Schroder: A Novel (3 page)

The groom had listened, laughing gratefully, wincing with sympathy, his bride blending ice angrily in the kitchen, but all the while the groom kept thinking: What stress? What rudderless ship? The groom had never felt happier in his life. Never more carefree. In that modest hotel on Virginia Beach, both of them hilariously pale with northern winter, they had honeymooned for five days. Every night, they ate mounds of food garnished with pineapple, and every morning, they arrived at the beach early, when the tide was still out, and they placed their two chairs straight on the sandbars, which they called the
cheap seats
. Those honeymoon mornings seemed to be suggesting something to the groom. The suggestion was this: Be happy.
Decide
to be happy. If you want to be happy, be happy! No one cares if you’re happy or not, so
why wait for permission? And did it really matter if you had been deeply unhappy in your past? Who but you remembered that? It was really one of the groom’s most standout moments, and it liberated him. After realizing that he could be happy, that he could thrive, it seemed to him that there was no one powerful enough to make him unhappy again, and thereafter his happiness would always belong to him, even if he lost everything else. His body braced, his heart roused, he finally got it—the American secret—that the only person who could obstruct a man was himself.

So there is no other reason for why he would continue his elaborate and ultimately disastrous deceit re: his bogus identity except that he was just firmly and sentimentally committed to it. His decision to be happy seemed only to invite him to rededicate himself to his made-up past. On the final morning of their honeymoon, he watched the children on the beach, and he watched his bride watch the children, and he thought, No, I will not tell you. I will never tell you. I’ll cut out my tongue first.

Then he pointed into the distance. “Hey, Laura,” he said. “Look over there, at that old lighthouse. There was one just like that outside of Twelve Hills. Total déjà vu. Huhn.”

The bride smiled. “Tell me about it.”

“About the lighthouse?” He lifted his sunglasses and smiled. “Well, you could climb all the way to the top of it. Up these old stone steps. No rail. All very spooky and dangerous. Once you got to the top, you could see for miles. And there were those viewfinders that open up when you put a quarter inside. You could see all the way to Boston. Tiny Boston. Tiny mother, waiting below in the shade. Huhn. It’s funny what you remember.”

The bride closed her eyes. “That’s beautiful, Eric,” she said. “You’re lucky. You’re lucky to have memories like that. What a sweet childhood.”

“It was,” the groom said. “I am.”

Her eyes widened. “We should go there sometime,” she said. “To your lighthouse on the Cape. Do you think it’s still open? Could we go? I want to see what you saw. I want to see where you grew up. Twelve Hills, and everything.”

The groom’s eyes lit up, he was so touched.

“Let’s!” he agreed.

Her smile was so loving, and the beach so breezy, his happiness so incontrovertible, that for a moment the groom believed that he actually
would
take the bride to the lighthouse, and that he actually
had
climbed it as a boy, and that there actually
was
such a place as Twelve Hills, and his mother really
did
stand waiting in the shade. Closing his eyes, he even saw distant Boston as if through two little portals of memory, sitting in petticoats of mist.

By the time the groom had returned from his daydream and back to his father-in-law on the sofa, the moment to make objections had passed. In fact, explicit plans had been laid for his future. Plans had been made, and the groom took no objection.
Good
. His father-in-law was nodding at him.
Then I’ll have a talk with Chip Clebus, and he’ll show you the ropes. I’m glad we understand each other
. By sheer coincidence, the men did understand each other. Apart from his research, and loving his wife, the groom had few ideas for how to organize his time on earth. And so within days he was sitting in a classroom with a bunch of other unfocused extroverts, preparing for his
real estate certification by studying the contractual nuances of sale-leasebacks.

Turns out the groom had a talent for making money in real estate, and for the three or four years in which his larger dreams were totally and effectively repressed, the groom made a shiny pile of commissions. These commissions took the young couple through the birthing and infancy of their daughter, Meadow. The money bought the baby a cradle that swung via a mechanical arm, and it bought calendula oil for her bottom and pretty music and as many spins on the carousel as someone who would never remember any of it could wish for. And they were happy years. Seriously. If the groom could have wrung all the necks of his lies and eccentricities, he would have done it. There is no explaining—and it pains me to think he will never be believed now—how much the groom loved his life then. How grateful he was. Once, looking out over Poestenkill Gorge in winter, the baby asleep in her sling against her mother’s chest, he watched the new-fallen snow glitter at the base of the trees, and he watched the naked branches form an overlapping lace through which he could see down onto the church spires and chimney smoke of the valley, and he felt as if he’d been walking for a long time—years—and had finally arrived at his intended destination.

Oh, Laura. If I had lived my life as one man, one consolidated man, would I have been able to see what was coming? Would I have guessed that it was all bound to fail, and that within five years, we would separate? Would I have been able to
prevent it—I mean that night when, your face streaked with tears, you asked me to get out? You’d had it with me. You’d felt for years—you’d explain this later—like you were living in a house with tilted floors. We’d gone wrong.

Pine Hills. We were in the kitchenette. You were facing away from me, leaning with both hands against the sink basin. We’d been arguing for some time. Arguing and washing dishes. Meadow was asleep. She was four by then, old enough to hear raised voices, and so we tried to keep disagreements strictly late night. What were we fighting about? You name it: your increasingly fervent Catholicism, my laziness, your need for order and structure, my lack of discipline, your martyred reticence, my tendency to talk too much. We had a mouse infestation. I’d caught one of the rodents and, without the heart to kill it, had given it to Meadow for a pet. As we argued, I watched this mouse tunnel in the infinite corner of its plastic box.

