Don't Worry About the Kids (18 page)

She felt his forehead with her lips. “But you have a fever!” she exclaimed. She darted from the couch, to the bathroom, and returned with a thermometer. “You're burning up.”

He lay in bed for four days. She fed him, washed him, shaved him, and read to him, and she urged him not to be a critic of the writings of others, but to consider, when he was well, doing more writing of his own. She hoped, when his time was less pressured, that he would give himself the chance, yet again, to let his imagination take wing. But if he did or if he didn't, she would still love him, she would still be happy.

His eyes ached, his muscles were sore, his throat and chest were thick with phlegm. He thought of Milly Theale, in
Wings of the Dove
, dying in the room that overlooked the Grand Canal. He realized that he did believe that Janet was, truly, as happy as she claimed to be. Still, he sensed that it was his
idea
, and not himself, that had brought such happiness to her, and the difference disturbed him.

“Maybe—” he said, while she sat at his side, holding the glass from which he sipped his tea and honey, “—maybe I need a prolonged rest. I feel so damned exhausted sometimes, Janet. As if—”

“Don't be silly,” she said. “It's just the flu. It's been hitting everybody. You'll get over it in another day or two.”

“But—” He dropped back upon his pillow. “I can't ever remember feeling this bad, not even—”

“Shh,” she said. “You shouldn't talk. You're tiring yourself more. You sleep for a while and then maybe—” she smiled, “—maybe I'll come join you and we'll attempt an old Biblical remedy—”

He tried to smile. “What they ordered for King David?”

“Mmm,” she said. “Now close your eyes. Be a good boy.”

When next he opened his eyes, the room was dark. He called for her and she came at once, wearing a white bathrobe. He remembered Susan Hayward, in a movie version of “The Aspern Papers,” rustling through darkened rooms in a white evening gown. “Are you ready?” she asked.

“I'm in a sweat,” he said. “I'm drenched.”

“Good. The fever may be breaking.” He watched her as, wraithlike, she turned her back to him and removed her robe. She let it fall about her feet, and then she stepped away. Her hair seemed longer and silkier to him. She laughed, lightly. “Did I tell you that this morning, when I went to the library to check out some books, they asked me for my student I.D.–?”

“I'm cold,” he said. “I think I'm getting a chill.”

“I'll be there in a minute.” She stood in front of the vanity table mirror and brushed her hair. “I'll warm you. But—can you imagine?—that at my age they mistook me for an undergraduate?”

She turned to him, smiling with a kindness that numbed him. As he watched her move across the room, he found himself beginning to imagine for the first time how other men—in France, in Italy, in Spain, in Greece, in Morocco—might have looked upon her.

She lifted the covers and lay next to him. “Your skin is so hot,” she said.

“Maybe we should take me to the doctor.”

“Never,” she said, gently, kissing him.

“I'm cold,” he said. “And things seem to be getting dark suddenly…”

“The darkness before the light?” she laughed. “Don't talk—you'll tire yourself. Let me talk. Did you know the one time I doubted?” She stroked his forehead. “The one time I doubted was not when you asked me how we could, afterward, return to our ordinary lives, but when you said what you did about how James might have written the story—about how the point would have been something about acts and consequences, about our not ever being free, not even in our imaginations.”

“You should have told me.”

“But if I had, we might never—” She broke off. “And there's something else I've wanted to tell you.” She touched his face with great tenderness. “If I tell you that I haven't been able to read your story yet, will you forgive me? Oh Mark, I've tried—believe me—and I
was
so happy when you first gave it to me as a gift. It's just that…”

He closed his eyes. “It's all right,” he said. “It doesn't matter.”

