A Person of Interest (17 page)

“He’s John’s father, Aileen,” Nora said, by which she meant that Warren had notified Gaither not out of hostility to Aileen, although there was this, but in deference to a natural order of things. For Nora this order was unquestionable, and the conflict it presented with the equally nonnegotiable law of loyalty to a sibling was taking its toll. Of the two women, Nora could easily have been mistaken for the one who had just given birth. Her face was taut and gray with fatigue, and her hands, when attempting an everyday task, as now—she was folding diapers—shook and fumbled. In the heat of discussion, her clauses inverted themselves. Aileen knew that between caring for her own two small children and helping with John, Nora was getting even less sleep than she was, and she knew, though Nora thought she did not, that Nora had been fighting an ongoing battle with Warren over Aileen’s, and now John’s, tenancy in the house. But she also knew that the quandary supposedly at the heart of this warfare, that she and Gaither both had equal claim to their child, was false. Gaither’s claims were not equal to hers; they were not even of the same nature as hers.

She did not know what they were, exactly; to define them she would have to make use of that distinguished, desiccated library of abstract principle on which her parents had raised all their children, and of
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 105

which Nora had always been such a gifted student and Aileen such a failure. She had never cared for that library, and she cared for it even less now that she possessed, for the first time in her life, a scrap of actual knowledge, as harrowing to her as any Old Testament revelation.

The child, John, was neither Gaither’s nor hers, but his own. He had only passed through her. Yet where there were no rights, such as Gaither sought now, there was responsibility, conferred by that passage, upon her alone. Until he was unthinkably grown up and gone, he was hers to guard fiercely, and she his sole sentinel.

It surprised her that Nora had forgotten this, for as much as the epiphany had shored Aileen up, making her seem almost arrogant with self-assurance, she never imagined that her situation was unique.

It was the condition of being a mother. Nora must have known, at the moments at which each of her children was born and perhaps for years afterward. But now, with the younger child about to turn four, Nora had forgotten, as she had forgotten so many things Aileen needed to know. Some perhaps species-protecting amnesia seemed to affl ict more experienced mothers: Nora had no idea when John might be expected to produce his first real bowel movement or support his own head, or how long he should sleep in a hat to protect against drafts, or how often Aileen should nurse. And so perhaps it wasn’t an occasion for bafflement but for tender forbearance on Aileen’s part that Nora felt herself trapped, between equal combatants, with the only solution imaginable an unimaginable reconciliation. It was for Nora alone that Aileen finally agreed to let Gaither see John, the fourth time he tried.

The first time, Warren had returned alone to the house and shut himself up with Nora, and later Nora came red-eyed to plead with Aileen.

The second time, the next day, Gaither reappeared, obviously instructed by Warren, according to Nora as impeccably dressed but not in the same suit, and Aileen and Warren shouted at each other across the back bedroom until John began keening. The third time, the day after that, it was finally Monday, and Warren was at work and the children at school; when the doorbell sounded, Aileen and Nora and John were in the back bedroom together, and Aileen pulled Nora’s head to her shoulder and kissed her hair and stroked it, as if Nora were the one under siege. “I’m so sorry, Nonie,” she whispered. The next day, the fourth day, she told Nora to let Gaither in. Whether it was a
106 S U S A N C H O I

fourth brand-new suit or a third, they couldn’t know, not having seen him the previous time, but in either case Aileen was struck by how much he had changed.

For all the revulsion and horror Aileen had experienced in predicting this moment, for all her feeling that Gaither was a gross violation of that natural order to which she felt so attuned—as distinct as it was from the order subscribed to by Nora—the meeting was eerily rote, as if there were a well-known protocol for such things after all.

