Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  The moment I enter the apartment on Savin Hill Road, Dad sits upright and says, in English, “Thank you for coming.” Although he is fully dressed, he seems to have just awoken from a long sleep. As ever, I am not prepared for his civility, how he is calm to the point of frigid, nor am I prepared for how frustrated it makes me that he still sleeps on the couch, instead of in the single bedroom I have long vacated. I feel the need for air, the need to sigh repeatedly, as well as the telltale muscular fatigue I suffer from long after I’ve finished climbing those three flights of stairs. Just moments ago, I barely survived the foyer of the building, against whose plaster I used to rest my secondhand dirt bike. Why does the foyer hurt me? Why does the memory of the dirt bike hurt me? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Sliding my key from the lock, I turn and offer Dad an encouraging smile. He stares up from the couch uncertainly. I realize I am smiling at a blind man.

  “Ah,” he says, and pats the surface of the TV table. He picks up something that looks like a welding visor and places it over his glasses. He finds me through magnified eyes.

  “Now I see you,” he says.

  I walk over and clasp his shoulder, suddenly moved. “Hi, Dad. I’m here.”

  “Sorry for how I look,” he says.

  “What?” I say. “You look fine.”

  “I cannot see.”

  “Well, you can see me.”

  “I can see you hardly.”

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  He gives my wrist a squeeze. “My son. You came.”

  My throat constricts. That’s right—I remember now—the surgery carries a small risk of permanent blindness. He is afraid. But instead of offering him reassurance, I feel my stomach drop, and a child’s wail begins to climb me from the inside. God no, I think. You cannot cry, you shit. If you start to cry, you will never forgive yourself. You will die of shame. Trottel. Idiot. Weakling. That’s when I make a deal. I say, Dear God: If you help me make it out of Dorchester without crying, I will never set foot in this place again. I will totally disappear.

  The wail stops at the top of my throat and sinks back into silence.

  The surgery goes well. At the end of the day, I drive Dad back to the apartment. I lead him up the steps by the elbow. The upper half of his face is bandaged by gauze. I disregard the policies of parking in the shared lot and leave the car closest to the entrance, blocking someone in. I prop Dad on the couch with some extra pillows. He asks for a beer. I go to the old half fridge, get a beer, pop off the bottle cap, and guide the misting nozzle to his mouth. We sit together as he sips, and for a moment, I almost enjoy the familiar sensation of his silence.

  “Miscommunication,” Dad says, swallowing. “This is the English word.”

  “What?” I ask. “What did you say?”

  “We were crossed stars.”

  “Who are you talking about, Dad?”

  “Your Mutter. Your Mutter and I.”

  I slap my knee. “You should rest.”

  “But it is a simple thing to say. Miscommunication. It was to happen. We had lost the power of speaking. We became as children.” He turns his bandaged face toward mine. “I would like to explain it to you.”

  “Dad. You don’t need to explain it to me,” I say. “It’s ancient history.”

  “It has long confused me. Love. Opportunity. She said I was unloving. But see where we were. See what we lived with. The society we lived with. A false regime, another country’s puppet. Artificial. Paranoid. Shut. The heart needs inspiration. The heart needs opportunity—”

  “Dad, please. Stop.”

  “You were too jung to know. So I tell you now.”

  “No,” I say. “Nein.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because. That’s why.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I laugh, looking for support from the empty room. “By God, you just had surgery. Where in the hospital paperwork does it say that the patient should recount long and painful stories from the distant past? Stories that nobody—that everybody—Besides, you’re on like twelve different sedatives and I don’t trust you.”

  “I want to say what happened.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t want to know what happened to us?”

  “No.”

  “I felt, in surgery, what if something happened to me? And I leave you alone? But I have made it and I will tell you now.”

  “Nein!” I am shaking. “Ich will es nicht wissen, Daddy. Ich will es nicht hören.”

  “Let me tell you. It’s all right.”

