Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  Around and around the carousel went, the frozen horses jumping.

  Grief is a carousel.

  Guilt is a carousel.

  Life is a carousel.

  No—history is a carousel.

  No, no. Memory.

  Memory is a carousel.

  FORGETTING

  One of the pieces of advice offered to parents in extremely contentious custody cases is confiscation of the children’s passports. If there is any worry on the part of one spouse that the other spouse is at risk for flight with a child—that is, kidnapping (there, I said it)—the concerned spouse should request that the courts hold that child’s passport. However, parents should understand a) that the United States has no exit controls—in other words, any of us can shamble in or out at any time we take a fit, and b) that there is no way to track or revoke a passport once it has been issued.

  This is where things get murky.

  I mean, where the unconscious mind enters. Mine.

  Emboldened, I guess, by the damning child custody evaluation, your side appealed the custody arrangement with new allegations that I was a danger to my own daughter, stipulating that these charges would not be dropped until I submitted to psychological testing. In the meantime, your lawyer informed Thron that she was making a motion to restructure the custody agreement to be less, not more, collaborative. Their proposal, The Opposition warned us, was that I be forbidden under any circumstance to spend unsupervised time with Meadow. Visits between us would be monitored by a state-appointed chaperone. Never again, the lawyer vowed, would I be allowed to endanger the girl with my bizarre, neglectful parenting. Nor would I be allowed to speak with her privately. If I wanted to be with Meadow, I would have to do so under the supervision of someone from Child Services.

  I responded to this development by imbibing such a quantity of Canadian Club that I woke up the following morning shirtless on the carpet, my face hot with midday sun. I looked around the bedroom in which I lay. Everything that was not nailed into the floor had been pushed over—I could only assume by me—the secondhand bedside table, the bookshelf, and even the old, gothic wardrobe that I had taken from our Pine Hills apartment, claiming it as a Kennedy heirloom. As I tried to lift this wardrobe back onto its feet, something slipped out from between the wardrobe and its pasteboard backing and fell to the floor at my feet.

  Now, even though I had erased any sort of paper trail of my life before I became a Kennedy, I had not, by necessity, destroyed my German passport. I was not an American citizen, so the German passport would have to do in the event of emergency international travel, which I’d easily avoided. I’d hidden the booklet inside this wardrobe who knows how many years ago. Now it lay open suggestively on the floor. I rubbed my eyes and leaned down to peer at it. There I was, a decade younger, an unmarried man of twenty-eight. My skin was taut, my stare a little icy. I barely recognized the face.

  The name?

  Well, everyone knows it by now.

  Schroder.

  Erik Schroder.

  No, no. Schroder. Try to pronounce the r as a guttural. Really get in there.

  Schgroder. That’s it.

  Where’s the umlaut? Relinquished. Before we left Germany, Dad had been forewarned by somebody or other that Americans didn’t believe in umlauts, and that no one in the United States used surnames anyway, but rather greeted each other by saying, Halloo, Guy! And since my father barely assimilated in the eight years in which I lived with him in Boston, I would count the umlaut as Dad’s single concession to America, a change he noted to each of his auditors in 1979 as we processed from queue to queue at Logan International.

  He had planned to naturalize us, my father. But he never did. We remained resident aliens. Therefore, we lived with the low-level paranoia of people vulnerable to deportation. We drove slow, never jaywalked, carried no debt, and avoided the giving and getting of favors, basically alienating ourselves from the rites of Boston brotherhood. A stickler for rules, however much he resented them, Dad even made me carry my permanent resident card with me at all times, as he carried his.