“Is this about school?” I was saying. “Fine. I’ll be better about school. I’ll get her there on time, and it’s a negative on the spontaneous field trips, OK? Effective immediately. I don’t love the school—you know all this, hon—the bloody Jesuses hanging all over the place. It’s just not my idea of a place for children. You know, ‘sweet childish days, as long as twenty are now’?”

You said nothing.

“But OK, OK,” I said. “I’ll be better. I’ll work on my attitude. You know, you told me you were Catholic when we got married, but I didn’t think you were
serious
.”

Finally, you turned around. I could see now you’d been crying. This astonished me. I’d been trying for a joke.

“Oh, Eric,” you said, crying. “We’re so far apart.”

My hands were still poised to dry the dish you’d been washing. Palms up, a damp cloth draped over one forearm.

One thing I’m sure of is that despite the late-night arguments, despite our differences, despite the way the light in our marriage had dimmed, even to my blind eyes, I never thought of leaving you. Not once. But there was a gap between how bad I thought things were and how bad you thought things were, and our life fell into that gap.

“We are?” I said.

TENDER YEARS

We may no longer remember that until the mid-nineteenth century, children and their mothers were viewed as a man’s property. When marital strife led to that carnival we now call
divorce
, the child was whisked away to the father’s arms, leaving the mother sobbing in the street, without recourse. We have all read, or been told abridged versions of,
Anna Karenina
, yes? But it did not take long, you see, for the custody pendulum to swing in the other direction. By the late 1800s, a
maternal preference
in divorce cases was supported by the “tender years” doctrine. This doctrine held that children of “tender years”—that is, younger than eight—should be raised by their mothers. Therefore, men who wanted custody of their children appeared not only misled, but also slightly skeevy. But the issue of custody did not arise much, because divorce itself was fairly rare.

Well, time passed and for reasons I will not go into here, divorce lost its edge. Somewhere in the bowels of the 1970s and ’80s, some people started to see divorce as an act of empowerment, for stifled men and women alike. Marriage became the problem, and divorce, the solution. Soon, everybody wanted
one. Divorces became much easier to obtain. They might as well have passed them out on street corners. You could get divorced on a boat, or on a train, or in a mall, or in a box with a fox.

Coterminously—and I’ll be done with this soon—those decades lent the field of divorce litigation some new and exciting ideas. For example, the
no-fault
divorce, in which a marriage was alleged to have malfunctioned somehow on its own, independent of its participants. And even though the concept of a divorce with no fault is oxymoronic, and a better term might have been fault-fault divorce, as a legal category, it caught fire. The upshot to no-fault divorces and my point at present is that they presumed
neither maternal nor paternal preference
in matters of custody. What’s more, when parents were encouraged to settle custody disputes prior to a hearing, via the quieter process of mediation, divorce lost its inherent staginess. Gone were the exciting, perjured testimonies of one family member against another. This enabled a legal preference (in twelve states) for the concept of
joint custody
.

You and I picked a hairy little folknik as our mediator, an MSW from Cornell who wore shorts and huaraches even in cold weather. You sat across from me at his table, your eyes downcast, your shyness on display, the lonely, bookish girl beneath your righteous exterior, as you struggled to defend your desire to deep-six our union.

Is it damaging to my case to say that I looked forward to seeing you at divorce mediation? I shaved, I aftershaved, I picked out shirts you had once bought for me. The mediator worked out of a cottage near the thruway. In the backyard
he’d created a pleasure garden full of autumnal dahlias, and two chairs tilted hopefully toward one another on a slate patio. Our separation was still very fresh. I still didn’t understand why we were separating, and I’m fairly sure you didn’t either. We’d been living separately for a couple of weeks, and this apartness gave our meetings an air of courtship. I missed you, OK? Even though you had been granted temporary custody of Meadow, you always let her come to see me at my whim or hers. It felt like we were still on the same team. She would arrive to my new place in North Albany in the backseat of your father’s immense black Chevy Tahoe, looking rather glamorous through the tinted window. Your father’s friendliness contributed to my sense that the situation was, like the custody arrangement,
temporary
. If I handled it well, you would come to your senses.

If ever there was a man who deluded himself with dreams of reconciliation, I was that man. How much legal leverage I lost in the effort to win you back! I chronicled your talents as a mother, as well as the faithful way Meadow loved you back. When allegations were cast my way—that I was insensitive, that I had ignored numerous warning signs, that my behavior was occasionally “erratic” and my parenting style “unpredictable,” that my research interests were “esoteric” and finally just tedious and maybe even make-believe—I accepted these criticisms and heaped a couple of fresh ones atop the pile.
You’re right
, I said.
You’re so right.
I wanted to persuade you that I was flawed on purpose. Because if I was flawed on purpose, then I was just as capable of being perfect as I was of being flawed. I was in total control of who I was. I was capable of change.

You blushed and barely looked at me. I see now that you
were embarrassed for me. You were embarrassed for me that I knew so little of the cold nature of the law. Only after I found myself the
noncustodial parent
did I realize my error, my wasted sacrifice.

In one of our final meetings, when I finally sensed the sour turn my fate had taken, the mediator assured me that if I had objections in the future—if I were to change my mind—I could do so within the court of law, during a hearing. In the meantime, it seemed to him that there was a lot of good in giving one parent sole physical custody and that this arrangement would still provide me with a bounty of visitation rights. For some children, especially young ones like Meadow (our hippie said), it was better to live in one home.
My
new place could be Meadow’s sleepaway home. An exciting change of scene.