Gaither was standing at the parlor window, his back to the room, when Aileen entered with John in her arms. She had finished nursing in the bedroom, and had swaddled John in a fresh blanket, and even put on a fresh blouse herself, less from a vestigial instinct to look nice for her husband than in response to the strong sense of formality, of the absence of intimacy, that had entered the house with Gaither. He did not turn when she entered, and as she seated herself on the sofa she found herself studying the elongated triangular form of his back, the ruler-straight demarcation between his fresh haircut and his pale exposed nape, the plumb line of each pleat at the back of his slacks with the impassive yet careful attention she might pay to a commanding stranger. He aroused no feeling. She had forgotten their marriage—

erased it—and if she was trying to recall the sensation of having had sex with that gravely clad body, it was not in hopes of salvaging something but because she found the void in her memory so fascinating.

John was a bundle of surrender-limp limbs she held propped in the crook of one arm, and it was only as Nora moved toward her, a ferry crossing dark straits, that Aileen’s mind grew turbulent. A hot kitchen smell steamed off John, the salt-and-butter scent of his sweat and her milk, and as she gave him to Nora, it died from her nostrils. Nora crossed the room and with instructive gestures, like a hospital nurse, placed John in Gaither’s arms. Gaither turned again to the window, his head bent, his back eclipsing the small lump of blanket. It seemed to Aileen that not a sound had been made since the front bell had blasted many eons ago and she had looked at her sister and said, “All right.” Even John’s varied creakings and huffings were absent. In the fi ve days since his birth, they had come to seem as much a part of the aural landscape as the oak’s sighing or the mourning dove’s falling notes outside the bedroom window. Now profound silence had spread like
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 107

black ink through the rooms. For the first time, her son was out of sight and arm’s reach; even when she slept, she kept a hand dipped in the warmth of his cradle.

Nora had seated herself on Gaither’s side of the parlor, but a re-spectful distance from him; though she faced Aileen, she kept her gaze on the floor. Aileen’s gaze had nailed itself to Gaither’s back but was sightless. Gaither’s gaze was presumably trained on his son. Where did John gaze? Were his dazzled eyes open, receiving his father, or—please, God, she thought—were they closed? She did not know how long the four humans remained in this state, like four planets stalled in their orbits. A feeling of acute panic, of having made in an instant the most fatal of errors, overtook her and was beaten back several times.

At last John let out a brief cry, and Gaither responsively, but without any show of discomfort or haste, handed him to Nora. “I’d like a word with you before I leave,” he said. He turned again to the window.

As Nora crossed the room with John in her arms, Aileen found that her right hand had held her left wrist so tightly that she had made a deep print of her watch on her skin. She’d been wearing her watch all along, but she did not know when Gaither had come, so she did not know how long he had been here, although her sense of time was lately almost compulsive. She could know, for instance, that she had nursed John beginning at 10:04, and for twenty-three minutes. But now she could not remember when, after Gaither’s arrival, she had last finished nursing and swaddled John in the blanket and brought him into this room. This lapse felt ominous, as if from now on, in spite of herself, she would increasingly be guilty of neglect.

She stood when Nora reached her, received her child—luminous eyes open, scrawny fist in the act of erupting oratorically from the blanket—and turned and strode out of the room, as if all had been smoothly choreographed from the start. But she was trembling so that she thought she’d drop John, and when they were shut in the bedroom, she quickly opened her blouse, as if in apology, although it was possible that barely fifteen minutes had passed since they’d last been in this room.

Finally she heard the front door swing shut and Gaither’s car—her car also, she reminded herself—leave the driveway. The homely brown
108 S U S A N C H O I

sedan would cancel the considerable effects of the upgraded wardrobe, but perhaps he’d upgraded the vehicle also. For the first time, she wondered how Gaither had paid for his clothes, and with this idle thought all the pragmatic realities of her impending divorce lit upon her at once. Until now she hadn’t thought of the things that they shared—the brown car, a few sticks of Goodwill furniture—which were themselves almost worthless but which referred to the one thing that mattered, their money. When Aileen married Gaither, he had been almost literally penniless, while she’d had a small trust, about ten thousand dollars, that had come to her, as to Nora and their other siblings, when their parents had died. Whatever remained of this money now lived in a joint bank account, unless Gaither had used it for a new car and clothes.

