Child of My Right Hand (5 page)

“Walk around the school sometime,” Burroughs continued. “Look at all the Confederate belt buckles. You'll see what we're up against.” His cheek bulged again, as if full of acorns for winter. “The football team practices this afternoon. If you like, I'll talk to them.”

“That would be wonderful,” Genna said. “Thank you.”

Marla, who'd been seated, legs crossed, at the corner of Burroughs's desk, said, “I have a note from Simon. He's hoping Dr. Burroughs will read it to the team.”

Marla passed Jack a sheet torn from a spiral notebook. He recognized the ornate, upright script. The swirls and decoration, Simon's usual misspellings. Your for you're. Fealings for feelings. Genna read it aloud.

Hi,

My name is Simon Barish. I'm new this year. Some of you may have herd things about me. Or seen my clothes and decided your different from me and you hate me. So you've been calling me names.

Well, I have fealings like everyone else. If you see me in the hall, don't think you know what I'm like, because as the saying goes, You can't tell a book by its cover. Come up to say hello, and who knows, maybe we'll be friends.

Thank you very much for listening.

Your friend,

Simon Barish

Genna put the letter down and looked at Jack, eyes glistening.

“That's really something,” Marla said. “Isn't it?”

There was a knock, and Simon entered with his gelled and spiked blond hair, his extra-wide jeans with green velvet patches, his too-big belly pressing against a black T-shirt Jack especially disliked: If I throw a stick will you fetch it?

Simon smiled, expectant, simultaneously embarrassed and pleased because he must have known they were talking about him. How remarkable he is, Jack thought. How brave. What a royal pain in the ass. My son, he thought, glancing at Genna, and I love him.

On Friday afternoon, when Simon and Lizzie bopped in from the bus stop, their laughing, querulous voices raised Genna from her study. Although they were deep in the so-called difficult years, they were all her pride and much of her joy, and she hurried out to greet them. In the slate entranceway, Simon and Lizzie had just abandoned their backpacks precisely where every afternoon she asked them not to; Sam pogoed on his hind legs celebrating the arrival of a New Person! thrusting his large, moist nose into the startled face of a slender boy Genna hadn't met before.

“Down, Sam, down!” Simon shouted. “Damnit, Lizzie! Why'd you let him in?”

“I didn't,” Lizzie shouted, but grabbed Sam's collar and dragged the offended, hundred-pound oaf out the door.

“Mom,” Simon said, “this is Rich.” Rich was cute and curly-haired. Fine-featured, almost delicate, he energetically wiped Sam schmutz off his cheek. “Rich,” Simon grinned, “this is Mom.”

“Nice to meet you,” Genna said. “I see you've met Sam.”

Rich smiled, said nothing.

In the kitchen, Simon hung with simian grace from the fridge door, allowing cold air to escape. How different, she thought, than in my parents' house, where I wouldn't have dared. Then, looking exceptionally well-fed, Simon declared, bitterly, as he did most afternoons, that there was nothing to eat.

“Mom,” he continued, with a glance at Rich. “Can we order pizza?”

Simon was obviously smitten. So she didn't respond, as she normally would have, Do you have any money? Nor did she suggest carrots, an apple, or any of the healthy snacks she stocked the fridge with, not because she minded being mocked (as the mother of teenagers she was inured to all forms of verbal abuse), but because she didn't want Simon to appear loutish in front of Rich.

“There's DiGiorno's in the downstairs freezer.”

“All right,” Simon said.

Lizzie's head snapped up; she was at the kitchen table reading the morning's funnies as she did most days after school. A long-established house rule (posted on the fridge as part of the Barish House Accords) was that those frozen DiGiorno's, five-ninety-nine a box, were quickie dinners, not snacks.

“Come on,” Simon said. “I'll show you my room.”

Rich followed Simon downstairs. When the boys were out of earshot, Lizzie asked, “After school pizza?”

“It's Friday.” Genna watched Lizzie mentally revise the BHAs.

“Is Simon allowed to have boys in his room?”

Lizzie had inherited Genna's ironic sensibility, but otherwise resembled her not at all: tall and slender, where Genna was neither. Her mother's genes had skipped a generation, re-forming in Lizzie, Genna sometimes thought, like an image in a Star Trek transporter. The original Star Trek.

“It depends on the boy, don't you think?”

Lizzie grinned. What a charmer her daughter was. “What about Rich?”

“He's awfully cute.”

Lizzie grinned wider. Genna knew she was about to say something hilarious. One of Genna's unadulterated joys was that Lizzie trusted her sufficiently to say what she really thought. How rare in a teenage daughter. But just then Rich and Simon started up the stairs.

“Puh-lease,” Simon sang in his too excited, too loud, too high voice. “That is so disgusting.”

