Only Children (32 page)

Besides, Pearl was one of the few people Luke seemed to trust. He loved to talk to her. Several times Luke had allowed Pearl to push him on the swings. Once Luke had agreed to let Nina go for a cup of coffee (only a block away) and stay with Pearl. Pearl had even made Luke’s first friend for him, a little boy only six weeks older, named Byron. Byron’s nanny, Francine, was a good friend of Pearl’s; if Pearl took care of Luke, they could be a regular foursome. The harmony, both adult and child, seemed like such a rare opportunity.

And yet, now that Nina had decided on a career and Eric had agreed to hire someone to take care of Luke, now that Eric was making such good money they could afford any price, now that she had had the luxury of nearly two years observing Pearl and other housekeepers, Nina felt it was rude to ask. She and Pearl were almost friends. Might an offer of employment be taken as an insult?

“Pearl, did I tell you that I’m going back to school?” Nina tried as an introduction. She had to force herself to jump, eyes closed, into the shock of worldly talk.

“No!” Pearl said. She bent forward a bit and then straightened abruptly, as if the news were a spring she had sat on. “Who’s going to be taking care of Luke? ”

“Well, I have to get someone.”

Pearl looked to Luke, solemn, hardworking Luke. Disappointed that Byron wasn’t in the park, he concentrated on building his sand castle, but glanced up every minute or so to make sure Nina was there, even though she had been there, always there, for every minute of his life. “He’s not gonna like that,” Pearl said.

“No, he isn’t!” Nina said, laughing at the dreadful prospect.

Pearl smiled. “No, I don’t think so.” She chuckled with thoughtful pleasure. “No, he won’t want his mama to be anywheres but with him.”

“Is there any chance you might be free to—” She had exhausted all her will in going this far. Nina couldn’t complete the sentence.

“—be his sitter?” Pearl asked in a tone of wonder, as if it were too good to be true.

“Yes!” Nina said. “I can’t think of anyone who would be better.”

“Don’t think I’d be better than his mommy,” Pearl demurred. “But he does know me. And he’s such a sweet boy. Really, he is, and so smart! I can’t believe what he knows already.”

“I just think it would be so great for Luke and me if you could do it.”

“Well, I’d like to. But I’d best discuss it with my woman first and then come and meet your husband.”

“Sure.”

“Would you be needing me full-time?”

“Yes,” Nina said softly, hoping this wasn’t a problem.

“Good, because I don’t like to have time on my hands. My mama says I’m crazy. I just can’t stand to be doing nothing.”

Nina heard a wail from the sandbox. Luke was in tears. He was still seated cross-legged in front of his sand castle, but his shovel was gone, in the hands of a self-possessed dark-haired girl of four, who walked away quickly with her ill-gotten tool. Luke’s head bobbed as he cried, chest pulsing, mouth broken open at the corners, his hands rising to cover his eyes.

Nina got up. Pearl said, “Oh, I know that girl. She’s always causing trouble,” but Nina had no time to answer. Her heart, as always, quickened at the sound of Luke’s broken feelings. By the time she reached Luke, his long black eyelashes were wet. They held tear droplets at their edges, glistening, like jewels, in the sunlight. Nina glanced about for someone who might be the girl’s mother or nanny, someone to intercede and get the shovel back.

“What’s the matter?” she heard herself ask Luke, even though she knew what was wrong.

“I wanna go home,” Luke bawled. He was shattered crockery.

“I’ll get your shovel—”

“Don’t want my shovel!” Luke said, for the moment not wilting anymore, his back straight, his eyes open.

Why does he do this? Nina asked herself. Why does he deny the simple truth?

“Oh?” Pearl’s resonant voice came from behind Nina. “Well, I happened to get it.” She put Luke’s shovel beside him. “Is it all right if I leave it here? In case you be needing it?”

Luke, surprised, looked up at Pearl with his great blue eyes. “Don’t want,” he said, but not sure anymore.

“Course you don’t. My, my, is that a castle?”

Luke nodded slowly, his face relaxing.

“Of course it is!” Pearl said. “Looks all done.”

Luke stared down at his creation. He had carefully sculpted the dirty sand (here and there were stray pigeon feathers, a cigarette butt, the top of a soda can) into walls and made little towers at the corners.

“So you won’t be needing the shovel,” Pearl said. “But it is yours,” Pearl added. “So let’s keep it here beside you.”

