The People in the Trees

  I didn’t have to turn around to see what was happening in the silence; the children’s anxious, excited expressions, their eyes gleeful with anticipation, and Victor’s chin thrust high in the air, the inscrutable expression in his dark hooded eyes.

  I realized in the days that followed that Victor had decided to think he had won a sizable victory against me. Unfortunately, this feeling was shared by some of the younger and more impressionable children; although they did not wish to be humiliated by me as Victor had been, they would engage in games they thought provocative, such as calling Victor Vi in my presence before glancing at me quickly and giggling nervously. I would smile beatifically or ignore them, and they would giggle again, all of which served only to severely undermine the seriousness of Victor’s intent. He would only scowl and turn down his mouth. But soon they too tired of this game.

  When there was need to use his name, I continued to call him Boy, but mostly I did not call him anything at all. In his confusion, he seemed to have become resigned to the name, mostly, I believe, because he could not find a good argument with which to counter it. As long as I did not call him Victor—and, true to my word, I ceased to do so at once, thinking carefully before I spoke to him—he would come when I called, grudgingly and slowly and in fact very much like a dog. (One could always tell which children were squabbling or dissatisfied with him, for they too would call him Boy; to his friends and supporters, though, he was Vi.)

  After a few months, this became quite normal. In fact, many unusual things eventually become normal in a large family, in which a gift for consistent adaptation, not cleverness, is often the best means to survival. Indeed, for a longish stretch of time, life remained locked in its unexciting rhythms: the children went to school and played and fought and ate. Children detested me and others returned to profess their newly discovered love for me. I went to the lab and gave speeches and wrote and published. It was a contented time for all of us.

  Thanksgiving arrived, and a dozen or so of the older children returned to the house with their spouses and children, their bags fat with presents for the current generation: dresses and soccer balls and motorized cars and trinkets from the mall that the children seized in a frenzy as if they had never seen toys before in their lives. That year we had twenty-six of the children at Thanksgiving dinner, as well as eight spouses and eleven grandchildren. Of course they could not all stay with me, even tripled up in the rooms, but they all seemed to spend a great deal of time idling about the house, and I was glad when the holiday was over and they returned to their normal lives and I was able to enjoy the brief week of quiet before it was time to prepare for the Christmas holidays, when the entire production would repeat itself, albeit with many more people. Still, I was eager for Christmas that year, as Owen and his current companion, a thirty-seven-year-old sculptor named Xerxes (whose real name, he had once accidentally revealed, was Shawn Ferdlee—Ferdlee!—Jones), were coming to visit.

  The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is always one of the most unpleasant in the year, and that year was a particularly difficult one. It had always been that there were in the house at least two or three older children to manage the younger ones’ holiday shopping and gift wrapping, and to buy and decorate the Christmas tree the children insisted on, and then to supervise the cleaning and some of the cooking. As it happened, though, that year the oldest children still living at home were Isolde and William, who were both fifteen and therefore not of much use: neither of them knew how to drive, and both of them were still too young to exert any sort of authority over their siblings. The college and graduate students too were of little use; they generally made their appearance the weekend before Christmas, lugging with them garbage bags full of reeking laundry and preferring to spend their time squashed into the sofa, idly flicking through the television channels and sprinkling their dinnertime pronouncements with bits of atrociously accented but confidently delivered German or Spanish and brushing the little ones aside impatiently. Finally I called Ella, who was at university in Washington, and asked if she could come home for the weekend and, as I said vaguely, help out.

  “Oh, I’d love to, Papa,” Ella lied, “but …” And then she detailed a quantity of schoolwork she would have been lucky to complete in three years, much less three weeks. Apparently the brief period of intense, heartfelt gratitude, which often translated directly into compliance, that Ella had experienced after her lachrymose confession had come to an end, without my having benefited from it in the slightest.

  These children of mine, I thought, and not for the first time. But as usual I was uncertain how I dared end my thought.