Grinning, the boys re-entered the kitchen. She hadn't heard Rich speak yet and tried to find something to ask him. He noticed she was watching him, and his pretty, long-lashed eyes—were they really green?—lost their unguarded glow. Rich, she thought, is a hidden person.

Simon bustled about, much like Sam, who didn't realize he'd grown too large to get up on the bed and was always banging into furniture and sniffing crotches. Rattling pots and lids, Simon excavated the Teflon pizza pan from under the stove, removed the spicy chicken pizza from its box, its bag, its cardboard insert and slid it onto the pan. What a load of garbage.

“Mom.” Simon slid the pizza in the oven and set the white egg timer. He liked to cook, and not just microwave popcorn and frozen pizzas. “Can Rich sleep over?”

Lizzie's head snapped up again, her dark brows arched like parentheses.

“Not tonight.”

Simon stopped smiling. “Why not?”

“The first time Rich visits”—she tried to make Simon meet her eyes so he would realize she meant it—“he can't spend the night.”

“His dad won't care,” Simon said. “He lives with his dad.”

“And my grandmother,” Rich added softly.

So he does speak. “Simon.” She was trying not to appear angry; she'd discarded anger in the old house like a dress that no longer fit. “May I talk to you in private?”

She glanced towards Rich, who looked as if light might pass through him. This boy, she thought, has seen his share of discord. She walked to the living room where sunshine poured through the wall of glass. How could anyone not be happy in this much light? Simon entered and stood beside her, half a head taller and half again as wide.

“Dad and I have asked you not to put us on the spot by asking if someone can sleep over when they're standing right there.”

“But why not? You can call his grandmother or his dad when he gets home from work.”

“The first time someone visits, he can't sleep over. But he can stay for dinner if you want.”

Simon's jaw unclenched. “Are you and Dad going out afterwards?”

“We haven't decided.” In fact, Jack had suggested a movie, and she'd more or less agreed. But she couldn't decide about leaving the boys alone. “Rich is awfully cute, isn't he?”

“Mom.” Simon tried to look angry but failed. Grinning, he bounced out of the room.

At five, Jack called and spoke to Lizzie, who found Genna reading on the deck, and reported that Dad would be home in twenty minutes. Genna had a horror of kids returning to an empty house; most days she arranged to be home by three. Jack got the kids off to school, sometimes waited for her to have breakfast, then left. Genna, who didn't function well before nine—as soon as the kids were weaned, she'd delegated breakfast duties to Jack—left later, returned earlier, but accomplished more. Her last two books had been well-received, while Jack hadn't published in quite some time and was having trouble with his grants. All this, she knew, weighed on him, so she accepted that he'd be home an hour or two later than she and tried to believe he was hard at work all those hours he was gone.

Last winter, after he confessed the affair with some woman he'd met at the conference he attended each spring, she thought she'd lose her mind. Looking back, for more than a month, it appeared she had. He told her in the solarium of their old house one January afternoon. The kids were at school, but for some reason she could no longer recall, neither she nor Jack had driven to Tipton. Maybe the roads were bad. It was gray mid-winter blah in the Ohio River Valley. The sky was two feet above the ground and no light entered through the uncurtained windows. Genna hadn't seen the sun in days, and it was all she could do not to crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head.

Jack announced it had been his New Year's resolution to make a clean breast of things. Where did that expression come from, a clean breast? Some woman-hating, anti-breast-feeding bias? After nine months the affair was over, but he didn't feel he could go on living with her without confessing.

“Do you love her, Jack?”

She watched his face: blue eyes, broad cheeks, square chin, the athlete's neck which descended almost without tapering from his head to his shoulders. An honest face, almost too open, she'd thought when she met him. Not particularly Jewish-looking, except for his nose, which looked as if it had been broken, though it hadn't.

She watched his face, and there was the truth, sharp as her pain.

“Oh,” she said. “I see.”

“I don't anymore.”

Could she believe him? How could she believe anything in that penumbral room, with gray light sifting like ash to the frozen ground that had been her heart. The one thing she had felt most sure of was that Jack Barish, with his broad, honest face would never be able to lie to her, but she understood now that he must have lied frequently and well.

She rose unsteadily and said, “I have to go now.”

She drove to the Bonbonnerie, the best bakery in town, ordered two brownies, two scones, a blueberry cheese Danish and ate them all. She drove to the river and thought about throwing herself in, but that would hurt the kids more than Jack, and why should she kill herself, he was the louse. She drove to Lebanon, the antique town and found all the things she would buy for the house she lived in without Jack. She drove to Tri-County Mall and sat in her car with the heater blasting. She continued to Kenwood Town Centre and walked the bright halls like a released mental patient.

