The People in the Trees (56 page)

III
.

By the time Christmas Eve arrived, I was so eager for the holiday to be over that I had, the day before, accepted a last-minute invitation to a conference at Stockholm University that began on the thirty-first and lasted until the fifth of the new year.

It had been an awful week. The day before, I had had a conversation with Owen that had degenerated into a shouting match. Over the years, Owen—despite not having any children of his own—had come to determine that he was far more of an authority on them than I was, given his years of service educating undergraduates on the oeuvres of Whitman, Cavafy, and Proust. Even then, when we were old men, Owen’s naïveté continued to astound me: after his infrequent visits, he would call to tell me that he had interpreted the children’s complaints to him about the tidy and disciplined household I ran as “cries for help,” as if I were a despot running a small slave state and he were a crusading United Nations envoy who had been sent to bear witness to their lives of misery and injustice. I did not care for Owen’s behaving as an anthropologist in my own house, and I told him so. Still, he persisted, dispensing unwanted advice and even less wanted admonishments about a practice—the successful ferrying of children into adulthood—that I had been engaged in for more than thirty years and he for none.

That Christmas, however, he called, full of a degree of disapproval and self-righteousness unusual even for him, to inform me that Abby, one of the college-age students, had turned up in the lobby of his and Xerxes’s building in New York, “scared and desperate” (his portrait of her distress was near Victorian in its piteousness), claiming that I’d thrown her out of the house. Yes, I told Owen, I
had
been forced to ask Abby to leave the house, where she had been squatting for much of the fall, because she had insisted on smoking marijuana in her bedroom, which I had asked her repeatedly not to do. Owen, unsurprisingly, thought this appalling and inhumane on my part. I normally did not engage with Owen’s provocations, but in that moment I could not stop myself, and the fight quickly expanded in scope to cover my apparent decades’ worth of parental shortcomings. To this day I cannot account for his sudden ire. Was it born of boredom, or the elderly’s tendency to involve themselves
in matters in which they are not wanted or needed? Or was it—as I sometimes thought, as much as I shrank from it—inspired by a sort of jealousy, something that I always sensed roiled just beneath Owen’s consciousness, sometimes cresting, sometimes receding, but ever-simmering, its boil growing louder and hotter with each year, with each approbation that was given me, with each child I sent sailing into the world’s slipstream? I had everything, after all, and he had only Xerxes and his thin books of poetry and a life lived mostly within New York State.

At any rate, the talk did not end well, and at its end he announced that he (along with Xerxes, whom I had been curious to meet, and Abby, whom for all I cared he could keep for as long as he wanted, if he thought he could do a better job than I) would be staying in New York for the holiday. “I’ll send the children their presents,” Owen snapped before hanging up the phone, and as dismayed and angry as I felt, I remember also registering his comment with some bitter relief: Owen could always be counted on for superior gifts, which the children awaited every year.

That night, after everyone had gone to their rooms, I ventured down to the living room with a large plastic filing box Mrs. Lansing had prepared for me shortly after Thanksgiving. Downstairs, dozens of stockings, each with a child’s name on it, hung from every surface—the children had even taken down the pictures from the walls and hung their stockings from the hooks. The room looked like the result of an insane person’s obscure and dedicated obsession.

Mrs. Lansing had written me specific instructions: each stocking was to receive from the box a ball of chocolate wrapped in foil that was stippled like an orange’s skin; a rectangle of peppermint candy; a milky round of glycerine soap, in the middle of which floated a plastic toy (a dinosaur, a butterfly, a pig, a shark); a tiny spiral notebook with a tinier, blunt-nosed pencil; and a handful of the salty honeycomb candies I so enjoyed. In addition there was a wrapped toy for each of the thirteen children still living at home; for the adults and college students, there were envelopes containing checks. All of these I distributed—in the stockings, under the tree (awesome and horrible, it towered in the corner, covered with ornaments that had been made in school with construction paper and glitter and clotty gobs of glue that looked like tatters of litter, its hard white lights
winking gaudily), taking care that every stocking had been filled. When I was finished, I sat down and ate some chewy and underbaked chocolate-chip cookies the youngest children had made and left near the fireplace earlier that night and returned the cup of milk to its plastic jug. I thought suddenly of my conversation with Tallent, his sly certainty that I’d find myself with children. Had he perhaps known what my life would be before I did? I had the sensation that I was being watched, or observed, really, and I turned, thinking for a moment I might see him peering out at me from behind the highboy, his pencil gliding across the page as he stared at me, a specimen who had grown into exactly what he had expected. But there was no one there, and I was embarrassed, and relieved, and then embarrassed anew to be relieved.

I was tired but not yet ready to sleep. Indeed, I felt itchy with impatience and disappointment. I had been brooding over my recent fight with Owen and found myself wondering idly whether I should not just call him up and apologize.
Listen, Owen
, I’d say.
I’m sorry. We oughtn’t fight. We are both old men
. Five years before, I would not have dreamed of having such a conversation with him. But now our arguments, which had once seemed exciting and bracing, vibrant colorful displays of will and opinion, were enervating and tiresome. Perhaps I should simply call him and assume the blame, I thought. He would be momentarily triumphant, and it would be irritating. But, I thought, I had already written my own story for history, and it would not include the details of my spats with Owen: who began it, who ended it, who won, who lost.

