Sunlight sat flatly in the room. Helen looked at the bowl of lemons, at the magazines the chambermaid had fanned out on the table. She looked at her husband, who was leaning forward now on the edge of the bed, and saw the crumpled moistness of his golf shirt. She was about to say, reaching her arm toward him, Oh, honey, let’s try and relax, let’s try and still have a good time while we’re here. But when he turned to her, such different contortions seem to grip him that she thought if she passed this man on the sidewalk she might not have known it was Jim. She dropped her arm.
Jim stood up. “He said that to me, Helen.” His face, unnatural-looking and imploring, gazed at her. He crossed his arms then, his hands touching his opposite shoulders, their private sign language of many years—and Helen either could not, or would not (she never knew which), but she did not stand and go to him.
8
It was absolutely true: Bob was useless. He sat on Susan’s couch without moving. “You’ve always been useless,” Susan had shouted before she drove off. The poor dog came and shoved her long nose under Bob’s knee. “It’s okay,” he murmured, and the dog lay down at his feet. His watch said it was midmorning. He made his way carefully to the back porch, where he sat on the steps and smoked. His legs would not stop shaking. A gust of wind sent the yellow leaves of the Norway maple to the ground and then toward the porch. Bob put his cigarette out on the moving leaves, scraped them with his foot while his leg shook, then lit another cigarette. A car slowed by the driveway and pulled in.
The car was small and not new, and low to the ground. The woman behind the wheel seemed tall, and when she opened the door she had to give herself a good hoist to get out. She was about Bob’s age and had glasses slipping down her nose. Her hair, different shades of dark blond, was messily pulled back with a clip, and her coat was full and kind of a tweedy black-and-white. She had a familiarity to her that Bob sometimes felt when he saw people from Maine.
“Hi,” she said. She pushed her glasses up her nose as she walked toward him. “I’m Margaret Estaver. Are you Zachary’s uncle? No, no, don’t stand up.” To his surprise she sat down on the step next to him.
He put out his cigarette and offered his hand. She shook it, though it was awkward, seated as they were beside each other. “Are you a friend of Susan’s?” he asked.
“I’d like to be. I’m the Unitarian minister. Margaret Estaver,” she added again.
“Susan’s at work.”
Margaret Estaver nodded as though she had thought that might be true. “Well, I imagine she doesn’t want to see me anyway, but I thought—I thought I’d just come on over. She’s probably pretty upset.”
“Yuh. She is.” Bob was reaching for another cigarette. “Do you mind—I’m sorry—”
She waved a hand. “I used to smoke.”
He lit the cigarette, drew his knees up, and put his elbows on them so she wouldn’t see that his legs were shaking. He blew the smoke away from her.
“It came to me very clearly this morning,” Margaret Estaver said. “I should extend myself to Zachary and his mother.”
He looked at her, squinting. Her face had a liveliness to it. “Well, I’ve messed things up more,” he confessed. “A Somali woman thinks I tried to run her over.”
“I heard.”
“You did? Already?” Fear roared through him again. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I really didn’t.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“I called the police to report it. I spoke to a cop I went to high school with, not Gerry O’Hare, I went to school with him too, but Tom Levesque; he was on duty down at the station when I called. He said not to worry about it.” (In fact Tom Levesque had said the Somalis were whackjobs. “Forget it,” Tom said. “They’re jumpy as shit. Forget it.”)
Margaret Estaver stretched her feet out, crossed them at the ankle. She wore backless clogs, dark blue, her socks were dark green. The image settled on Bob’s eye quietly as he heard her say, “The woman said you didn’t hit her, just that you tried. She’s not filing charges, so that’s the end of it. A lot of people in the Somali community are distrustful of authorities, as you can imagine. And of course they’re feeling pretty sensitive right now.”
Bob’s legs were still shaking. Even his hand was shaking as he put the cigarette to his mouth.
Margaret’s voice continued. “I heard Susan’s been raising Zachary alone for a few years. My mother raised me alone, and it’s not fun, I know that.” She added, “A lot of the Somali women are raising their children without fathers, too. But they tend to have a lot more than one child, and they tend to have sisters or aunts. Susan seems very alone.”