As February wore on, she found a rhythm. She'd eat dinner with the family then leave. Jack didn't ask where. She prowled the malls. She saw every movie in town, most of them twice. When the malls closed, she moved to the bars in Clifton but soon understood they were college or sports bars; she saw students all day and detested televised sports. She tried the downtown hotels and let hopeful businessmen buy her drinks. One night she went upstairs with a guy named Pete from Portland, Maine, who was thirty-two, handsome and very drunk. She permitted Pete remove her bra, but couldn't go through with it.

Pushing his mouth away from her erect nipple—there had been that, at least—she grabbed her things and dressed in the corridor, then drove around and around and around before parking with her lights off on a dead-end street overlooking the Ohio River. It was on that overlook, two-thirds drunk but remarkably sober, another man's lips and breath still imprinting her breast, that Genna admitted what she'd known all along. She didn't want someone else. She didn't want revenge. She wanted life with Jack to be the way it had been, not only before January 26, but before these past few years when everything seemed slowly to dissolve.

Now, she thought, supine on a padded lounger in the late afternoon on her deck, with the white oaks and sycamores transmuting light to a violent green gold, they had another chance. There were Simon's problems, but Simon always had problems. Parenting Simon was helping him clear a swath through his problems, not eliminating them. But this house felt right, and Genna, who hadn't been able to breathe in Cincinnati, felt in her lungs and in her very bones, that this house was right for all of them. All these photosynthesizing leaves. Even the air was better.

That was why she needed to believe Jack was working all the hours he was gone. If he'd been more successful, he wouldn't have had that affair. (Was she an idiot to think that?) If the new project he'd alluded to, but wouldn't tell her about, would somehow get published, then this new house with its super-oxygenated air would work its magic, and Jack would feel strong enough to resist the attraction she knew he felt for Marla Lindstrom.

She'd sensed it in Marla's office, and again in the emotionally-charged atmosphere in Burroughs's office; several times she'd thought Jack and the squat principal were going to leap up and pound each other. Jack Barish wasn't Pierce Brosnan, but he was handsome enough. Over the years her girlfriends had told her what a hunk he was, and a nice guy, too (she'd always agreed). If she ever tired of him, more than one girlfriend had said, only half-joking, just let her know.

As for Marla, she was one of those bird-like women Genna had always envied. Narrow-hipped, small-breasted, looked great in stylish clothes. She had large, bright blue eyes in which Genna could read the state of play. The smile she'd given Jack when they arrived. The palpable sexual tension in Burroughs's office. How they'd glance at each other then look away.

She didn't exactly blame Jack. In the past he'd been attracted to several of her friends and they'd been attracted to him. What did it matter, she'd thought. Everyone was grown-up; everyone was attractive. Nothing ever came of it, as far as she knew, except some sexy dancing at parties, and she'd felt pleased, honored, even, because the nothing that had happened was one more brick in the storehouse of Jack's love for her.

His confession changed all that. But although half of her wanted to rip those big baby blues out of her little face, Genna didn't exactly blame Marla. Genna gathered she'd been divorced for some time in a college town without many single men. Jack was attractive, and as that weasel Woody Allen said about his affair with Mia's daughter, the heart wants what it wants.

No, she didn't blame Jack or Marla for being attracted to each other; she would blame them if they acted on it. Before January 26, she would have had no doubt. And now? A flash of color. A red-crested woodpecker lit on the large oak near the railing and began drumming its beak into the bark.

What she did know—even the birds were more vivid, and there were deer; she'd seen two yesterday morning on the stone path just below the house—was that she didn't have the luxury of ordering Marla to keep her skinny ass far away from Jack. After yesterday's meeting, it was clear Marla would have to be Simon's advocate. In every school, they'd needed one. The six through nine teacher in the Montessori, the principal in performing arts. It certainly wouldn't be Dr. Burroughs, who really did look like a badger.

So Genna would hold her tongue and hope Marla and Jack would hold their tongues and every other part. Genna reclined on the lounger and glanced up at the late sunlight slicing through the leaves. She watched the red-headed bird attack the tree and hoped saving Simon wouldn't cost her Jack.

***

Jack abandoned his project on the connections between American racism in the 1920s and the rise of eugenics in Germany the morning after meeting with Burroughs. After three years of being able neither to complete the whole nor publish the parts, and then being totally mortified when a writer named Kuhl published a book on the subject, it was time. Perhaps admitting this failure would lighten his spirit. Maybe he wasn't meant to take on such a great historical theme, one in which blame was laid and guilt assessed, responsibility objectively measured and assigned. American eugenicists such as Clarence Campbell praised Nazi eugenics policy and millions of “genetically inferior” individuals were sterilized and murdered. You did that, and that's why this happened. Jack was sick of it.