What I Loved

  I called Bill and Violet but heard only Bill's soft voice telling me to leave a message. I asked them to call me immediately when they came in. Then I called Lucille, whom I hadn't spoken to since her reading. As soon as she answered the phone, I launched into the story. When I finished talking, she was silent for at least five seconds. Then, in a small, toneless voice, she said, "How can you be sure it was Mark?"

  I raised my voice. "The pin number. He asked about my birthday! Most people use their birthdays! And the dates! The dates all correspond to his visits. He's been robbing me blind for months! I can go to the police! Mark's committed a crime. Don't you understand?"

  Lucille was silent.

  "He's stolen nearly seven thousand dollars from me!"

  "Leo," Lucille said firmly. "Calm down."

  I was not calm, I told her, and I didn't want to be calm, and if for some reason Mark arrived at her house without paying his regular visit to mine first, she was to seize the card immediately.

  "But what if he didn't take it?" she said in the same unruffled voice.

  "You know he did!" I howled, and I slammed the receiver into its cradle. I regretted my anger at Lucille almost immediately. She hadn't stolen money from me. She didn't want to condemn Mark without real proof. What seemed clear to me wasn't obvious to her, and yet when Lucille's cool, detached voice met my anger, it was like throwing gasoline on a fire. Had she expressed shock, pity, even dismay, I wouldn't have yelled.

  Less than an hour later, Mark knocked at my door. When I opened it, he smiled at me and said, "Hi. How's it going?" Then he paused and said, "What's the matter, Uncle Leo?"

  "Give me my card," I said to him. "Give me my card right now."

  Mark squinted at me with a puzzled expression. "What are you talking about? What card?"

  "Give me my ATM card right this minute," I said, "or I'll get it myself." I waved my fist in his face, and he took two steps backward.

  He looked very surprised. "You're crazy, Uncle Leo. I don't have your card. Even if I did, what would I do with it? Calm down."

  Mark's handsome face and startled eyes, his dark curls and relaxed, unresponsive body seemed to invite violence. I grabbed him by his silver Lurex sweater and pushed him against the wall. Four inches taller, forty years younger, and certainly stronger than I was, Mark let me push him up against the wall and pin him there. He said nothing. His body was as limp as a rag doll's.

  "Take out the card right now," I grunted at him through clenched teeth, "and hand it over. I swear if you don't, I'll beat you bloody."

  Mark continued to look at me with an expression of blank amazement. "I don't have it."

  I shook my fist in his face. "This is your last chance."

  Mark reached for his back pocket, and I let go of him. He pulled out a wallet, opened it, and slipped out my blue card. "I was tempted to take your money, Uncle Leo, but I swear I didn't use it. I didn't take a penny."

  I backed away from him. The boy is mad, I thought. A sensation of awe passed through me, old awe, the awe of childhood fears, of monsters and witches and ogres in the dark. "You've been stealing from me for months, Mark. You've taken almost seven thousand dollars of my money."

  Mark blinked. He looked uncomfortable.

  "It's all recorded. Every withdrawal is on paper. You stole my card on Saturday after I had gone to the bank and then returned it Sunday morning. Sit down!" I yelled.

  "I can't sit. I told Mom I would come home early today."

  "No," I said. "You're not going anywhere. You've committed a crime. I can call the police and have you arrested."

  Mark sat down. "The police?" he said in a small puzzled voice.

  "You must have known that, stupid and absentminded as I am, eventually I would find out. I mean, this isn't a few quarters."

  Mark turned to stone before my eyes. Only his mouth moved. "No," he said. "I didn't think you'd find out."

  "You knew that money was for my trip to Madrid. What did you think would happen when I went to take it out to pay for my airline tickets and the hotel?"

  "I didn't think about that."

