The Laws of our Fathers (70 page)

    As they walk, as Seth thinks about these things, his mind turns to the piece he'll write tomorrow. His work is always with him, a part of him forever lodged in that mainframe in Seattle where the man known in 167 daily papers as Michael Frain seems to exist. That Michael, in Seth's mind's eye, has a somewhat distinct physical appearance, shorter than Seth, fuller in body, perpetually young, with a wry, unflappable expression, probably the physical self he idealized when he was, say, a freshman in high school and still thought anything was possible for him.

    The column he'll take up tomorrow is one of half a dozen he dredged from his months visiting his father in hospitals and rehab facilities. It's about marriage. The piece concerns a lean bald-headed man from Kewahnee who donated a kidney to his wife. Seth didn't know that was possible. He thought it was like bone-marrow transplants, where you faced problems unless you were bora with a twin. This man, an engineer at Dunning, a defense outfit, is not particularly articulate, not the kind of fellow who can say much about motives. But this couple now lies together in the same room in Sinai-Cedars Hospital, getting different IVS drugs and the same painkillers, with matching fourteen-inch incisions on their left sides. It seems like an act from mythology, reaching inside yourself, an organ from him now an organ in her, an echo of Adam's aboriginal rib.

    The magic of what Seth does is the interviews, asking people to account for things like that. He can be 1,500 miles away, no more than a voice on the phone, someone whom they know at best by reputation, and usually not at all, merely somebody trying to let his soul crawl down the saying ‘I want to know you, would like to tell your story,' and folks, in their hunger to be understood, will tell him almost anything. In his hospital bed, his hand bruised by the I Vs, this man took a sip of water first. 'Well,' he told Seth, in that slow Midwestern drawl, 'well, it didn't really occur to me there was anything else I'd like to do.' The line was a killer. Lucy and he once had that kind of autonomic commitment, and would still do anything for one another, he thinks, whether out of habit, or gratitude or admiration. But listening to that man he was suddenly unsure that what's growing up between Sonny and him will flower that fully. There's been peace, humor, sensitivity -and amazing sensuality. But he doubts Sonny, in the face of sacrifice, could ever really convince him there's nothing else she'd like to do.

    At Seth's feet lies the little corner of the lawn his mother ripped away a generation ago to form a vegetable garden. She tilled this fifteen square feet of soil relentlessly and made it yield remarkable things: leaf lettuce first, then tomatoes, peas, pole beans. A huge zucchini somehow sprang up in the adjoining privet and was mistaken by the entire family, when they spotted it, for a raccoon. He can recall his father, terrified, edging up like a fencer with a rake extended. Seth remembers many Sundays out here, hoeing, weeding, being the man his mother needed, doing her gentle bidding while he tried to keep up with the Trappers game on his transistor. Lucy has wonderful vegetable gardens and he's always adored her for them.

    His mother's gardening equipment was housed in the narrow barnwood shed his father positioned in the rear corner of this lot. Bernhard feared thieves, of course. A heavy rusted padlock hangs there. Seth would love to look inside. What has my father left me? he thinks again. He heaves on the old wooden door, then recalls the key, still hidden under the same piece of loose walk. The interior is dark, smelling of rotted wood, of rancid fertilizers and loam. The old tools lie in disarray, the metal parts rough with rust. The spiders have choked each other in bleak, silky competition.

    'Jeez-o Pete,' he says suddenly, 'what a horrible day this is.' Behind the open door, safe from the wind and prying eyes, actually alone with Lucy for the first instant in months, he wordlessly accepts her comfort. Here she is in the crook of his arm, this woman, this tiny female person whom he was with longer than he lived without her. Here she is.

    

    
Sonny

    

    'You aren't leaving? I hoped we'd get a chance to talk,' Lucy says as Sonny, carrying her purse, approaches the front door. It's a few minutes past 4:30 and most of the afternoon visitors have departed. Attempting to sound casual, Sonny explains she has to pick up Nikki from day care, a few minutes away, and expects to return with her. Unmentioned is the fact that Seth performs this task many afternoons now.

