No Book but the World: A Novel (19 page)

Kitty fished a piece of oil-soaked arugula from the bottom of the bowl and licked it off her fingers.

“Stop eating everything,” ordered Meg. “What are you, pregnant?” Kitty’s hands dove into her trouser pockets. Meg turned to Dennis. “You’re the engineer.” She handed him the stack of plastic food containers. “Figure out what to do with these leftovers.”

“Not actually an engineer,” he demurred, accepting the assignment nevertheless. Dennis had dropped out of graduate school after one semester, sick at last of books and theories, impatient to get his hands on actual
things
. Score one for Neel Robbins, he’d grudgingly thought, while Don and Meg made valiant efforts to hide their fretful disappointment. Luckily, he’d had to temp only a few months before landing a job at the green-energy start-up Greensleeves.

“Kitty, you go see if anyone needs anything. Where’s my grandbaby? Oh, having her bottle. Li-Hua looks like she’s dying of boredom. Why don’t you go ask Tariq to let her finish feeding Dilly?”

A single grin passed between the siblings. They loved this about her, too: that beneath the dulcet tones lurked an efficient brigadier general.

Afternoon progressed toward evening. The sky turned dusky, unfurled pennants of pink, then went swiftly, definitively black. The lights outside multiplied, illuminating other holiday gatherings in the apartments across the way, while above the rooftops and stretching west they plotted a pointillist picture of downtown. Gerta Hauptmann left first, ushered into a Gramercy-bound cab. Soon after, Chris and Richard and Li-Hua headed off for the F train back to Jackson Heights, and then Don and Tariq pulled wool hats on over their twin pates and went out for a walk with Dilly, who’d begun to fuss, in hopes that the motion would make her fall asleep. In the bedroom, Ava slept on. And in this way, Dennis found himself once again alone with Kitty and Meg. As if by prearrangement, the moment the umbrella stroller had been maneuvered out the door, the two siblings and their mother launched into the discussion they’d been longing to have, no antecedent necessary.

Kitty turned to Dennis. “So is he getting out?”

Dennis shook his head: Fred was being held without bail.

“But I thought that was maybe going to change. At the pretrial hearing? Or detention hearing, whatever?”

It hadn’t, though.

“Why not?” Kitty demanded. She was reclining on one of the brown sofas—they all were now: shoes off, feet up on the cushions, throw pillows tucked under various parts of their anatomies—so that the vigor of her indignation seemed at odds with the languor of her pose. “Is he a danger to the public?”

“It’s because he doesn’t have a permanent address, I think,” ventured Meg. She and Kitty lay at opposite ends of the same sofa, and Meg stroked her daughter’s stockinged foot. “It makes him a flight risk.”

“Also no ties to the community,” confirmed Dennis.

“Oh. That’s how
law
works?” Kitty drawled the noun, leveling accusatory looks at Dennis and then Meg, as if they might be the very legislators responsible for these rules. “So, what—you can’t get bail if you’re homeless?”

Dennis explained what Ava had told him the lawyer told her: “It’s not cut-and-dried. It can depend on the nature of the crime, the way it’s playing out in the media, the feelings in the community, the whim of the judge. Apparently in Criterion, it’s not even a judge-judge. It’s a lay magistrate. They don’t have to have any legal training. The guy in Perdu, the magistrate there, he’s a local businessman.”

“What kind of businessman?” Meg asked.

Kitty snorted. “Does it matter?”

“Ava said he owns a hardware store.”

“Jeez. Well, what about the lawyer?” asked Kitty with new animation. “Is he any good? Do the
lawyers
in Podunk have to have legal training?”

“Careful,” said Meg, tweaking her big toe.

“What?”

“You’re sounding like a snob.”

“I’m seriously asking!”

Dennis, from the adjacent sofa, considered his little sister. He was accustomed to people referring to her, almost matter-of-factly, as a beauty. Even Neel used to call her Bonny Kitty. Much of her charm resided in her energy: the liveliness of her chin, with its defiant whisper of a cleft; her high, smooth forehead pleating in consternation; her bright chicory eyes flashing at you expectantly; even her nose was lively, now wrinkling, now flaring. But he saw it as too much performance, for he’d seen it too often performed. And he could not shake the conviction that she was enjoying being outraged at least as much as she was genuinely experiencing outrage; that her sense of injustice and her indignation on Fred’s behalf thrilled her.