Luke nodded. “I made a tower,” he said, pointing.

“Un-huh,” Pearl said earnestly, studying Luke’s little structure hard. “That’s for the guards.”

Luke laughed. “To see!” he corrected.

“Oh, of course it is!” Pearl said, shaking her head at her stupidity. “I should’ve known that.”

Luke laughed loudly, his voice healing, his character reglued. “Yeah! Course, it’s for looking. What else could it be?”

“That’s right,” Pearl agreed, her dentures gleaming. “I must be crazy to think it’s for guards.”

“Yeah!” Luke said, getting to his feet to walk around his creation with pride. “Too small for people!” He roared at this and looked at them with joy, but his face, just as suddenly, went slack.

The girl was back. She stood a few feet off, hands on her hips, staring at Luke’s castle with an envious conqueror’s rage.

Pearl glanced at the little girl, lowered her voice to a threatening growl, and said, “Don’t be thinking of playing here. We’re playing here now. There’s plenty of room over there.” The girl shrugged her shoulders and moved off.

“I want to go home,” Luke said anyway, and reached for Nina’s hand.

“All right,” she agreed, the relief Pearl had brought, its refreshment, so quickly dissipated. “Thank you,” she said to Pearl. “How can I reach you?”

“I’ll call you,” Pearl said, and wrote down Nina’s phone number. “I’ll talk to my woman tonight,” Pearl added when they left.

At home that night Nina hesitated again, this time with Eric. She hesitated even though the idea of hiring Pearl wouldn’t be a shock. Eric knew that Nina planned to return to school in a month and he knew all about Pearl (although he’d never met her). Still, Eric, despite his apparent calm, would be nervous at the actual event of turning over Luke’s care to someone else. She worried he might balk at the last minute. Perhaps, on meeting Pearl, he would find fault with her to prevent Nina’s departure.

Luke, despite the miraculous cure of his colic, had never become an easy child. He remained serious and careful, even his best moods diluted by a wary distrust. But he was a sweet two-year-old, very loving, and very smart—sometimes it seemed like a terrible intelligence to Nina, that it was the intelligence which made him difficult. Luke slept through the night, he didn’t fuss about his food, or going places, he could be taken anywhere, restaurants, movies, trips, he showed no signs of the terrible twos, and yet he was completely dependent on Nina—or Eric. He almost never played by himself. He asked constant questions. He wanted to know the name of every object. He noticed every street horror. He feared the crowd of other children at the playground. He let his pail and shovel be taken from him without a protest, preferring to be stripped of his possessions rather than fight for them. He seemed to want and need a limitless supply of love, not things, not showy attention, but real contact, conversation, reading, play, intimacy, and patience. He could detect even a subsonic whine of irritation in response to a request and would then refuse to accept the giving, like the Jesus of her childhood sermons, wanting only pure love, not grudging duty. But granted generous love and ungrudging devotion, he was a miracle of happiness: easy, laughing, witty, and kind.

Most maddening of all, Luke never showed his good side to others. Adults expecting the usual performance by a baby—gurgling laughs at funny faces, easy clowning at his own infant clumsiness, automatic pleasure at their friendliness—were shocked by Luke’s obvious suspicion of them, his unforgiving self-critical attitude at his own failures, his anger at being teased, his obvious desire to be their equal.

“Do you remember me? Give me a kiss. I brought you a present. Would you like me to play with you?” All those offers (always made, Nina noticed, with every expectation by the adults that their generosity was special, impossible to refuse), offers made by grandparents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, friends, were answered by Luke ducking his head and mumbling: “No.” He would give them nothing, no matter how high the bribe. It almost frightened her; his lofty lack of self-interest sometimes seemed inhuman.

To have found Pearl, someone whom he did like, someone who gave to children without vanity, without expectation of reward— that was Pearl all right, a woman of apparently limitless self-sacrifice and patience—to have found her and for Luke to already know and like her … it was a miracle. Surely Eric would understand that.

So—nervous—Nina told Eric about her conversation with Pearl. Eric had begun to watch a videotape of a cable show about the stock market and he asked her to wait until it was over. She sat patiently while Eric shouted answers to the people on the program, applauding or booing as if the opinions were base hits or errors. Finally he listened to Nina. Eric nodded, said great, and that he would arrange to be home early any day that Pearl could come by. But Eric’s legs jiggled up and down, his eyes became solemn (like Luke’s thoughtful, worried look before nap time), and it was obvious to Nina that Eric was scared by the prospect of leaving his son in the care of a stranger.