  And so in the end I was forced to complete the majority of the work on my own. Mrs. Lansing had picked, of all times, the first week in December as the date to have her hysterectomy, which meant that my time at home was quickly filled with all sorts of dreary errands and tasks: I drove to the dreadful mall in Bethesda; I spent thousands of dollars on crackly silver foil wrapping paper, and plastic robots that, with a touch of a button, fired little plastic torpedoes from their arms, and yellow-haired baby dolls with bubbling eruptions of lace at their cloth throats, and scraps of dresses made from shiny, slippery fabrics that smelled of cooked vinyl. There were other errands and chores too, of course—I made heaps of cookie dough, most of which I ended up shaping myself, late at night, dousing the cookies with lashings of glittery colored sugar before burning them in the oven; I had the housecleaner, Mrs. Ma, come three times a week instead of twice, but not an hour after she had left found the house littered with debris and the walls waxy with smears of crayon. I think it is enough to say that I resented spending my time on the many conversations and tasks I was forced to have and do in a day. I was quickly and continually reminded of the wisdom of spending the month occupied with work and conferences (as I had every year previously), and I passed most days wondering why I had chosen to subject myself to such inanities and irritations.

  I suppose part of the reason I stayed home was in anticipation of Owen, whom I was very excited to see; in November we had made up after a significant argument we had had the previous July, and there were moments during the intervening months when I had missed him so purely and profoundly that my chest would feel empty and cavernous. Then there was the fact that of late I had begun to feel very old and very alone, as well as exhausted, and I craved the companionship of someone who had known me earlier in my life, when I was unfettered and the only responsibilities facing me were my own. Sometimes I would look at Eloise, the youngest child, and feel a sort of despair. Oh god, I would think, what have I been playing at? In those moments I would suddenly see myself as a fraud, a charlatan whose joke had gone too far without his even realizing it. I would look at the children clustered around the table, eating and eating and eating, and suddenly find the scene both repulsive and unnatural. It was not the first time I had been struck by the fundamental absurdity, the excess, of the situation I had brought on myself, but it was the first time such feelings had been accompanied by such pure, unfiltered despair.

  And then there was another, troubling development, as recently I had found my thoughts returning, again and again, to the boy, and how I had felt when I was with him, and how fervently I had hoped and tried to recapture that sensation, to make that joy part of my daily life—that was why I had brought them here. That was what I had wanted from them. And yet with each one, the feeling of pleasure I craved was ever-briefer, more elusive, more difficult to conjure, and I was lonelier and lonelier, and finally they were evidence only of my losses, of my unanswerable sorrows. Sometimes I wondered—had I adopted them to punish myself? And if so, for what? For Ivu’ivu? For Tallent? It was not a happy speculation, but it was at least logical in its way. Surely I have done this to myself for a reason, I would think; surely this is not for nothing; surely this is not just a folly; surely I have not imprisoned myself with these children as I had once been imprisoned by their parents and uncles and grandfathers, in a place that had t
aken from me everything I had loved. In these moments, I would watch the children dispassionately, almost as if they were monkeys in a lab and I would be able to leave them at the end of the day.

  But of course there was no leaving them. I sometimes had dreams in which I was a traveler stranded in a land densely populated by strange, unknowable creatures. I had a notebook with me in which I recorded the sights I had seen during my travels, but the creatures were hard to describe, and harder still to draw. They were not pleasing, but neither were they beastly. They looked similar, but each had some feature that distinguished him from his brother: one had a great beak, massive and hard and cruel, the pale pink of milky blood, another a set of mud-colored wings that when lifted revealed a gorgeous riot of scarlets and lilacs. They were essentially benign, but sometimes one would jump on my face without provocation, its clumsy claws gripping at my nose, my eyeglasses, and squawk. Their home—which was in one direction a thickly bubbling swamp, in another impregnable forest, its endless columns of trees vanishing into an eggy mist, in another a parched stretch of livid orange dirt—was no less strange or understandable. But what was most notable about the landscape (which was beset with strange cycads, from which hung clumps of bananalike fruits, grossly swollen and smelling of sugar and peat) was its sounds: the air was thick with whoops and cackles and purrs and hoots, all of them so loud that the sounds seemed almost tactile and seemed, like invisible creatures, to fall from the sky and creep upward from underneath the tall, striped grasses. Sometimes I felt I could almost distinguish the calls and wondered how the creatures were able to separate one sound from another amid the din. And then I noticed that the creatures had no ears; they were making noises simply to feel the vibrations in their gleaming, scaly throats, to feel their frightening, imperturbable land echo with their sounds.