Meg gave Kitty’s foot a reproachful little slap, but added, “Denny, love, how
is
the lawyer?”

He told them what little he knew: that Ava hadn’t much liked Bayard Charles at first, that she worried he seemed quick to enter a plea, but then he’d gotten her name on the visitor list so she could see Fred, and now she thought he was becoming more invested in the case as he learned more about Fred, his background, the way he was, his peculiarities.

Dennis used that word, there in the living room on Jane Street:
peculiarities
.

No one said anything for a moment.

Then Kitty propped herself up against her end of the sofa and looked pointedly at Meg. “Mom? I know we’re not supposed to talk about it, but what
are
his ‘peculiarities’?”

Meg gave a slow, considered nod. Yet all she said was, “I don’t know.”

“But you know what we mean.”

“I do.” She squinted, as if into the vaults of memory. “But Neel and June never wanted to talk about it. I mean they didn’t want to give any sort of name to his . . . his condition. They wouldn’t have liked even that word. And it was . . . a politeness, or really a form of respect—”

“What, not to mention it?”

“I was going to say, to try to see it the way they did: not as a ‘condition’ you could separate out and—I don’t know, analyze, treat—but as part of the wholeness of the boy. Of Fred.”

Kitty turned to Dennis. “Do you know?”

“Know what?”

“Does Ava ever talk about it?” put in Meg.

He hesitated, seeing the territory before him suddenly strewn with mines. He and Ava had made a practice, all these years, of eliding the subject of Fred. For Dennis it was simply a matter of following suit, deferring to his wife’s implicit wishes. He’d perceived how she worked to minimize his interactions with Fred, the way she’d encourage him to stay in the city whenever she traveled to Freyburg, or ask him to accompany her only when she knew Fred was away. Initially these efforts had struck him as odd. After all, Dennis had known Fred growing up; what was there to hide? (Although the fact of their families having known each other so long might explain why they never discussed his condition, parsed his Fredliness; it obviated the need. This might even, it had occurred to Dennis on occasion, be one of the reasons Ava had married him.) Later on he found her behavior insulting: Did she think Dennis insensitive, intolerant? Did she think so little of his love for her that she imagined he’d be easily put off? But eventually, as Dennis became more intimately acquainted with Ava’s own flickering strangenesses—the tiny foibles and quirks that set her apart from the world, that seemed to provide her with some necessary shade, as if she were a rare, delicate mushroom—he came to understand. Or to believe he understood.

It was not Fred himself that Ava wanted to keep hidden. It was that part of her she feared bore too strong a resemblance to him, that indistinct part that his presence might amplify, lend clarity and prominence.

Dennis recalled the confession she’d made earlier, lying on his parents’ bed.
I didn’t want Fred to move in with us when my mother died.
Well, neither had he. So it had all been pretty convenient. Only now, two years later, did he wonder: How much of her disinclination stemmed from fear, fear of what might happen to their marriage, fear of whatever conclusions Dennis might form if not shielded from the daily reality of Fred? He shifted uncomfortably on the brown sofa, perpendicular to where his mother and sister lay cozily entwined. Did he bear some of that burden of guilt? Had he too readily accepted the solution of Fred’s going to work on the Cape? By the time he’d learned of this plan, it had all been arranged, apparently by June herself. But were he and Ava supposed to have countered with an offer of their own?

No one—not June, not Ava, not Dennis—had mentioned the obvious: that Fred was good with his hands and the routines of manual labor. That Dennis was just starting his own home insulation business. That if Dave Alsop was willing to put Fred on his housepainting crew, Dennis might as easily offer to put him on some jobs closer to home.

“Hello?” prompted Kitty. “What does Ava say?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you have a thought?” Meg went back to stroking Kitty’s foot. “Dr. Manseau?”

“Not actually a doctor.” Kitty’s degree was a master’s in psychology.

“But you must have covered some of this in school. What might a diagnosis be? If you had to hazard a guess.”

