Making Toast (11 page)

“Daddy and I couldn’t believe we’d given birth to a girl,” the letter went on. Ginny had three brothers, I one, and the two of us had produced Carl. We thought that’s what we could do. “Daddy’s first reaction was, ‘We don’t have girls,’” Ginny wrote. “But did we ever make a girl!” When I first saw Amy, curled up in the little white hospital blanket, I recalled what John Kelleher, a professor of Irish Studies at Harvard, and the father of four girls, had told me about fathers and daughters: “Every girl child peers up from her crib, sees her old man, and thinks, ‘Sucker.’”

Ginny’s letter detailed all that was loveable and quirky about Amy, so it was a long letter. It was written in a hand surer than Ginny’s is these days. Since Amy died, her handwriting has deteriorated—one of the very few outward signs of her suffering. The letter closed: “I wish you work that matters. I wish you the joy of great love in marriage. I wish you the beauty and fulfillment that comes from being a mother.”

From the outset, Ginny has told me she feels Amy’s spirit around us. From time to time I have repeated that thought to the children, but I have felt Amy’s spirit only fleetingly. My anger at God remains unabated, and it may be that I do not wish to concede Him anything as good or as kind as providing the superintending presence of my daughter. I know what comfort it gives people to think of the dead as nearby. It would be nice as well to think that the dead are happier to be close to us. But, I am more likely simply to accept Lewis Thomas’s idea of an afterlife based on the principle that nothing in nature disappears, and to go no further. The only spiritual thought that has come to me is a kind of prayer to Amy that we are doing what she would have us do.

At Thanksgiving, which we celebrated at Dee and Howard’s home in Bethesda, Howard asked me to say grace. I said, “The best one can say about this family is that Amy might be pleased with us.”

Then one afternoon, Ginny and I were waiting to meet John at Union Station. He was coming to spend the Christmas holiday with us. We were sitting in the car, looking for him. His train was a few minutes late. I felt a hand touch my right wrist—not softly, so that it might be mistaken for the flutter of a breeze on my sleeve, but definite, like a comforting pat one person might give another. I looked at Ginny to ascertain that she had not done it, but she was turned away from me, searching the crowd for John. I hoped to feel that touch again, but I did not. And I have not felt it since. It might have been a small spasm, an involuntary movement of my forearm. Something like a twitch.

One night, as the children are about to go to sleep, Ginny finds Sammy lying on his back on the floor of Harris’s study. His arms are spread wide and his tongue sticks out of the side of his mouth. The day Amy died, Sammy was alone with her while Jessie went to get Harris. He tried to get Amy to breathe. He tried to open her eyes. “This is the way Mommy looked,” he says. “I’ll never forget it. She was so young, the youngest person ever to die.” Ginny says yes, Amy was very young and that she was a wonderful Mommy. Sammy gets up from the floor and goes to bed.

Wendy’s parents, Rose and Bob, bring the children a book called
Elf on the Shelf
, and the seven-inch-high elf doll that accompanies it. The book explains that the elf will sit around the house, observing the children’s behavior, and report directly to Santa Claus. The elf is supposed to move to a different location and vantage point every night, so Harris, Ginny, and I give him a hand. He has a red pointed cap, spindly legs, and the squinched-up face of a sneak. I think him little better than a snitch. But Harris notes that since his arrival, the children’s behavior has been impeccable. He would like to extend the elf’s stay, but cannot think of a justification.

On Christmas Day I help Jessie put up
High School Musical
stickers on the walls and closet doors of her room. The morning goes easier than it did last year. The news that nobody is buying anything in this season evidently has not reached the children of Clearwood Road. Besides the stickers, Jessie got books, a snow globe, a karaoke player, lots of clothes, and her own computer. Sammy, who does not regard clothes as gifts, got a remote control motorcycle and rider, a Mars Mission Lego set, Air Hogs remote control helicopters that terrorize everyone in the house, and, for the Wii, Mario Baseball and a Star Wars game, in which it is possible to make massive gains, and in a trice, to lose everything. The Wii is dazzlingly inventive, and in its own addictive way, it may also teach that disasters come and go, and there’s always another game. Both older children shared a basketball set-up consisting of a hoop, a stand, a backboard, and an automated scoreboard that registers points when someone hits a shot. Basketball has temporarily replaced soccer for Jessie as a Saturday activity, and Sammy plays too. They also shared Shrinky Dinks—decals to color and put in the toaster oven where they shrink and metamorphose into spiders and other animals. I am entrusted with the toaster-oven operation. Besides the Caterpillar dump truck James received, and the gas station, and the workbench, and the garage, he got his own toy toaster—“to make toast like you, Boppo,” he said.