She finally understood, after two years, that Luke was a possession of Eric’s. Not one of many, but the possession. Eric loved only through ownership, so for him the emotion wasn’t false, it was real love. Nevertheless, it required performance, that Luke, like some stock, gain in value and popularity. Eric ended every night with a prayerful litany: “Luke remembered such and such Luke can say such and such, he listens when I read, he’s so handsome—” and so on. All of that was true, but this wasn’t pleasure, it was pride.

She almost hated Eric for the way he loved Luke. She felt jealous of the admiration, fearful of its hubris, and worried by the implication of pressure in the future. Eric had already begun to fuss about Luke’s education, clipping articles about the IQ test used for admittance to private nursery schools. He assessed the motor and language skills of other children in the park, noting that Luke was taller than others his age, and had a much larger vocabulary. He bragged about Luke’s remarkable memory to their friends, and worst of all, Eric’s conversations with Nina were always about Luke. Eric laughed about Luke; he hugged Luke as if he were clutching a life preserver; he taped the financial TV shows to have more time to play with Luke and watched them during the few hours she and Eric were alone. All of Eric’s energies were directed at the stock market and at Luke; there was nothing for her.

“He’s just like me,” Eric would say about anything Luke did well.

“That’s the Wasp in him,” Eric would say about Luke’s shyness or his passivity in fighting off other children in the sandbox.

And Luke adored his daddy. Daddy came home with toys, freed Luke from gravity, carried him into the atmosphere, high above the world on his broad, thick shoulders. Daddy never yelled. Daddy never said no.

But Nina had to say no. Nina was always there. Nina yelled. She was vain enough to think that her parenting was better, her love more genuine. But did Luke know that? Did he seem happier with his father because he really was or because Luke knew that Daddy couldn’t take anything else? When Luke crashed into something and cried, the look on Eric’s face was more pathetic. When Luke lost a pail to a marauding toddler, he seemed even more humiliated than usual if Eric was around. Luke would burst into tears, not at the loss of the object but at Eric’s painfully slow method of recovery or, even worse, Eric’s monologues of advice to Luke about how to handle the next confrontation. Luke would listen, head bowed, his chin tight, hating himself, hating his father’s supposedly reassuring tone, eyes darkened in their pain. In dreadful pain, she knew. She knew. She knew how much the kindly advice of a disappointed father can bruise and bruise and then bleed later.

But how could she tell Eric? Eric would never believe her conviction that if he blew up at Luke and yelled with all his might, told Luke to bash the next grasping two-year-old in the face, that Eric’s rage, for all its apparent brutality, would be better for Luke than Eric’s labored critique, delivered in a compassionate tone.

Luke had taken to refusing to go to the park on weekends, something Eric encouraged, it seemed to Nina, and she believed their twisted relations with each other about the other kids was the cause. She wanted to correct Eric, to get him to behave like a father, to push Luke, out into the world, to open his big arms and let go.

But every attempt to introduce her observations provoked immediate defensiveness: “I said that to him! But he gets too upset. I can’t. I think—I mean, he’s two years old, he’s got plenty of time to learn how to defend his things. I mean, I think he’s kind of noble—not worrying about his possessions, but worrying over the other kid’s feelings.”

Eric’s attitude, his casual acceptance of Luke’s lack of aggression, seemed bizarre and self-contradictory. All Eric cared about, in his own life, was money. The gathering and growing of money. How could he accept Luke’s passivity?

And her own disgust with Luke’s meek, selfless manner, Luke’s horror of argument or disapproval, his total absence of competitiveness—wasn’t that like herself? Nina never cared when one of their friends bought a new car, got a house in the Hamptons; she was never provoked by others bragging or teasing, by their accomplishments, honors, possessions. Like Luke, she preferred to sit with nothing, to have herself and the universe, rather than squeeze into the squashed planet of things. Why shouldn’t her son, with her blood, her bones, her eyes, be the same?

She knew the answer. Because he was a man. She hated the answer. But the answer was in her heart, not her head. He was a man and they would take things from him if he didn’t fight. Maybe feminism had changed things for women (she doubted it, but she hoped so), but for the men? No. They still slaughtered their own.