  I didn’t get it. My father spoke venomously about Germany. He said he didn’t care what people said against him or against Germans because nobody hated Germany or Germans more than he did. No greater country had ever ficked itself so thoroughly as Germany. He had surrendered our umlaut. Didn’t that just about sum it up? One day when I was in high school, I actually went and got naturalization forms for both of us and brought them home. I had been astonished to learn that on Part 1 (D) on Form N-400, the applicant is asked if he would like to legally change his name upon naturalization. The possibility of this made my heart race, for I had a new name by then, and here was a chance to legitimize it. If I could just say it aloud. To him. To say, This is who I am now. This is what I call myself. I like who I’ve become. Standing beside the card table I used as a desk, my father reviewed the documents. He studied them for a long time. During that same interval, I realized that my quest for legitimacy was ridiculous. The difference between summer-me and Dorchester-me was so stark, the space between them so great, no mortal boy could oonch them closer. I would never be able to say my new name to my father. I couldn’t be both men to anyone. By the time my father replaced the applications on the card table, crossed his arms, and shook his head slowly, I was relieved.

  “Nein, Erik. Ich will das nicht.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  “Das Problem hat nichts damit zu tun, deutsch zu sein. Das Problem liegt mit den Staaten. Und daß es Staaten gibt.”4

  We remained there for another moment, him standing there beside the card table.

  “Außerdem,” he said, shrugging. “Don’t you know it yet, Erik? There is no such thing as forgetting.”

  ERSTER TAG OR DAY ONE

  Curious weather. A thunderstorm gathering down in the valley. The sky dark and roiling, even though it was morning, with patches of crucified daylight dazzling between. Leaves twisted in the wind. Weather vanes whined. The birds were silent. My skin felt different. My scalp, tight. I was sick with some kind of charge—a surge, a change in my fate, a redirection. Some kind of breaking up that I needed.

  Despite the fact that you had secured yourself an excellent lawyer, a young, Cornell-minted go-getter, and all I had was Rick Thron and a damning child custody evaluation, somehow we got your side on the run. Due to the skipped visitations, a judge held you in contempt of court. I don’t know how he did it, but Thron somehow suppressed the child custody report, and without this key piece of evidence, your team panicked. A hasty move to appeal was thwarted when the judge reminded us that we already had an arrangement on the books—a hard-won parental agreement that had functioned well for Meadow for an entire year. We could still negotiate the conditions and limitations, but you had to let her visit me.

  By then, I’d stopped caring about the legalities. I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d be found out. I was reckless, illogical, maybe even lacking moral character, but I was not crazy. I could tell how much better your lawyer was than mine. Mine hadn’t even checked out my bogus documents. The only thing I knew for certain was that I could not bear it anymore, the suspense of the way things were. I could imagine that someday, maybe, I would feel better, I would get accustomed to my new life, but today—this day—I couldn’t take it anymore, the way the wind went out of the world whenever my daughter left. When she left, the yards, the parks, the streets of Albany all seemed abandoned. The life went out of things. And until my life returned to its cycle of baked beans and sporadic couch sleep, I would experience a spasm of grief, a kind of spiritual lockjaw, that I stopped wanting to bear. No, I thought. Not today. I can’t do it. If you had told me I was going to die at the end of today, I would have said, Good.

  The familiar black Chevy Tahoe pulled up to the curb.

  I came out to the stoop, hands in pockets, and waited. My father-in-law gave me his trademark surprised smile, like Hey, you’re still you, and waved
to me as if I were not actually locked in mortal conflict with his daughter. I waited for Meadow as she jogged across the spring grass carrying her backpack.

  To the first question:

  Did the accused premeditate the abduction?

  The answer is no.

  Or, not really.

  Besides, the word abduction is all wrong. It was more like an adventure we both embarked upon in varying levels of ignorance and denial.

  “Good morning, Butterscotch,” I said.

  She looked up at me, her red-framed eyeglasses reflecting the several large willows that loomed over the ranch house from the backyard. The wind rose, lifting the ends of her long brown hair. She hoisted the backpack onto her shoulder.

  “Morning, Daddy.”

  THE ROAD

  After lunch, I told Meadow to wash up and get her backpack.

  “We’re hitting the road!” I said.

  She tilted her head. “We’re hitting the road? With what?”

  “No, no, no,” I laughed. “We’re going driving. We’re going on a trip. A spontaneous trip. You and me. How does that sound?”