  I experienced this dream often enough to become resigned to it. Initially its exoticism, its mystery, scared and thrilled me and left me full of awe. But later I found myself simply eager for my time there to be over. In the dream I would find a rock, furred with a soft fungus the color of eggplants, and sit quietly and wait to be transported elsewhere, out of this land whose mysteries had long since failed to move me with wonder. Above me, an unkindness of ravens, the only animal I could identify, flew in tight, swooping, mournful arcs. They flew back and forth, back and forth, their eyes glinting, sharp and beady, but although I listened closely, they never made a sound.

  III.

  By the time Christmas Eve arrived, I was so eager for the holiday to be over that I had, the day before, accepted a last-minute invitation to a conference at Stockholm University that began on the thirty-first and lasted until the fifth of the new year.

  It had been an awful week. The day before, I had had a conversation with Owen that had degenerated into a shouting match. Over the years, Owen—despite not having any children of his own—had come to determine that he was far more of an authority on them than I was, given his years of service educating undergraduates on the oeuvres of Whitman, Cavafy, and Proust. Even then, when we were old men, Owen’s naïveté continued to astound me: after his infrequent visits, he would call to tell me that he had interpreted the children’s complaints to him about the tidy and disciplined household I ran as “cries for help,” as if I were a despot running a small slave state and he were a crusading United Nations envoy who had been sent to bear witness to their lives of misery and injustice. I did not care for Owen’s behaving as an anthropologist in my own house, and I told him so. Still, he persisted, dispensing unwanted advice and even less wanted admonishments about a practice—the successful ferrying of children into adulthood—that I had been engaged in for more than thirty years and he for none.

  That Christmas, however, he called, full of a degree of disapproval and self-righteousness unusual even for him, to inform me that Abby, one of the college-age students, had turned up in the lobby of his and Xerxes’s building in New York, “scared and desperate” (his portrait of her distress was near Victorian in its piteousness), claiming that I’d thrown her out of the house. Yes, I told Owen, I had been forced to ask Abby to leave the house, where she had been squatting for much of the fall, because she had insisted on smoking marijuana in her bedroom, which I had asked her repeatedly not to do. Owen, unsurprisingly, thought this appalling and inhumane on my part. I normally did not engage with Owen’s provocations, but in that moment I could not stop myself, and the fight quickly expanded in scope to cover my apparent decades’ worth of parental shortcomings. To this day I cannot account for his sudden ire. Was it born of boredom, or the elderly’s tendency to involve themselves in matters in which they are not wanted or needed? Or was it—as I sometimes thought, as much as I shrank from it—inspired by a sort of jealousy, something that I always sensed roiled just beneath Owen’s consciousness, sometimes cresting, sometimes receding, but ever-simmering, its boil growing louder and hotter with each year, with each approbation that was given me, with each child I sent sailing into the world’s slipstream? I had everything, after all, and he had only Xerxes and his thin books of poetry and a life lived mostly within New York State.

  At any rate, the talk did not end well, and at its end he announced that he (along with Xerxes, whom I had been curious to meet, and Abby, whom for all I cared he could keep for as long as he wanted, if he thought he could do a better job than I) would be staying in New York for the holiday. “I’ll send the children their presents,” Owen snapped before hanging up the phone, and as dismayed and angry as I felt, I remember also registering his comment with some bitter relief: Owen could always be counted on for superior gifts, which the children awaited every year.

