The Laws of our Fathers (45 page)

    

    Green Earth is a health-food superstore, a virtual supermarket, baking beneath the usual blast of high-powered light. Banners and signs, adorned at the corners with silver Christmas bells, stretch aloft, noting freshness and nutrition data. Seth, never without his pointed observations, the trait that gives him something to say in print three times a week, characterizes Green Earth as a tumorous version of the little macrobiotic places on Campus Boul in Damon where we'd argue about Adelle Davis and the health effects of refined sugar. This is another column he's written too many times, he says: the selling of the revolution. Music went commercial first. But capitalism has sucked up every element, clothing, language, absorbing the style but not the message. Now everyone can be hip, for a price.

    The store is in the usual weekend turmoil. We have to queue just to get the featured items off the shelves. In their cold-weather wear, the students and grandpas and city moms trail through the aisles. Seth and I separate to shop. He returns with apples, dried fruit, spring water, peanut butter, little treats for the life of the man in the hotel suite. Surveying what's in my basket, he correctly guesses that I'm a vegetarian. Since my illness, I explain. Nikki occasionally asks for meat, which I willingly provide - it's not a fetish - but the two of us generally subsist on pastas. God has never made a six-year-old who didn't enjoy noodles. He briefly recalls some of Sarah's dietary obsessions fifteen years ago. Noodles and baked beans.

    ‘I never asked what she's doing in school.'

    'Sarah? You ready?' he asks. 'Jewish studies.' Another of those moments: I've let my jaw drop. 'She's doing an honors thesis on feminist reworkings of the liturgy. Whether we ought to say "God of our fathers" or "of our fathers and mothers" or "parents" or "ancestors." Tradition, authority, and gender in a religious context. Interesting,' he adds.

    'Did you become observant, Seth?'

    'It's Lucy,' he answers. At the time of their marriage, Lucy promised Seth's mother she would make a Jewish home. She converted and by now has been president of their congregation, not once but twice. Four years ago, he says, she had a bat mitzvah.

    'And how do you handle that?' I ask.

    'With ambivalence. You know, you get older. You're more aware of the people before you, acknowledging them and what they cared about - and died for. The Holocaust is bigger to me every year, especially now that my mom is gone. I actually raised funds for the museum. But the ritual leaves me cold. They don't even catch glimpses of me in the synagogue. Lucy and Sarah always say they're praying for me. Sometimes I feel like one of those sixteeth-century Catholics who lined up other people to do their time in Purgatory. But I'm proud of Sarah. I'm glad she's serious about important things.' We nudge the carts along. Seth circles his jaw as his face mobilizes beneath some transitory discomfort. 'I'm not sure I've got her approval at the moment, but she knows she has mine.'

    'I'm sure she approves, Seth. Of both of you. She just sounds concerned. It's a hard situation for her, too.'

    He cranes about to eyeball me. 'How did that come up?'

    'Oh.' I shovel the items from my cart onto the moving belt. The checker is a young Asian man. Off-duty, he wears rings through his nose and eyebrows. Nikki cannot control herself and squeals whenever we see him on the street. 'Basically, when she asked if we were involved.'

    'Us? Oh Lord. This is the child whose maturity I've been bragging about?' He grimaces and looks away to a shelf beside the cash register, crammed with the same dumb trash tabloids and ladies' mags I see in the poison supermarket.

    'She seemed to have misunderstood something Hobie said.'

    'Oh. I know what that was. He was giving me gas the other night when we had dinner with Sarah. Guy stuff. Hobie said every time he looks around the courtroom, he wonders if I'm here to watch the trial or the judge.' His eyes cross mine bashfully, meaningfully, and then, as shyly as if it were actual contact, he looks away - a rabbit darting back into its hole. It's reminiscent of the moment we had pulling in here when he spoke of history.

    We pay separately and wheel one cart through the small lot, back into the winter air, which is sharpening as the hour of darkness nears. The sun is a pale disk in the soiled white sky. Between us a deliberative silence has persisted, more uncomfortable as the seconds mount.

    'Can I ask Seth?' I say suddenly. 'Why
are
you here?'

    He is slinging packages into the trunk and gives me a brief sidewise look.