She kissed him. “I know,” she said. “Because now that I've told you, I feel better. I'll be able to read it.” She rested her cheek against his. “Until now I haven't felt free to. I've been frightened of it somehow, and not because of anything I might find in it, but by the idea that you finished it. Can you understand that? Whenever I've looked at it I've been frightened by the idea that it has an
ending—and
yet our life itself goes on and on—”

“You should have told me before,” he said. “There's really nothing…”

“Shh,” she said. “You've been sweet never to have asked me if I'd read it. But you don't have to say anything now. We don't have to explain to each other anymore—not ever again.” She pressed against him. “And promise me too that you'll try not to worry about how you look—your age; I've always liked older men, haven't I? Wasn't that what first attracted me to you?”

He closed his eyes and let her do what she wanted with him, and while she did—and all the while she talked to him, comforted him, and loved him—he realized that if he would now dare to ask her about her year, and if she would tell, he would not be jealous, either of real acts or of those he might imagine. He believed her. He understood that what she'd said was true—that, now that she had had her chance, now that they had done the great thing—she would be faithful to him forever. And yet being free of the thing he had feared most hardly comforted him, for even as he realized that this fear was gone, and even as Janet ministered to his needs with a kindness and passion he could hardly endure, he sensed that a new and more terrible fear was settling within him and taking hold. He looked away, toward the night table, toward the envelope that contained his story, and he saw, finally, that he had been wrong: his great fear was not that she might reveal her acts to him or that he might be jealous, but that, having revealed herself fully to him—all that she had and had not done—she might look at him with her bright and eager eyes and plead with him to do the same, and that he would have to think then, for the first time, of all that, having at last given himself the chance, he had, nonetheless, failed to do.

Your Child Has Been Towed

W
HEN
I
WAS
A
BOY
growing up in Brooklyn during the years after the Second World War, my favorite place was our local library. On Saturday mornings while my parents slept late, I'd sneak out the door, then run the three blocks from our apartment house until I came to the squat white stone building. The children's room was on the right side, a large rectangle with enormous windows that ran along its three outside walls. The windows were high up above the shelves of books, and when I sat inside the room, I used to look up and imagine there were machine gun nests perched just outside the glass, machine gunners in camouflaged helmets firing down on me and the other children—spraying us with pellets of brilliant sunlight.

I loved going to the library on Saturday mornings because that was when Mrs. Kachulis, my fourth-grade teacher, was there. Each Saturday morning she came with her daughter Demeter. Mrs. Kachulis always called her daughter, who was in the third grade, by her full name of Demeter. At school, Demeter's girlfriends called her Demmy and sometimes, if no teachers were around, boys would circle around her and call her Dummy. The first time I met Mrs. Kachulis at the library was by chance. I'd gone to synagogue with my father, a block from the library, because he had to say Kaddish for his father. Otherwise, since my father was proud to be what he called a godless Jew, he never went. On the way home we stopped at the library so I could get some books to read over the weekend. He had taken me with him to synagogue because I was, he said, his
kaddishel
, the person who would say Kaddish for him all the years after he died.

My favorite writer during those years was John R. Tunis. I knew the names of the ballplayers on his imaginary teams as well as I knew the names of the players on the Brooklyn Dodgers. I'd read all his books several times each and I was looking through
The Kid from Tomkinsville
again when Mrs. Kachulis found me. She grabbed me by the arms, helped me up from the floor, smiled at me as if I were the one human being in the world she had most hoped to meet. This is what she said:

How wonderful to see you here, Jason! I come here every Saturday morning with Demeter. We'll meet again. You know Demeter, of course. Demeter, come here, please, and meet Jason Klein. Demeter, this is Jason Klein, the most brilliant and generous student I've ever had.

A blast of air entered my mouth and shot down my throat. It breathed heat into a bundle of dry twigs that lay waiting just below my chest. The twigs burst into flame.

Hello, Mrs. Kachulis. I'm pleased to meet you, Demeter.

Mrs. Kachulis asked to see what I was reading. I offered the book to her and I wondered if she would know what I loved most about holding the book: that the straw-colored binding made me imagine what the sun felt like on the Kid from Tomkinsville's back when he was out on the ballfield somewhere in Florida, far from home, on his first day of spring training.

My father came to get me. You must be proud to have a son like Jason, Mrs. Kachulis said. I'll tell you a secret—he makes my days worthwhile.

