The Cradle (15 page)

She waited silently and stared straight ahead. She looked at all the people in the crowd. She looked at Diane.

The woman nodded and seemed happy with the answer. A few other people raised their hands.

She had believed every word of praise, every review, every parent’s note of thanks, as though she had...as though she’d actually
meant to tell these things to the public, as though all along she had not been screaming these stories out. All the words
weren’t to make an army of children.

A man raised his hand and asked her whether she still wrote poetry, and who her favorite poet had been, and she said, “No.”
Then she said, “Walt Whitman.”

Now the people in the crowd sensed something had gone wrong. The children looked concerned. Renee tried to hold her smile
in place. Not at all for an army. How could she have been this blind for this long? But that answer was simple, too. She had
chosen to be.

Now a woman was asking a question. She was already asking a question. Had Diane called on her? She didn’t see. Renee tried
to focus in on the woman’s mouth as she spoke. She was saying something about dragons. Renee nodded along as the woman spoke,
and she even raised her eyebrows now and then at what seemed like the right moments. She tried to gather the question in.
The woman wanted to know why children responded so well to stories that had, at one point in time, been the actual stories
of cultures, the stories that adults told one another and that held the most meaning. Were thousand-year-old stories the hand-me-down
stories children got once the adults had grown tired of them? Arthur, the Lady of the Lake—those had been serious business
at one point in time, and the magic that drove the legends had been serious business, too. This was how people lived their
lives. This was what they believed. Why, now, was this a game for toddlers? What had changed? Science? Maybe the industrial
revolution had played a role. The woman revealed that she had a master’s degree. Then she just said
Beowulf
,
Beowulf
,
Beowulf
. In Renee’s ear the woman said
Beowulf
four hundred times in a row. Then the woman made a comment that made the rest of the parents chuckle, so Renee chuckled along
with them. The woman apologized for rambling. She asked her question one last time. She said, “What I suppose I’m
really
asking is whether you see children’s literature as an important aspect of our
culture
in, well, the same way that other
literatures
can be thought of as important? Should our universities’ English departments be taking these books
seriously,
right alongside the traditional canon? Right alongside Melville and Hawthorne, if you will?” and Renee leaned forward and
said into the microphone, “I wrote every single one of these books for my son.”

Jonathan died three weeks after he landed in Vietnam. He was incinerated. The image in her mind was almost a cartoon: a large
round bomb landing directly on his head. That was her way not to imagine how horrible it had been.

She had started to read poetry before she met him, but something fused that fall, once she knew she was pregnant and once
she knew he was dead. What poetry was seemed to change. It became more than what she was doing and far more than expressing.
It became more like architecture of being. The poems she wrote for the book came that fall. Between October and December,
she wrote one almost every day. To her it had been a curious, irrelevant coincidence that her teachers actually found what
she wrote to be excellent. Most of the other undergraduates in class stared at her poems with confused looks and told her
they liked the imagery. Either way, she just wrote. October to December, she wrote seventy-two poems, and her professor picked
the best of them and collected them together into a folder and told her, “Just let me send these to somebody,” and she agreed,
and before Christmas she was told her book was to be published by a New York press. She just kept writing. Then her father
gave her the Whitman, and she stopped.

It was important to remember the order. Wasn’t it easy, after living fifty-eight years, to let one moment slip ahead or behind
the other, and to make a new logic based on the new order? The usual order was this: he died, she had the baby, she gave him
away, and then she stopped writing poems. Walt Whitman was only something in the background of it all. But that had not been
the case. It was easy to put 1969 in that order, but the truth was she stopped writing before the baby, and before she gave
it up. She stopped when she read that book. She used to read it in the park just down the road from her family’s home, a brownstone
on Racine. And her feeling, as she read those poems, was something like: if some other person from some other time has done
exactly what I would most like to be able to do, then what is the point of doing it at all? It was already here. Someone had
already brought it to earth. She knew that other artists felt this all the time, but she had not given up on the thought,
and she had followed it to its logical end. She didn’t need to write because everything she wanted written was already written.

It was not
Leaves of Grass
. It was not I am the grass and You are the grass and We are the Atoms and I am the dirt and We are lying beside one another
but I am Myself and You are also Myself and I Touch Myself and look how it is both I and I here, on the Grass. All that meant
nothing to her. The poems her father had given to her were other poems, smaller, kinder. They had less ambition. And in truth,
it wasn’t even the words, and it had nothing to do with what was described. It was something invisible behind them. It was
tone, perhaps. It was voice. It was that when she read them she heard some other voice in her mind. When she read, “When I
sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, how soon unaccountable I became tired
and sick, till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, in the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, look’d
up in perfect silence at the stars,” she could hear someone saying it.

There she was, on the bench, a pregnant girl in Chicago with a voice of her own, but when she read the poems, some alien voice
seemed instantly to be there within her, and the voice read the words back to her. It was not the voice of Walt Whitman. There
she was, the girl reading the book, but someone else was speaking the words. How, though, could that have been? How could
there be a voice that wasn’t your voice? How could it be, unless this other voice was also your voice?

She stopped. There was nothing else to say.

Today was April 14, and Lake Michigan wasn’t frozen anymore. There were no swimmers yet and she couldn’t see any boats. It
was the blue water and waves and the mucky, empty beaches.

People were here on the path. It was one of the first warm spring days, warm being over forty, and in the Midwest that meant
wildly inappropriate clothing choices—it was as though they believed that if enough of them wore tank tops or shorts, the
earth would think to itself that maybe its own orbital schedule was off and shrug and just decide to go right into summer.
Renee had her coat, her hat, her scarf. Her mother, beside her in the wheelchair, was also bundled up. She had a red checked
blanket over her legs.