“She is.”
Margaret nodded.
“She said there’s going to be a rally.”
Margaret nodded again. “In a few weeks, after Ramadan. A demonstration of support for tolerance. In the park. We’re the whitest state in the country, I guess you probably know that.” Margaret gave a little sigh and pulled her knees up, leaning forward to hug them; the gesture was youthful and natural, and somehow surprising to Bob. She turned her head to glance at him. “As you can imagine we’re a little behind in the diversity field.” Her voice had a slight Maine accent, a dry wryness that he recognized.
Bob said, “Well, Zachary’s not a monster, but he’s a sad kid. Boy, there’s no doubt about that. Do you have children?”
“No.”
She’s gay. Women ministers. This was Jim’s voice in his head.
“Me neither.” Bob put his cigarette out. “Wanted to, though.”
“Me too. Always. Expected to.”
Awkward. Jim’s sarcastic voice.
Margaret said, a lift of energy in her tone now, “I don’t want Susan thinking the demonstration’s against her or Zachary. I’m a little concerned how some of the clergy here are getting that mixed up, the ‘against’ stuff. Against violence, against intolerance of religious differences. And they’re right. But the law is there to condemn. The ministry should uplift. Speak out, of course. But uplift. How corny is that?”
Corny.
“I don’t think it’s corny,” Bob said.
Margaret Estaver stood up, and Bob thought the word overflowingness as he took in her messy hair and big coat. He stood as well. She was tall but he was taller, and he saw the gray roots of her streaked dark blond hair as she bent her head to reach into her pocket. She gave him a card. “Seriously,” she said. “You call anytime.”
Bob stood for a long time on the back steps. Then he went inside and sat in the cold living room. He thought of Mrs. Drinkwater saying that Zach cried. He thought of Susan yelling. And he thought he should not leave. But darkness rolled through him. You incompetent mental case.
When the man on the phone told him how much it would cost to take a taxi all the way from Shirley Falls to the Portland airport, Bob said he didn’t care. “As soon as you can,” Bob said. “The back door. I’ll be standing right there.”
Book Two
1
The colors of Central Park were quietly fall-like: the grass a faded green and the red oaks bronzed, the lindens changing to gentle yellow, the sugar maples losing their orangey leaves, one floating here, another falling there, but the sky was very blue and the air warm enough that the windows of the Boathouse were still open at this late afternoon hour, the striped awnings extending over the water. Pam Carlson, seated at the bar, gazed out at the few boats being rowed, everything slow-motion-seeming, even the bartenders, who worked with unhurried steadiness, washing glasses, shaking martinis, sliding their wet hands over their black aprons.
And then—like that—the place filled up. Through the door they came, businessmen shedding their jackets, women flipping back their hair, tourists moving forward with slightly stunned looks, the men holding backpacks that carried a bottle of water in a netted pocket on the side, as though they had hiked a mountain all day, their wives holding a map, a camera, the conferring of their confusion.
“No, my
husband’s sitting there,” Pam said when a German couple started to move the tall chair beside her. She put her handbag on the chair. “Sorry,” she added. Years of living in New York had taught her many things: how to parallel park, for example, or intimidate a taxi driver who claimed to be off-duty, how to return merchandise that was supposedly nonreturnable, or to say without apology “This is the line” when someone tried to cut ahead at the post office. In fact, living in New York, Pam thought, poking through her bag for her cell phone to check the time, was a perfect example of what great generals had understood throughout history: that the person who cared the most won. “A Jack Daniel’s on the rocks with lemon,” she told the bartender, tapping the counter next to her untouched glass of wine. “For my husband. Thanks.”
Bob was always late.
Her real husband would not be home for hours, and the boys were at soccer practice. None of them cared that she was meeting Bob. “Uncle Bob,” her kids called him.
