Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  I ran. I ran for a long, long time. I ran in a hysterical pattern that was random enough to lose anybody sane. Tearing my way through the weeds and broken tricycles and dirt yards of Dorchester, I didn’t even turn around to see if the boy was still behind me. I ran crazily, crisscrossedly, as some sort of artistic expression, now that I look back at it, of what it felt like to be me.

  Later that evening, against my will, I began to cry in front of my father. I was ashamed. I told my father what had happened, that a boy had tried to fight me, but that I had not stood and fought him, but instead I’d run away.

  My father put down his fork and looked thoughtful. I stared at his beard, cranberry red at its thickest, and hoped that whatever he’d say would relieve me. He was a man of very few words, and the longer we lived in Boston, the fewer of them there seemed to be. After a moment, he picked up his fork.

  “Natürlich hast Du nicht gekämpft,” he said. “Es ist nicht natürlich, zu kämpfen. In Wahrheit ist es natürlich, wegzulaufen.”3

  EVALUATION

  I will not rehash here the series of contortions, gambits, and hurt surprises that took our custody battle onward to its next, more acute stage. Of course, any shred of hope for marital reconciliation was lost as soon as I enlisted Thron’s services, but I guess I expected that. And although my time with Thron would turn out to be short, for several months that spring he was something of a friend, and I trusted him. So when he proposed we go ahead with the child custody evaluation, I agreed. I would have several long, probing conversations with the evaluator, in the privacy of his or her own office, but first I would meet him or her in public, with Meadow, during a regular visitation.

  I picked my site—the playground at Washington Park. This was the playground on which Meadow had virtually grown up. When she was a tot, she had feasted on its wood chips, and when she was old enough to grip the handlebars, she had sagged back and forth on the metal spring horses. In recent years she had learned to kite on the adjacent hill. Whenever I wanted to spoil her, I’d buy her some huge, delta-winged kite made out of brightly colored ripstop, and we’d wait for a good day to try it out. So I pictured us there on our hillside, tethered to the broad blue belly of the sky via one taut string, looking favored, looking somehow worthy of endorsement.

  The first stumbling block came with the news that Thron’s pick for our evaluator had been nixed, and soon we were forced to accept a last-minute substitution of a different expert by The Opposition. Also, there was no wind. Awaiting our rendezvous, Meadow and I tried to force the kite into the sky. Several attempts left it flightless in the grass. We tried again, and a rogue gust tacked the kite sharply sideways, where it looped itself around the low branch of a large beech tree. This augured poorly. And I—maybe I was making Meadow nervous?—because the whole goddamned thing was making me nervous, but still—I proposed we rescue the kite. I figured Meadow could easily reach it if she stood on my shoulders.

  Usually, it’s easy to get Meadow excited about things like that. All you have to do is add a dash of intrigue, a little pretending, in which our small task becomes a principled affair. (If we don’t retrieve the kite, the Stalinist zealots will swarm the city by nightfall!) But that day, I couldn’t get Meadow to play along. She seemed put out, suspicious of me. I could tell she’d been talking about me with her mother. I didn’t really blame them. I think I speak for a lot of divorcing parents here when I say that there’s so much bad shit coming at you during a divorce that a child’s emotional distress takes its place in a whole constellation of problems, and these problems are so numerous that one starts to pin one’s hopes on a legal resolution as some kind of final, almost atomic solution, something obliterative, and until then, well, it’s almost a personnel problem; you don’t have the staff; there aren’t enough yous.

  “What’s the matter, Butterscotch?” I asked her.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I’m just not feeling partyish.”

  “Well, you don’t have to feel partyish. But if nothing’s wrong, maybe could you put a little pep in your step? A little zip in your skip? You look like someone just killed your puppy.”

  “I don’t have a puppy.”

  “Exactly. Come on. Crack a smile. Please? For me?”

