The Laws of our Fathers (71 page)

    'Even when that was going on,' Lucy says, ‘I didn't understand much of it, but I told myself, "If you do this, this is for yourself and only yourself and he can never know." And he hadn't. They were two completely different spheres, like sleeping and waking, or stoned and straight, it seemed completely implausible they could even touch. But they did. They had.

    'I mean, the whole thing was like ancient history. It had been over years and years before, Hobie and I had both seen it was crazy and absurd. And one of the problems - I mean, now I was a mom, we had a home; we had, you know, our customs, our things, furniture and breakfast cereal, and honestly, one huge problem was I couldn't even understand it anymore myself. I looked back and it seemed like being with the Moonies. I mean, ho w can I even explain what I used to think when I was twenty-one? We forget what we used to be like, what everything was like. It seems like there weren't the same categories, you know? I mean, everything wasn't in this sort of place. Who understands what an adult commitment is when you're twenty-one? I thought I could sleep with Hobie and be Michael's wife. It sort of made sense, and then eventually it didn't. I mean, that's life, that's reality, I can't apologize for that.

    'And you know, the shrinks, the counselors, they pointed out the right stuff, about how complicated it is between Michael and Hobie anyway, and why did Michael - Seth - why did he want to hook up with Hobie's girlfriend in the first place, and we all played a part. But it was still a major mess. Not that he ever wagged a finger, because he's done more than his share of shitty things and he knows it. But he couldn't even talk to Hobie for a couple of years. And I mean Hobie prostrated himself, he absolutely begged forgiveness, which I frankly didn't even think Hobie would know how to do. And you know, I forgave Michael and Michael forgave us. He's a forgiving person. Except for his father. I'd had trouble getting pregnant again, secondary infertility, and we did in vitro and we had Isaac. And we went on. But there's that term "sadder but wiser"? That's a terrible phrase, don't you think? When you really hear the words? And he was sadder but wiser after that. And our marriage was sadder but wiser. And with Isaac suddenly, maybe it was too sad and too wise. And what's the way out, you know? Is there one?'

    Lucy, boiling in shame, closes her eyes and crushes out her cigarette. The store is emptying out. As the customers pass through the doorway, a touch of cooler air, swifter movement, the simpler smells of sundown and spring cross the cafe. Through her bleared eyes, Lucy dares to look again at Sonny. She says, 'So now you know.'

    

    
Seth

    

    The day, like some lingering sweet lament, lolls toward a close. Seth and Nikki sit on the grey stairs of the back porch, facing the failing stockade fence his father years ago erected along the property line of the tiny city lot. The birds twitter urgently, and a block or two away a power mower thrums, as some citizen tries to liberate the weekend with an hour's labor after work, rushing through the first cutting of the year. In magnificent hue, the sky loses light about them. Lucy and Sonny have gone together to pick up takeout for dinner. Inside, Sarah, who just led a minyan in reciting the mourners' prayer, is whiling with the last of her friends. Nikki watched in awe as Sarah chanted and now has asked Seth to hold a conversation in a foreign language, albeit one of her own invention. They have gone on quacking and gargling at each other for some time.

    'You know what I was saying?' the little girl asks. She is in jeans and a pilled turtleneck adorned with corny, small flowers and two smears of fingerpaint. ‘I was saying, "Yes, I want to go on a horse ride." '

    'Oh, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying, "Thank you, Seth, for hanging out with me, you're such a swell fella." I could swear that was what you meant.'

    'No-o-o!' she exclaims and in mock-reproof squeezes his cheeks, stopping to comb her fingers through his new beard, which all three of them - Seth, Sonny, and Nikki - privately refer to as 'Nikki's Whiskers.' Her laughter rollicks momentarily, then her dark eyes grow serious again, reverting to what was on her mind. 'Why was she talking Spanish, anyway?'

    'Spanish? Who?'

    Nikki waves a tiny hand desperately toward the living room. She cannot recall Sarah's name or otherwise describe her. He has told her a thousand times Sarah is his daughter, but Nikki seems to find it impossible that a daughter is not someone her age.

