The boys nodded and smiled wanly, yes the party had been fun, yes the presents were okay, but their apprehensive mood was not so easily dispelled. Joel said shyly, “I guess that letter had bad news, Daddy?” and Kenny said, with childish vehemence, “Mommy made us bring it to you, Daddy—it wasn’t us. “Joel joined in, nodding vigorously. “It wasn’t us.” Both boys’ knees bobbed and quivered beneath the bedclothes.
Michael said, “Oh no, guys—not at all. The letter had good news, really. Very good news. But, to Mommy, maybe, it was sort of surprising news.” He hesitated, not wanting to say anything further about Mommy that might, even in playful man-to-man terms, seem critical; even when Gina’s nerves were on edge from the children, and she didn’t trouble to disguise her emotions, Michael took care never to speak a critical word about her in their sons’ hearing. (How he wished that Gina, impetuous quick-tempered Gina, would do as much for him—but that was another story.) He said, “But everything is fine now, guys. Mommy and I are going out but we’ll be home by midnight. Marita is here—you remember Marita, don’t you? You like Marita, don’t you?” The boys nodded wanly. Marita was the latest in a succession of helpers whom Gina hired and oversaw, whose task was to care for Joel and Kenny when their parents were otherwise engaged. Michael scarcely knew her himself.
Michael said, smiling, “Tomorrow is Sunday. We’ll go over to The Islands, maybe, if the weather is nice. Just the three of us, maybe. Okay?” The Islands was a wildlife sanctuary with hiking trails, footbridges linking small islands, canoeing. The boys’ eyes usually widened with excitement at the prospect of being taken there, on a rare outing with their busy father, but, now, their enthusiasm seemed only polite. Kenny jammed a thumb into a corner of his mouth, saying, “Daddy, is Mommy mad at us?” Joel shivered, whining, “Daddy, it wasn’t us, it wasn’t our fault.”
“Of course, nothing has been your fault, and Mommy isn’t mad at anyone, don’t be silly. It’s bedtime. I’ll turn off your light, and”—Michael stooped to the light, but the boys protested shrilly, kicking at their covers.
“Daddy, no!”
“Daddy, don’t!”
“Daddy, don’t go! Daddy—”
“—don’t go yet!”
Michael laughed, startled. “Hush, boys. Joel, Kenny—be good! Hush!”
He gripped the boys’ flailing legs through the covers and held them still. At once, like captive animals, the boys ceased to struggle. Yet they were panting, and their eyes, delicately lashed as Gina’s, and of that same striking seagreen hue as Gina’s, flared up in frightened defiance. Joel asked, “Who is it! Who’s coming to visit next week!” Kenny chimed in, “Daddy, who! Tell us who!”
Michael hesitated. He’d never been a competent liar; in fact, he virtually never lied. It was a matter of principle, but, had it not been principle, it would have been of necessity. As a stammerer learns to avoid syllables that exacerbate his stammer, so Michael had learned, over the years, to avoid occasions that forced him to lie. Yet, now, his two young sons staring avidly up at him, he was at a loss for words.
Finally he said, meaning to end the discussion, “Lee Roy Sears is just a—human being. A man like me. And now it’s bedtime.”
“‘Lee Roy—’”
“—‘Sears’?”
“Is he a bad man?”
“Daddy, is he?”
Michael laughed, exasperated. “I’ve told you no, boys. He is not a bad man. Daddy wouldn’t have anything to do with a bad man, you know that. Where did you get such an outlandish idea?”
The boys giggled, glancing at each other at the same instant; as, in the grip of such a childish mood, they often did. As if their communication with each other were wordless, visceral. As if a single leaping thought galvanized them both.
Kenny sputtered, his thumb jammed deeper into his mouth, “’Cause he’s been in jail.”
Joel said, giggling daringly, “’Cause he killed somebody, I bet!”
Kenny echoed, “I bet, I bet!”
This set them off—giggling, squealing, squirming, kicking off their bedclothes. It took all of their father’s patience to calm them down. “C’mon, c’mon, Joel, Kenny! Be good! Cut it out! You don’t want to behave like silly little babies, do you?—when you’re seven years old?” Michael’s sunburnt face smarted with irritation; he was exasperated; yet there was something of the boys’ mother in their naughty behavior, an undercurrent of puckishness, even of coquetry. And they were such beautiful little boys, with their fair, fine, wavy hair, their big eyes, their perfect skin. Not once in seven years, not even at their rampaging naughtiest, had Michael been able to chastise them with anything more forcible than words.
