No Book but the World: A Novel (18 page)

“Ava,” said Meg in her soft taffy voice. This was after the initial greetings, the shedding of their outer garments, the setting down of their dishes with all the other potluck offerings already crowding the butcher-block island. “We were sorry to hear about Fred’s troubles.” She looked her daughter-in-law in the eye a moment before folding her in a second, prolonged embrace.

“Who knows?” Ava glanced down toward the sitting area where the rest of the company had gravitated.

“Just us, honey. Don and me. And of course Tariq.”

Don was even more discreet, saying nothing to indicate he’d heard about Fred, just smiling at Ava, crinkly-eyed, with extra frequency and warmth, reaching out to squeeze her hand or shoulder from time to time, and refilling her glass even more attentively than was his wont. Tariq, handsome in his trim, hygienic way, offered her only his usual impeccable manners. Kitty betrayed her concern by planting herself loyally in Ava’s vicinity and noting whenever Ava fell out of interaction for what struck her as too long, at which point she’d try to baste Ava back into the fold by sharing some anecdote about Dilly or, whenever she felt more drastic measures were called for, by plunking the child bodily in Ava’s lap.

All their solicitude came as a relief to Dennis, who realized only now how much effort he’d expended these past few days, hovering in his wife’s vicinity, trying to gauge and maintain the ideal balance between attentiveness and distance. For Ava never wanted comforting in the way his other girlfriends had. She reacted to the smallest expressions of his love with gratitude and sometimes tremulous awe, and anytime he offered more than she deemed sufficient, she would retreat, as if it overwhelmed her system. Dennis had taught himself to respect her need for distance, as he had done, for example, last week, in acknowledging her wish to map her own route to Perdu in an old-fashioned way, on a paper map. He understood that this self-containment was part and parcel of what he loved about her. But in times of duress, especially when all he wanted to do was step in and fix whatever ailed her, he found it difficult to remain both attentive and actionless.

Now in his parents’ apartment, while others tended to Ava’s silent distress, he let himself go off duty. He talked English football with Richard and Tariq (the former rooted seriously for Manchester United; the latter was a rabid Liverpool fan). He kidded around with Li-Hua (having recently discovered sarcasm, she deployed it hilariously, with a novice’s enthusiasm and lack of nuance). He competed with his uncle Chris to see who could catch a cashew in his mouth thrown from the greatest distance. And when Dilly tugged on his pant leg, requesting an “’orsey ride,” he let out a whinny and sank to all fours. (“’Orsey? What are you, raising her Cockney?” Dennis asked Tariq. “Is this a ‘Go Liverpool’ thing?”)

Dilly was cutting a new tooth, drooling “like Niagara,” as Don phrased it several times, and experimenting with biting down on an array of textures as she toddled around the room or was passed from lap to lap. She bit so hard on one of Gerta Hauptmann’s clay beads that she broke it right off the string. “My word!” exclaimed the elderly lady, examining the shards in her palm, and then to Kitty, with well-mustered appreciation, “She has wonderfully strong jaws.” To which Kitty responded with a scream: Dilly, thrilling to the attention, had tried out a similar trick on her mother’s finger.

“No, Dillon,” said Kitty gravely, and holding out her hurt finger to Tariq: “Look at the toothmarks!
Bad
Dilly.
Not
funny,” she added, but the little girl only widened her bulldog grin.

“She’s your daughter,” said Don, lifting her delightedly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” demanded Kitty. “I wasn’t a biter.”

Meg cut in peaceably. “Maybe it’s a sign that it’s time to eat.”

At the table—really three tables of slightly incompatible height and width pushed together and covered with a series of cloths—Dennis sat between Kitty and Richard and across from Ava, whose wineglass Don continued most attentively to replenish. Ava, he noticed, seemed to take each pour as a cue to drink, which she did with the air of an automaton. Somewhat guiltily, aware of how willingly he’d neglected her during the pre-dinner hour, Dennis began trying to calculate how much she’d had. “Don’t forget your water, Ayv,” he said, leaning across the table and sliding it toward her, a cue she responded to with equally mechanical obedience, picking up her tumbler and taking a sip.