Diagnosis. That word even more of a betrayal than “condition.” And yet—Dennis glanced toward the hallway that led to the bedroom—mightn’t it also be a help, their speaking in these terms? Ava had said the lawyer asked some of these same questions.

Kitty turned up her palms. “I used to think he must be a little retarded,” she confessed. “I mean”—her cheeks pinked—“when we were kids. Now I’d say cognitively impaired. But I’m not sure. Even back then, it was like . . . he always seemed so out of it, and then he’d go and surprise you. As if he hadn’t missed a trick, as if he’d been understanding everything all along, picking up on even more than a typical kid.”

“A savant?” mused Meg.

“You’re free-associating, Mom. Do you even know what that means? I don’t remember anything that would count as signs of savant syndrome, so much as . . . sometimes he’d just surprise you with how aware he was. As if he knew more than he let on.” She seemed to be remembering something. Dennis wondered what. For his part he saw again, in a frieze as sharp as it was unbidden, Fred at twelve kneeling in his hapless way—large and heavy and soft—on the freshly painted seven-square court, his head bowed, his face obscured by that dark froth of bangs, and then peering unexpectedly up at Dennis, his eyes dark and glittering and full of laughter.

“Is it some kind of autism?” Meg wondered. “Aren’t some autistic people extremely smart?”

“Asperger’s,” suggested Dennis.

“Or another form of high-functioning autism,” said Kitty a bit officiously. “I don’t know, in school, when we were learning this stuff, I mean I do remember thinking about Fred, actually, how he seemed to fit a lot of the symptoms. Maybe he’s on the spectrum. There’s also”—she snorted—“pidnose. PDDNOS. ‘Pervasive development disorder not otherwise specified.’ As you can see, it’s a really well-understood area.” She let her head clunk back theatrically on the armrest.

“The question is,” said Meg, “could any of this help him now?”

“I don’t see how,” said Kitty, “if he’s never been diagnosed. I hate to say it, but don’t you blame his parents?”

“You have to understand,” said Meg in her languid way, neither defending nor condemning, “Neel and June had beliefs about all that—about so-called experts, and labeling, and the medicalization of personhood.”

Kitty snorted again.

“No,” Meg reproved her softly. “They weren’t superficial beliefs. They’d come to them with a lot of thought.”

“But you and Daddy left Batter Hollow. I thought you decided it was dumb.”

“It didn’t ultimately feel right for us,” Meg agreed. “But who’s to say it was wrong for them?”

“I’ll say it. It was gross negligence. Like Gerta Hauptmann’s reporter-guy said.” Kitty, becoming more exercised, sat up now. “I remember that year you let me stay out of school and go running around with Ava and Freddy all day long. Fine, none of us got hurt, but we could have.”

“Remember, though,” objected Dennis, “you’re looking at it through the filter of a helicopter mom.”

“I’m not a helicopter mom.”

“Excuse me, you’re the mother of a young child in the twenty-first century living in Park Slope, which happens to be the epicenter of helicopter parenting. You can’t help but be influenced by today’s norms.”

Kitty ran her fingers through her short hair. “Okay, fine. But that’s not even my point. It’s not just that we were left to do our own thing. Although yes, sue me: I do believe children need care and supervision. But on top of that. It wasn’t just that they wanted us to have freedom. Neel had this way of observing us.”

“Pick an argument,” snapped Dennis. “Did you want to be supervised or not?”

“I mean this
way
of observing us. Like a primatologist.”

“And you a bonobo.”

He expected her to stick out her tongue at this but she was earnest now, ruminative. “I mean it’s one thing to be an educator and observe students. But to regard your own children with, with . . .” Her hands groped the air as she searched for the term. “. . .
professional remove
. Isn’t that unforgivable?”

“What are you guys talking about?”

They all started.

Ava emerged from the darkness of the hallway and stood shyly just inside the large, lighted room. Clutching the plaid throw around her shoulders, she shambled forward a few steps, sleep-disoriented and blinking.

Meg righted herself on the sofa. Dennis and Kitty stood with awkward simultaneity, as if caught engaging in illicit behavior.

“How long have I been asleep?” Ava stopped partway into the room and squinted uncertainly at them. “What’s unforgivable?” she asked.

KITTY