What Michael most wanted to protect his sons from was physical injury: his own, or another’s, wrath.
Judging that they’d gone far enough for the evening, and that Daddy was serious in his displeasure with them, and maybe, in his own complicated adult way, hurt, Daddy whom they adored and whose love they cherished, the twins decided, in the same instant, to stop being rowdy; to settle down and be good; to listen to Daddy, and believe him, when he said that the man who was coming to visit the next week was not a bad man, and certainly not a murderer, but someone they might like—“At least, you should give him a chance. Isn’t it only fair, Joel, Kenny?—to give Lee Roy Sears a chance?”
Joel and Kenny mumbled, “Yes, Daddy.”
“You’re good boys,” Michael said, with such sudden passion that Joel and Kenny were embarrassed, as they were when their mother cursed in their presence, or burst into tears. “You’re sweet, and you’re kind, and you’re generous, and it’s only fair, isn’t it, to give Lee Roy Sears a chance? A man who, when he was your age, had none of the advantages you have?”
Again they mumbled, in a single voice, “Yes, Daddy.”
Michael briskly adjusted their pillows and disheveled bedclothes, and tucked them in another time, and stooped over them to kiss them, in turn, goodnight. He switched off the bedside lamp but sat with them in the half-light (the bedroom door was open a few inches, a hall light was on) until they fell asleep. It was an old custom of Michael’s, begun when the boys were babies, of which Gina did not approve, to comfort them when they were overly excited or troubled or had wakened from bad dreams. He said, gently, “Everything’s okay. Daddy’s watching over you.”
What difference might it have made in his life, he wondered, had his own father taken the time to sit with him like this, many years ago.
So fastidious was Michael regarding his sons’ feelings, so scrupulous about never betraying the smallest gesture of favoritism, he wasn’t sitting on the edge of one of their beds but on a stool he’d pulled over. He understood that Joel and Kenny, more keenly than ordinary siblings, were aware of such things.
By degrees the boys’ breathing grew rhythmic, regular, deeper. Michael watched their faces as they sank into sleep: their shut eyes, their slightly parted lips, their small perfect noses … He felt a sensation of love so piercing, he could barely contain it.
Yet his old guilt rose in him at such times, like stagnant, lapping water. For he felt that he did not deserve these beautiful young sons, as he did not deserve his beautiful wife. His very happiness, his very identity as Michael O’Meara—he did not deserve.
And why, because he wasn’t worthy of them. Their love and trust. And why wasn’t he worthy of them, why not worthy of their love and trust, because they didn’t know him. They knew nothing of him. If they knew, they would not love him. Still less would they trust him.
Michael’s guilt regarding his sons was obscure, but regarding Gina it was pointed—she’d had a difficult pregnancy, and their marriage had been severely tested. Though he knew it was primitive reasoning, Michael couldn’t help but feel he’d inflicted a dangerous pregnancy upon his unsuspecting wife.
At first, newly pregnant, in the summer of 1983, Gina had been overjoyed. She’d hugged and kissed Michael a dozen times a day; her sarcasm and short temper vanished immediat
ely; like an adoring child she telephoned his office simply to whisper to him, “I love you so.” She’d gone to New York City with her closest Mount Orion friend, Tracey Deardon, to buy maternity clothes at Bloomingdale’s. She’d talked and laughed on the telephone for hours with her mother, her married sisters, old college roommates, while Michael, puzzled, but happy for her happiness, waited for dinner, or sometimes ate alone, forced to think (and the insight had the weight of a profundity!) that, until now, Gina must have felt herself deprived; excluded from the company of women who were truly women.
At first, too, Gina had been radiantly healthy. Her skin lost its porcelain pallor and acquired a warm, rosy glow. Her eyes lost their sharpness, that glisten of sarcasm, and shone. She gained weight in her hips and breasts, and regarded herself with wonder. Eagerly she decorated and furnished the nursery. Eagerly she interviewed potential live-in helpers. (There was no question of Gina taking on the task of baby-rearing by herself.) She studied baby books, nutrition books, popular psychology books. (The Care and Feeding of Expectant Husbands was one amusing title.) Taking Michael with her, she began attending natural childbirth classes at a Mount Orion women’s center. (Michael was enthusiastic about the classes, but Gina quickly lost interest—if childbirth was meant to be natural, why was it such work? Gina’s delivery was to be cesarean, like most of her friends’.)
