child. You sent your father as emissary. He and I waved to one another through the window of his terrifying car. Polite to a fault, having borrowed some notion of chivalry, I tried to give you space. Time to think.

  This patience was an act—my hardest, hands down.

  March brought a spate of sunshine. I sold two houses. I began having sex with a fellow Realtor at Clebus, a woman you knew and never liked much.

  When I told her you and I had separated, she seemed disappointed and instinctively took your side.

  AFFORDABLE, ACCESSIBLE, DIGNIFIED

  When I first walked into the law offices of Rick Thron, I did not look my best. I was in need of a haircut, and I was freezing cold. I’d left my winter coat behind while showing a house in Delmar and, inexplicably, never went back to get it. Thron’s office was on the upper floors of a building that overlooked Quackenbush Square, where, in the summertime, amphibious trolleys collected Albany’s tourists to carry them back and forth across the Hudson. But it was not yet spring. The world utterly lacked an upshot. March was almost over, but a late winter snowstorm had covered the streets of Albany with slush. My boots squeaked all the way down the hallway to Thron’s office door. When I entered the office, I was dulcified by the pretty secretary, who must have been installed precisely for men like me, desperate men, men who had come at last (too late, way too late) for help.

  “Here’s what I hear you saying,” said Thron after listening to my sad tale. “I hear you saying that you love your daughter. I hear you saying that you were a coequal parent, if not a genuine Mr. Mom, before the separation. I mean you were, in fact, a stay-at-home dad for a year—the primary caretaker—when your daughter was three. Am I hearing that correctly?”

  “Yes, you are,” I said.

  “And I hear you saying that in a gesture of goodwill toward your estranged wife, you got your nuts crunched in mediation, and now you’re left with this sense that—the sense that you feel—”

  “Spiritually squandered,” I said. “Without meaning. Void.”

  “Bad,” said Thron. “You feel really bad. Your feeling bad is made more bad by the sense that you—out of the goodness of your heart—forfeited your paternal rights—out of—of—”

  “Love,” I said.

  “Love.” Thron sat back. “Right.”

  “I still love my wife,” I said. “My estranged wife.”

  Thron, a broad-shouldered man whose generic office lacked a single plant or photograph, made an axing motion with his arm. “Forget. About. That. Your estranged wife does not love you. Someone who is trying to estrange you from her and from your child does not love you. Don’t be like the battered wife, Eric, stabbed fifty-seven times by her own husband. How does a person hang around long enough to get stabbed fifty-seven times by somebody? Because they’re still waiting around for love. Don’t get distracted, Eric. Don’t let your estranged wife stab you fifty-seven times. She stabs you once, that’s it. You stab right back.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “Do you know, Eric, that spouses who initiate divorce often think of the divorce as a ‘growth experience’? They even show better immune function. But you—the spouse who stuck around, the loyal one, the one who meant his vows—what do you get? You get left holding the bag. Your divorce could make you sick.”

  “It has!” I cried. “I’ve had bronchitis for months.”

  “If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times, Eric. You should have come to see me a long time ago.” Pertly, Thron stacked some papers. “Now, who filed the petition?”

  “Petition?”

  “The petition for divorce.”

  “We haven’t filed. It’s—we’re separated. It’s a trial separation.”

  “Then we’re filing today.” Thron licked his thumb and peeled a form off a thick pad. “We’re going to file today, so we can start litigation. You can’t litigate with no divorce. Otherwise, it’s just a friendly disagreement. And you tried that already, right? You need to sue.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “You can. File first, Eric. Be the plaintiff. Don’t be the defendant. Don’t spend your life counterpunching.”

  “I need a day,” I said.

  “One day. One day. Tomorrow you come in and file. Then ASAP we’ll also file a petition in family court for a modification of the custody agreement. If your estranged wife does not agree to it, bam—we go to court.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “We’re also going to hire—granted, at some expense—a topflight, independent child custody evaluator. This individual will observe you alone, and also you with your daughter—you know, playing checkers, sharing a soda—and he or she will write what I’m sure will be an A-plus report on your skills as a father. This report will be on file to aid the judge’s decision should we go to trial. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Because you know what, Eric? You are a good father.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I can tell you are a good father. I can see it in your eyes.”

  They could not help it; those eyes filled with tears. My heart let its ragged doves to the sky. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted someone to say just that to me. You are a good father. I was sweating everywhere, my underarms, my forehead, my back, secretions that seemed born of relief.

  At the same time, a different voice inside me said, Don’t. Don’t do this. Trottel. Idiot. Don’t you know a thing?

  “Now, Eric,” said Thron. “Let’s go over some basic information. Let’s start with your date of birth.”

  “March 12, 1970.”

  “Place of birth?”

  I looked out Thron’s window. The clouds were easing down the Hudson, as they often did in the afternoons, leaving the sun canting down into the valley in shattered-looking rays.

  I came very close to telling Thron the truth in that moment. I am not who I say I am, I almost said. When I was five, I crossed the East German border holding nothing but my father’s hand (I almost said). I spent my shitty adolescence in an immigrants’ ghetto in Dorchester, Mass. And that’s just the beginning (I almost said).

  Out Thron’s window, between the buildings on Quackenbush, I stared at the Hudson. How pitiable is a river. Nothing belongs to it, neither its water nor its sediment. This will never be over, I reminded myself. You created it to have no end.

  “I was born,” I began, “in Twelve Hills, Massachusetts, not far from Hyannis Port.”

  “Sounds nice,” said Thron, taking notes. “A small town?”

  “Very small.”

  “And you lived in town?”

  “Right in the middle of town,” I said. “Our house was a modest saltbox. Sixteen hundred square feet, not counting the finished basement. We weren’t rich, although both of my parents came from money. My paternal grandparents lost their entire fortune when they were betrayed by a trusted business partner in the late fifties. They moved into the Cape house, and my father grew up there. And I grew up there. The property itself was a gem. Oceanfront. Landscaped with beach heather, wild roses—”

  “Fine,” sa
id Thron. “And your parents? Alive or deceased?”

  “My mother passed away when I was nine. She’s buried right there in the village cemetery. My father, an entrepreneur, now lives overseas. I rarely see him.”

  Thron squinted at the page, and his eyes took on a greasy iridescence. “Hey. You’re not related to the Kennedy Kennedys. Are you?”

  I smiled, shrugging.

  “The connection,” I said, “is distant.”

  DADDY

  I had been bullied in Dorchester. Habitually. The black kids were decent to me on the whole, if only by turning away from my vulnerable stare as if I wasn’t even present, but the Irish American princes who looked like me and lived, like me, in sagging three-story tenements were looking for a fall guy. They tricked me, shoved me, and suckered me, while never being so cruel that I could easily recognize any one of them as the enemy. They made fun of my German accent long after I could have sworn that I no longer had one. On one occasion, a boy no bigger or stronger than me confronted me in the concrete drainage ditch we used as a shortcut home from school. I had never considered this boy an enemy. In fact, we often compared homework on the school steps in the morning—and so I was surprised when he put up his fists and began hopping from one foot to the other.

  “Come on, Schroder,” he said anxiously.

  I was confused. “Come on and what?”

  “Come on and fight. Fight!”

  “Why?”

  “Because! That’s why!”

  I could have fought him. I probably would’ve won. I knew that a victory would bring some relief from the teasing and unchecked xenophobia that surrounded me every day. But I didn’t fight him. I had been taught only to escape. I spied a swinging gate in someone’s chain-link fence and I ran through it and slammed the gate back toward my pursuer.