  I couldn't believe it. I refused to believe it. I badgered, pushed, and interrogated him, but he only gave me the same dead answers. He was "embarrassed" that I had discovered the theft. When I asked him if he had used the money for drugs, he told me with apparent candor that he could get drugs for free. He bought things, he said. He went to restaurants. Money goes fast, he explained to me. His answers struck me as outlandish, but I now believe that the frozen person sitting on that chair was telling me the truth. Mark knew that he had stolen money from me, and he knew that it had been wrong to do it, but I am also convinced that he felt no guilt and no shame. He could offer no rational explanation for the stealing. He was not a drug addict. He wasn't in debt to anyone. After an hour, he looked at me and said flatly, "I took the money because I like having money."

  "I like having money, too," I screamed at him. "But I don't rob my friends' bank accounts to get it."

  Mark had nothing more to say on the subject. He didn't stop looking at me, however. He kept his eyes on mine, and I looked into them. Their clear blue irises and shining black pupils made me suddenly think of glass, as if there were nothing behind those eyes and Mark were blind. For the second time that afternoon, my anger changed to awe. What is he? I asked myself—not who, but what? I looked at him and he looked at me until I turned away from those dead eyes, walked to the telephone, and called Bill.

  The next morning Bill offered me a check for seven thousand dollars, but I refused it. I told him it wasn't his debt. I said that Mark could pay me back over the years. Bill tried to push the check into my hand. "Leo," he said, "please." His skin looked gray in the light from my window, and he smelled strongly of cigarettes and sweat. He was wearing the same clothes he had had on the night before when he came downstairs with Violet and they listened to the story. I shook my head. Bill started to pace. "What have I done, Leo? I talk to him and talk to him, but it's like he doesn't get it." Bill paced. "We've called Dr. Monk. We're all going to see her again. She wants Lucille there, too. She also asked to see you alone, if you wouldn't mind. We're cracking down on him. He can't go out. No telephone calls. We're going to escort him everywhere—pick him up at the train, walk him home, take him to the doctor. When school's over, he'll live here, get a job, and start paying you back." Bill stopped walking. "We think he's been stealing from Violet, too, from her purse. She doesn't keep track of her money. It took her a long time to catch on, but..." He stopped. "Leo, I'm so sorry." He shook his head and held out his hands. "Your trip to Spain." He closed his eyes.

  I stood up and put my hands on both his shoulders. "You didn't do it, Bill. It wasn't you. Mark stole from me."

  Bill dropped his chin to his chest. "You'd think that if you really love your child, these things couldn't happen." He looked up at me, his eyes fierce. "How did this happen?"

  I couldn't answer him.

  Dr. Monk was a short plump woman with frizzy gray hair, a soft voice, and economical gestures. She began the interview with a simple statement. "I'm going to tell you what I told Mr. and Mrs. Wechsler. Children like Mark are difficult to cure. It's very hard to get through to them. After a while, their parents usually give up on them, and they go out into the world alone, where they either pull themselves together, land in prison, or die."

  Her bluntness shocked me. Prison. Death. I muttered something about trying to help him. He was still young, still young.

  "It's possible," she said, "that his personality isn't fixed yet. You understand that Mark's problems are characterological."

  Yes, I thought. It's a question of character. Such an old word—character.

  I talked about my anger, about feeling betrayed and the uncanny effect of Mark's charm. I mentioned the fire and the doughnuts. Through the window in the room I could see a small tree that had begun to leaf. The broken knots on its long branches would later become large blooms. I had forgotten the name of the
tree. I looked at it in silence after telling her about the friendship between Matt and Mark and continued to stare at it, searching for its identity as though its name were important. Then it came to me: hydrangea.

  "You know," I said to her, "I think that before his death, Matthew withdrew from Mark. When I remember it now, they were very quiet with each other in the car on the way to camp, and then in the middle of the ride, Matt said loudly, 'Stop pinching me.' It seemed so ordinary then—boys irritating each other." The pinch led to the bite, and when I finished the story, Dr. Monk raised her eyebrows and her eyes sharpened.

  She didn't say anything about the bite, and I kept talking. "I told Mark about my father's family," I said. "I hardly remember them. I never even met my cousins. They died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. My Uncle David survived, the lager but died during the march out of the camp. I told him about my father's death from a stroke. When he listened to me, his face was so serious. I think there might have been tears in his eyes ..."