  She wandered across the old playground, making a halfhearted sally across the monkey bars. She wore an old purple jumper and white stockings, dingy at the knees. Her hair was lank and flat, slipping out of her headband. Here was one of many moments in which I might have walked away, called the whole thing off, gotten used to being powerless, learned to be patient and conciliatory, and spared us all of what was to follow.

  But a car door slammed nearby, and here she came—our potential savior.

  I had never seen anyone who looked quite like her. The woman’s face was as round and white as a potato, but her hair was black and coarse. Across her puffy cheeks was a spray of pigmentation, dots too big to be freckles. On each wrist she wore a black splint. She walked from her beat-up Toyota with a slightly neuralgic gait. Although she was one of the homeliest women I’d ever met, I remember thinking, Good. Here is a woman who can sympathize with me. Why else had she entered the field of psychology, but because of her own rich ache?

  “Thank you so much for coming,” I said, shaking only the fingers of her hand. “Your expertise means so much to me and Meadow. We just want to resolve this dispute and get our lives back to normal. We’ve been kiting—” I gestured to the snagged object in the beech tree. “Too bad you missed it. Meadow is an excellent kiter. She has excellent motor skills for a child her age. Please…” I gestured toward a picnic table on which I’d set up some supporting materials. “I’ve got some things to show you.”

  The evaluator, a Ms. Sonja Vang, followed me. I whistled for Meadow. She peered around the tree and pleadingly shook her head no.

  Please? I mouthed.

  No. No.

  For me?

  No.

  I turned to Ms. Vang, who was gazing at me evenly, and said, “Meadow can be shy at first. She’ll come around.”

  The woman shrugged and rested her splints against the edge of the picnic table.

  “To me,” I began, “fatherhood is no onus. It’s not a burden. Some men, I know, take a kind of martyred pleasure in feeling trapped by the family? They like to believe—and this is just my armchair analysis—that were they not trapped by the family, they would be, what, disabling bombs somewhere, breaking a world record, what have you. This belief enables them to a) come up with an explanation for their lack of personal success and b) get out of the more tedious aspects of child rearing—you know what I mean, the bottom wiping, the shushing, the nagging, in general, the relentless being aware of the child—by suggesting that they have been dragooned into the role, away from a higher purpose. Do you know what I mean?”

  I smiled, waiting for encouragement. Sonja Vang made no movement except to adjust her bottom against the picnic bench. She was panting slightly. I had my first flash of doubt. Had The Opposition planted a mole?

  “From the moment Meadow was born,” I continued, “I was involved with her care. Not because I thought I should be. It was because I wanted to be. When the recession hit, I spent a year at home with her, as her primary caretaker—a stay-at-home dad—which in any court of law would qualify me for custody, though I don’t have to tell you that, right? And so—right—it was my close attention during that year which yielded what I have come to see as a unique understanding of her needs, and the way her mind works. Children aren’t mysteries. We don’t have to teach them sign language, like gorillas. No. We only have to pay attention to what they’re already saying. Do you know what I mean?” I checked to see if Ms. Vang knew what I meant; she was rubbing her eyes with the back of her splint. Helplessly, I continued, “Fathers don’t have to be ‘like mothers.’ Men aren’t soft. Men don’t smell good. You know, floral. But a good father can take a kind of abstract, h
uman interest in the child that a mother is incapable of taking. A good father can help a child develop her aptitudes vis-à-vis a broader social backdrop. I have located a study”—and here I pushed forward several pages, printed off the Internet—“that has proved that children of both genders show better psychological health when living with the father as the custodial parent, due to—well, you can read it yourself.”

  The woman removed a case from her battered handbag and withdrew reading glasses. She peered down at the report.

  “Your splints,” I said, finally unable to bear her silence. “Did you fall?”

  She did not look up. “Repeated stress.”

  I pushed forth my next bit of evidence. “Now, I’m just plain old bragging here, but I wanted to show you this piece of paper. Given to me when Meadow was three. The results of an IQ test, done over at the medical center, by old colleagues of mine, on a lark.”

  A shadow of irritation crossed the woman’s face. I had the sense I should wrap it up.

