Saving St. Germ (33 page)

“Pawn? Wait, Mother, that implies that
both
Jay and I are playing a game.” I set my cup down with a bang and she jumped. “Jay may be trying to play a game. I’m not. I’m not playing a game. This is
Ollie
we’re talking ...”

I started to cry again. Goddammit, I thought, but the tears cascaded down. I shook my head and dabbed at my eyes with a napkin.

“This is
Ollie.
He
took
her from me. He lied and told his lawyer I’d ... hurt her.”

Q sat forward, setting his cup down.

“What is he claiming you did to her?”

“He’s saying that I ... hit her. She had a little bump where she hit her head on the sink and he said I did that. Prior to that he said I was irresponsible because I didn’t agree with him that she needed to be treated like a dysfunctional kid.”

“Dear, is there a chance that he’s right about Ollie? I don’t mean the
bruise,
I mean the ... dysfunction.”

I looked back at her in fury.

“Of course there’s a chance that he is right. There was also a chance that I’m right. Who knows? All
I
know is that my daughter has always seemed like herself to me. She just needs time to grow and let the world get used to who she is.”

“But there were ... problems? In school, with other children, language development—isn’t this right?”

“Yes and no, Mom. Mostly no. I don’t know how to say this so that you’ll stop looking at me like I’m some kind of fucking child-abuser, but I know my kid, OK?”

Q frowned at me. “Esme, please don’t speak in that manner to your mother.”

I stood up. “Please don’t speak like that to my
mother
? You’re going to tell me how to address my mother now? It wasn’t enough that you ran my life for five or six years and made me think I had to be fucking Joan of Arc, now you’re going to tell me how to talk to my
mother
? Jesus, how arrogant are you? And by the way, my
mother
and I never talk at all, so there’s really no precedent. She and I have never been close, have we,
Mom
?”

She just looked at me.

I sat down again, talking to Q, who was glaring at me.

“I’ll tell you what really sucks about all this. She could have helped me so much this last year when I was debating what to do about Ollie. I wanted to know about my own early childhood, of which I remember little. I thought it might shed some light on Ollie’s behavior. I wrote her letters, but she never told me anything. Isn’t that right?”

“It’s hard to know
what
you want, Esme.” She put her cup down.

“Yeah. Hard for
you.
Your mind’s been elsewhere for my whole life!”

“Esme, I’m not like you. You want answers to everything; that’s how your mind works. When you were in therapy, in graduate school, you bombarded me with letters too. I don’t like supplying you with
evidence
for some theory you’ll derive to justify your own behavior.”

“What behavior?”

“Like
now,
the way you’re acting now. Finding excuses. If Ollie needs help, Esme, get her help.”

“Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. I mean
any
of it, having a child like Ollie, any of it,” I said. I took a breath. “I was finding a way, on my own, trying to discover the right place for her. I’d written to a teacher, Gloria Walther—she was Ollie’s first kindergarten teacher but was transferred—to ask if she knew of a school that would
recognize
Ollie, help her develop. I’m waiting to hear from her. In the meantime, I’m all alone. Jay took her away from me, Mother. I can’t really grieve and I can’t let my life go on. I know that she’s alive and not that far away but I can’t get to her. Do you have any idea how that feels?”

Suddenly her demeanor changed; the erect posture, the carefully held face, altered. She shook a little, as if an electrical surge had passed through her; then she began to cry.

“Yes!” she cried. “I
know
how that feels.”

I stared at her, astonished, and Q put an arm around her and patted her hair. He looked over her head at me and something blazed from his face: righteousness, anger, fierce protectiveness? I couldn’t tell.

She sat up and dabbed her eyes with her napkin. She looked at me. God, I hated that look. She was always
reasonable.
After she expressed an emotion, she limited it, cauterized it, quickly, perfunctorily. I remembered the mothers of kids I knew: shouting, laughing, weeping. Millie wept a little, now and then,
for form’s sake.

“Esme, I’ve avoided telling you this because I didn’t want to give you fuel for your theories about Ollie. I was an outsider when it came to your upbringing. When you began to exhibit certain tendencies—yes, yes, like those you describe in Ollie—your father panicked. He thought that you were disturbed. We took you to the psychiatrists and child-development people and the advice at that time was always: Give her a normal upbringing,
force
her to be like other kids.”