Except for the penetrating bray of The Wiggles, to which James has grown attached—“fruit salad, yummy yummy”—the day passes pleasantly. James dashes from project to project, like a driven painter skittering over a large canvas, hammering something in one part of the house, shifting something from one room to another. John plays Sorry with Jessie and tells Ginny it reminds him of Amy playing the same game with him when he was little. In the afternoon we all visit Harris’s sister, Beth, in her house on Capitol Hill. Beth, a headhunter in Washington, often takes Jessie and Sammy on excursions to her office. She combines the Christmas gathering with a fundraiser for the children of people in prisons by inviting guests to contribute to the cause. She does this so diffidently, half of us forget to make a donation. Beth has inherited her intelligent ardor for charitable projects from her parents. Howard and Dee spend much of the year helping out in Acadia National Park in Maine. Their Volvo station wagon bears the bumper sticker, “My other car is a bicycle.” I told them I am planning to make up a bumper sticker of my own that will read, “My other car is a bigger SUV.” They smiled charitably.

In the early evening, John, Harris, Ginny, and I sit down to dinner. Harris looks tired, me too. No one says anything about Amy’s absence but the conversation feels choppy. I hear Bubbies in the next room repeatedly playing a Hannah Montana CD on the karaoke. He plays “I Can’t Wait to See You Again.”

Sammy’s enthrallment with the Empire State Building began when Ginny and I took him on his special trip to New York, and he saw the building for the first time as we approached the Holland Tunnel. “What’s the
second
tallest building?” he asked. He could make out a portion of the Chrysler Building just behind the Empire State.

“Did you know that a gorilla once climbed to the top of the Empire State Building?” I said. “No way!” he said. Once I had mentioned King Kong, I had to get the DVD of the original 1933 version for him, which was presented as a post-Christmas gift. One afternoon, we watched it—Sammy, Jessie, and I. James and Ligaya came and went. I was a little anxious about certain scenes I remembered, such as King Kong casually grabbing a woman out of her apartment-house bedroom and tossing her to the street. I wasn’t sure that the children would find beauty in the beast. But I figured that the size of the ape would predominate, which it did. Jessie could take everything but the bleeding of the dinosaurs. At the sight of the oozing black blood, she hid herself under a throw. Sammy loved it all, especially when King Kong pounded his chest in victory. And the climb of the Empire State Building was as good as advertised. James observed that King Kong was “really big.”

In the 1970s, there were at least two revival houses in Washington that showed movies like
King Kong
. On the weekends, Ginny and I used to take Carl and Amy to the Biograph and the Key to watch the Hope and Crosby “Road” pictures, and the Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes pictures (the source of their Halloween donnybrook), and Hitchcock’s
The Lady Vanishes
and
The 39 Steps
. Amy’s favorite was
The Philadelphia Story.
It was not much easier to sell our kids on black-and-white movies than it was to explain them to Sammy and Jessie, but once in, they embraced
King Kong.
“Why does he take the lady away with him?” Sammy asked. I told him he wants to marry her. “What do you think of King Kong?” I asked. “He’s mean, but he’s kind, too,” he said.

Jessie’s unpanicky and reasonable reaction to
King Kong
suggested that, while retaining her unflagging optimism, she is beginning to accept the existence of terrifying things. A couple of years ago, Amy’s friend Betsy Mencher asked if she and her husband Andy could take Jessie with them and their daughter Julia, who is Jessie’s age, to a community theater production of
Beauty and the Beast
. As always, Jessie was excited. But Amy predicted that she would have a very hard time with the Beast. Jessie could not deal with anything menacing or evil.

“How well Amy knew her children,” Betsy told me. The slightly ominous introductory music to the production had barely started when Jessie became alarmed, and within a few minutes she was crying. “I got her out of that theater as fast as possible,” said Betsy. “And we went to McDonald’s.”