  “This material is significant only in that I feel, as a scholar myself—and I won’t bore you with the details of my own research here—I feel more than ever required as Meadow’s father. This gifted child needs two parents to—jointly, and with all the resources they can muster—lead her through—”

  “Excuse me,” Ms. Vang said. “Where is the child?”

  I blinked back at her. “Meadow? She’s here somewhere.”

  “Because I’m here to observe the two of you. Together. You know, playing and stuff. Being together.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m not a jury, Mr. Kennedy.”

  “No, no you aren’t.”

  “And I’m not innerested in theories about parenthood.”

  “No, of course not.”

  I turned and scanned the playground desperately for Meadow.

  “And with the divorce rate in the United States at about fifty percent,” she continued, picking up steam, “higher than any industrialized nation, I do brisk business. And mostly what I see in these custody battles are people who think too much. People who could easily sort out their differences if they weren’t so full of ideas. People who’d rather be right than happy.”

  I stood, panicking now, the woman close at my side. Meadow was nowhere to be seen. She was not on the play structure, the rock climber, the swings. A stampede of young men with their shirts off blew through the playground, the Saint Rose cross-country team.

  “This is awful,” I said, walking briskly downhill toward the water fountain, where I was sure I’d find Meadow petting the dogs. “Sorry to make you walk so much.”

  Unsurprisingly, Ms. Vang withheld reassurance.

  “Meadow is always wandering off. Just ask her mother. She’s always petting someone’s dog. Admiring someone’s bicycle.”

  “Should watch out,” grumbled the woman, loping beside me. “What I’ve seen done to children would give you nightmares.”

  “So how did you get into the business?” I asked.

  “I started out in law enforcement.”

  “Aha.”

  “And then I was managing my father’s seafood business, but then he died.”

  “Oh.”

  “So I made lemonade. Went back to school. Found my calling.”

  Several dogs nosed around in the fountain, their owners milling nearby. No Meadow. Finally, abandoning all pretense of composure, I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted her name. People stared. A park attendant pruning rosebushes reached for his walkie-talkie. The barbarous woman who held my fate in her hands settled her buttocks down upon the granite rim of the fountain—built by some magnate in honor of his dead father—and looked at me with flat eyes, and I thought, Screw you, screw you, I never had a chance with you anyway.

  And that’s when I saw my daughter. She had been very close to us all along, right over our heads, having climbed the large beech in which our kite was stranded. I could see her now clearly, now that I was so far away, at a distance that seemed to increase exponentially with my own dawning regrets. As she inched out on the branch, her hand seeking the kite string, her eyeglasses flashed in the sun. The lenses were like mirrors flashing code: Am completely confused. Will try this. She was a child in the sky. I had put her there. And although seeing her totter on the branch was a blow to me, I saw, as I never had, how much worse things could get.

  CAROUSEL

  The rest of the story can be told summarily.

  Meadow did not fall. The kite was not retrieved. The independent evaluation was not favorable to me. Sensing a window, The Opposition regrouped, and meanwhile my weekend visitation came and went Meadowless, and there was nothing I could do about it, nothing whatsoever. Despite the fact that Thron told me the threat was ridiculous, that losing visitation altogether was impossible, I fell into a depression worse than the one that had brought me to him. For two weeks, I did not leave the house. Unless you count going to the liquor store and Dunkin’ Donuts. After a couple of angry calls, my last active client—a yogic master looking for commercial space—moved on to someone else.

  May came. One morning I left the house and just started walking. I walked all the way down New Scotland, right into town, and several hours later found myself standing in front of the New York State Museum. With its top-heavy modern design, and hundreds of joggable stairs rising to a monumental balcony, the building is hard to miss. From the museum balcony, you can get a clear view of all four mountain ranges that surround the capital region: Adirondack, Green, White, and Berkshire. Everywhere up here, you’re surrounded by mountains.

