The Laws of our Fathers (43 page)

    At 10 a.m. precisely, we placed the call to my father's office. The terror that raveled his voice was extraordinary. I realized again how close it lurked beneath the surface of his life. 'Oh my God, Seth.'

    'Dad, I'm all right. Really, I'm all right.' 'Where are you?'

    ‘I can't tell you. They're right here. It's been a little wild.'

    'Okay, that's enough,' June said, beside me, loud enough to be heard. The motel room was dismal, clean but otherwise on its last legs. It must originally have been war construction, a barracks perhaps. The walls were clad at half-height in plastic sandalwood-colored paneling, presumably to hide the gouges. June had drawn the heavy green drapes.

    "They understand that they have the wrong guy,' I told my father. 'I mean, they do now. I finally got them to take me over to the library this morning. I showed them Bernard Weissman in
Who's Who.
And your biography in
American Economists.
It took a while to find something that had your son's name.'

    'They have let you go?'

    'Not exactly.'

    'Okay,' said June. 'So he's alive. He's breathing. He's fine.' She'd grabbed the phone. Her voice was hoarsened in a way that nearly made me laugh. After all her talk of Drama School, I had expected an inspired performance - something Method, wholly unique. Instead, she seemed simply to have borrowed the manner of the gritty radio dramas -
The Shadow
or
Johnny Dollar -
which were still on the air when I was a boy. But she'd correctly calculated the effect. This was, after all, real life, where the overdone suggested someone sinisterly bent beyond normal restraint. My father was terrified.

    'Who is this?' he cried. I was poised, not far from the earpiece.

    'This is me. This is the Dark Revolution. This is the voice of the truth. Okay? Next time I call, I'm going to tell you what you can do to make us let him go. First thing, you have to listen to the rules. And obey the rules. Rule One: No phone calls over one minute. And your minute is up right now. Bye-bye.'

    After she'd clapped down the phone, my father must have sat in his office for some time, perhaps checking his own pulse until he could re-establish his normally orderly thoughts. Perhaps he stared at his coarse, pallid face reflected on the glass of one of his diplomas or citations. Certainly, as always, he talked to himself. The world, he thought, had ceased being a reasoning place. People roamed like beasts, seized by unpredictable emotion, giving vent to wretched fantasy. Waking or sleeping - daylight was the only membrane that separated him now from the turbulence of dreams.

    But a fragment of him must have been contented and serene. He had spent so many years preparing himself. He had always known he would see it all again.

    June called back in fifteen minutes to tell him they wanted ransom. 'You have money. You can pay.'

    ‘I am a university professor. I am a poor man.' I heard that cunning tone I'd listened to at store counters a thousand times, as he criticized quality, the price, hoping for some edge with which to bargain. With a bitter smile, I had predicted exactly what he would do. And even so, something in me crumbled. There was no hope. 'What am I to pay? How? You understand. I am not that Weissman.' He went on that way another instant before she interrupted.

    'You want to know where your son is now? You have any neighbors with a dog? That's where your son is. He has a dog's choke collar around his throat. It's attached to the fucking wall. His hands are manacled. So are his feet. He sits when we say, he stands when we say. He gets to pee every four hours. Maybe we'll let him go next year. Maybe the year after. I don't care. Dog food's cheap. Do you understand me? Now it's your choice. If that's what you want, you just have to say it. That's Rule Number Two. You tell me what you want. Do you want that? You want us to treat your son like some mangy, flea-ridden, shedding, dogshit-shitting dog we'll do that. You just say. Is that what you'd like? I want to hear you say that. Come on. Follow the rules.'

    I had never heard my father cry before. He emitted a stifled wheeze, then his voice shattered. I bent over completely and covered my head.

    'I want $20,000. That's all. Just twenty. We went into this figuring $2 million. It's fucked up, okay, but we have expenses. This whole fucked-up operation wasn't cheap. We have mouths to feed. We have a lot of people who are a lot of disappointed. Okay? And we need time to make some nice new plans. Now either you help us with that or we won't be helping you. Okay? That's a rule too. Dig?'

    He was crying too hard to answer.

