Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (26 page)

“Damn it,” I mutter.

Jack bends his candle to mine and marries the wicks.

I turn back to the fountain. Across the pool I see the helpers in T-shirts busy distributing their tissues. There are lots of tear-streaked faces. Even some audible sobbing. It takes me a minute to find my father and William. They are standing at the edge of the Lake, throwing rocks into the water. People have begun to drift away, to continue on the walk. I concentrate, desperate to feel something, quickly, before it is too late. This is the time for me to liberate myself from the guilt that lodges like a stone in my gullet. I try to picture Isabel's face, but it is just a baby face, soft and unformed, too much like other babies for me to focus on with any clarity. Instead I think of Emma Stebbins, who designed this sculpture, they say to honor her lover, the actress Charlotte Cushman, who was dying of breast cancer. I've even heard that that's why the angel has such a great rack, because Charlotte did, too, before she underwent the horrors of nineteenth-century mastectomy. But Charlotte Cushman's breasts and Emma Stebbins's overwrought sculpture are not what I am supposed to be contemplating right now.

“Let's keep going,” Jack murmurs into my ear. Ever solicitous, he leads us on, my mother and me, a hand for each of us. As we cross the terrace and head north along the path I look back to see if my father and William are following. I can't find them anywhere.

“Where are they?” I say.

Jack looks over at the Lake and then up the terrace.

“What is it?” my mother says. She is still whispering, even though by now the rest of the walkers have passed us and are on their way up the meandering path to the model boat pond.

“Daddy!” I call. “Daddy! William!”

“Stay right here,” Jack says. He takes off at a run up the terrace calling William's name. It does not take long. A few moments, only. They had not actually intended to hide and have not gone far. The two of them are in the Arcade, in the tunnel underneath the stairs leading to the terrace.

“Nono is going to come with me to be in the Lyle movie,” William says. He stomps his feet up and down, kicking his knees high. “We're practicing our dance steps.”

“Do you remember how you and I used to dance like Lyle and Signor Valenti when you were little?” my father says.

“Let's try to catch up to the rest of the group,” Jack says.

“Sorry,” my father says. “I guess young William and I got a little carried away.” It is much darker under the Arcade and all of our candles have gone out.

I can feel it rise in me, the poisonous shame I've been running from for so long. I turn it on him, because he, too, has reasons to be ashamed. “What are you doing here?” I say.

“We didn't want to interrupt the solemn occasion with our high jinks,” my father says. “We thought it would be better to practice here, in the Arcade.”

“No. Why are you here at all? Why did you bother coming?”

Jack, who has been herding my mother and William in the direction of the terrace, stops. He stands very still, like a soldier whose job it is to diffuse land mines. Slowly, very slowly, he reaches out his hand. I duck away from his grasp.

“Why did you bother coming?” I repeat, my voice louder.

My father looks from me to Jack and then over at my mother. It is too dark to make out his expression. “You know why I came,” he says finally. “As a show of support, to you and to Jack.”

“You came to play in the park at night.”

He laughs uncomfortably. “Now don't be silly, honey. I'm here for you. For you two, and for Isabel.”

“Don't you
dare
,” I scream. “Don't even say her name!”

Jack moves quickly now. He grabs my upper arm roughly and half leads, half drags me out of the Arcade and onto the terrace. “Let's go,” he says. “William!” he calls over his shoulder. “You walk with me now.” Out on the terrace Jack pauses, and I know he is trying to decide whether to attempt to catch up to the distant line of tiny glittering candles or just turn back and go home. It is that moment of indecision that allows my father to reach us.

“Emilia!” my father blusters. His hat is askew and he is breathing heavily from his short pursuit. “I will not allow you to speak to me that way.”

