Fallen Land (11 page)

Nathaniel watches his son march out of the hall and into the kitchen. Cupboard doors open, accompanied by new sounds, as if the little machine were curious or surprised or disappointed by what he finds. Whatever else Nathaniel may feel about this behavior, Copley undoubtedly has a sense of humor, and that in itself must suggest he is something other than a psychopath, sociopath, or any of the other psychiatric diagnoses Nathaniel fears might be applicable given what he knows about the history of mental illness on Julia’s side of the family.

“Does it still feel the same to you?” he asks his wife as they stand in the dining room looking at the walls and wooden floors. The rain outside strengthens, pinging against the panes, and a gust of wind sideswipes the house, rattling the windows along the north and west sides, howling drafts through the chimney, while the top of the building groans as if gearing up to twist off its axis. The air conditioning has been left on and the house is frigid and dry. The word
sepulchral
comes to mind, but this doesn’t seem quite right. Surely a house can’t be
sepulchral
.

Although it might have seemed spacious and characterful on first glimpse, back in the middle of summer, it now feels exactly like what it is: vast, empty, and dark, the corners thin and sharp, as if the whole structure were caught in an enervated spasm. There is a quality to the space, the arrangement of rooms, the proportion of wall-to-window, the heaviness of the crown molding and baseboards, that makes Nathaniel feel claustrophobic. A shiver ripples round his shoulders and down his back. Despite the rain, he tries to open the windows in every room he enters, but they are all locked. He loosens his collar, unbuttons his shirt another notch, ruffles his hair to get the sense of a breeze moving through it. I’m having a panic attack, it’s just a panic attack. There’s nothing wrong with the place. Calm yourself. Breathe in and out, there’s plenty of oxygen. Catching his reflection in one of the windows, he thinks for an instant that someone else is in the room.

“Do we have keys to the windows?”

Julia is taking notes, squinting into dark corners. “It must be one of these,” she says, pressing a ring of keys from the realtor into his palm. None of the keys is small enough to fit into the window locks.

“We’ll have to get a locksmith. We have to be able to open the windows. We can’t spend our lives in a house with windows that don’t open. It has to be some kind of fire risk or health violation.”

“There are lots of things to do. Calm down,” Julia says, making a note on her clipboard. He can see the word,
LOCKSMITH
, but it doesn’t help. Staring at the empty patterned walls in the dining room he is unable to move, catching his own reflection every time he turns to look out a window onto the dark gray world. All this space! Endless, suffocating, all-consuming space! Maybe it isn’t too late to pull out. Of course it’s too late. Everything is signed, transferred, transacted. The keys and the house are theirs, the mortgage their burden, the structure and the land it sits upon their new responsibility. God, what a mistake!

As Copley returns from the kitchen, marching across the room, Nathaniel recognizes the steps from the dance recital: the woman taught his son to march like a tin soldier in
The Nutcracker
. The dance class was another mistake. Soccer would have been better—or more swimming lessons. His son had excelled at swimming and there was no expectation that the parent should be involved except as a spectator, no pressure to run and pass balls, to attempt footwork impossible for a body that knows nothing about sports. It is not as if there is anything suspect about a boy with an aptitude for swimming in the way there is with a boy inclined to dance. Nathaniel saw the way friends raised their eyebrows when they heard about the dance class, when Julia invited some of them to the embarrassing recital—embarrassing because Copley was such a
natural
, convincing and fluid and not remotely self-conscious in his movements, so incredibly fey and graceful. That was the real horror. If only the physical intelligence could be channeled into a more masculine discipline, not that Nathaniel cares what kind of person Copley becomes. If he happens to fall in love with men later in life, Nathaniel will of course accept it, but he does not want a son who prances.

The three of them walk circles around the ground floor in the way they did with Elizabeth the realtor, who was so persuasive even as her spiel set Nathaniel’s mind racing along a fast-branching trajectory of horrific complications and hidden flaws in the structure. He agrees with Julia that the reproduction Morris wallpapers and painted moldings have to go; the place will look better, more like them, when the walls and ceilings are uniformly white.

“You still love it, though?” he asks her. She jerks back her head, looking surprised.

“Of course I do. It’s about the house, Nathaniel, not the way it’s been decorated. You’ll see. This house really
has
something.”

