“How about a quick game of hearts before bed?” I asked. “I’m in disgrace, you know. I lost so badly the last couple of times, I can barely hold my head up.”
“No. I’m beat.”
“One short game?”
“
“All right.”
I stood for a moment, though it was clearly time to leave him alone. The light from his bedside lamp, which I had bought ten years ago, shone on his pale hair and precise, sculpted features. He took after me, but in an idealized way. My own looks, which any mirror told me were rather too severe, had come up softened in him.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night. Sleep well.”
Still I lingered. I could not leave off looking at him, even if he resented me for it. If I’d had the courage I’d have said to him, “Don’t do it. Please don’t start hating me. You can have the world without shutting me out of your life.”
I walked quietly from the room, as full of him as I had been when I was pregnant.
I invited Bobby and his father for dinner the following Tuesday. They arrived half an hour late, with two bottles of wine. “Sorry,” the father said. “We had to drive all over town looking for a decent Chardonnay. I hope you like Chardonnay.”
I told him we loved it.
He wore a goat’s beard, and a mustard-colored jacket with bright brass buttons. His florid face was a riot of broken capillaries. He looked like an older, drunken Bobby.
The father’s name was Burton. He scarcely touched his food when we sat down to eat. He drank wine, smoked Pall Malls, and paused occasionally in these activities to fork up a bit of my poached sole, hold it aloft for a moment or two, and insert it into his mouth with no more notice than a carpenter gives a tenpenny nail.
Ned asked him, “How do you find the kids over at Roosevelt?”
Burt Morrow looked at him uncomprehendingly. I recognized the expression.
“They can be difficult,” he said in a measured voice. “They are not bad kids by and large but they can be difficult.”
After a moment, Ned nodded. “I see.”
“We try to get along,” Burt said. “I try to get along with them. I try not to offend them, and am mostly successful, I believe.” He turned to Bobby and asked, “Would you say that I’m mostly successful?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Bobby said. He looked at his father with an expression neither loving nor disdainful. They shared a certain stunned quality, a way of responding to a question as if it had been posed by some disembodied voice whispering from the ether. They might have been the kindly, dim-witted older brothers in a fairy tale—the ones on whom the charms and enchantments are wasted. Jonathan sat between them, his blue eyes snapping with intelligence.
“That’s all I try to do myself,” I said. “Just stay out of Jonathan’s way and let him experience life. Lord, I wouldn’t know how to discipline. I sometimes still feel like a child myself.”
Both Bobby and his father looked at me with numbly astonished faces.
“I married young, you know,” I said. “I wasn’t but a few years older than these boys are now, and I certainly hadn’t planned on falling in love with a Northerner named Ned Glover, nor on getting myself moved to Ohio, with that Canadian wind blowing sleet up off the lake. Brr. Not that I’d do things any differently.”
Ned winked and said, “I call her Helen of Louisiana. I’m still waiting for a bunch of Southerners to leave a wooden horse on the front lawn.”
Burt lit another cigarette. He let the smoke drift out of his open mouth, and watched it snake its way over the table. “I might do some things differently,” he said. “I think you’d have to say that I would. Yes.”
I was not ignorant of psychology. I knew Jonathan needed to escape from his father and me, to sever the bonds: to murder us, in a sense, and then resurrect us later, when he was a grown man with a life of his own and we had faded into elderly inconsequentiality. I wasn’t blind, or foolish.
Still, it seemed too soon, and Bobby seemed the wrong vehicle. At thirteen we have so many choices to make, with no idea about how consequences can rattle through the decades. When I was thirteen I had consciously decided to be talkative and a little wild, to ensure that my own parents’ silent dinners and their long, bookish evenings—marked only by the chimes of the clock—would have no lasting effect on me. I had been barely seventeen when I met Ned Glover, a handsome, humorous man in his twenties, owner of a Chrysler convertible, full of stories from the North.
That night in bed I said to him, “Well, at least now we know how Bobby comes by it.”
“Comes by what?”
“Everything. His whole personality. Or the mysterious lack thereof.”
“You really can’t stand that kid, can you?” Ned said.
“I don’t bear him any particular malice,” I said. “I just, well, this is an important time in Jonathan’s life. I’m not sure he should be hanging around with a character like that. Do you think Bobby might be a little retarded?”
“Sweetie, the infatuation will wear off. Trust your own kid a little more. We’ve been raising him for thirteen years, we must’ve taught him a thing or two.”
I didn’t speak. What I wanted to say was “I’ve taught him a thing or two; you’ve been holed up in that theater.” But I kept quiet. We lay waiting for sleep. There would be no sexual congress that night. I was miles from the possibility. Still, I thought we had time.
Perhaps I struggled too hard to remain Jonathan’s friend. Perhaps I ought to have distanced myself more. I simply could not believe that the boy with whom I’d played and shared secrets—the achingly vulnerable child who told me every story that entered his head—needed suddenly to be treated with the polite firmness one might apply to a lodger.
Our ongoing game of hearts came to an end, as did our Saturday shopping trips. Bobby continued wearing Jonathan’s blue windbreaker, and started turning up in Jonathan’s shirts as well. When he stayed overnight, he slept in Jonathan’s room on the folding cot. He was consistently cordial to me, in his rehearsed, immigrant’s fashion.
One morning in March I was slicing a grapefruit for breakfast. Jonathan sat alone at the kitchen table, it being one of the mornings Bobby was not with us.
I said, “Looks like a lovely day if you like ducks.”
A moment passed. Jonathan said, “Yes, if yew lack ducks.”
He was mocking my voice, my Southern accent.
I ought to have let the insult pass. I ought simply to have ignored him and served the grapefruit. But instead I turned and asked pleasantly, “What did you say?”
He just smiled as if unutterably pleased with himself.
I asked again, “What did you say, darling? I’m not sure if I heard correctly.”
He stood up and left the house, saying, “Believe I’ll skip break-fuss this mornin’, dahling.” As he walked away that eye stared at me from the back of the jacket.
It happened again in the evening, while we were watching television. That night we did have Bobby. Ned was at the theater, and we were watching a
Jonathan said, “He’s on a five-year mission in deep space. If you were married to him, you’d need a dozen sons to keep you company.”
I might have laughed along like a true sport but I was still too surprised by this new, outright meanness. “I rather thought we kept one another company,” I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Boys like nothing better than to shop and cook.”
Bobby sat on the floor, as was his custom. He objected for some reason to furniture.
He said, “Quit, Jon.”
“All in fun,” Jonathan said.
“Yeah, but quit anyway.”
And so Jonathan quit. He watched the program without further comment. His feet looked huge and rather