    'I'd love to get away for a second,' says Lucy. 'How about I come along?' As Lucy rushes off for her coat, Sonny indulges in an instant of stark assessment. Lucy is one of those women born in the right age. In the era of Botticelli and Rubens her looks would have been disregarded. Yet at the end of the twentieth century her slender waifishness is right. She has intense black eyes, a tangle of dark hair, a narrow, fragile face. Her size and apparent vulnerability always made Sonny feel like half a cow, even a quarter of a century ago, and watching her slip around the house, she's been unable to contain her amazement that any woman after two children can actually have a waist that small. Seth's side-of-the-mouth descriptions of Lucy have tended to portray her youthfulness as a failing, a sign of continuing childishness, but avoided mentioning that she's retained a lot of sensual pizzazz. Dating a twenty-six-year-old no longer seems pathological. Lucy's one of those women whom men - on the sidewalk, across a revolving door - still turn to watch in that idiot way, as if there's actually some hope you might commit a carnal act right here on the street. Is Sonny envious? Only slightly. There are other aspects of youth - bending from the waist without back pain, or the ability to remember seven-digit-number strings -she'd rather recover.

    In the car, heading off, Lucy chatters. People remain so fundamentally themselves, so recognizable. Seth insists Lucy is brilliant, but hamstrung by self-doubt, something Sonny can hear in the urgent way she gushes about the fact that Sonny is a judge. How exciting! How difficult! Support and flattery, the rhetoric of women of our age, Sonny thinks, but she knows Lucy is sincere. She answers that her job is far less lofty than it sounds.

    'But it's important in the lives of other people,' Lucy answers. 'And you did that. As a woman. I know what that means, how hard that was. When Michael told me you were a judge, I actually felt proud. Does that sound ridiculous? But I'm very proud of all of you, the women I knew who did all these things that their grandmothers or even their moms couldn't even dare to consider. When we started college, if you think about it, we were so vague. So many women were. I was. We didn't have any sense of what we could do. And what you did, you, all our women friends, they did for themselves. Together, I mean, hand in hand. I don't think Sarah can really understand the imagination that required.'

    The reaching trees rush by in reflection on the windshield. Sonny tips her head.

    ‘I can't take credit,' she says. 'My mother gave me that.'

    'Really?'

    'It was very unusual for the time, but a wonderful gift. I owe her so much for that.' 'You are great,' Zora whispered. 'You are a treasure of the world.' Day in, day out, the message was repeated, with a passion that left no doubt it was true. At instants, that unrestrained praise of her abilities seemed more a burden than a benediction, but in the end, Sonny thinks, it's a lot to have, to reach back to.

    They park at Drees, a small brick building, retooled three or four times for various municipal uses. Rush hour, sometimes madness on University Avenue, is light today and they are early. At Sonny's suggestion they walk down the block to a gourmet coffee shop, the Seattle franchise which has America mainlining caffeine. A native, Lucy knows all the code words. 'Grande, macchiato, double shot.' They sit on brushed-steel stools across a granite table. Shoppers, mostly female, pass on the street. A woman with a baguette from the French bakery across the way turns in the midst of conversation and nearly knocks Lucy from her seat. There is a brief scene, much laughter, and a flurry of apologies. When they are alone once more, Lucy hunches over her coffee cup and lets her tongue slide forth kittenishly to lick the foam.

    'So, is it love?' she asks. Sonny, who had not contemplated such directness, feels her chest rock when she attempts to draw a breath.

    ‘I know Seth's in love with my daughter. I'm not as sure about me.'

    'Oh, I think he's always been hung up on you. What's the term? With the torch? As a child it made me think of the Statue of Liberty. But it means love is never finished. Don't you think that's right? I think love is never finished.'

    Sonny sees how this will be, one of those oblique, neurotic dialogues, saying one thing and, in some lost recess, meaning something else. If love does not quit, where does that leave Lucy and Seth? Registering Sonny's discontent Lucy apologizes. She didn't mean to pry, she says.

    'It's hardly prying,' Sonny says. 'It's natural. You wonder about Seth and me, I wonder about you and Seth.'

    In response, Lucy stirs her coffee, her eyes nowhere in the room. 'Life is messy,' she says suddenly. 'Isn't it? People have these messy little corners that you can't get to with one another.' Is it Seth and her she means? Or is she talking about the fact that even decades ago Sonny and she were not especially close?