  She slid off her stool, leaving the crusts of her peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the Mickey Mouse plate I kept around for her.

  “OK,” she said. “Where’re we going?”

  “Well. How’d you like to spend the day at Lake George?”

  She clutched her hands in front of her chest. “Yes yes yes!”

  “Who wants to sit around here all day? I think it’s plenty warm to swim, don’t you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Did you happen to pack a swimsuit?”

  “No!”

  “Not a problem!” I shouted back. “We’ll buy you a new one when we get up there.”

  That morning, before her arrival, I had packed myself a small bag (swimming trunks, a toothbrush, some reading material), letting this small bag flirt with my own desire to flee, but not with the clarity of premeditation. It was more with a desperate flourish that the last thing to go into the bag—after a slight hesitation—was my passport. Just in case! You never know! We climbed into my Saturn and rolled down all the windows. Meadow sat in the backseat in an age-appropriate booster. The car was clean and impersonal, with CLEBUS & CO stenciled cheerfully on either side, for anyone to see.

  We were mostly through the suburban bottleneck of Albany when I became aware of something in my rearview mirror. A big black shadow of a car that had been lurking along several lengths behind. I took a gratuitous left. The car followed. I took a random right. Again the car followed. I sped up. So did my counterpart. I stopped at a Stewart’s and idled in the parking lot. My counterpart moseyed past only to pull over to a roadside asparagus stand about fifty yards ahead. I shook my head heavily.

  “What is it?” Meadow asked.

  “Pop-Pop’s following us,” I said.

  She craned her head forward to gawk.

  I stilled her with my hand. “No. Don’t look.”

  “Why’s Pop-Pop following us?”

  “I don’t know. I’d better think.”

  “Are we still going to Lake George?”

  “Hush,” I said. “Let me think.”

  Meadow sighed, folding her hands on her lap, muttering, “You said we were going to Lake George. You said we could go. You already said.”

  I watched the Tahoe idling just ahead down the road. I could almost picture the poor man gripping the wheel, trying to retract his head into his torso. Did he really think I couldn’t see him?

  “It’s so boring sitting at home.”

  “Please, Meadow. Let Daddy think.”

  “That’s all Mommy and Glen ever do. Sit around and talk talk talk.”

  I raised my eyes to the rearview mirror. “Mommy and who?”

  “Glen. Daddy, Glen talks forever. He’s boring. He’s a lawyer.”

  “But Mommy’s lawyer is a woman, right? Or has she changed lawyers? Or is Glen just a friend who’s a lawyer? Oh, who cares. Right? Who cares? I don’t care. Do you care? I don’t.”

  I looked back out at the passing traffic. I thought of my estranged wife confabulating with Glen, whoever the hell he was, toasting another legal victory over a homemade meal. And I almost laughed—a shrill, shattered laugh—thinking of the poor Papa Bear in the story who says, Who’s been eating my porridge? Who’s been sitting in my chair? I reached back and made sure Meadow’s seat belt was snug across her lap and gave her an inscrutable tap on the leg. Then I accelerated so quickly the tires shrieked. I nearly clipped the Pepsi deliveryman as I swerved around the side of the building and pulled out onto the two-lane road going the opposite direction, right in front of a huge Sysco truck. In my driver’s-side mirror, the Tahoe jerked forward, circling the asparagus stand and leaving the roadside pullover in a cloud of dust. This was just the goosing I needed; Grandpa was giving chase. Behind me, he kept trying and failing to pass the Sysco truck across the double yellow lines, the oncoming traffic wailing past. His willingness to drive at such risk was a thrill and made me want to see how far he’d go. At a congested intersection, I led him into the right-turn-only lane, toward the highway, only to cross two lanes at the last second before the light turned green to go left. I was heading north again, on Van Rensselaer Boulevard, and had lost sight of Pop-Pop in the bottleneck he created as he tried to avoid being shunted west onto the Thruway. A cantata of horn blowing. My jaw tingled. I suppressed a whoop of victory.