  I had not come to look at the mountains. This was more like a pilgrimage. My own personal Lourdes. Because this was the place where Meadow and I had spent so many days during my year at home with her. The year she was three. The year in which she learned to read. The year she learned to play the recorder, waltz, read the periodic table, and speak passable German. During that long northern winter, we’d gone to the library almost every day. I’d bring my research (sorry, as it turns out, I still don’t feel like talking about my research), and she would settle on the carpet nearby with crayons or a fan of books, and we’d spend companionable hours like that. At some point she would tug my pant leg and I would know it was time for a visit to the carousel.

  What carousel? The one made a gift to the people of Albany by the people of our sister city, Ypres, in 1935. All its mirrors still intact, as well as the original, somewhat deafening organ, the carousel found its way into the New York State Museum in the 1970s. Boasting thirty-six horses, two deer, two donkeys, and one monkey, it’s worth a visit, if you’re in town.

  The day I went to see the carousel alone, I noticed that the assortment of people waiting in line was the same as when Meadow and I had been among them—young parents absentmindedly bouncing babies, toddlers with their foreheads wedged between the railings. I thought about how the children were too young to understand the value of what was happening to them, which was that their minds were being imprinted by every scent, every touch, every sound, and that it was from this template they would draw for the rest of their lives. This is how the world would forever hit their nerves.

  “How old?” I asked the young mother standing beside me.

  The mother looked up from her baby. “Eight months,” she said.

  “Very cute.” I pointed. “Is that a tooth?”

  The young woman put her finger in the child’s mouth and swiped it. The baby’s eyes widened. “Nah. I don’t know what that is.” She fixed his tiny sweater.

  “Well,” I said. “He’s a cute little guy.”

  “I know he is.” She beamed, looking unaccountably beautiful.

  Meadow’s favorite horse on the carousel was a black one with a golden saddle—the outside horse. I had stood beside it countless times. When she had first ridden the carousel, her waist was thick, a baby’s bubble of milk. But each time we returned to the carousel, her body was different. Her waist thinned, seemingly in my hands, and her legs
lengthened and her shoes began to scrape me as they rose and fell, shod with hard plastic flats and ruffled socks. When she was little, she barely noticed me, so entranced was she by the lights and mirrors of the carousel. But as she grew older, even after she could safely ride the carousel by herself, she would ask me to stand beside her anyway, and I would whistle, and compliment her stallion, and she would look down at me, and I don’t think I ever felt gladder of anything, that a daughter of mine might be in the midst of a happy childhood—that elusive gold standard, a goddamned miracle.

  The carousel. Who doesn’t have one in his childhood, that universal symbol around which all cravings, fulfilled and unfulfilled, seem to circle magnetically forever? They even had one, if you can believe it, in the middle of Treptower Park in East Berlin, circa 1974. And even though life in Berlin was unique, the children weren’t. That is, a child in Berlin tallied the same pleasures as you did: how many rides he was permitted, who was watching and with what expressions, what to call this feeling of going up and down and around simultaneously and whether or not to enjoy it, what the child beside him was doing or not doing, who was crying and how sincerely, how the music sounded, sad or happy, or too tightly wound, maniacal; he tallied it all, especially what was done post-carousel, everything made special and weird by the motion, by a sense of having traveled. Like any child, the child in East Berlin thought about the carousel late that night in bed. His musings were double-edged; by remembering the carousel he felt he “kept” or “possessed” the carousel, and yet he understood that the carousel was not a thing, like a balloon or a toy, and could not be possessed. He noted preciously that the next time he rode the carousel—if he was so lucky, if his Mutter would take him there again—would not be like the time he rode it today. Also, he was starting to see that there was a difference between secrets and mysteries, and life was—unluckily for him—a mystery, not a secret, which meant nobody owned it, and therefore nobody could make it transparent for him, and nobody’s death would yield the answer to it, and maybe he even understood that from there on in, whenever he looked at a carousel, no matter how old he’d grown, no matter how gray, he would never be able to comprehend the riddle of how it made him feel.