    ‘I don't need explanations,' Sonny finally says, then, after an instant's reflection, murmurs Isaac's name. Lucy cannot contain a small, tense reflex.

    'Naturally,' Lucy says. ‘I mean, that's the biggest piece of it. Isaac. Michael won't give it up. Resolve. Let go. God, I don't know the word. But he won't. The sadness won't leave him. And I empathize, I think I'm a sympathetic person -'

    'Of course you are,' offers Sonny, realizing it's foolish to reassure someone she hasn't seen for twenty-five years, but still certain she's right.

    'But it's me, too. He was my child, too. I can't live with this silent accusation that I've forgotten Isaac and he hasn't, that he suffers and I don't. I can't bear that.' She has started crying now. The liner goes at once, and settles on her cheek, a trail of greying sludge. Lucy stares at the traces on the paper napkin grabbed from the stainless dispenser and shakes her head. Why did she bother with makeup? she asks. She's been crying and redoing it all day.

    Having touched this great pain so quickly leaves Sonny uneasy. It's like digging in a garden and inadvertently exposing the root of a plant, a white, awkward thing never meant for light. As she watches Lucy regather herself, the day presses in on her amid the hubbub of the store. The place is filling. Women and men, on the way home, with time to grant themselves a few minutes of relief, queue before the bright chrome-and-brass fittings at the counter. A few little ones grind against their mothers' thighs. The steam machines whir, spilling out sensational aromas, while the young clerks bustle about, enjoying the frenzy and performance of the rush hour. For a moment, it seems to Sonny that she can recover some recollected kinship to every person in this store: young and unknown to herself; at loose ends with spare moments; mom with babe in arms. She surmounted all that. Why can she see the arc backward so clearly, but nothing ahead?

    'I mean, Isaac's not our whole thing,' Lucy says. 'We're like any other married couple. We've done some bad stuff to each other over the years.'

    'I was married,' Sonny says.

    'Right,' says Lucy, and smiles quickly, tentatively, not certain it's polite to agree. 'But for Michael, for me - you know, the issue is how much disappointment you can embrace before you say, "I have to start again." I mean,' Lucy says, 'it turns out there are some things you can't say. In a marriage? You can mess up a relationship in a sentence. You don't know it for sure until ten years later. But that's how it turns out.' Lucy, whose dark eyes are flighty, seldom loitering, now land directly on Sonny. 'He's never told you, has he?'

    Trying to find the thread, Sonny does not answer. Lucy leans on the tiny hand she has brought to her forehead, the nails short but carefully trimmed in red.

    'God, I need a cigarette,' she declares. Lucy takes her paper cup and moves to a table in the corner. She has lit up, wreathed in smoke, by the time Sonny arrives. And her mother died of emphysema. Sonny recalls Seth's stories of this woman, with a ruined face like Lillian Hellman's, smoking behind the oxygen mask, and her family screaming, begging her to consider the fire hazard, if nothing else.

    'This, you know, period, whatever you call it,' Lucy says, 'this is like our second Big Crisis. We had a first Big Crisis. About ten years ago. Did you know that?'

    'A little,' Sonny says.

    'Michael's mother was dying. And he was having a hard time with that. Alzheimer's. They just disappear right in front of you, it eats the soul before the body. And he was becoming very successful at the same time. And he was having a hard time with that, too, you know, people were different with him now that he wasn't just some weird guy ventilating a lot of crazed private thoughts. It was like the commercials that were on then about "Everybody listens"? That was his life all of a sudden. The room would go silent. Everybody listened. And so he was pretty nuts with all of it, and he started sleeping with some girl around the paper. He was traveling with her and telling me nothing was going on. His assistant. But you could just about see sparks when they even said hello. And men never will get it, will they, that women know! And I put up with stuff, that's one of my problems, I always take way too much - but this? Finally, after a party, I threw a fit. I realized I was entitled. I was so hurt, savagely hurt. And he was kind of a skunk about it. He said all of the usual incredibly dumb things, but the one that got me was "You don't understand, this doesn't mean anything," and I said, "No, I do understand, and don't say it doesn't mean anything," and, I don't know, I just said, I said, "For Godsake, I was still sleeping with Hobie a year after we were married." So I'd said it.' She waits an instant, considering only the ember at the end of her cigarette.