She stopped. We waited, and after drawing a long breath, she went on.

“I disagreed. When you began to ... move around in circles and talk to yourself, it didn’t seem like a disturbance to me. I thought you should not be ... treated like a disturbed child. But your father ... You know, Esme, before your father got so sick with emphysema, he was a strong, stubborn man. Your father insisted that he could help you, change you. He thought that I was a bad influence.” She stopped here and said nothing for quite a while. Q wheezed away like a squeezebox and I sat staring at her, as she sat erect, her body slightly turned from me. “You know that there was a popular theory among psychiatrists at that time that autism could be
caused
by the mother? James thought that our bond, the bond between you and me, was ... He broke it. That bond between you and me.” She put her head down. “Do you know what it’s like to try and withdraw emotionally from your child?” She looked up again. Her face was naked, grief-stricken.

“That’s what they asked me to do. Your father. The therapists. So. Then your father worked with you. Every time he caught you spinning in circles he ... shook you and brought you back. He insisted that you do regular kid things. He bought you comic books, he taught you to tell jokes. He was
funny,
your father, remember? He tried to make you laugh. When you started to withdraw he went after you. He followed you into that world and he turned your face around and brought you back. He made you talk to him, he made you use words that made sense. ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he’d say. ‘Say it again, Esme, say it again, until you make sense.’ Then, you know, not too long after that, he started drinking. He lost his job at Fann Hydraulics and he worked for a while as a toll-taker on the Triboro Bridge. Do you remember that, honey?”

“No,” I whispered.

“Well, he worked the night shift and he used to take you with him sometimes.”

“No,” I said. Then: “Maybe I do remember, but I never knew
where
I was.”

The memory washed over me. I must have been four or so, maybe Ollie’s age. ... I remembered being in a tiny space with him. When I remembered it, I always thought that I was recalling a dream, because it appeared to me that we were
in prison,
my father and me, in a cell, behind bars. Beams of light swept over us. I’d always thought the beams were from a nightmare prison watchtower, but now I realized they were headlights. Now I remembered him talking to me, telling me to ask for the toll, fifty cents, to hand the change back from a dollar. “Talk to the people,” he’d say. “Say ‘Good evening, sir.’” “Esme, make sense. Answer the lady, Esme, speak up, what do you say?” “Thank you.” “Please.” “Pardon?” “Your change, ma’am.” And I remembered too, suddenly, how he bragged about me. I could make change fast, I picked the math up, even at that early age. He wanted it both ways, I thought. “Here’s my smart little kid. Fast as lightning, nobody’s fool. But look at her, just like all the other kids. Smart as a toll-taker’s daughter, making change (you say the right word, you pay the toll), handing out the tickets to those who complied, stamped
PAID,
you can pass.”

“I remember it now,” I said.

“Esme, he did all this because he wanted you to be happy, he wanted you to be normal.
I know
you think that there is no normal, I know that. But
he
believed it, you see. You and he used to trade jokes back and forth. Then you just got too fast. He couldn’t keep up. And in school, though he’d tried to keep you out of accelerated classes—you took off. You started winning all those prizes with your science projects. He just gave up, you know. But by then, he was so sick.”

She started to weep again. Then stopped herself. Then wept again.

“Why would you want this to happen
again,
Mom?” I noticed how Q silently reached over and took her hand.

I couldn’t imagine how she could have lived through that, conditioned herself, to be the person she’d become to me, day after day. “No, sweetheart, not now.” “No, Mommy can’t help.” “Mommy has to go now.” “Let go, Esme.” I stared at her: Who would we be now, had we been allowed to love each other?

“I don’t know. You said yourself we’ve never been that close.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Why would you want me to do to Ollie what he did to me?”

“Because she has to live in the world, Esme. She can’t keep talking just to herself and you. You must see that.”

“I know she has to live in the world and talk to other people. I
do
see that. But I’ve made a lot of people angry trying to protect her,” I said. “Because I don’t believe that some
expert
can tell me about my own daughter.” I paused. “She needed this time in her life to be
safe
: She needed to know I was her mother, that I wouldn’t go away.”

I got up, walked over, and sat between them. They shrank back a little, both of them, nervous. I sat down between them.

