Kramer vs. Kramer (8 page)

He was thinking about placing his own ad in the newspaper, but did not want to open himself up to the crazies at large. Instead, he taped a sign on what was the community bulletin board, a wall in the supermarket across the street. “Housekeeper wanted, 9 to 6. Nice family.” He had heard this often enough. “I only work for nice families.” He got one call from a Mrs. Etta Willewska, who said she lived in the neighborhood and had not done this work in a while but was interested. She was a short, wide Polish woman with a cherubic face, inappropriately dressed for her interview in what seemed to be her best dress, a black formal outfit. Her accent was slight; she and her husband had been citizens for thirty years, she said proudly. They had a married son. She had been a housekeeper for many years, then worked for the most part in industrial laundries. Her husband worked in a factory in Long Island City. She thought it would be good to work for a nice family again. She then asked Ted a question. It was something not one of the others had bothered to ask.

“What kind of boy is he?”

Ted was not certain. He had the general outlines, but he had never been obliged to define Billy’s personality.

“He’s very nice. Sometime’s he’s shy. He likes to play. He speaks well.” He did not know what else to say.

“Could I look in?” she asked.

They peered through the door at Billy asleep with his people.

“He’s very beautiful,” she whispered.

The light from the hall fell across his face and he woke suddenly.

“It’s okay, honey. It’s me. This is Mrs. Willewska.”

“Mrs. Willewska,” Billy said in a tired voice.

“Go back to sleep.”

When they went inside she said: “He’s very smart. He said my name without a mistake. Many people cannot.”

Ted wondered about the burden of carrying a name many people cannot say without a mistake.

“I don’t know if he is smart. At four it’s kind of hard to tell. I think he is.”

“You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Kramer.”

He had not considered himself so over these past few days.

They talked in general terms about the duties of the job, which he said paid $110—he could at least match what he would have offered through Mrs. Colby. Could she come in for a few hours to get acquainted? Could she start on Monday? She said she would be happy to work for him and take care of William. On leaving she inquired as to the kind of meals Ted liked when he came home from work. He had not realized this was part of the bargain.

So he had a lady with a cherubic face who would cook suppers and take care of Billy. Trust your feelings, Thelma had advised on the hiring of help—and he felt he had his person. He called Mrs. Colby and told her he had found someone. Adrift in her index cards, she said she hoped his wife was feeling better.

Now he could make his other calls. He had tidied up. He could say to his parents—My wife left, wait, don’t go crazy, we have a wonderful housekeeper, it’s neat, I made it neat. He could say to his former in-laws—Do you know where Joanna is? She left, you know. We have a housekeeper, wonderful woman. He could say—I don’t need your help, any of you. I’m keeping him. We’ll do all right. It’s the way I want it.

He went into Billy’s room and stood over him. What kind of boy
was
he? Could you know at four? What kind of boy was he going to be? What kind of life would they have?

We’ll be okay, Billy. We’ve got Mrs. Willewska. We’ve got each other.

The boy moved in his sleep, immersed in his child’s dreams. He moved his lips, muttering words that were unintelligible. It was fascinating, but Ted could not watch, eavesdropping on his private world this way. He felt like an intruder. Little boy, don’t worry. We’re going to be fine. He kissed him and backed away. The child was involved in his dream. He was saying something about “Snoopy.”

N
EARLY HYSTERICAL. SCREAMING.
“What do you mean she just walked out on you and the baby? What do you mean?” his mother howled, repeating it as though the repetition were required to record it on her brain. “Just walked out? On you and the baby? Ahhh!” A howl from his childhood. “What do you mean you got caught sneaking in the RKO Fordham? What do you mean the manager has you in his office?” The theater manager knew the family. Ted’s father had a small luncheonette on Fordham Road then and the manager called the store instead of calling the police. He and Johnny Marin were going to sneak in the side door the moment Jimmy Perretti pushed it open from the inside, crouching into the shadows of the RKO Fordham like commandos in
Commandos Strike At Dawn,
only to get caught by the usher and about to be sent up like convicts in
The Big House.
“What do you mean my son is a criminal? Ahhh!” “I didn’t know you had it in you, kid,” his brother said after the manager released the hardened criminal in exchange for a hot turkey plate.