  “Du bist krank. Du bist betrunken.” I clasp my hand over my mouth, glad he cannot see me. I stand and move to the window. The street below is empty. The top corner of the white tenement across the street is sheared by the sun like a dog-eared page. Neither of us speaks.

  Then my father says, hollowly, “We were given one hour to get to Friedrichstrasse…”

  “Enough,” I say. I return to the couch and take away his beer. His hands grope the air for it. “You shouldn’t be drinking this. You’re not making sense.” My voice falls to a whisper. “You’re not making sense.”

  He pushes himself upright. “Son. I see you so seldom.”

  “I know.”

  A long horn sounds from below. We both turn our heads to look.

  “The lot,” Dad says. “You must move your auto.”

  Hey! Hey up there! a female voice cries from outside. Hey, asshole!

  “She must mean me.” I pick up my car keys. “I’ll be back.”

  “No,” Dad says wearily. “You go. Go. Live your life. I’m home now. I only want to sleep. Go, go.”

  I wipe my eyes. “I said I’ll be back. Where’s parking?”

  “Victoria Strasse,” my father says quietly, pressing the gauze against his eyes. “Monday–Wednesday parking on Victoria Strasse.”

  I descend the stairs. Their uneven risers are embedded in my gait. Out the side door. The slap of the storm door. A woman in a dirty minivan eyes me through her side-view mirror, a clove cigarette tilted at an angle between her fingers. I get into Angela’s Firebird and back out.

  I am driving fast. Very fast. I’m back on the Expressway, heading north. I did not find parking on Victoria Strasse. That is, I did not look for parking on Victoria Strasse. I allow the gas pedal to sink to the floor, and veer into the passing lane. Until then, I’ve been hewing to the speed limit like I always do, instinctively afraid of police cars, of anything in ambush. Aerosmith sounds all wrong now and instead I just glare at the road, trying to throw myself forward two hours, to those verdant foothills between Stockbridge and Austerlitz, the anticipation of the New York state line, the anticipation of Angela.

  Come back soon. Promise you’ll come back soon.

  I pretend that I am needed, and that’s why I weave between the lanes of traffic toward the North Shore. I pretend that I’m impervious, that I have no debts, and no future that will ever have a hold on me. I pretend that I’ll never possess anything I can’t afford to lose. I pretend that I’m unstoppable, ignorant of the fact that thirteen years later, I will walk into a sheet of glass that I did not know was there and that glass will be my father. That sheet of glass will be my first life. That sheet of glass will be myself. I am covered in shards.

  Das Ende

  SCHRODER Q&A

  1. What events in your own life led you to write this book?

  My son was about three years old when I started this book. He wasn’t old enough to be as articulate as Meadow, but he said and did a lot of wise things. For some reason, when I realized how much he could actually understand, I started to get nervous. I hoped I was saying or doing the right thing. But no one is entirely “normal,” and occasionally I wondered if what I said and did as a mother wasn’t a little eccentric–nothing as inappropriate as Eric, but you know, on the playground it seems like either you’re doing something questionable as a parent or somebody else is. So I was very interested in exploring what makes a “good p
arent,” how both parent and child get through the crucible of the early years.

  During this same time, my parents separated after forty-four years of marriage. This was a profound disorientation for me. Then, my father–who had been the first and most influential reader of my work, to whom this book is dedicated–fell terminally ill. I moved him up to a hospice home in my town and had to learn how to let him go. Meanwhile, I tried to be cheerful for my son–again, to project a sense of normalcy–but that was getting increasingly harder. Who was I kidding? Anyway, these things end up getting absorbed into the writing of Schroder. The writing heals. Or at least, the writing is a vessel to hold the experience.