Through the kitchen door I could see the moon, seeping a thin yellow light like pus. I stepped outside, and above me the sky was smeary with thin rubbings of cloud and spangled with bright white stars. I don’t know how long I stood there, watching my breath leaving my mouth in ghostly streams, still holding one of the children’s unsuccessful fat cookies in my cold fat hand. I could leave, I thought. I could pack a small bag and get into my car and drive away. I would take a plane to a European city, any city, and live there. Any university would accept me enthusiastically, with no questions. It was a perfect time; the older children were home, would take care of the younger ones, would figure out whom to call. The youngest children—little Eloise, Giselle, Jack—might, I thought, be adopted
by the elders. The others, I assumed, would go into foster care, which would be regrettable. Although perhaps their association with me would find them adoptive families; I would be glad of that. But of course this plan would not do, no matter how logical it seemed to me.

It was now quite late, for the night was very dark and silent, and I was eager to return to my study. I would sleep, perhaps, for a few hours, and then the children would wake and I would find myself marching through another day. But when I turned the handle of the door to go back inside, it would not budge.

Almost immediately my mouth became rich with the flavors—old blood, brackish water, metal—of fear, and then anger. The door did not lock automatically; it had to be locked purposefully from the inside. I pounded on the door, slapping my palm against the square panes of glass. “Hello!” I cried, absurdly. “Hello! Let me in!”

And then I saw someone skittering out of the darkness. His torso was hidden by shadows and so I could see only his legs; for a moment, I fancied that it was not one of the children but rather an imp, a wicked sprite who darted through darkened houses, searching for its other half.

But of course I knew who it was. “Victor!” I called, as loudly as I dared, smacking the glass. To go around to the front door I would have to have been able to somehow straddle the wooden gate that separated the front from the back yard, which was not only taller than I but could be unlocked only from the front side (why? I wondered). I had no other options, no options but Victor. Screaming for help? It would not do to have the neighbors discovering me, the great scientist, in his bathrobe and slippers, locked out of his house and commanding one of his children to let him back in! (The other children I imagined upstairs, slouched into positions of unearned indolence, their round dark ears cupped with foam-fattened headphones, their poor fragile eardrums assaulted by thumping basslines, drumbeats, horns.) There was only Victor, only Victor. “Boy! Open the door this instant!”

The legs stopped then, a few feet from me. “Boy,” I hissed. “Open the door right now. Do it now.” I was about to threaten him, but then I realized how weak and pathetic it sounded: I was the one outside in the cold, with only my bathrobe for cover. He was inside, in the house, in
my
house. In the windowpanes I could see the reflection
of the tree, its lights blinking meaninglessly. On and off, on and off. “Victor!”

And then he came suddenly very close to the glass, and I am sorry to say I took a short step backward, which he of course noticed. He smiled, and for a moment, with his fierce grin and sharp, bright, pointed teeth and his dark eyes—so moth-dark that it was difficult to determine where the pupil met the iris—he looked like a demon, and I was frightened of him.

“My name,” he said, and I could hear him through the glass, “is Vi!”

“Victor,” I said slowly, in a tone I knew was frightening, “you are to open this door right now. Then you are to go to bed. If you do not open this door right now, I will beat you so hard that you will be unrecognizable.” To myself I thought,
I will anyway, whether he opens the door now or five minutes from now
.

But he just tilted his head and stared at me. Nor did he drop his ferocious smile, which stretched his mouth into a long, thin, evil-looking shape, like the blade of a scythe. It was, I realized, the same awful smile I thought I had rid him of all those years before, and I felt a shiver run through me. “I would have,” he said, in a voice that was meant to mimic my own. “But you called me Victor. After you said you would not.”

I knew he was not finished. “Victor!” I hit the door again. “Victor, you animal!”

But he was not shaken. “And so,” he continued, “I’m afraid that makes you a liar. And what is it that you’ve always taught us about lying? That it is a degradation of one’s integrity. But I don’t believe that. I believe that it damages the person you lied to as much as the person who told the lie. And so I am going to punish you.” He took a step back, so his face was lost again to shadows. Still, I could hear his voice. “I’m afraid,” he said, in that cold voice, “that I will have to leave you there to think about what you have done.” Another step back, so I could see him only from his chest down. And now his voice was fainter too. “It’s never too late”—another step back; only his waist and legs were visible—“to learn a lesson.” Another step back. “Papa.” The word felt like no more than a whisper. And then he turned, and I could see the whites of his soles as he walked away from me.

I realized then that I had remained frozen during the last part of Victor’s speech, and suddenly I saw my reflection in the glass: my palm, crepey and lined, scratching against the door, my mouth gaping and mute, my eyes startled and wide with the helpless confusion of the elderly.
My god
, I thought.
My god. Who is he? Who is this child I have living in my house?
I thought again of how I had found him, curled on the ground, covered with a layer of soot so dense it was like a pelt. Like an animal, I had thought, and had been outraged. But now I thought it again.
Like an animal
. And my outrage, though no less real, was not directed at his circumstances but at myself. I should have left him, I thought. It was never my place to try to save something that no one else had wanted.

But I continued to call. “Victor!” I shouted, as loudly as I could. I clawed at the door. “Victor! Victor!” I continued to bang against the door and call for minutes, hours. “Victor!” While upstairs, I knew, he lay curled up in the bed I had given him, in the room I had given him, and slept.

It was Gregory, one of the adult children, who found me the next morning, slumped against the doorframe. It seemed as if I had eventually succumbed to sleep, and when I was awoken by his cry, I was made to experience anew both the indignity of my situation and my physical dishevelment—a long sparkling floss of saliva stretched from lip to chin, and once inside, I began to shake with such ferocity that I could hear my teeth clicking against one another like castanets.

“Papa, what were you doing outside?” he asked me. I assumed he had already opened his envelope, for he was particularly solicitous, scurrying around me, handing me his cup of coffee, draping a blanket around my shoulders.