  That night, after everyone had gone to their rooms, I ventured down to the living room with a large plastic filing box Mrs. Lansing had prepared for me shortly after Thanksgiving. Downstairs, dozens of stockings, each with a child’s name on it, hung from every surface—the children had even taken down the pictures from the walls and hung their stockings from the hooks. The room looked like the result of an insane person’s obscure and dedicated obsession.

  Mrs. Lansing had written me specific instructions: each stocking was to receive from the box a ball of chocolate wrapped in foil that was stippled like an orange’s skin; a rectangle of peppermint candy; a milky round of glycerine soap, in the middle of which floated a plastic toy (a dinosaur, a butterfly, a pig, a shark); a tiny spiral notebook with a tinier, blunt-nosed pencil; and a handful of the salty honeycomb candies I so enjoyed. In addition there was a wrapped toy for each of the thirteen children still living at home; for the adults and college students, there were envelopes containing checks. All of these I distributed—in the stockings, under the tree (awesome and horrible, it towered in the corner, covered with ornaments that had been made in school with construction paper and glitter and clotty gobs of glue that looked like tatters of litter, its hard white lights winking gaudily), taking care that every stocking had been filled. When I was finished, I sat down and ate some chewy and underbaked chocolate-chip cookies the youngest children had made and left near the fireplace earlier that night and returned the cup of milk to its plastic jug. I thought suddenly of my conversation with Tallent, his sly certainty that I’d find myself with children. Had he perhaps known what my life would be before I did? I had the sensation that I was being watched, or observed, really, and I turned, thinking for a moment I might see him peering out at me from behind the highboy, his pencil gliding across the page as he stared at me, a specimen who had grown into exactly what he had expected. But there was no one there, and I was embarrassed, and relieved, and then embarrassed anew to be relieved.

  I was tired but not yet ready to sleep. Indeed, I felt itchy with impatience and disappointment. I had been brooding over my recent fight with Owen and found myself wondering idly whether I should not just call him up and apologize. Listen, Owen, I’d say. I’m sorry. We oughtn’t fight. We are both old men. Five years before, I would not have dreamed of having such a conversation with
him. But now our arguments, which had once seemed exciting and bracing, vibrant colorful displays of will and opinion, were enervating and tiresome. Perhaps I should simply call him and assume the blame, I thought. He would be momentarily triumphant, and it would be irritating. But, I thought, I had already written my own story for history, and it would not include the details of my spats with Owen: who began it, who ended it, who won, who lost.

  Through the kitchen door I could see the moon, seeping a thin yellow light like pus. I stepped outside, and above me the sky was smeary with thin rubbings of cloud and spangled with bright white stars. I don’t know how long I stood there, watching my breath leaving my mouth in ghostly streams, still holding one of the children’s unsuccessful fat cookies in my cold fat hand. I could leave, I thought. I could pack a small bag and get into my car and drive away. I would take a plane to a European city, any city, and live there. Any university would accept me enthusiastically, with no questions. It was a perfect time; the older children were home, would take care of the younger ones, would figure out whom to call. The youngest children—little Eloise, Giselle, Jack—might, I thought, be adopted by the elders. The others, I assumed, would go into foster care, which would be regrettable. Although perhaps their association with me would find them adoptive families; I would be glad of that. But of course this plan would not do, no matter how logical it seemed to me.

  It was now quite late, for the night was very dark and silent, and I was eager to return to my study. I would sleep, perhaps, for a few hours, and then the children would wake and I would find myself marching through another day. But when I turned the handle of the door to go back inside, it would not budge.

  Almost immediately my mouth became rich with the flavors—old blood, brackish water, metal—of fear, and then anger. The door did not lock automatically; it had to be locked purposefully from the inside. I pounded on the door, slapping my palm against the square panes of glass. “Hello!” I cried, absurdly. “Hello! Let me in!”