  Who had we been kidding anyway, me and Hank? He was justifiably suspicious of me since the day he met me, and he’d been generous to wait this long to hate me openly. I felt something like gratitude for that. He had always been, to my mind, the kind of upbeat, clannish father I assumed every American was awarded at birth. I stepped on it. We were now going sixty miles an hour through stop-and-go traffic on Van Rensselaer.

  I was hesitant to glance back at my passenger. I wasn’t used to spending long periods of time with Meadow anymore. In the intervening year since we’d ceased sharing the same roof, she’d conquered kindergarten, and was a big girl for six, taller and smarter than any of her classmates, and I hoped I’d come out OK as she sat in moral judgment of me back there in her zebra-print booster seat. I reminded myself that even as a toddler, she’d been unsentimental. She didn’t like drippy speeches or ardent kisses, and so I decided to skip the emotional appeals, the flimsy self-justifications for what I was doing. They barely sufficed anyway.

  “Traffic is terrible,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “You doing all right back there?”

  “Actually, I’m thirsty,” she replied, her voice slightly strained.

  “Well, let’s get you something to drink. What would you like? Jelly-bean juice? Hm? Monkey milk?”

  “Actually, could I have a Mountain Dew? Mariah drinks Mountain Dew. Her mother lets her.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem. I’ll stop just down the road a bit and we’ll find you a Mountain Dew. We’ll do the dew. Can’t be that bad for you if it’s dew, right?”

  “Yeah. And can I watch Star Wars?”

  “Maybe. Listen. One thing at a time.”

  “OK.”

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got this under control. All right?”

  That’s when Grandpa reappeared, like a zombie who staggers forward with his head blown off. The fender of the Tahoe was rumpled—I could see this from far away—and he was now driving with fresh desperation, flashing his headlights. Did he really think I would stop? Did he think I would heed him now, both of us with our gloves off? I was not in violation of the terms of my allotted visitation period. There was nothing in our parental agreement that said I couldn’t drive around the outskirts of Albany at high speeds. No, I thought, looking into the rearview mirror. Not today. You’re going to have to kill me.

  Somewhere early on in my post-divorce social suicide, I had represented a client in the purchase of a foreclosed bungalo
w in Loudonville. After the transaction, we became friends, this client and I. He was also single and gave off a whiff, as I must have, of redundant abandonment. When he decided to go away for the summer, whom else did he call to watch over his property, and occasionally run the engine of his new Mini Cooper to keep the battery from dying, but me? I had already visited this friend’s house once and had sat in the garage with the Mini Cooper running, noticing with dispassion that it wasn’t just a Hollywood plot device; you really couldn’t smell carbon monoxide. And it was this Mini Cooper that came to mind—with wonderfully changed function, as an Escape Car—as I headed west on 378, the wounded undercarriage of my father-in-law’s Tahoe throwing sparks in the increasing distance behind me.

  MOST BEAUTIFUL WATER

  The first white men who ever came across Lake George were handily captured, on account of them standing there gawking at its beauty. It’s still an oceanic, slate-blue tableau when you come across it a half hour’s drive north of Saratoga Springs, propped there in the Adirondacks 320 feet above sea level. Its basin stretches from the town of Lake George all the way north to Ticonderoga, its western border a series of goofy little pleasure towns filled with motels, waterslides, and pancake houses.

  Driving northward, full of anticipation, Meadow and I sang. We sang our favorites, like “Yellow Submarine” and “Kentucky Woman.” She’d been amused by the Mini Cooper we’d switched for my Saturn in Loudonville and did not ask any questions about why we were driving it or whether or not we were still being pursued by Pop-Pop. We were together again. It was easy. For the first time in a year, I felt some hope. I felt like I had finally taken back some control. No more rope-a-dope in divorce mediation. I knew that we were going to make it to Lake George. I knew that, and I didn’t give a shit about what happened after that. Frankly.