Even as she was starting to hope this was true, so that he might fi nally be guilty of something, she knew that Gaither was too morally fastidious. In all aspects of life, Gaither conformed to a rigorous set of pre-cepts some of which coincided with law and some with his religion, but many of which he’d evolved on his own. It had discomfi ted him that Aileen brought more money to the marriage than he did, and although he had endorsed the joint checking account on the biblical principle that in marriage the two become one, in reality he had kept their standard of living artificially low, so that they never spent more than he earned. She could not imagine him freebooting now, however much he despised her. In fact, he was probably even more loath to make use of her money. As if something had snaked through the outermost edge of her vision, she had an instant’s perception that there was some other agency working with Gaither, grooming and clothing and advising him. Then Nora came into the room, and the insight was lost; she wouldn’t recollect it until much later.

“Did you see the car he came in?” she asked Nora.

“What?” Nora said, startled. “His car?”

“Was it our car? Our brown Dodge?”

“I don’t know.” Nora looked at her helplessly. “I don’t remember.

Is it important?”

John stopped sucking; he had fallen asleep. Aileen carefully closed her blouse and touched a finger to John’s cheek. As if in response, his lower lip began working, a soft little pseudopod busily rushing somewhere, pursuing what had just sated him.

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 109

“You must want to know what he said,” Nora offered, and there was something too-solicitous in her voice, as if Aileen were the hopeless supplicant, not Gaither.

“I doubt I could guess.”

“He wants to take John for Thanksgiving. To see his grandparents.” Aileen looked up; Nora did not seem ready to laugh with her at the ludicrousness of the notion. “Thanksgiving is
Thursday.
”

“I know. I told him it didn’t seem . . . likely.”

“And then what did he say?”

“He said he’d be back tomorrow for your answer, and if you say no, then he’ll take John at Christmas—further from now, but for longer. He said if you say no to Thanksgiving weekend, he’ll take John to see them at Christmas, but for a full week. The week between Christmas and New Year’s.”

“He won’t take John at all, anywhere, but I’ll tell him myself. When he comes here tomorrow, you stay with John in this room, and I’ll tell him myself.”

“I think maybe you shouldn’t talk to him, Aileen. We can work out your message, and then I’ll give it to him.”

“That’s all right. Speaking with him won’t kill me. Don’t think I haven’t wanted to see him because I’m afraid of him.” As she spoke, Aileen saw a movement of impatience, almost exasperation, mar Nora’s face. Nora looked away, out the window. The oak tree was there, the only mature tree on the small property. When Nora had given Aileen this bedroom, the smallest one in the house, formerly home to the sewing machine, Aileen had swelled with a gratified greed she’d been careful to hide. It was the smallest bedroom in the house, but it was also the best, the only one with a view from the window of something other than the nude chain-link fence and Warren’s nude, ailing saplings and the lopsided, rusting swing set. The doves roosted in the heights of the oak or waddled between its humped roots like tentative invalids, and for reasons Aileen did not yet understand, she connected this nature-made city of turned auburn leaves and fl uttering susurrations and coos with herself and her son. She did not yet realize that John had transmuted the status of all of those things, material and intangible, monumental and trivial, that for the moment comprised her existence. She had always suffered from an aversion to taking the long
110 S U S A N C H O I

view, from a reluctance to base her decisions on possible outcomes.

Now the profound gravitational force exercised by her child seemed to confi rm, finally, that one’s life was best lived as an endless immediacy.

Everything seemed to reflect this idea except Nora.

“What?” Aileen said, belatedly grasping that Nora had offered to act as a go-between for reasons other than sparing her feelings.

“That wasn’t all he said, about Thanksgiving and Christmas. It wasn’t even the main thing. He pretended it was, but I felt it was his way of testing the waters. I said I’d speak to you about Christmas, that’s all. I didn’t mean to let on what I thought you would say. But he must have seen more from my face. That’s when he said this other thing. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded very . . . calm. And cold. As if that was what he had come here to say all along.”

“For God’s sake, Nora.”