After living for so many years in only a few rooms, Nathaniel has to admit feeling relief in finding himself at last with the kind of space he knew as a child—in fact with a larger house than the one in which he and his brother Matthew were raised. He has always worried about Copley growing up in an apartment, fearing that high-density living and separation from nature might be having a kind of distorting effect on the boy’s mind. The behavior of recent months has seemed
to bear out this hypothesis
, as Julia is fond of saying. Here, in this new town and this new house, the boy can run free in the fenced backyard, lie down under trees and find a way of relating to the world as Nathaniel did in his own childhood. He will teach Copley to climb, perhaps even hire a carpenter to build a tree house. On weekends, the three of them can unlock the back gate and step right into the woods, a portion of which now belongs to them, and from there hike straight into the nature reserve and all the way to the great broad river, sit on the bank, fish for hours, pack a picnic, pretend they are wayfarers rafting from one side of the country to the other, and at the end of the day they will walk home tired but relaxed and ready again to face the challenges of the week. Nathaniel knows it is going to be a much healthier kind of life than they had back east. There will be time and space and freedom to be noisy in ways apartment living prevented. Too many years have been spent lowering the volume of their stereos and televisions, too many years cautioning Copley to use his “indoor voice,” too many years not vacuuming or doing laundry after six in the evenings. Now they no longer have to worry about neighbors: they can make as much noise as they want and no one can complain.

After completing their survey of the first floor, they all go upstairs, Copley whirring and churning as he tries to climb the steps with his knees locked, legs girder straight. Nathaniel fights the urge to say something, knowing that if he makes an issue of it Copley is bound to burst into tears and hide in a closet, hammering his fists on the floor as he has on several other occasions when Nathaniel’s frustrations got the better of his desire for familial peace and he shouted at his son to knock it off.

“Cop—”

“It’s the adjustment,” Julia whispers, taking Nathaniel’s arm. “Give him time to auto-correct. He needs to do it his way. The soldier thing is a point of continuity between here and Boston. If it goes on too long, then we’ll say something.”

“We have to find a therapist—a psychiatrist. He should be evaluated.”

“Please, Nathaniel, don’t rush into it. Let’s see if it works itself out.”

“But you
agreed
,” Nathaniel says, words spurting through clenched teeth; his own sudden rage surprises him. Julia drops his arm and looks almost afraid.

“I agreed to consider it, Nathaniel. I think we
should
consider it, but I’m not prepared to make a decision at this very moment, when so many other things are happening.”

A thumping sound comes from the hallway. Nathaniel looks out to find Copley, as though an insect confused by glass, marching headlong into the oriel window.

“Copley. Enough. You’re going to hurt yourself. You could go straight through that.” Nathaniel puts his hands on his son’s shoulders and swivels him around, although the windows are triple-glazed and there is almost no risk. In their Boston apartment Copley would go nowhere near the sealed windows, terrified of the dizzying twenty-story drop to the street.

The boy walks across the hall and into one of the other empty bedrooms, churning and stomping until he meets another immovable obstacle.
Thumpa thumpa thump
. Nathaniel fears that whatever is going on will require more than just therapy to correct.

“What are we going to do with him?” Nathaniel says as Julia raises a finger to her mouth.

“What do you mean?” she whispers.

“After school. Who’s going to take care of him? And what about during vacations?”

“Day care?”

He shakes his head. “Too many horror stories.”

Copley gives up, turns around, and walks naturally from the bedroom down the hall into the room Nathaniel has chosen as his study.

“Well, we’re not getting a nanny, if that’s what you’re thinking. It seems elitist,” Julia says.

“An au pair, then.”

“As if that’s any better than day care. Just as random.”

“At least he’d be at home. At least we’d have some control over the kind of environment he’s in, the kind of values—”

“God, Nathaniel, you sound like a fundamentalist.”

“All I mean is you don’t know what you’re going to get in a day-care environment, who’s going to be looking after your kid, what they’ll be saying and doing that’s going to plant ideas in his brain that maybe we don’t want there. And anyway, you said—”

“Lower your voice.”

“You said the university day-care center doesn’t take school-age kids, and my company doesn’t think kids exist outside of the regular school day. So it means finding something else, some private center, and how do you know it’s any good? We don’t know
anyone
in this city. We don’t know whose recommendations to trust. I just—it seems like it would be safer to have him at home. It won’t be forever. Four or five years, and then he can be home on his own.”