Pam had come straight from the hospital where she worked twice a week as an intake assessor, and she’d have liked to go and wash her hands now but if she got up the Germans would take her seat. Her friend Janice Bernstein—who had dropped out of medical school years ago—said Pam should wash her hands the minute she left work; hospitals were just petri dishes of bacteria, and Pam agreed completely. In spite of her frequent use of hand-sanitizing lotion (which dried the skin), the thought of this vast array of waiting germs made Pam very anxious. Janice said that Pam was very anxious about too many things, she really should try to control it, not just to be more comfortable but because her anxiety caused her to appear socially eager, and that was not cool. Pam replied that she was too old to worry about being cool, but in fact she did worry about it, and that’s one reason it was always nice to see Bobby, who was so uncool as to inhabit—in Pam’s mind—his own private condominium of coolness.
A pig’s head. Jesus.
Pam shifted on her chair, sipped her wine. “Could you make that a double?” Pam asked, after studying the glass of whiskey set down. Bob had sounded dismal on the telephone. The bartender took back the whiskey, returned to set it down again. “Start a tab, yes,” said Pam.
Years ago—when she was married to Bob—Pam had worked as a research assistant to a parasitologist whose specialty was tropical diseases. Pam had spent her days in a lab looking through an electron microscope at the cells of Schistosoma, and because she loved facts the way an artist would love color, because she experienced a quiet thrill at the precision science aimed for, she had loved the days she’d spent in that lab. When she heard on the television about the incident in Shirley Falls, saw the imam walking away from the storefront mosque on a downtown street that looked terribly deserted, all sorts of feelings flooded her, not the least being an almost out-of-body nostalgia for a town that had once been familiar to her, but also—and almost immediately—a concern for the Somalis. She’d right away looked into it: Yes, those refugees who came from the southern regions of Somalia had showed Schistosoma haematobium eggs in their urine, but the bigger problem was—not surprisingly to Pam—malaria, and before they were allowed to come to the United States they were given a single dose of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine for malaria parasitemia, and also albendazole for intestinal parasite therapy. What concerned Pam more, though, was learning that the Somali Bantu—a darker-skinned group, apparently shunned in Somalia, having come there as slaves from Tanzania and Mozambique a couple of centuries before—showed a much higher rate of schistosomiasis and, according to what Pam had read from the International Organization for Migration, also serious mental health problems of trauma and depression. The Somali Bantu, the Organization said, had certain superstitions: They might burn the skin of areas affected by disease, or pull out the baby teeth of a small child with diarrhea.
Part of what Pam felt when she read that was what she felt now remembering it: I am living the wrong life. It was a thought that made no sense. It’s true she missed the smells of a lab: acetone, paraffin, alcohol, formaldehyde. She missed the swoosh of a Bunsen burner, the glass slides and pipettes, the particular and deep concentration of those around her. But she had twin boys now—with white skin, perfect teeth, no burn marks anywhere—and lab work was a life of the past. Still, the variety of problems, parasitological and psychological, of this refugee population made Pam feel homesick for whatever life she was not having, a life that would not feel so oddly wrong.
These days life was her townhouse, her boys and their private school, her husband, Ted, who ran the New Jersey office of a large pharmaceutical company and so had a reverse commute, her part-time job at the hospital, and a social life that required seemingly endless deliveries from the dry cleaners. But Pam was often homesick. For what? She could not have said, and it made her ashamed. Pam drank more wine, looked behind her, and there stepping through the foyer of the Boathouse bar was dear Bob, like a big St. Bernard dog. He could have been wearing a wooden cask of whiskey around his neck, ready to paw through the autumn leaves to get someone out. Oh, Bobby!
“You would think,” she confided, nodding toward the Germans, who had only now stopped hovering nearby, “that after starting two world wars they wouldn’t be so pushy.”
“That’s the dumbest thing ever,” Bob said pleasantly. He was watching his whiskey, swirling it slowly. “We’ve started lots of wars and we’re still pushy.”
“Exactly. So you just got back last night? Tell me.” With her head ducked toward his, she listened carefully, was transported back to the town of Shirley Falls, where she had not been in many years. “Oh, Bobby,” she said sadly, more than once, as she listened.