They moved north, with the water on their right. They had already eaten at a restaurant across the street from Theresa Owen’s
assisted-living apartment complex.

Renee tried to tell her mother what had happened at the reading and managed to say only some of it. Her mother already knew
about Hawaii. Renee’s mind was circling and doing some strange work of its own; it felt like she kept going down. The mood
made it difficult for her to talk, and for long moments they just moved quietly together. She felt as though something beneath
her, something in the floor, was gone.

“It’s not all true, you know,” her mother said. “You’re a very good writer. Plenty of those stories have nothing at all to
do with all that.”

“With what? An abandoned boy?”

“Yes.”

“They all do, Mom.”

Theresa sighed and looked to the right, toward the lake. Her wheelchair veered right.

“Mom, look ahead. Just look straight ahead.”

“I know, I know.”

“You don’t know.”

Theresa piloted the wheelchair around the puddle.

“How well,” Renee asked a few minutes later, “do you remember when I decided?”

“What? To give him up?” She frowned.

“I don’t remember it at all,” Renee lied. “Was it spring? Was it just before?”

“May. Sometime in May. Your father and I both came home and found you in tears. We said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and you said, ‘I
can’t.’ And we took you to Evanston a week later.”

Ahead on the left, Renee saw a young girl jog up to a pull-up bar, jog in place in front of it for a moment, then reach up
and take hold of the metal. She was wearing a gray-and-yellow top, tight, and tight black running pants. Her hair was in a
ponytail. For a moment the girl just hung, and Renee thought she might be stretching. Then she slowly lifted herself up, once,
and slowly lowered herself back down. Again, she slowly lifted herself up, then she slowly lowered herself down.

“I’m not sure what to do,” Renee said. “Now. This is—I think it’s obvious that I can’t go backward again. Or stay the same.”

“Looking, finding,” her mother said. “All very mysterious. Did I tell you about my keys?”

“No.”

“Just last week. It was the strangest thing. I went down to eat and came back upstairs, and at my door I looked everywhere
but I didn’t have them. I went back down to the restaurant and asked them, and they didn’t have them, either. I got the spare
set from my neighbor, and she and I went over every single inch of the apartment. Nothing. I spent two days using the spare
set, not having a clue. Do you want to know where they were?”

“It turned out you were wearing them.”

Theresa frowned, looked down at her lap. She looked up. “Wearing them?”

“It’s a joke.”

“How would one be wearing keys?”

“You couldn’t have been.”

“If this were a story about glasses, I would understand the joke.”

“I know, Mom. I see that.”

“Your humor has always had this certain...
confusion
to it.”

“The keys, Mom.”

“Yes, the keys,” Theresa said. “Guess where they were? All along? You won’t be able to.”

“Where?”

Theresa smiled. “They were in Leipzig,” she said. Her eyes glittered. “Germany!”

Renee looked down, waited. “Okay,” she said.

“Isn’t that amazing?” Theresa asked. “Isn’t that just amazing? Halfway around the world!” She laughed again and shook her
head.

Renee still waited.

“Well, how did they get there?” she said finally.

“I mailed them there,” Theresa said. “I sent a book to Leslie Stewart at the University of Leipzig and I also dropped my keys
into the box. I don’t know how. I think maybe I tried to use one of the keys to cut the packing tape. We’ll never know the
secret. A few days later Leslie mailed them right back.”

“I’m not sure,” Renee said, “I understand the point of the story.”

Theresa shook her head. “I’m not sure it has one,” she said. “I just thought it was the strangest thing.”

Renee pulled herself back together by the afternoon. She went home to her clean and very warm house in the suburbs and made
toast and had a glass of wine. April 14. It was still only 3:30. She tried to watch television, but there was nothing on.
There were two messages on the machine from Diane, both thanking her, both asking whether she was okay. Another from Bill.

Eventually she went upstairs to the office and stood in front of the board. She couldn’t help herself. She had thought, a
few times, of trying to use what she had written in the notebook, on the airplane, for the last poem.

Now that felt hollow. That had been her first attempt and it had not been right. It had just been more words, too many of
them. All she was, was words. She couldn’t just keep writing words. In the meantime actual life would be rolling on beneath
her feet. She was so tired of all that kind of energy. Write that sentence and make sure the sun looks like it looks. What
hand gesture would he make, really? Does the person telling it sound enough like a human being or is there too much there?
Too little? Should she stand out of the way and simply let it happen? With children’s books, tone was even more important.
The whole idea of the world was in tone. Just a single word could change it, and the child-reader would be pushed out of the
dream. She thought of the lifetime’s energy she’d put into making those small choices. Each page of each book had hundreds
of them. She thought of all the long days, locked in the office, coffee beside her, hunched forward and staring at the ever-evolving
computer screens that had come and gone over the years. It was as though she’d been leaning forward and squinting at the light,
hoping to see him inside the pages. Hoping that his actual human form could or would somehow materialize in some previously
unnoticed depth a few hundred feet back behind the letters, and he would then step back and look around and see he was surrounded
by them.

She looked at the dark monitor of the computer. Screen saver, stars. She heard the furnace all the way down in the basement
creak to life.

The high-pitched pulse of the doorbell startled her.

She looked over her shoulder, then turned and went down the stairs, thinking it was probably Diane, here to check on her.
She’d stayed with her in the back room at Butterfly, even though Renee had not told her what it was, exactly. She assured
Diane it hadn’t been any of the questions, it wasn’t her fault. Only that she hadn’t been right since Adam had left. Diane
had made her a cup of tea.

The doorbell rang again when she was halfway across the living room, and she said, annoyed, “Hold on, hold on.”

She turned the knob and pulled the door open.

She stood for a long time, looking at the boy—not boy, teenager—who stood in front of her.