In the time before Billy, Ted and Joanna had gone to Fort Lauderdale to see Dora and Harold Kramer’s new condominium, a garden apartment near a pool. While Harold watched television, Dora took them on a tour of the grounds. “This is my younger son, Ted, and his wife,” she would say. Sons were identified poolside by occupation, daughters and daughters-in-law by their husbands’ occupations. “Ted sells,” she said, but she never mentioned that he sold advertising space, since she was still not wholly clear what that was. He would have been easier to explain if he were a big liquor wholesaler like his brother, as in “This is my older son, Ralph, he’s a big liquor wholesaler,” or a doctor like the Simons’ boy.

“W
HAT HAVE YOU BEEN
doing up there?”

“Breaking up a marriage.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“It’s very modern.”

“Who permits such a thing?”

“Ted?” His father had left his game show on television, having delayed to make certain this was important enough to come to the phone.

“How are you, Dad?”

“You let your wife leave you?”

“The decision was not democratically arrived at.”

“And she left the little baby. Ahhh!”

He
howled. The shame of this must have been enormous. He had never heard his father howl his mother’s howl before.

“I’ve got everything under control.”

“Control?” his mother shrieked. “How can everything be under control?”

“Mom, listen—”

“Your wife has run away from you—”

“I’ve hired a housekeeper, a terrific woman. She’s raised her own boy, she’s taken care of other children.”

“What is she?” she said quickly.

“Uh … Polish.”

“Good. They work hard. Ahh, what’s the difference? It’s a tragedy, a disgrace.”

“She’s very nice. She’s going to come in every day and take care of everything.”

“A disgrace. That woman. She’s a tramp. A tramp!”

“Mom, Joanna is probably a lot of things, some of them I don’t even know myself. But a tramp,” he said, trying to stifle his laughter. “How do you get a tramp out of this?”

“A tramp,” she said definitively.

“A slut,” his father added for emphasis.

He had tried to make it neat. It was not neat enough. When he hung up he was still chuckling at how they possibly got a tramp and slut out of it.

S
HE CALLED HIM WILLIAM;
he called her Mrs. Willewska. Ted called her Mrs. Willewska also; she called him Mr. Kramer, the formality appealing to Ted, as if they were an old-line family like the Kennedys, accustomed to having help. She was a gentle, reasonable woman, intuitive with a child. For Billy, his mommy gone forever was still an unfathomable idea. What was real to him were the details of his life, who brings me to school, who picks me up, who makes me lunch, when do I watch TV, who makes me supper, who does what Mommy did? These were tangible, and the possibility that these would be unpredictable was frightening to him. His mother’s absence did not mean his world had come apart. No one to give him a peanut butter sandwich did. During the search for a housekeeper, these were Billy’s concerns, which he verbalized with nervous questions about times of arrivals and departures for school, for dates, for meals—who does what, who stands where? As soon as Etta Willewska arrived, the unfathomable continued to be so—no Mommy? All else, however, was answered. Mrs. Willewska did that. Within a few days, Billy was saying, “Daddy, Mrs. Willewska said I could not have another cookie. I had one before.” On a morning when Ted walked along with them to take Billy to school, Ted began to step off the curb, only to be admonished: “It says don’t walk, Daddy.”

“We only cross when it says walk, Mr. Kramer. So he’ll learn.”

“Right.” Take
me
by the hand, Mrs. Willewska, and cross me.

She had brought stability to them. They were both, at the core, still bewildered. But on the details, on the peanut butter sandwiches and the walks and don’t walks—Mrs. Willewska did that.

To people in business he offered as information that “My wife copped out on the marriage and the kid,” and usually said, “But we’ve got it straightened out with this fabulous housekeeper,” saying this part so quickly he cut off their specific questions.

After several days of normal performance at work and the beginning of a regular routine for everyone at home, he decided to call Joanna’s parents, since he had not heard from them. Maybe they knew where Joanna was. They did not. She had left it to Ted to tell them.

“You don’t know anything?”

“Know what?”

“Joanna has left us, Harriet. She’s gone. She left Billy and me to go off and find herself.” You’re some cutie-pie. You really left this for me? There was a long pause on the other end. “I sort of hoped she’d have told you herself.”