“A latchkey child. Remember the moral panic about latchkey children when we were kids?”

“I was a latchkey child.”

“Your mother worked at home, Nathaniel. Not the same.”

“But she didn’t supervise. I might as well have been home alone. It did me no harm.”

Julia studies him with her problem-solving face, benign and curious and measuring, weighing all the factors.

“We have to do this the
right
way, Nathaniel.”

“Stop saying my name. You always pepper your speech with my name when you’re trying to get your way.”

“What’s wrong with you today?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Moving is stressful. Aren’t you stressed?”

“No, Nathaniel, just—”

“You see?”

“No, I’m not stressed, and I’m not trying to get my way.”

A toilet flushes and a moment later Copley returns to the hall, having run wet fingers through his hair to plaster it against his head, the rough surfaces of nature smoothed down, making him look manufactured, poured into a mold and enameled. Marching back into one of the empty bedrooms he turns to face his parents. “Hear this. I will have this room,” he says. He blinks twice and rolls his eyes back in his head, rolling them so far that only the whites show and it seems as though he has no eyes at all.

T
HEY LOCK THE HOUSE
AND
drive back to the hotel where they are staying. For a few hours, over dinner and before bed, Copley acts like a normal child, speaking distinct words and answering in full sentences. He orders his own food at the restaurant and is polite to the waiter. Back in the room he asks if he can watch television before bed instead of reading a book, and when Nathaniel and Julia agree that on this one occasion, because they are staying in a hotel overnight, he will be allowed an activity usually forbidden except for half an hour on weekends, he thanks them in such a genuine way that Nathaniel feels his throat constrict. That it can be so easy to produce such happiness seems, for a moment, amazing. And when they tell Copley it is time to sleep he turns off the television, folds his clothes back inside his small suitcase, and goes to brush his teeth without having to be told. Nathaniel looks at Julia, they both raise their eyebrows, smile, and kiss their son goodnight when he climbs under the covers of his double bed. This is how it once was, how easy relations used to be among the three of them. In retrospect it would have been wiser, no doubt, to give him less time to worry about what the move would mean, the friends he would no longer see, and the school in Boston where he was always so happy.

Unlike the motel of the previous night, tonight’s hotel, one of a large chain located on the park downtown, is quiet. Rolling close to Julia, tucking himself into her body, Nathaniel falls asleep without difficulty and dreams that the three of them are taking a trip with a larger sightseeing group. At first, he and Copley are sitting at the front of the bus, but after they stop to visit a tourist trap gift shop, Copley goes to sit with Julia at the back and Nathaniel is left alone at the front behind a bald man. In the back of the man’s seat is a plastic sleeve holding a number of brochures. Nathaniel removes one of them, skims it, loses interest, and tries to put it back in the plastic sleeve only to find it no longer fits. The man begins to lose his temper, telling Nathaniel to knock it off and stop hitting his seat. “You’re disturbing me, asshole.” Nathaniel takes exception to the man’s language, reminding him there are children on board. The bald man stands, raising his fists, and Nathaniel sees for the first time that he has only one eye, in the center of his face, glaring down the bridge of his fat nose. Nathaniel wakes panting and sees, in the darkness, Copley staring at him, the light from the street outside catching the glassy white globe of his son’s exposed eye.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
THEY MEET
the movers at the house. As soon as Nathaniel catches sight of the two men rolling out of the truck, he thinks of carnies—barkers and butchers calling out business at their joints, running rides and targeting marks. The older of the two men has nape-length white hair receding in an even line past the apex of his head, and his royal blue coveralls cling to his body, revealing a broad hemisphere of gut arcing from his groin to his sternum: an evil clown, beady-eyed and heavy-jowled, cheeks throbbing for white greasepaint and a nose so red and round it looks ready for the center ring. The other man, younger, ferret-like, and wary of eye contact, does most of the heavy lifting, moving fast and dodging round corners, running back and forth from the truck to the house whistling through the gap between his two front teeth, the tune a melody Nathaniel recognizes but cannot place: carnival music, or some big band song that his parents played. The ferret might be anywhere from his late teens to late thirties, with a creased babyish face that is either a sign of delayed adolescence or years of alcoholism. When it comes to lifting the beds and couches and larger pieces of furniture, the two men work together, the evil clown turning a liverish purple, wheezing and panting with every step.