  2. What event in the news sparked the particular story you tell in Schroder?

  Several years ago, while I was abroad, I read a short AP article about the Clark Rockefeller case, which had just broken. He was the German con man who posed as a Rockefeller. He was also was the father of a young girl, whom he attempted to kidnap. His particular case is quite interesting, but I never followed the case nor have I read anything about it since. There was only one thing from his case that really inspired me. This con man was by many accounts a loving father, and he called the days with his daughter “the best days” of his life. The story echoed what I was already wondering about parenthood: can a deeply flawed person be a good (or good enough) parent? What does it take? How would we define that?

  3. In Schroder, the bond between a parent and child dictates a lot of the action. What is it about the nature of this bond that drives Erik? Is there a difference between the bond of a mother and a child versus that of a father and a child?

  Yes, I think the parental bond is different between genders because men and woman are different. But I firmly believe that a bond between a father and child can be as strong as that between a mother and child. Maybe not in the infant years, but beyond. Personally, I think it’s really the primary caregiver who knows the child best, whoever feeds and clothes the child and pries sharp objects out of his or her hand (what Eric calls “the relentless being-aware” of the child). For at least a year, Eric is a stay-at-home-dad. He’s not a great one, but for the first time he actually pays attention. Anyone who pays attention to his or her child builds a bond. You can’t help but respect their miniature successes and failures.

  4. Does Erik Schroder truly love his daughter or simply the idea of her?

  Woah. I don’t know. I think that’s a question you could ask of any parent. Eric does think that Meadow is “like him” in certain ways. Parenthood gets just a little bit thornier, I think, when your kid is “like you.” Because at moments you might think he is you, which is distinctly unhelpful to him. There’s a moment late in the novel when Eric suddenly realizes that maybe he wanted to test Meadow, to see if she could stand bad things, like he had to stand bad things when he was a kid. It’s a disturbing and pivotal moment for Eric, when he realizes his narcissism is harming his own child.

  5. What is it about the theme of identity—from our formative years through how we present ourselves as adults—that attracted you as a writer?

  Someone once said to me, “All your books are about identity.” I think so. Who knows why? I had an early and unsettling awareness of the self as a construct. Sadly, I haven’t shaken that. I think we all do a lot of “deciding” who we are; we train ourselves to have certain qualities. But who knows, maybe even then, maybe, some other god-given self shines through, a self that’s better or worse than the one we’re projecting.

  I guess the same thing gets played out in Schroder. Although Erik reinvents himself as Eric, the capable American, he can’t totally transform, not convincingly. His injured German boyhood self slips through. Even Laura begins to see this. Before she ever discovers he’s a fraud, she senses there is something fraudulent about him. So maybe that’s my answer. Maybe there is a “real self” that cannot be renamed or repackaged.

  6. America is a land of opportunity and reinvention. Could Schroder have taken place elsewhere? What is it about the nature of America that allows a boy named Erik Schroder to grow into Eric Kennedy?

  Yes, this is an American story. America has accepted waves of immigrants throughout its history. Sometimes their names were changed by lazy immigration officials and sometimes the immigrants changed their own names. My mother was one of those people. She came to this country from Latvia when she was eleven, was one of the displaced people of World War II. Her childhood was very hard. She didn’t want constant reminders of it, nor her ethnic background. Everyone made fun of her name. You see where this is going…

  A lot of people come to the United States to reinvent themselves. It’s understandable. Of course, Eric does not legalize his name change, and because he’s not a citizen, he’s actually committing fraud by accepting Pell Grants, etc. But for me, the only truly immoral thing he does is lie to Laura. A marriage can’t be built upon a phony life history.

  7. Because Schroder is written as a confession, Eric is a somewhat unreliable narrator. Are there parts of the story we are not privy to because of this?

  Part of a novel’s craft is the hiding and revealing of all the information that the novel touches upon. The order of Eric’s confessions is significant. I might point to the very final chapter. He “hides” this information for a long time. In this scene, we see that Eric’s father attempted to explain his past to him, but Eric refused this attempt. He’s too scared. It’s too buried. Eric becomes more reliable as the book goes on, or at least more honest. Let’s say he’s an unreliable narrator in recovery.