    'Acute psychological need,' he answers. He smiles to put me off, then thinks better of it and turns my way. 'Look, I'm here for lots of reasons. This trial - it's like the star over Bethlehem. It's a weird conjunction of the planets. I'm concerned or interested in every person involved - Nile, Hobie, Eddgar, and, God knows, you. I mean, if that's what you're asking, yes, Hobie's right. I've

    thought about you a lot, Sonny. I always have. If that doesn't sound too drippy.'

    We've reached a Rubicon. I see it and feel something frantic swimming through my eyes. Seth takes this in, his pale face rummaged by dashed feelings, then moves off toward the driver's side door. We ride halfway to my house without a word spoken.

    'Say something,' he finally tells me.

    ‘I would, if I could think of anything to say.'

    'Is it bad that I'm still hung up on you?' he asks.

    'Not "bad."'

    'Shocking?'

    'Probably. Surprising, anyway.'

    'Because you're not still hung up on me?'

    'Because life goes on, Seth. It's the past. Before the dinosaurs. I have more recent mistakes to dwell on.'

    We arrive home at just the right moment. Nikki and her brother are coming down the block. I stand on the stoop in my green coat waving, and both kids rush to join me. Sam and Nikki re-enact a number of scenes from the play, repeating the lines perfectly; it's clear they have been doing this all the way home. Then Sam kisses his sister and me and grabs his bike, which has been locked to one of the iron gate posts. Seth, in the meantime, comes up the walk with the last of my groceries in his arms. Waking to him again, I am deeply struck by his presence. I find myself thinking he has aged well, although that makes no sense. His eyes are lively and deep, there is strength across the brow, but time has thickened his skin, taken something from his looks. In ten more years, his face will be waddled and lumpy. But it's substance, I feel, some sense of the weight of the life he's lived. A good person. Again, a strong sensation of his pain grips me, and with it something regretful and self-accusatory. I was unkind just now. At the store.

    'Look, Seth. Why don't you stay and let me make some of these groceries into dinner?'

    'No, no,' he says. ‘I have some stuff to write.'

    'I mean it. I promise it's healthy and it won't be room service.' 'Don't take pity on me, Sonny. You warned us both about that the other day.'

    'No, Seth, no. I want to know you. I do. We're going past each other. And we shouldn't. Stay. Tell Nikki what a newspaper is like.' I step down off the stoop to take the last packages from him. 'Let's be at peace, Seth.'

    He flaps his arms. Fine, peace. Whatever that means.

    My house has the crisp look of newer construction, everything painted white to expand the rooms. The entry and living area rise to a cathedral ceiling and skylights that spill, even in this dim season, the welcome tonic of interior light; it glistens on the peachy-colored floors of bleached birch. The furnishings are spare - Charlie got the couch, for instance - but the shelves and walls are crowded with art collected over our years. African masks, Native American pots, posters by abstractionists and moderns. Laughing, Seth steps over the blocks and bright toys that litter the living room. He remembers this phase, he says, when some lost plastic piece of something was always turning up underfoot.

    Now that Sam has departed, Nikki suddenly turns shy. In the kitchen, as I shelve the groceries, she clings to my thigh and flirts from that zone of safety. She has a somewhat old-fashioned hairdo, a ponytail and bangs. Seth remarks on her eyes - brilliant and intelligent, he says, like her mother's.

    'Can you make a beard?' Nikki asks.

    'Make a beard?' asks Seth.

    'Charlie has a beard.'

    'Ah.' He kneels and lets her stroke his shaved cheek. She accepts him quickly after that. He lifts her to the top shelves to put the canned goods in the dark, oak cabinets. Eventually tired of this, Nikki tries to lure me into a game of checkers.

    'Nikki, I need to start dinner.'

    'I'll start,' says Seth. 'Give me an assignment.'

    'Nikki, what if you play checkers with Seth?'

    Seth cajoles. He's a veteran. He'll teach her secret moves. They lay the board out on the living-room floor. Nikki is voluble, enthusiastic, and like all six-year-olds plays to win. I hear them as I run the tap.

    'Don't go there,' Seth counsels. He shows her his moves in advance. Even so, Nikki must take a number of moves back before Seth is defeated. They play Topple next, a game Seth does not know, which involves balancing plastic pieces on a stand.