There was no turkey, Don and Meg having been vegetarians for decades, but the table groaned under untraditional bounty. There were, in addition to Dennis and Ava’s vegetables: a butternut-squash-and-zucchini galette, stuffed cabbage, two kinds of cornbread (Meg’s, which was closer to a corn pudding, and Richard’s jalapeño-and-cheddar contribution), green salad with pear and manchego, cranberry-orange chutney, potato latkes, and cold sesame noodles. For dessert there was the apple cake, chocolate-frosted pumpkin bars, and an old-fashioned icebox cake—a solo effort by Li-Hua, who, stripped from the moment of all sarcasm by her own blushing pride, recited from memory, at her dads’ urging, the recipe: squirt whipped cream on chocolate wafers, stick them together in the shape of two logs, refrigerate overnight.

“I made those back in the days when we really had iceboxes,” declared Gerta Hauptmann, and Dennis studied her wizened face across the table and did some math, trying to work out whether she was making a joke. She was so small that Meg had had to place a foam pillow on the chair for her, and now Dennis imagined her feet dangling above the floor. “I met your father, you know,” she said then, turning abruptly to Ava on her left.

Ava, who hadn’t said a word during the meal except to murmur thanks whenever Don filled her glass, frowned. The shell curve of her ear reddened. “My father is dead.”

“Oh no,” said Gerta. She gave Ava’s arm a tiny, spirited punch as if to say
What a card
. “Back when he first opened his school, this was, a million years ago, and everyone wanted an article about it. That’s when I was working for
Life
. Got sent up with a reporter. We took the train. Spent the day. I never wanted to leave.”

“I didn’t know that, Gerta,” said Don.

“This was before your time—long before you were a student there.” Gerta nodded at him and her heavy clay earrings swung precariously from earlobes that looked thin as paper.

“You wrote an article about my father?”

“Just shot it, dear. I took the snaps. But he had the right idea, I thought. Your father. Beautiful man. He reminded me of Oberon. The fairy king. Beautiful school, all that wilderness, the woods, the freedom, the children going in and out of doors as they pleased. None of them wore shoes, as I recall. They looked like fairies, too, little rascal fairies. Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed . . . what’s the other one named?”

Conversation around the rest of the table had ceased, and Gerta Hauptmann had taken on a new vivacity, the glow of her memory seeming to illuminate her bony features.

“Moth,” supplied Tariq.

Gerta turned to him. “But the reporter felt otherwise,” she recalled, frowning. “What was his name?” She appeared to consult Tariq. “He had terrible hands, I remember, quite hairless. And pink. Smug little hands. That was when all men wore hats . . . but I digress. Anyway, I was only the photographer. In the end, the words tell the story.”

“What did he say?” asked Don.

“The reporter? He wrote a snide—oh, a sneering piece, full of moral stuffing and . . . what is the word? Certitude.” She addressed Ava. “He said your father would follow his pupils into the woods, where they’d set up play areas, camps and forts and things, and observe them. Never interfere, not even when they got into fights. He said—this was the damnable line—he said your father was more primatologist than educator.

“Of course, it didn’t do a bit of harm among those who really appreciated what the school was doing. My pictures didn’t do any harm either,” she added, demurely boastful. “Enrollment went up.” Gerta’s small fist thumped the table triumphantly. Cups rattled in their saucers.

And over the crumbs and cold, pooled coffee, a kind of fermata settled.

“Excuse me,” said Ava. She rose and took two steps toward the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom, but teetered so alarmingly that Richard pushed back his chair and rushed to steady her. When she turned to thank him, Dennis saw that her eyelids were at half-mast, and her speech sounded occluded, as if she were balancing a plum pit on the middle of her tongue. So he rose, too, and saw her to the bathroom—that she did not object to his help was further confirmation of how past her limit she was—and from there proceeded with her to his parents’ bedroom, where he settled her onto their bed, covered her with a woven throw, and lowered the window shade. On his way to the door, he heard her say, “Den,” in a crumpled voice. He went back and knelt beside the bed.

Her eyes were closed, her mouth pinched. “I’m wretched.”

Ambiguous little pronouncement: Verdict or complaint? Dennis stroked her forehead, hoping to make the vertical line between her eyebrows disappear.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she murmured.

“There’s no chance of that.”

“No, I didn’t—I didn’t want to lose you.”

“What do you mean, Ayv?”

In a cracked whisper: “I didn’t want Fred to move in with us when my mother died.” From behind closed lids, tears. “I wanted to keep . . . I wanted us to be—”

Dennis passed his finger over her brow, willing it smooth. “Shh,” he said, even though her words had run dry. What else could he say? “Sh.”