  8. In many ways, Laura’s perspective is absent from the novel. She is a character created out of “negative space.” Why did you decide to keep her voice out of the main narrative? Was it hard to exclude her from the central action of the novel?

  I identify with Laura. Of course, it’s kind of like hamstringing yourself to leave a character you relate to out of a novel. But she’s there. I hope the reader might glean what she thinks of Eric, why she left him, etc., through the tidbits Eric reveals in the service of other things. But the novel isn’t really about why Laura loves or doesn’t love Eric. The novel is a love letter–Eric’s. It’s a long love letter that goes unanswered. I got sad myself writing the end of the letter/novel, when I realized that a “real” Laura probably wouldn’t even read it… Meadow will always remain connected to her dad, if only by blood, but Laura can wash her hands of the whole thing. Grown-ups can divorce each other. Kids can’t divorce their parents.

  9. Given his actions as a husband, father, and a man, how sympathetic did you want Eric to seem to the reader?

  After the first draft of the novel was done, I did a fair amount of listening to trusted readers and even legal advisees, listening for places where I might have gone a little nuts with my own fictional play. I have a dear friend who’s a lawyer, and we went through the draft scene by scene and she pointed out the things Eric does that would “mitigate” the kidnapping charges he’s faced with, and which things would “aggravate” those charges. At times, the law matched the moral barometers of my other readers. These were the same places where the readers said, “that’s unacceptable.” However, I must say that I didn’t want to write a book about which there would be consensus. I mean, I’m not trying to create a character about which easy judgments can be made, or upon which we can all agree. I don’t want to read such books, either. I’m not saying everything’s OK by me when it comes to human behavior. As a reader and a person in the world, I have my own limits for the acceptability or unacceptability of people’s actions. But a good book takes me much further into a moral question than I could go by myself.

  10. What it challenging for you to write in a male voice?

  I don’t think Eric is the “typical” male, but his voice came pretty easily to me. I hope he seems convincing as a man. The men in my life have mentioned that he does. I guess it’s just years of listening to them talk. My husband–who is a very reliable, law-abiding citizen, by the way–is really hon
est about men and male psychology. I think he let me into some of the secrets of the brotherhood.

  11. How did you bring six-year-old Meadow to life, particularly since the reader only sees her through the eyes of her father?

  Meadow initially felt like a dream to me, very abstract. But she grew as the book went along. I started to feel her stoicism. She took shape. Also, here and there, I stole lines of dialogue from my son. For example, he once defined “the soul” as the thing that “keeps the body up.” I could never have come up with that myself.

  12. Why did you choose to use footnotes in your novel? Why not reveal these things in the body of the text?

  Eric likes to digress, and occasionally show off his esoteric and maybe useless knowledge. For a while, I let him do this whenever he wanted. Then I realized that that’s exactly what footnotes are, places where the scholarly self can qualify and digress. The footnotes show Eric’s second, shadow consciousness as he’s writing. At first, that second consciousness tries to be all academic and cool. He uses the footnotes ironically to discuss theories of silence. He’s detached from his personal story, or at least he’s trying to seem like he is. But gradually, the footnotes turn personal. He stops talking about silence theory in the abstract and begins to talk about himself. The footnotes start to be anti-footnotes. He tries to keep them down, tries to minimize them, but occasionally they are the most honest things he says. The footnotes are just another facet to show Eric’s struggle, which is the struggle to tell the truth, the struggle to tell a true story.

  13. The language in Schroder is often beautiful and poetic and sometimes at odds with the story you are telling. What is it about the use of particular language that aids in the telling of a story?

  I was just debating with some students about whether the use of a “fancy prose style” makes a narrator seem more or less reliable. I think probably less. But I don’t come at writing that way. Any poetic lurches are born out of my writing mind, the mind that’s deep in concentration and imagination. John Updike once said that it is the responsibility of every writer to try and convey how the world “hits his or her nerves.” I think the poetic language in this book and my previous books is my attempt to convey the same.