Once Gina learned that she was pregnant with twins, however, everything changed. Her health. Her attitude toward Michael. She began to suffer the symptoms of classic morning sickness—nausea and vomiting. She had trouble sleeping. She wept at the slightest provocation, or at no provocation at all. Like Michael she’d professed to be overjoyed by the news—the young couple insisted that they were “twice as happy”—but like Michael she was stunned. Twins. Identical twins. Where one baby had been expected. When well-intentioned relatives and friends congratulated the O’Mearas, Gina bit her lips in silence.
When Michael went to embrace her, she pushed him gently but emphatically away. She couldn’t bear to be touched, she told him. Not by anyone.
She contemplated, or terrified Michael by seeming to contemplate, having an abortion.
For Michael, this wretched period ironically marked the first time he became conscious of how he was regarded in Mount Orion. Until then he’d scarcely given it a thought—he wasn’t the kind of person to contemplate his own popularity, his reputation among others. As soon as news of the young couple’s pregnancy made the rounds, however, numerous friends, acquaintances, and business associates congratulated Michael; when it was learned that twins were expected, people laughed, remarking, “How like Michael O’Meara, to father twins!”
Michael was mystified, bemused. Did people consider him a model of virility? A fount of tireless energy?
Gina fled Mount Orion and the white colonial house on Glenway Circle, and, for three terrible weeks, during which time Michael had no choice but to continue with his busy outward life as if nothing were wrong, she stayed with her parents in Philadelphia. Her body was becoming grotesquely misshapen, her beauty swallowed in sallow, puffy flesh. She insisted that Michael could not possibly love her since she was loathsome, disgusting; in his place, she could not possibly love herself. What had they done, to bring such misery upon them! “Of course I love you, Gina,” Michael pleaded over the telephone. “I would give up my life for you.” Gina said, weeping helplessly, “I’m giving up my life for me—for this!” In the end Gina allowed Michael to drive to Philadelphia to bring her home, resigned to her fate.
Michael had consulted his mother—was there a history of twins in the family?—her family, or in his father’s? Mrs. O’Meara, wintering in Palm Beach at the time, sounded as far away as the equator, her normally curt, crisp voice yet more impersonal over the telephone, saying, “Michael, pregnancy is always difficult for women, you’ll have to be very understanding about Gina,” and Michael said, “Oh, yes, Mother, I think I have been, I’ve tried to be, I love her desperately and I want to be the best possible husband in these circumstances and the best possible father”—and Mrs. O’Meara said, her voice overlapping with his, “For a woman, having babies seems like the answer to a riddle but, in fact, it turns out to be part of the riddle,” and Michael said, raising his voice because the connection had begun to crackle with static, “Yes, Mother, but what about twins?—is there a history of twins in the family?” and Mrs. O’Meara said, her voice now remote, “I know nothing of twins. I know nothing.” Shortly after, the connection was broken.
In its bloody physicality, childbirth turned out to be less arduous than the months preceding. Gina’s labor began, lasted approximately seven hours, and came to an end. It was Heaven, Gina said. Meaning to be free: to be delivered. Or, euphoric with drugs, and the delight of being presented with two perfect baby boys, one weighing six pounds four ounces, the other six pounds one ounce, Gina found it so. How happy she was, and how happy, and relieved, Michael was! For weeks afterward Gina smiled and smiled, a new dazzling-white lovely smile, as if she were dazed, overwhelmed, yet in bliss. She could not nurse Joel and Kenny and happily gave them up to formula. She could not deal with their crying and happily gave them up to their father or to Rita, the live-in helper. She fussed over them when visitors came, kissed and hugged them, posed to have her picture taken with them, was clearly delighted with them, beautiful little Joel and beautiful little Kenny, yet, when she was out of the house she seemed almost to forget them: it was others who reminded her. How did it feel, Gina O’Meara was repeatedly asked, to be the mother of identical twins?
Gina bared her lovely white teeth in a smile and said, “It feels like Heaven!”
Since that time, as the boys grew, Gina experienced periods of intense satisfaction with motherhood and her place in the world—for, however unfixed her basic identity, she was now a mother, and that was undeniable. She could speak expertly of private schools in the area, pediatricians, children’s clothes, toys, and television programs, and she could respectfully seek advice from older mothers in their Mount Orion circle. She had made her parents proud, doting grandparents. She could bask in her husband’s unstinting adoration (in Mount Orion, Michael O’Meara’s devotion to his wife was much envied by other wives) and feel not the slightest twinge of guilt at sometimes—almost—betraying it.