Fury expands my chest and lifts my chin. Right before I explode I catch my mother's eye. She has run up behind my father and even in the yellow light of Central Park at dusk I can see what she feels. She is so used to this, so used to submitting to the power of my fury. What else, after all, has she been doing all her life but subsuming her happiness, even her hope of happiness, to the whims of everyone else around her, most especially to those of her daughter? So reconciled is she to the havoc I will wreck on the complicated love she has worked out with this man, that she does not even think to ask what right I have to destroy what I can't possibly understand. She is resigned to the inevitable demolition of any contentment she might have rebuilt.

I see this, I know this, but it is too late.

“You won't allow me to speak to you that way?” I snarl at my father.

“I will not.”

“You know what I won't allow? I won't allow you near my kid. I won't allow you to touch William, or even to talk to him. I don't want him exposed to any diseases you might have picked up from your stripper.”

In the half-light I watch my father's face cave in like a coal mine after an ill-positioned dynamite explosion. First his mouth collapses inward, then his eyes sink. His wrinkles deepen until his face looks like a closed fist.

“Emilia,” Jack says. “What are you doing?”

I spin around to my husband. “You know why my parents got divorced? Because my father was spending thousands of dollars a month on a Russian stripper. Sheldon Greenleaf, president of the New Jersey Bar Association and sex addict. Who knows, maybe he was doing that the whole time he was married to my mother. Maybe whenever he'd take his little girls into the city for a day playing in the park and climbing on the Balto statue, he was really looking to get laid.”

We are a frozen tableau, silent but for the horrified intake of breath of each one. Then Jack leans down and hoists William into his arms. His strides are long; in moments he is across the terrace and up the steps, taking them two at a time. He is a black smudge against the lamplight. Then he is gone.

“Come Shelly,” my mother says. “We'll flag down a cab to take us back to the car.” She slips her hand into the crook of my father's arm and they walk slowly away, suddenly much older even than my father's sixty-five years. At the foot of the steps my mother turns back to me. “Catch up to the others,” she calls. “It's almost dark and you shouldn't be on your own in the park at night.”

And then I am alone. I slip my hands into my pockets and find the second Isabel star, the one I am supposed to float in the water in the model boat pond. Although it is too late for healing, although I cursed and shouted away whatever reparative and rejuvenative dreams I had for this memory walk, I take off after the dead-baby people at a run. There is a tangle of paths leading from the Bethesda Fountain along East Drive to the model boat pond and I'm not sure which one they have taken. I can no longer see the dim line of candles, so I just head up the road and cut over where I think the Hans Christian Andersen statue is. Even though I know this part of the park well, it all changes shape in the dark, reforms and reconstructs itself into a new and strange topography, and until I see the Trefoil Arch I am not entirely sure where I am going. I run down the stairs into the dark hole of the arch, my steps echoing loudly. It is black and terrifying and I am very alone. I burst into the gray light and run up the hill, off the path now, running through mud and dead grass until I see the back of the bronze man seated with his book and his duck.

The crowd is gathered around the water, and I come up in time to hear the last lines of a poem read in a trembling, weeping voice by someone whom I cannot see.

“Your memory is sweet in my heart. A gentle teardrop, a tug in my womb. Forever mine, forever part. A snowdrop, a lily, always in bloom.”

I wince. An irreparable rift with my parents, and bad poetry. This is indeed a walk to remember.

In small groups, couples and families, or just women on their own, people approach the model boat pond, bend down, say the name of their babies aloud, and send their cellulose stars out into the icy water. The water is partially frozen but the rain has done its work and left enough liquid to dissolve the stars. I watch for a little while. Most people are crying now, the couples holding on to each other, the men supporting their wives, keeping them on their feet. The tissue women are very busy, slipping back and forth with their boxes and their condoling embraces. I envy the ease of their grief. I finger the star in my pocket. There is no point in bringing this one home. I already have the bent one pinned to my coat, and what, after all, will I do with that?