    'You mean when Sarah was praying?' he asks. 'That was Hebrew. Span-ish,’ he mocks and grabs Nikki about the waist momentarily, jostling her in delight. She throws herself deep into his arms, and the compact feel of the little girl, with her mysteriously sweet aroma and innocent seductiveness, enters the core of him. Isaac was such a handful, so haunted and inconsolable, that Seth had half-forgotten the spectacular buoyant pleasures normally part of this age. Around Nikki he has often been called back with a throb to those times, when he was in his late twenties and Sarah was little. She'd been a surprise in every aspect, her conception first, and then, upon arrival, the way her needs dominated Lucy and him. Every meal, for instance, was a task. She was allergic to milk products and, worse, for years would only take her food disguised in baked beans. Each day was a thicket, planning for her, working, scheduling. Lucy was trying to finish college. He had been hired at a daily in Pawtucket, and one day one of his columns was picked up by a real syndicate, fifty papers, which kept asking for more. He'd write. Research. Do interviews. He'd keep endless notes on different ideas and work on them with no particular consistency, free-form, a renegade enemy of order in his writerly role. But with all the pulling and heaving, at home, in the office, he found suddenly there was no activity in the course of the day which did not feel imbued with deep purpose - Lucy, Sarah, what he wrote. And where it all was going, who knew, who knew, but he was laboring toward something, if only perhaps the creation of the self he was, after long wondering, seemingly meant to discover all along. Good years, he thinks now. Good times.

    In this mood, he clings to Nikki. Her long dark hair, pigtailed today, spins around as he lolls her back and forth. He is always self-conscious about handling her. Welcome to our era. But a six-year-old needs to be hugged. When his children were little, he enjoyed nothing more than lying down with them for a nap, clinging to their small hands, losing track in sleep of where exactly their bodies and his began and ended. He finally lets her go so he can explain what Sarah was doing.

    'Sometimes people feel that they have to try to talk to God. That's praying. And Sarah was praying about her grandfather. Remember that real, real old man? I showed you his picture? I used to go visit him? We're remembering him.'

    'Did he get dead?' Seth knows Sonny has gone over this at length, but no doubt they'll be repeating it for days.

    'He was more than ninety. He was almost ninety years older than you.' He was the century, this benighted, amazing century, Seth thinks. He has not cried yet, but he's been on the verge once or twice, and with this new thought, he stifles a sob. It would upset Nikki. If she was his kid, it would be all right if he upset her. He would just cry. He'd be willing to say this is life, too. No truckling before the altar of tiny vulnerabilities. But she's not his.

    'Is he in the ground already?'

    He tells her what he can. That it's all right, the way it's supposed to be. Yet that is no comfort. Lurking here, Seth suspects, is the fact that neither Sonny nor he has ever told Nikki that Seth had

    a little boy, not much older than Nikki is now, who passed. Even if Nikki were only a third as bright as she is, only partially possessed of that remarkable insinuating intelligence in which she is forever assessing the adult world, she would sense, would know. Who after all does she think this person is to whom Sarah and he are always referring? If things go on, he thinks, they will have to deal with this forthrightly. He will not do what was done to him, create a home poisoned by a secret terror, never to be mentioned.

    'So that's what Sarah was doing. She was praying. And when Jewish people pray, they talk in Hebrew. See? Sarah and I are Jewish people, so she talked in Hebrew.'

    'Am I a Jewish people?'

    He ponders this. Her grandfather, Jack Klonsky, according to family legend, was Jewish. Among the Reform that might be sufficient.

    ‘I don't think so, Nikki. Your mom isn't. Usually, people are what their moms are. Or their dads. And Charlie and your mom don't really like to go to church. Some people don't like to pray. I'm not crazy about it, to be honest.'

    'Jennifer 2 goes to CDC In Nikki's kindergarten class, there are three Jennifers, all of whose last names start with G.

    'Right. So she probably likes praying. And Sarah likes it.'

    'Well, how do I tell?'

    'What?'

    'If I like it. Duh,' she adds, with noble six-year-old contempt.

    'I'm sure your mom will help you. Maybe you can go with Jennifer 2 sometime. Or, you know, you could go with Sarah. Then you and Charlie and your mom can talk about it. Maybe you'll want to be Catholic like your Aunt Hen, or you could be Jewish like me. Probably you'll decide you want to be like Charlie and your mom. That's what most people do. But whatever it is, you don't have to worry about it now.'

    'I do.'

    'What?'

    'Want to be a Jewish.' She laps her hand over Seth's. And moves a trifle closer on the stair.