Jason's a good boy mostly, my father said. Especially when he sleeps. Look at the books he's reading, a boy his age.

Sports books. Always sports books, my father said. Athletes and horses and grown men chasing little balls. When I was his age, I read books by Ralph Henry Barbour, but I read other things too. On Saturday afternoons I studied Talmud with my father. Jason should be interested in the world, in history, and in how things work. He should read about President Roosevelt and the Depression and the internal combustion engine and why we won the war.

Ah, but he does—he reads everything. He devours books, Mrs. Kachulis said. I've never met a boy more curious.

He's a strange one, my father said. That's true enough. You never know what goes on in that beautiful head of his, behind those golden curls. He certainly doesn't think like you and me.

For our history project, he did a report on lend-lease, Mrs. Kachulis continued. He made marvelous drawings of battleships and destroyers and fighter-bombers. He made a meticulous chart showing how u.s. industry mobilized miraculously for the war effort. I put his work on display for the entire school to see.

He's no slouch, my father said. His hand moved toward my head as if to ruffle the curls. Then, without touching me, his hand retreated to the back of his own head, to the spot where all the hair began, and he scratched himself there. We have to get home, he said. Your mother will be waiting for lunch.

Demeter was the goddess of agriculture and fruitfulness, the protectress of marriage, the mother of Bacchus. I liked the name Bacchus because it had two c's in it. I liked the name Demeter because it was the name of a rookie outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers—Don Demeter—I'd been following since he came up from Fort Worth in the Minor Leagues. Despite his frail gifts, I hoped Demeter might someday become the heir to Duke Snider's centerfield kingdom. In his first at bat in the Majors, pinch hitting against Don Liddle, and the very first time he swung a bat, Demeter blasted a home run.

Each week when we met in the children's room of the library, Mrs. Kachulis asked me what I was reading. Each time she found me there, sitting at one of the low blond wood tables, or on the wine-colored carpeting near the far wall, she seemed as surprised and delighted as she was the first time. On the third Saturday we met, she told me to come with her to where the grown-up books were.

And after that first time, she took me with her to the stacks every week. The stacks were positioned directly behind the squared-off area where you checked your books in and out, there for you as you entered or left the library. The stacks were dark—you could switch lights on yourself for whichever aisle you were using, and Mrs. Kachulis would walk along, singing to herself in Italian—she loved opera, would sometimes stop class, clap her hands, and proceed to tell us the story of one—taking down books and handing them to me even while she kept walking and singing. Try this one and tell me what you think of it, she'd say, and pass the book backwards to me as she moved forward.

I had often become attached to ballplayers simply because of the way their names sounded or were spelled: Ramazotti, Lavagetto, Med-wick, Jorgenson, Loes, Mikses, Cimoli, Roebuck. Now it was the same

with names of authors: Shellabarger, Undset, Fuchs, Yerby, Zugsmith, Slaughter, Ullman, Wouk, Buck, Brace, Cather, Saroyan, Baasch, Jewett, Bemelmans, Lagerkvist…

In class, when I'd finished my work before others had, I'd tell her about the books—not
about
them really, for what I did was simply to retell the stories. When I was done, or when we had to stop so the class could continue, she'd smile at me and say, Oh you're such a careful reader, Jason. I love having you tell me stories.

I never thought Mrs. Kachulis was a beautiful woman, but I loved her smile more than any smile in the world, since when she offered it to me I felt that no least part of it was meant for anyone else. Some of the students called her Mrs. Horseface because of how large her teeth were and the way her long jaw quivered slightly when she laughed. I loved her more because they mocked her. Had I been strong enough to defend her with my fists, I would have, but knowing that I could not defeat
all
the boys who made fun of her, and that, therefore, when the fight was over they would only mock us both, I did nothing. Except to imagine a time when my mother might die, when my father might, in his grief, despair, and when I would be put up for adoption. Then Mrs. Kachulis would put out her arms and embrace me. Of course I'll take you as mine, she said.