  "It isn't something that you tell many people."

  I shook my head and looked at the hydrangea tree. I felt lost to myself at that moment, as though another person were speaking. I kept my eyes on the tree, and there was something red in my mind, very red through a window.

  "Do you know why you chose to tell Mark?"

  I turned to her and shook my head.

  "Did you tell Matthew?"

  My voice shook. "I told Mark much more. Matt was only eleven when he died."

  "Eleven is very young," she said gently.

  I began to nod, and then I wept. I cried in front of a woman I didn't know at all. After I left her, I wiped my face in her small neat bathroom with its bountiful supply of Kleenex and imagined all the people who had been there before me, wiping away their tears and snot beside the toilet. When I walked outside the building on Central Park West, I looked across at the trees that had burst into full leaf and had a sensation of ineffable strangeness. Being alive is inexplicable, I thought Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.

  A week later, Mark signed a contract in front of me, Violet, and Bill. The document was Dr. Monk's idea. I think she hoped that by agreeing to conditions laid down in black-and-white, Mark would be drawn into an understanding that morality is finally a social contract, a consensus about basic human laws, and that without it, relations among people degenerate into chaos. The paper read like an abbreviated, individualized version of the Ten Commandments:

  I will not lie.

  I will not steal.

  I will not leave the house without permission.

  I will not talk on the telephone without permission.

  I will repay in full the money I stole from Leo out of my allowance money, the money I will earn this summer, next year, and into the future.

  I still have my copy among my papers. At the bottom is Mark's signature scrawled in a childish hand.

  Every Saturday throughout the summer, Mark arrived at my door with his payment. I didn't want him in my apartment, so he remained in the hallway while he opened the envelope and counted the bills into my hand. After he was gone, I recorded the amount in a small notebook I kept on my desk. Mark paid me from the earnings he made as a cashier at a bakery in the Village. Bill walked him to work every morning, and at five o'clock Violet picked him up. Every day she asked his boss how Mark was doing, and the response was always the same. "He's doing fine. He's a good kid." Mr. Viscuso must have pitied Mark for having such an over-protective mother. Other than his family, me, and his coworkers, the only person Mark saw was Lisa. She came to visit him two or three times a week, often carrying a book under her arm for Mark to read. Violet told me that these volumes usually came from the pop-psychology shelves of local bookstores and were filled with prescriptions for "inner peace" that included exhortations to the reader such as "Learn to love yourself first" and "Fight the underground beliefs that keep you from being your best, happiest self." Lisa had signed on to the cause of Mark's reformation, and she spent many hours with him explaining the path to enlightenment. According to Violet, when Mark wasn't working, eating, or communing with Lisa about the tranquillity of his soul, he was sleeping. "That's all he does," she said, "sleep."

  In late August, Bill flew to Tokyo to prepare for a show of the doors. Violet stayed home with Mark. At nine o'clock on the Thursday morning after Bill left, Violet came downstairs to my apartment wearing her bathrobe. "Mark's gone," she said as she walked into the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with me.

  "He left through the window, took the fire escape to the roof, and then walked down the stairs to the front door. I thought the roof door was locked, but when I checked this morning, I found it open. I think he's been doing it all along, but usually he comes back before morning. He sleeps and sleeps because he's exhausted from being out all night. I never would've known," she said quietly, "but the phone rang at around two o'clock last night. I don't know who it was. Some girl. She wouldn't tell me her name, but she asked me if I knew where Mark was, and I said he was sleeping and I wouldn't wake him. She said, 'The hell he is. I just saw him.' There was a lot of noise in the background, probably a club. Then she said that she wanted to help me out. 'You're his mother,' she said. 'You ought to know.' It's funny, I didn't say I wasn't his mother. I just listened. Then she said she had to tell me something." Violet took a big breath and sipped the coffee. "It might not be true, but the girl said that Mark is with Teddy Giles every night. She said, 'The She-Monster's out of its cave,' but I didn't know what she was talking about. I tried to interrupt her, but she just rushed on, saying that Giles had bought a boy in Mexico."