For Gina, like many beautiful American women, was intensely romantic: which is not to say adulterous, precisely. In their many years of marriage Gina had had no adulterous affair, but she’d had, and fully intended to continue having, romantic friendships.
Alternating with these blissful periods were others less clearly defined, yet unmistakable. So far as Michael could judge, poor Gina simply felt cramped, overwhelmed by the three males in her family—thus short-tempered and prone to sarcasm, wounded feelings, tears, silence. Recalling those terrible weeks (to which, in fact, neither Michael nor Gina ever alluded) when Gina had left him to live in Philadelphia, Michael was careful never to make things worse for Gina: he gave in to her requests readily, and usually cheerfully; he consented to a round of social events, a ceaseless self-perpetuating round, that sometimes left him breathless; he allowed her certain costly indulgences (membership in the prestigious Mount Orion Tennis Club, for instance, and tennis lessons with the resident pro) as if they were but her due as Mrs. Michael O’Meara, which perhaps they were. He may have sensed from time to time her emotional dependency upon her romantic friendships, but really he knew nothing about them, and he never made inquiries. He wasn’t a jealous husband. He was a gentleman to his fingertips. He knew too that Gina was not a physically passionate woman; thus it was unlikely she would ever betray him in that way.
One of the twins stirred in his sleep—Joel, since he was in Joel’s bed. Michael looked to Kenny, and saw, to his relief, that Kenny was sleeping deeply, oblivious of his twin, and of his father sitting a few feet away. In the dim light from the hall, the boys’ faces were angelic, and identical. Michael knew that Joel was a pound or two heavier than Kenny, that
Joel was usually just perceptibly quicker, more impatient than Kenny, that Joel’s hair whorled gently to the left at the crown of his head, while Kenny’s hair whorled gently to the right. They were “mirror twins”—a term their father did not like, and never used. This meant that, though identical to the casual eye, they were yet characterized by subtle asymmetries, mainly facial, so that, standing side by side and slightly facing each other, they gave the impression—eerie, or charming, depending upon your taste—of being a single child contemplating his mirror image.
Now Kenny stirred, sighed, raised his already damp thumb to his mouth, moaned slightly. Michael would have liked to ease the thumb away—seven years old was far too old for thumb-sucking—but he didn’t want to disturb the boy.
It was Kenny, wasn’t it? The little boy sleeping in Kenny’s bed.
(Once in a while, though not often, since Daddy so disapproved, the twins changed places—identities. Just to confuse others. A teacher, some of their little friends. Mommy too, sometimes. She thought it was funny and called them little devils. If Daddy was home, the trick was riskier. If they did it, they had to really do it, and stay with their switched identities for as long as Daddy was around. If he found out, he wouldn’t laugh and scold, like Mommy, he would stare at them as if they had betrayed him, and he would be hurt, and since they loved him they did not want to hurt him, not their Daddy, not hurt. But still, sometimes, it was so funny.)
Since the twins’ birth, the primary factor in the O’Mearas’ marriage was, for Michael, that Gina concur in rearing them as if they were merely brothers, and not twins. For Michael, who believed in the unique worth and dignity of the human soul (and whether God existed to sanction this belief, Michael neither knew nor cared, at age forty), there was something subtly debasing about the very idea of twinness: the duplication of one’s chromosomes in another. Something subtly disturbing about mirror selves. (Michael O’Meara had been less effective than he should have been, as a quarterback on his high school football team, somehow thrown off stride, worried by his own aggression, regarding his opposite number on the opposing team.) Gina hadn’t entirely understood, but she hadn’t opposed Michael in his child-rearing notions, seeing he was, in this instance, adamant, and it gave her pleasure to acquiesce to him in matters that seemed to her insignificant. Therefore, even when they were infants, she dressed Joel and Kenny differently: no cute twin outfits, thank you! Friends and relatives were firmly instructed not to give the boys twin presents, nor even to indulge in “twin talk” with them. Teachers were firmly instructed to treat the boys like individuals and to seat them far apart if they were assigned to the same classroom. Like most normal children, the O’Meara boys took their cues from others’ responses to them, and, so far as Michael O’Meara could determine, these responses were to them as brothers, not as twins. At least, when Michael O’Meara was present.