In time her breathing eased into the rhythms of somnolence. He watched her tenderly but with curiosity, too. He had a thought about Ava, one that had occurred to him in the past but which he would never share with her: it was that sometimes she seemed to have her own small impairment, a milder version of what, in her brother, was more plainly, more problematically manifest. Yet would Dennis have ever formed such a thought if it weren’t for Fred? Surely all husbands found their wives unfathomable to a degree. Surely everyone was a riddle, a muddle, a bundle of more or fewer broken parts. And just as surely, Ava saw in Dennis things she found inexplicable, without being moved to question his wellness, to wonder whether he was sound or impaired.

Ava slept, the line between her brows gone at last. Dennis watched her and marveled at the ludicrous dignity of the human face in repose: stripped of sentience, pared to its composite parts, a cipher.

•   •   •

B
ACK IN THE MAIN ROOM
Dennis sought out his mother. Meg was at the kitchen end of the room, working on the redistribution of leftovers. He let her know where he’d left Ava, and Meg murmured, “Poor thing. She hasn’t been sleeping well?” with such apparent cluelessness that Dennis was annoyed.

“Well, that and the fact that Dad was doing his best to get her sloshed.”

“Oh, Dennis, he was not.”

“He was topping off her glass every three minutes.”

“He was a little nervous,” Meg allowed, “a little . . . misguided about how best to show his concern.”

Sarcastically: “Ya think?”

“She didn’t have to drink it,” Kitty pointed out, sidling up behind him. She pried an edge of pie crust from its dish and chewed it smackingly by his ear. The three of them stood around the butcher-block island, where Meg had stalled in her task at the preliminary stage of simply gazing back and forth between an assortment of plastic containers and the serving dishes that had been cleared from the table. Everyone else had been shooed down again to the other end of the room, where they sank willingly onto the brown sofas there, beneath the skylight and the tall, graceful windows that gave onto the backs of the neighboring apartment block: a view of narrow gray and brownstone buildings; an intricate geometry of fire escapes; thoughtfully plotted miniature gardens and crisscrossing strands of holiday lights that had already, in the smoky light of late afternoon, twinkled on.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dennis asked.

“Just that. Dad might have been misguided as a host, but Ava might have welcomed getting blotto.” Kitty plucked an olive from the dregs of the salad bowl and sucked it impassively from between her fingers. Her flaxen hair, modishly cut, sparked out all around her heart-shaped face.

“A little harsh, no? Given what she has going on right now.”

“I don’t mean it to be harsh. But I don’t think we’re doing Ava a favor by ignoring her part in it. I don’t think we do anyone a favor by absolving them of their personal responsibility.”

“In what way is she personally responsible for her brother being in jail?”

“I don’t mean that. I mean responsible for drinking as much as she did.”

Dennis thought of Ava curled in drunken slumber on his parents’ bed, of her garbled self-indictment and his own disloyal musings about how much she might share in common with Fred. He looked at Kitty now blithely feeding herself remnants of Stilton, nibbling up crumbs from the cheese board. “Certainly you’ve always made impeccable decisions under duress. What was that particularly impressive display of fortitude a few years back? When that dog-walker/musician guy broke up with you. Those were some solid choices you made, Katherine, giving up food and living on cigarettes and Ensure—”

“Dennis! I can’t believe you would bring up Enzo.” She glanced toward the other end of the long room, where Tariq was changing Dilly’s diaper while she chewed on a board book. “I’m not saying I haven’t made bad decisions in extremis. I
am
saying they were my decisions and I take responsibility for them. Just because Dad’s clueless about refilling guests’ glasses doesn’t mean it wasn’t Ava’s decision to drink too much.”

Dennis opened his mouth to return the volley, but was not sorry when their mother cut in. “Children,” was all she said, in the gentlest of tones; nevertheless the utterance was as effective as it was concise.

It resulted in Kitty’s and Dennis’s exchanging the look they’d exchanged a million times: a look that did not forsake entirely their own lingering adversarial positions, but acknowledged shared amusement at their mother’s mellifluous protest. More than once Dennis had wondered if this wasn’t in fact the genius of Meg’s mild rebukes: perhaps she knew full well that the absurd softness of her appeal brought them together in silent laughter.