  "Bought?" I said.

  "That's what she said, that the boy's parents sold him to Giles for a few hundred dollars and that after that, the boy fell in love with Giles, that Giles dressed him up as a girl and took him everywhere for a while. Her story was pretty confused, but she said that one night they had a fight and Giles cut off the boy's little finger. Giles then took the boy to an emergency room and had the finger sewn back on, but not long after that, the kid, Rafael, disappeared. She said that there are rumors going around that Giles murdered him and threw his body into the East River. 'He's a maniac,' she said. 'And he's got his claws in your kid. I just thought you oughta know.' Those were her exact words. Then she hung up."

  "Have you told Bill?"

  "I've tried. I left messages at his hotel, but not urgent ones. What's the poor guy going to do from Tokyo?" Violet looked thoughtful. "The problem is, I'm afraid."

  "Well, if any of this is remotely true, you have reason to be. Giles is a frightening person."

  Violet opened her mouth as if to speak, but then she closed it. She nodded and turned her head away from me, and I admired her neck and profile. She's still beautiful, I thought, maybe more beautiful now that she's older. She and her face have a new harmony that didn't used to be there when she was young.

  Mark showed up at his mother's house the following Sunday. According to Bill and Violet, he insisted that he had never left the house before, declared the story about Rafael "total B.S." and explained that he had run off to see some friends because he had been "bored." A week later, he was back at his mother's house, going to school. Every Friday, either Bill or Violet picked him up at the train, took him on the subway to Dr. Monk's for his therapy, waited for him, and then escorted him back to Greene Street. His imprisonment at home continued.

  In the months that followed, Mark's behavior fell into a recognizable pattern I began to call "the rhythm of dread." For weeks at a time, he appeared to do well. He produced A and B work in school, was cooperative, helpful, and kind, and paid me weekly out of his allowance money. Bill and Violet reported that their long talks with him about trust, honesty, and abiding by the contract seemed to be helping him "stay on track." He unburdened himself to Dr. Monk, who was pleased with his "progress." And then, just at the moment when the people around him had been lulled into a feeling of ca
utious optimism, Mark would burst into flames. In October, Violet found his bed empty in the middle of the night and all the cash in her purse missing. He reappeared Sunday morning. In November, his stepfather, Philip, noticed a large dent in his car before he went to work. In December, Bill took Mark to lunch in the neighborhood. After they had ordered hamburgers, Mark excused himself to go to the bathroom; he showed up three days later at Lucille's. In February, Mark's history teacher found him vomiting in the boys' toilet, a liter of vodka in his backpack and Valium pills in his pocket.

  Every incident played itself out according to the same master script. First, the unhappy discovery; second, the injured person's explosion; third, Mark's reappearance and fervent denials. Yes, he had absconded, but he hadn't really done anything wrong. He had walked around the city. That was all. He needed to be alone. He hadn't taken Philip's car out in the middle of the night. If there was a dent in the door, somebody else must have stolen the station wagon. Yes, he had run from the house that night, but he hadn't stolen money. Violet was mistaken. She must have spent it or miscounted. Mark's indignant assertions of his innocence were astoundingly irrational. Only when he was presented with positive proof did he admit guilt. In hindsight, Mark's actions were nauseatingly predictable, but not one of us was looking back then, and although his behavior ran in cycles, we weren't clairvoyant. The day of an uprising couldn't be foretold.

  Mark had become an interpretive conundrum. It seemed to me that there were two ways to read his behavior, both of which involved a form of dualism. The first was Manichaean. Mark's double life resembled a pendulum that swung between light and dark. A part of him truly wanted to do well. He loved his parents and his friends, but at regular intervals he was overwhelmed by sudden urges and acted on them. Bill firmly believed in this version of the story. The other model for Mark's behavior might be compared to geological layers. The so-called good impulses were a highly developed surface that largely disguised what lay underneath. Every so often, the restless, quaking forces below would make a sudden volcanic push toward the surface and erupt. I began to think that this was Violet's theory, or more precisely that this was the theory she feared.