    

    
Sonny

    

    'Well, we're all together again,' says Hobie with an ironic glimmer, as he glances about the old mahogany dining table to Sonny and Nikki, Lucy, Seth and Sarah. The visitors have departed. A few may look in later, but given the spare connections in Mr Weissman's life, the family decided to limit visitation to the afternoon and early evening. Lucy has a late plane to Seattle. On the table, the cartons of Chinese - the food of Jewish anguish, as Seth puts it, one of those jokes of his Sonny will never really get - leave the room savored of foreign spices and fried oil. How can anybody be hungry again? she thinks. The Jews are like the Poles, chewing their way through any meaningful event. But the energy of high emotion and the drain of the crowd this afternoon seem to have had a ravening effect. They eat speedily, on paper plates. Large foaming bottles of soda pop, dimpled from being grasped, stand amid the cartons. Nikki picks at an egg roll, then draws her hands inside her sleeves and tours the table telling everyone a pair of chopsticks are her fingers.

    Sonny sits beside Sarah, discussing Sarah's plans for next year. Teaching was Sonny's final career before she lit on the law, and she recounts some of her experiences. Everything was wonderful until she got to the classroom, where she was done in by thirty-eight third-graders, all of whom wore their deprivations as visibly as wounds. She laughs now at the memory of a girl of eight with a variety of behavioral disorders.

    'I hated her, and not because she was out of control. But when she got upset she ate Crayolas. Bit them and swallowed. Supplies were always so short, and she ate all the good colors. At the end of the year, the only ones left were black and white.'

    Listening, Nikki is momentarily amused by the notion of eating crayons, but she soon turns whiny, pulling on Sonny's sleeve. 'This is boring,' she moans, a lament that has been steadier since she discovered the black-and-white TV in Mr Weissman's study, which her mother will not let her turn on. In the living room, Sonny digs out the markers and books stowed in Nikki's backpack this morning. They read The Pain and the Great One together, then start a book of pencil-point mazes, which Nikki churlishly insists she can do on her own. When Sonny returns to the table, Seth and Lucy are complimenting Sarah's friends - their kindness, their maturity.

    'God, don't sound so amazed,' says Sarah. 'We're the same age the four of you were when you started hanging out together.'

    There is silence until Seth says, 'Gulp,' to considerable laughter.

    'So is this what you guys used to do when you hung out together?' Sarah asks. 'Eat Chinese and tell cool stories?'

    'We'd get ripped and listen to your father,' Hobie says.

    Listen to what? Sarah wants to know. Lucy explains about Seth's movies, the science-fiction tales he once composed.

    'Cool,' she says. 'So why'd you stop making them up, Dad?'

    'Who says I stopped? My computer's full of them.'

    'I didn't know that,' says Lucy. Her declaration is a substantial relief to Sonny, who had no idea either.

    'Whenever I get blocked doing a column, I fiddle with one of them. This is the halcyon era of science fiction. Recombinant engineering? Computer science? There's no end to weird little thoughts.'

    'Like what? Come on. Let me hear one.' Sarah reaches across Sonny to drag on her father's hand.

    'It's just stupid, private stuff. They're like topical parables or something. I don't know.'

    'Go ahead,' says Hobie. 'Let Sarah see how wigged-out you really are. I bet you got some twisted shit on that hard drive. Don't say no, 'cause I know you do. You got some tales about black folks?'

    'Naturally. Nobody is spared.'

    'Okay.' Hobie throws his broad arms out, then folds them: Do me something. The age-old challenge between them. He gave Seth ten minutes before about the inadequacies of his new beard. Seth requires additional encouragement from both Lucy and Sonny, but at last he scrapes his chair back and spreads his hands. Even Nikki comes to Sonny's lap to listen.

    'Soon,' he says, as the stories always started, 'soon, as we know, cloning will be possible. From a single cell - from dandruff or a piece of fingernail - an entire being can be created. When writers speculate on this, they talk about cloning geniuses - a whole league of Michael Jordans or another de Kooning. But I suspect that people will be most interested in cloning themselves. We'll be like paramecia, reproducing ourselves in an endless chain. You'll literally be the parent of yourself. The kid won't have your bad trips and nightmares and squirrelly parents, but otherwise it's you, someone who'll grow up to look exactly like you, who has your same insane predilection for peach ice cream and, regrettably, the same genetic defects.'