Kneeling on the edge of the pond, I take off my glove and push up the sleeve of my coat and my sweater. Then, holding the star in my hand, I bend over the pond and plunge my hand through the ice into the freezing water. The shock of the cold scalds my hand, a freezing burn, but I grit my teeth and keep my fist in the water. My fingers quickly grow numb, but I can just barely feel the cellulose of the star soften and melt. I ball it up and hold a fistful of dissolving Isabel star for a few more seconds, then it is gone. I open my fist and slide my fingers through the bitter water, but I cannot tolerate it for much longer. When I pull my hand out, it feels anesthetized, like a dead limb hanging from my sleeve.

“Kleenex?” a woman in a Walk to Remember T-shirt says.

“No, thank you,” I say, drying my hand and forearm on my coat. I stuff my now tingling fingers back into my glove.

“We're asking people to leave the park in a group at East Seventy-second Street,” she said. “When you're ready.”

“I think I'll just walk back across,” I say. “I live on the West Side.”

“No, don't do that. It's much too dangerous to be in the park on your own at night.”

She's wrong. It is safe now in Central Park, even at night. It is no longer what it was, the place where the first murder occurred in the same year construction was completed. As I make my way through the empty darkness, I think about William's namesake. In 1870, a man named William Kane was mistaken for Catholic and stabbed and shot to death by a group of the Protestant Orangemen. When William is older I will tell him this story. It features Orangemen, violence, and a man named William. I will have to find out where, exactly, this earlier William was killed. There might even be a secret memorial of which I'm not aware. Perhaps William and I will make a pilgrimage to the spot, create our own memorial. It's too bad he's too young now for a tale of murder and carnage. It would have been the perfect way to distract him from this terrible, unfortunate evening.

It does not take me long to cross the park. I leave the park at Seventy-seventh Street, reminding myself, as William would, that this is Explorer's Gate. I am home soon enough, but I am chilled through, my hands and feet numb with cold, especially the hand I immersed in the model boat pond. I am awkward with my keys, and I make a lot of noise coming into the apartment. Still, although I know they are home—I can see their coats and boots in the entryway—Jack and William do not greet me. They don't even respond to my tentative call.

I find William in the living room, engaged in the unthinkable.

“What are you watching?” I ask.

“
Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.
”

“Is it any good?”

He shrugs, not taking his eyes off the dinosaurs battling on-screen.

“I'm sorry about what happened before, at the park. I guess I kind of lost it.”

He shrugs again.

“I'm just kind of . . . you know . . . mad at my father. At Nono.”

“I can't hear the movie when you're talking.”

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.”

I check in Jack's study, but he is not there. Our bedroom door is closed, and for a moment I hover outside, feeling almost like I should knock.

Jack is lying on the bed, his feet crossed neatly at the ankles, his arms folded behind his head. His eyes are closed and his eyelids look translucent in the bright light from the bedside lamp; they glow pink with a faint blue hue lent by the delicate tracery of veins. His skin, in the summer nut brown, a perfect canvas for his brilliant inky eyes, is now winter pale. He is so handsome, compacted into a small and perfect package, sized for me.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

He opens his eyes. “I can't do this any more.”

“I'm sorry I lost it. The whole thing just freaked me out. The cardboard stars. The ectopic pregnancies with names. Everything.”

“It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card, Emilia. Isabel's death doesn't entitle you to do and say whatever the hell you want, to hurt whomever you want.”

“I know that.”

“No, you don't.”

I am standing at the end of the bed, gripping the footboard. I hold it tightly, because I cannot hold him. He will not let me near him, I can tell. He has been so patient, this kind man, such an old-fashioned gentleman of a husband, that I am taken by surprise. My intuition, my prescience, my precognition of all things to do with Jack Woolf fails me. I am entirely unprepared for how angry he is, for how many words he has saved up in these months of supportive silence.

“I have been such a fool,” Jack says. “I can't believe I allowed myself to be deluded into thinking I was the great love of your life.” He makes the phrase hollow and trite, italicizes it with irony.

“You are. You are the great love of my life.” I try to restore the rightful grandeur to what I know I feel, but for some reason my words ring as false as his.

“Do you even understand why you fell in love with me?” he asks. His face flushes and the red contrasts sharply with the blue of his unshaved stubble.