Finally she straightened up. “By God.” She got the bartender’s attention, indicated another round. “Okay. First of all: Can I ask a stupid question? Why did he do this?”
“Very good question.” Bob nodded. “I don’t know what’s behind it. He seems so amazed that it turned out to be serious. Honestly, I don’t know.”
Pam tucked her hair behind her ear. “All right. Well, second of all, he needs to be on medication. He’s crying alone in his room? That’s clinical and needs attention. And third of all: Fuck Jim.” Pam’s husband, Ted, did not like her to swear, and the word felt like a well-hit tennis ball as it left her mouth. “Just fuck Jim. Fuck. Him. I would say the Wally Packer trial spoiled him, but I thought he was an asshole before that.”
“You’re right.” There was no one else Bob would allow to say that about Jim. But Pam had standing. Pam was family, his oldest friend. “Did you just snap your fingers at that bartender?”
“I moved my fingers. Relax. So you’re going back up there for this demonstration?”
“I don’t know yet. Zach worries me. Susan said he was scared beyond reason in that holding cell and she doesn’t even know what a holding cell looks like. I think I’d die in a holding cell, and you take one look at Zach and realize he’s less equipped.” Bob put his head back as he drank from his whiskey glass.
Pam tapped her finger on the bar. “Wait. So could he go to jail for this?”
Bob opened his hand upward. “I don’t know. The problem could be with the civil rights woman in the state AG’s office. I did a little research today. Her name’s Diane Dodge. She joined the AG’s office a couple years ago after doing civil rights work in all the right places, and she’s probably gung ho. If she decides to go ahead with a civil rights violation and Zach’s found guilty of it, screws up on any of the conditions, then he could go to jail for up to a year. It’s not impossible, is what I’m saying. And who knows what the Feds will do. I mean, it’s nuts.”
“Won’t Jim know the woman in the AG’s office? He’d know someone there.”
“Well, he knows the AG, Dick Hartley. Diane Dodge sounds too young to have been there with him. I’ll find out when he gets home.”
“But Jim got along well in that office.”
“He was headed right to the top.” Bob shook his glass and the ice cubes rattled. “Then Mom died and he
couldn’t leave the state fast enough.”
“I remember. It was weird.” Pam pushed her wineglass forward and the bartender filled it.
Bob said, “Jim can’t go barging in, pulling strings with Dick Hartley, though. That’s just not an option.”
Pam was rummaging around in her handbag. “Yeah. Still. If anyone can pull strings it’s Jim. They won’t even know their strings are being pulled.”
Bob drank the last of his whiskey and pushed the glass toward the bartender, who placed a new one before him. “How are the kids?”
Pam looked up, her eyes softened. “They’re great, Bob. I suppose in another year or so they’ll hate me and get pimples. But right now they’re the sweetest, funniest boys.”
He knew she was holding back. He and Pam had worn themselves down trying for kids, putting off going to a doctor for years (as though they had known it would be the end of them), agreeing in vague conversations that getting pregnant should happen naturally and would, until Pam—her anxiety increasing monthly—suddenly said that such thinking was provincial. “There’s a reason it’s not happening,” she cried. Adding, “And it’s probably me.” Not having his wife’s inclination toward science, Bob had silently agreed, only because this aspect of women seemed to him more complicated than issues for men, and in Bob’s imprecise imaginings he pictured Pam going in for a tune-up, tubes cleared, the rest cleaned, as though ovaries could be polished.
But it was Bob.
Immediately, this made—and still made—devastating sense to him. When he was small he had heard his mother say, “If a couple can’t conceive, then God knows what He’s doing. Look at crazy Annie Day, adopted by well-intentioned people”—raising her eyebrows—“but they sure weren’t made for parenthood.” Oh, that’s ludicrous! Pam had shouted this many times during those months they were trying to get used to it: Bob not being able to reproduce. Your mother was smart, Bob, but she wasn’t educated, and that’s just magical thinking, it’s ludicrous, crazy Annie Day was crazy from the start.