Amy knew Betsy well too. When the two friends had graduated from college, Betsy’s latest boyfriend had just broken up with her. She would come over to our New York apartment every day, so that Amy could tell her the boy was worthless, and Betsy could do a lot better, and other customary assurances. Adding comfort food to comforting, Amy would serve Betsy her little brother John’s mac n’ cheese, which came in the shape of dinosaurs. Years later, on a visit to Amy’s home in Bethesda, Betsy came across dinosaur-shaped mac n’ cheese in the pantry. She asked why it was there. “To comfort my children when they’re in a sad or pathetic state,” Amy said.

I can hear her saying that. She often had the voice of a comic with a clipped delivery, even when she was saying things that weren’t funny. As with any serious-minded comedian, you could pick up traces of tragedy in the most light-hearted story, and when she said something hilarious, her voice hit just the right notes. The family was at the dinner table in Quogue, kidding Harris about sleeping on the floor during a golfing trip to Hawaii. “Harris Makes Do in Hawaii,” said Amy, as if stating a title in a series of children’s books. She laughed, Harris laughed, everyone laughed.

Odd that I seem to know Amy more completely in death than I did when she was alive. I do not know her any better (I doubt that I could know her any better), but there was so much to her life that I was unaware of until now, when I speak with her friends and colleagues and learn of this sound decision or of that small gesture of thoughtfulness. Jean Mullen, Amy’s former chief resident, told me that she and Amy happened to have the same set of dishes, and complained of the too-shallow soup bowls. Jean said, “Amy showed up at my door one day, carrying new deep soup bowls for both of us.” One sees many good qualities in one’s children as they grow into likeable adults, but their stature may remain obscured, because stature is most often measured at a distance. The distance of death reveals Amy’s stature to me. My daughter mattered to the histories of others. Knowing that did not prevent my eyes from welling up with tears for no apparent reason in Ledo’s Pizza the other day. But it is something.

Carl, Wendy, and the boys come over on a Sunday, and we drive to the Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport. Harris stays home to catch up on work. The museum is a reduced version of the one at the Smithsonian downtown, but easier for us to reach, and, we hope, less crowded. It is crowded enough, and it has a lot for the kids—biplanes, old airliners, stealth bombers, and rides that simulate space capsules and churn the stomach. Sammy spies a concession stand where everything, from the flimsiest keychain to a large model of a rocket ship, seems to be priced at $26. “Will you get this for me, Boppo?” He indicates the rocket ship. I choose this as my moment to impose limits. He has so much already. Over the summer, in Long Island, when we visited the aquarium in Riverhead, he asked for a stuffed gray-and-white shark, which I bought without hesitation. Here and now, however, I have decided to draw the line.

He takes the rocket and holds it in the air to suggest how wonderful it is. I hold my ground. “You don’t need it, Sammy,” I say. “Besides, don’t we have something like it at home?” He says, “But I want it, Boppo.” I tell him, “Not today. Let’s look at the old planes.” He gives the rocket a swoop with his hand. Carl approaches us. “What’s that, Sam?” he says. “It’s this great rocket,” says Sammy. “Want it?” asks his uncle. And before I can intervene, Carl has shelled out the $26. That evening, I report this moral defeat to Harris. “Frustrating. Isn’t it?” he says, looking me straight in the eye.

Ligaya falls on the ice. A concussion keeps her home in bed for the first part of the week. When she returns, James runs to her. She holds him as he clings to her head, examines and reexamines her face, and rests on her shoulder. For a full two minutes he does not let go. She has been away only three days. Ginny and I share a glance of apprehension. In April and May, Ligaya is scheduled to return to the Philippines to visit her family. She plans to be away six weeks. I threaten to have her passport revoked.

Andrew’s sixth birthday party is held at Laser Nation, in Sterling, Virginia. Jessie and Sammy are excited. James goes, too, but he is too little to shoot other children or be shot. At Laser Nation, the kids are armed with laser guns, which are attached to thick vests that light up when registering hits. The kids hunt each other down in a dark catacomb with pipes and gray and black walls. It looks like the interior of a submarine. The wood is painted to look like steel. Red, orange, blue, and yellow teams, designated by the lights they wear, move about the maze after the children have received instructions in the Briefing Room: No running, no physical contact, no unsportsmanlike conduct. Graeme, one of the participating fathers, who is from Australia, says, “No unsportsmanlike conduct? That discriminates against Australians.”