    'Know what?' she asks. ‘I have a loose tooth.'

    'No! So early?'

    'Feel. That one. Isn't it loose?'

    'Maybe.' I come out of the kitchen to warn Seth with a roll of my eyes. Nikki and I repeat this exercise each night. Six wants to be seven and fifty wants to be forty. When are we happy as we are?

    'Next to it,' she says. 'Try that.' He has the same lack of success.

    'No!' Nikki shrieks and throws herself down on the floor and rolls back to him like a puppy, more or less propelling herself into his arms. She grabs both his cheeks, something she does to Charlie.

    I return to the kitchen, trying not to find this performance alarming. My little girl, shy and generally collected, is rocketed into hilarity by the attentions of an adult male, exhibiting all the charm she can muster. When I come into the living room to announce dinner, Nikki has seated Seth on the ledge of the hearth and is singing the numbers from the Holiday Festival, humming through the words she has forgotten. He applauds wildly.

    'Dinner. Dinner. Wash up.'

    In the bathroom, from the toilet, Nikki eyes me. 'Do boys have to wipe?'

    ' Sometimes yes, sometimes no.' Yet again, I outline the circumstances. 'Some things are important,' I tell Seth, when I find him waiting mirthfully outside the door.

    My Aunt Henrietta, Zora's sister, insists that Nikki is the image of me. She means to praise both of us, but the observation concerns me. When her will-of-the-wisp father phones on Mondays or Tuesdays to apologize for missing the call he is supposed to make Sunday at noon, Nikki consoles him. 'That's okay, Daddy,' she will say, 'you didn't mean to.' But within, beneath, what is occurring? I played the cheerful child into adolescence - amusing, even, able to adapt to everybody else. It was only in my thirties, while I was in law school, that I began to wonder about the savage part of me, so often kindled in debate. I worry now that Nikki rages too in ways yet to reach the surface.

    In the kitchen, removing the cannelloni from the Pyrex dish in a sudden rush of steam, I stave off familiar guilt. There was no choice. With Charlie. And I grew up, didn't I? I muddled through, a little nuts about men, especially in my teens, but I'm centered, I'm normal. And Nikki has a father. Something. A picture. A phone call. And yet a sense of failure always freezes me to absolute zero at the center when I realize that my daughter dwells with the same pain that burned through my childhood. For years, I went through spells in which I persuaded myself that my mother's account of Jack Klonsky's death on the Kewahnee docks was one of those well-intended lies about provenance told in fairy tales -like what they said to Sleeping Beauty to keep her from knowing she was really a princess. I, too, was secretly some other man's daughter. These fantasies took me on strange internal journeys. For many months, I suspected my father was a labor leader named Mike Mercer, a congenial potbellied black man, a friend of Zora's. He had five children of his own, but I believed my parentage was hidden so no one knew I was a Negro.

    More often, I imagined my father as someone distant, barely known, some man of majestic importance who would arrive one day and care for me passionately. I envisaged this unknown man as the father on
Father Knows Best.
A striking, dashing, normal person. An American. Did I realize as a little girl how much Zora would have abhorred that image? But he was what I craved, a wise, gentle, omnipotent figure, whose faults all righted themselves within half an hour and whose love for his daughters, especially, was as simple and encompassing as his occasional chaste embrace. In contemplating all of this, I feel, as I often do, horribly sorry for both Nikki and myself.

    Seth lavishes praise on the meal. 'Who says people can't change?' he asks puckishly. Nikki remains too excited to eat. To interest her, he shows her a trick he did with his children, turning his cannelloni into a dachshund. 'Kennel-oni,' he calls it, earning a groan from each of us.

    'I want a puppy,' Nikki tells him, as she often, futilely, tells me. I explain that is one over my limit: the thought of housebreaking is impossible when I'm still celebrating the end of diapers. Seth recounts coming home one night when Isaac was little to find Lucy attempting to train their puppy. She was outside, with her skirt hiked up, squatting over the gravel of the dog run and relieving herself. The dog and Isaac, noses at the screen of the back door, both looked on bewildered. Caught in this compromising pose Lucy remained there, laughing in delight at this amazing, oddball family intimacy.