“She left her son? Her own baby?”

“And her husband. She left me, too.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Nothing, Harriet. I didn’t ask her to leave.”

“I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”

“Take it easy now, Harriet. Where’s Sam?”

“In the back.”

“Go get him. I’ll hold on.”

“I’m going to have a heart attack.”

“Don’t have a heart attack. Get Sam.”

He guessed that a person who could announce she was having a heart attack was not going to have one.

“Hello?”

“Sam, is Harriet all right?”

“She’s sitting down.”

“Did she tell you?”

“How dare you call with such a thing?”

“Well, maybe I should have written.”

“Joanna left her child?”

“Yes, she—”

“Her own beautiful little child?”

“She said she needed to do this for herself.”

“I’m going to have a heart attack—”

“Wait, Sam—”

“I’m going to have a heart attack. Harriet, you talk to him. I’m having a heart attack.”

“Sam, you don’t have a heart attack if you can say it.” He knew this from his last case.

“Ted, it’s me—Harriet. Sam is sitting down.”

“Is he okay?”

“We can’t talk to you now. You’ve upset us dreadfully with this news. You have a lot of nerve.” And she hung up on him.

D
URING THE WEEK, TED
was usually home near six; he and Billy would have dinner together, he would give him a bath, they would play for a while, Ted would read him a story, and somewhere around seven-thirty Billy went to bed. It was a fast hour and a half. The weekends, Etta’s days off, represented long, unbroken periods of time, and anxious about filling the time and keeping Billy happy and occupied, Ted was booking up the weekends with what amounted to package tours of New York City. This particular morning he planned to take him to the Museum of Natural History. The doorbell rang, and standing there were Joanna’s parents. They entered quickly, scattering through the apartment like the bomb squad on a tip. Throwing doors open, they discovered one small child watching television and startled him with a cascade of hugs and kisses and coloring books. They moved through the rest of the house, and having determined the evidence firsthand, Harriet announced, “She’s not here.”

Sam prowled through the house again, as though he might find some important clue, looked in at Billy, who had not moved—
The Electric Company
had arrived with Spider-Man, which took precedence over grandparents, even from Boston. Sam clicked his tongue, “Tsk, tsk,” over the boy and sat heavily on the couch.

They were an attractive couple. She was petite, a young fifty, dark eyes, her hair naturally graying. He had a handsome, craggy face, a physical-looking man with distinctive white hair. Ted had forgotten how striking they were. Clearly, Joanna was their daughter, Billy was of their blood. He would have been mistaken to think they would not care about the boy.

“What have you got to say in explanation?” Joanna’s father demanded in a stilted voice. He seemed to have been rehearsing the line all the way down from Boston.

Ted recounted the circumstances of Joanna’s leaving, trying to do it reportorially, quote her accurately—would you do the same for me?—and they listened, squinting their eyes as though they were trying to follow someone in a foreign language.

“She was never any trouble,” her mother said.

“Well, she is now,” Ted answered, getting in his points.

They did not understand. They had handed over to him a beautiful girl, and this is what he did to her. They began to reminisce about Joanna’s early triumphs, the pre-Ted days, oblivious to Ted sitting there—remember how pretty she looked on the night of … Then they would lapse into long silences. Billy called out from Ted’s bedroom, which had the television set, to know if he could watch
Sesame Street.
The child, the child. They leaped up and rushed into the room, reassuring themselves that
he
was still there, kissing and hugging him all over again, as he looked up, confused by why these people kept coming in while he was watching television to kiss and hug him. They went through the house, checking all the guards on the windows. How would Ted manage? He wasn’t qualified to take care of a child by himself. Who was this housekeeper? Did he know about the nurse who abducted the child and murdered it? Why was Billy watching so much television? What was he eating? Who would see to his clothes? He tried to field their questions. They were not listening to the answers. They kept looking through the house. Lollys? You have lollys? the pharmacist asked. Don’t you know sugar is bad for his system, lollys bad for his teeth? They live in Boston, Ted reassured himself. They wanted Mrs. Willewska to submit to their personal investigation on her day off. He refused. They wanted to take Billy to the zoo. He said that would be all right, but could they not “tsk, tsk” over Joanna while they were with Billy and upset him? Now they remembered Joanna again.