    'No police, FBI, kiddie cops. Pinkertons. No one. Okay? We set the conditions,' said June. She nodded as she held the receiver in the wan light of the cheap lamp. I had sunk to one of the beds and could no longer hear him. 'You pay this sum and he's free. Subject to conditions: We don't get caught. This never happened. That's how it goes. I don't trust you, you don't trust me. So we set the conditions.'

    What conditions? he must have asked.

    'Next call.' June smacked down the phone. She closed her eyes to grab hold of herself, to find her real life, before she looked down at me.

    'It's going fine,' she said.

    

    

    
Sonny

    

    The home in which Nikki and I live is a narrow, rehabbed greystone in University Park. The contractor carved a garage out of the cellar and laid a downsloping drive that floods in the winter thaw. Beneath the limestone ledges of the tall double-hung windows of the upper floors, wrought-iron flower boxes hold fall geraniums, now withered in their terra-cotta pots. Charlie and I paid too much for this place and I will never get what I need if we sell, a step I often contemplate. The suburbs on the East Bank, with their stable, well-funded public schools, and quiet tree-lined streets, seem tempting. At least a quarter of the families of the children who started in Nikki's nursery-school program are gone to that safer world, but whenever I contemplate the move, I hear Zora. "The suburbs!' she used to exclaim. 'Better a lobotomy.'

    This morning, Saturday, is crowded. Nikki demands a pancake breakfast and then time with her cartoons. I have to get the car

    into the shop; it's leaking oil again, a shimmering, gunmetal puddle on the garage floor. Walking home from Boyce's Repair, both of us are grumpy. I fret about how to handle the working woman's travail of Saturday grocery shopping without a car, while Nikki fears we'll miss Sam, Charlie's son by his first marriage, who is coming by to take his little sister to the Drees Center for a production of
The Princess and the Pea.

    I often say that I had more anxiety about parting from Sam than Charlie. From infancy, Sam was with us every weekend. He is a special kid, even more so to me, because he proved to be the one human being on earth who finally reassured me I would check out okay as a mother. Sam's own mom, Rebecca, is high-strung and still scorns me a decade later as a homewrecker. Once Charlie left, I was positive she'd never allow Sam back into my home. But Sam tolerated no change. He calls Nikki at least once each week and bikes over from his mother's house, a few blocks away, most Saturday afternoons. He lets himself in, sits while I run errands. He makes them snacks. They play at the computer. I find them, both agape before the screen, Nikki seated on one of his knees.

    It's all a mystery. How could a crabbed soul like Rebecca have raised a boy like this? He is funny and brilliant, with the heart of a hero. He plays the piano with passion. He acts in plays. At twelve, he is full of feeling and, not so incidentally, pain. After all, he is Rebecca's son, she of the shrewish moods and damaging tongue. Worse, he's been deserted by Charlie. He seems to cling to Nikki because they are joined, not merely by blood, but by circumstance, not just the gene load Charlie left behind, but the longing. Sam, I often think, has decided to heal himself by being a better man to Nikki than his father has been to both of them.

    Today, he arrives in a winter parka he can no longer comfortably close. Charlie, a former wrestler, is huge - not so much tall as broad - and Sam is already headed for size. He's an athletic boy, far less awkward than many his age, although he has that stretched-out look of early adolescence. He is dark and very handsome and innocently pleased by his fine looks. He has begun to carry a comb, to look for himself in any mirror we pass.

    I open the door to see them off and amazingly encounter Seth Weissman across the threshold, just lifting his hand to the bell. Like me, he's dressed in jeans and wears a fur-collared leather bombardier's jacket and a broad-brimmed Australian hat. He seems to be one of those bald-headed men with a lot of snappy headgear. A mistake, if you ask me, since it's just more shocking when they remove the cap.

    'Nikki, this is a friend of mine, Mr Weissman. And this is Nikki's brother, Sam.' I loosen the furry hood so Seth can appreciate her in full glory. Seth praises her beauty and is careful also to give a moment to Sam. Wordstruck, the two of us watch the children go. Rapt in conversation, they pass the row of rehabbed town homes, many handsomely trimmed out with Christmas lights. Nikki, as usual, picks up a stick and drags it musically along the line of wrought-iron fences.