I put my arm around my mother. Then I put my arm around Q. They seemed so old to me, suddenly, so fragile.

“You came because of the letters I wrote, I know that. It wasn’t really the conference, was it? You talked to Jay and you were
worried.
It’s all OK, really. It’s OK.”

After a while, my mother stopped crying and I touched the side of her face with my hand. She reached up and took my hand and held it. Then as if that were all the maternal intimacy she could bear for the moment, she let it go. She smiled brightly at me and got up. She went into the bathroom and shut the door. I cleared my throat.

“You know, Q, it’s so funny. For the longest time, I
did
think that I was in love with you. You know that. Well, I wasn’t in love with you. But you had such power over me—the power that parents have,
totemic
power. In some ways, everything I’ve done in my field was in reaction to you. Except the theory. That’s mine. Or
was.
It freed me of your power over me.”

He nodded his head slowly, in time with his labored breathing.

“I’ve made mistakes,” he said finally. “Mistakes of judgment. I was a very lonely man when we worked together and in my loneliness, I confused my work with an emotional life.”

He wheezed violently, then caught his breath. “You were right, Esme, about
some
of the things you said that day in my office. Not all. Not all. I am
not
invested in biotech futures; you were wrong to suggest that. And I find the genome project ... pretentious. It’s true, you’ve always been impulsive in your judgments.”

Still so arrogant I thought, still Q. But this no longer bothered me. In fact, it made me feel a little stronger.

“I
am
impulsive,” I said. “But you are, too. You just act on your impulses a little slower, so it looks like measured judgment.”

He looked at me, shocked, then amazingly, he laughed a little, hoarsely. “The way you talk to your mother,” he murmured. “I don’t like it, Esme.”

“You don’t have to like it, she’s not
your
mother.” I stared off into middle distance; the bathroom. “She’s
my
mother,” I said. Then we sat in silence for a time.

“Hey,” I said after a minute. “Do you remember a medical fellow named Jesse Falbo? He worked at Harmon-Tannen with us?”

“Maybe,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Wait ... Oh yes. Jesse. Yes.”

“I liked that guy,” I said, and thought of that other life, like a dream. “I really did.”

I
STOOD IN
the shower, letting the hot water pour over me. I reached up and turned a lever on the shower nozzle and the pour became a spin; the droplets spiraled over and around me and I leaned languorously against the tiled wall, my hair streaming down my back, and I shut my eyes and saw her—the familiar dark figure. She was spinning in the arc of the spray, then turning slower and slower, almost stopping now, and I could see as she slowly rotated—back-of-head to profile, to front—it was no surprise to me that she wore my mother’s face. And what I felt, even in the wake of Ollie’s loss, for a split second was gratitude. Then I reached for the soap and began to wash myself.

I stood beside the answering machine, filled with dread. Then I pressed the Messages button.

There were three hangups, right in a row, then Michele Mueller, then Terry McMahon, then Terry McMahon again, then the mediator from Family Court wanting to make an appointment with me; then L.R.’s hoarse voice filled the air.

“Esme. I’m so sorry I didn’t catch you at home. I’m back in Los Angeles and I’m afraid that I owe you an explanation for my disappearance.” (You owe me a tad more than that, I thought grimly.) “The reason I went away was because, I’m afraid, I was feeling some things rather
unworthy
of me.” She cleared her throat.

“Esme, you cannot possibly understand what it’s like to work for so long on a project and then have someone younger and less experienced come along and redefine it, provide the missing link, just like that. I can only report to you that it is daunting and there is a bitterness that is real and threatens to consume one. That is why I left. When I flew to New York, I had actually considered submitting the TOE to an appropriate journal, under my name only, and leaving it at that. I admit this to you now and I apologize to you for having had this impulse. It was only that, an impulse. I could never have done that. You will be relieved to know that though I submitted the findings to
Theory Abstracts
without your knowledge (and I apologize for this unorthodox step too!), I did not submit them without your name, which will be listed after mine, as co-author of the Theory of Chirality and the Weak Force. The envelope containing our theory with calculations will be opened in the offices of
Theory Abstracts
at eleven
A.M.
EST, Tuesday the twentieth. I congratulate you, Esme, and I thank you. We deserve to be very proud of ourselves now.”