    'They say you just teach them to leave you,' I finally remark. 'From the first step.'

    'But you never leave them,' he replies. His eyes shoot downward and I spend a moment damning my tongue, then step inside to grab my loden coat. Although I invite him into the entry, he will not cross the threshold.

    'I've accomplished my mission,' he says. 'She's gorgeous. Besides, I have to go to my father's. Deal with the crisis of the day. His car was stolen. All these years, I ragged him for driving around in a 1973 Caprice, and now apparently the damn thing's a vintage item.'

    I confess I wouldn't mind if somebody stole my minivan and left me with the insurance money to buy a car that didn't require a standing appointment at the mechanic's.

    'Do you need a ride anywhere?' he asks.

    'I'm just going to the Green Earth.' As a stopgap, I'll buy what

    I can carry. One night this week, I'll find a sitter so I can do the mammoth shopping trip even a family of two requires. These days, I'm always amazed how many people are in the store at n p.m.

    'Up Fourth? Isn't that on the way to my father's? Come on.' He's politely insistent and I don't know whether to say no. In his car, a rented Camry, Seth talks nervously, filling airtime, as if I might not notice that my resolve keeps breaking down. He points out sights around U. Park: Phillips Playground, where he learned to play basketball and tennis; St Bernard's, Hobie's grade school, an uninspired graystone hulk occupying a quarter of a block.

    The parking lot at the store is thronged. There is a line seven or eight cars long waiting to enter, and a melee of shoppers weaving with their stainless-steel carts across the asphalt. We are stuck on U. Ave as first one, then half a dozen horns bray behind us. Seth holds up a hand as I'm about to get out.

    'You think you could stand my father for a minute? I wouldn't mind stopping here myself. I'm pretty sick of room service. Then I could drive you home. You won't need to schlep the bags.'

    I can shop for the week this way, saving a later trip, hours that will be precious. And I'm somewhat intrigued to see old Mr Weissman, the iron lion of our youth.

    'This is bribery,' I tell Seth, as we drive off. We laugh, but I'm not fully at ease. I set the limits for my own comfort, so what's the difference? But I know the best judges seldom change their rulings. If they're wrong, a higher court can tell them. There's a lesson in that.

    Seth's father lives in what I've always referred to in my own mind as a 'Kindle County bungalow.' I've never seen similar houses anywhere else, a one-story toadstool of a structure, brown brick, with a hip roof and the stained glass and deco features characteristic of the twenties, when literally thousands of these homes were built throughout the Tri-Cities, blocks of them radiating about a central neighborhood core of churches, schools, shops. They were the Kindle equivalent of row houses, places where working folks with steady jobs could raise their families. The heavy oak front door, darkly varnished, sporting a wrought-iron knocker and a small barred window, opens to reveal a tall young woman. She's dressed in the with-it fashions that inevitably make me feel old: an unstructured vest, a flowing print skirt of autumnal colors, black anklets folded over combat-style boots, revealing the visible down of her unshaved legs. Seth clutches her at once.

    'I didn't think we'd catch you,' he says.

    ‘I was just on my way. I'm meeting Phil at the museum.'

    'Stay a minute to say hi.' Seth introduces his daughter, Sarah, a senior at Easton.

    'Judge Klonsky,' Seth says, which I instantly correct to 'Sonny.'

    Sarah is tall, with the glowing fresh-wrapped beauty of the young. Her spare form gives the impression that she's not long past the coltish phase taller girls endure, a distressing period when you're not sure how far your hand is from your shoulder, when you've got four inches on all the boys. Her brownish hair, full of tones, is worn loose to her shoulders. Behind her, the living room of the old house is dim. There are worn Oriental, heavy raw-silk drapes of a long-dated greenish hue, and older, threadbare furnishings in Chippendale style. I was here once or twice twenty-five years ago, and although I have little memory for such things, I'm relatively certain not a detail has been altered. Sarah has thrown her coat on and her backpack.

    'He heard the bell. He's expecting you. He wants you to call the police again.'