The Believers (15 page)

As soon as he had closed the door, Karla reached for the packet of M&Ms and tore it open. What an odd man he was! What questions he asked! She tipped back her head to receive the rattling candy into her mouth. He was kind, in his clumsy way. And clearly not a dummy. You could tell just by the way he had mimicked that nurse that he
got
things. She probed with her tongue at a little piece of M&M that had become stuck in one of her molars. Had he meant it, about their having lunch again? Half of her hoped that he hadn't. It would be a relief not to have to endure the tension of another encounter. The other half wanted him to have been in earnest--if only, she told herself, so she might correct the awful first impression she had made.

CHAPTER
8

"Lenny, have you seen my bag?"

Audrey stood at the foot of the stairs, waiting for a response. A few seconds later, she shouted again. "Lenny?"

"Yeah?" a groggy voice came back.

"Have you seen my bag?"

"No."

"Well, get a move on. We have to be off in a minute."

Audrey and Lenny were going this morning to see Lenny's mother at the Bedford Correctional Facility in Westchester. Visiting Susan was a chore that Audrey generally tried to avoid, but Lenny had been without a license since his last DUI conviction, and if she didn't drive him today, he would be forced to take the nasty prison bus. As she wandered into the kitchen, the phone rang.

"Hiya, Audrey," Daniel chirruped.

"Oh, it's you," Audrey replied. "I'd forgotten you existed."

Daniel was now working at a downtown law firm specializing in environmental law. He had not been to see Joel in several weeks.

"Well, I'm still here," he said.

"Saved any whales lately?"

He made a desultory sound of amusement. "No, not yet. How are you, Audrey?"

"Tickety-boo, thank you. Is there any reason for this call?"

"I was wondering if I could arrange a time to come and see you, actually."

"What for?"

"I need to talk to you about something."

"What?

"I'd rather not mention it on the phone."

Audrey gave a mocking laugh. Daniel was always being gratuitously mysterious about utterly unimportant things. It was one of the many ways in which he tried to make himself seem important.

"Don't be an idiot, Daniel," she said. "Just tell me."

Lenny entered the kitchen, holding her bag. She made an astounded, where-on-earth-did-you-find-it? face and blew him a kiss.

"It really wouldn't be appropriate, Audrey," Daniel was saying. "It's something that needs to be discussed in person. It is quite urgent, though, so if you could make time to see me today--"

"I can't," Audrey said. "I'm going up to Bedford to take Lenny to see his mother."

"What time do you expect to be back?"

"Bloody hell, Daniel, can't it wait until tomorrow?"

"Today really would be better."

Audrey grunted in irritation. "All right, I'll meet you here at five."

She hung up and turned to Lenny. "You clever boy! Where was it?"

"On the landing."

"Really? How weird! Are you ready to go, then?

"Yeah."

She looked him up and down. "I don't suppose you want to shave?"

Lenny gave his chin an exploratory rub. "Nah."

On their way out of the city, they stopped to get gas. Audrey sent Lenny in to pay while she pumped. When he returned, she found that he had used her change to purchase a Gatorade and a hot dog the color of doll flesh.

"Why didn't you wait?" she asked as they got back into the car. "I would have stopped somewhere decent if I'd known you were hungry."

"Yeah, but I was starving," Lenny said. "I didn't have anything for dinner last night."

Audrey glanced at him as she steered the car back onto Houston Street. "Why not, you silly?"

Lenny bit into his hot dog. "No money."

"Oh, Lenny." For the last three months Audrey had been giving Lenny an allowance of a hundred dollars a week. This, together with some odd jobs that he was doing for Jean and other friends, was meant to tide him over until he could find full-time work.

"I feel really shitty about it, Mom," Lenny said. "But I had to give Tanya back the money I owed her. And then I've been having to pay all these taxi fares to go and see Dad and--"

"Taxis!" Audrey exclaimed. "Lenny, there's something called the subway."

"I asked Jean for an advance," Lenny said. "But she doesn't want to pay me till I've finished the work."

"She wouldn't give you anything?" Audrey exclaimed. "Not twenty bucks?"

Lenny shook his head dolefully. "The thing is, I don't want to borrow any more money from Tanya--"

"All right, all right," Audrey interrupted. "I hear you. My bag's on the backseat. Take fifty bucks."

There was a silence. Lenny went on chewing his hot dog.

Audrey smiled the complicated smile of someone knowingly submitting to a con. "A hundred then, but no more."

"Are you sure?"

"Don't give me that. Just take the money."

Joel had been telling Audrey for years that Lenny was a wastrel, that he did not deserve her indulgence. He had once accused her of treating Lenny as if he were her "gigolo." But none of these reproaches had ever come close to making her change her ways. Audrey was rather proud of her reckless devotion to her son. To hear Lenny attacked only excited her heroic sense of being for him, contra mundum.

Twenty-seven years ago, on the night that Lenny's mother had been arrested for bank robbery, it was Audrey who had been delegated to drive uptown and retrieve seven-year-old Lenny from his babysitter. There had been a snowstorm in the city that day, and it had taken her an hour to drive up the hushed, white island to Harlem. She had spent another hour going around in circles, trying to locate the address, and by the time she finally entered the tiny apartment above a barbershop on St. Nicholas Avenue, it was long past midnight. She had found Lenny curled up on the sitting room floor, watching cartoons, with a giant, panting bull mastiff at his side. "Am I going to get paid?" the babysitter had demanded. She had just finished painting her nails, and she was shaking her flexed hands in a slow, up-and-down motion, as if she were casting off water or making an incantation. "Because the extra hours is time and half, you know."

"When's Mommy coming?" Lenny had asked, without taking his eyes from the television.

Up to this moment in her life, Audrey had never evinced the slightest sentimentality about children. Insofar as she had recognized them as an independent category of personhood, she had tended to think of them as trainee humans. Inadequate adults. She loved her own daughters well enough--wanted them to be happy and so forth--but they had failed to inspire in her that mad, lioness passion to which other mothers so preeningly testified. She was still in some shock regarding the servility of motherhood--the sheer, thankless drudgery of it. All the cleaning up of messes she had not made and preparing meals she did not want to eat. She fed her girls regularly and diligently brushed their teeth twice a day and made sure they were more or less appropriately dressed for the weather, but beyond a dull sense of satisfaction at having fulfilled her maternal duties, she received no pleasure from performing these tasks. Try as she might, she could not feel her daughters' happinesses and sorrows as her own. The miniature dramas of their daily lives bored her, to tell the truth. When Karla and Rosa woke in the night, complaining of bad dreams, she irritably instructed them to think of pleasant things and sent them briskly back to bed. When they came home complaining of school friends who were being unkind, she shrugged and told them to buck up. "What do you care what those ninnies think of you, anyway?" she would demand, exhaling dragon-clouds of cigarette smoke as she rustled through her newspaper.

She had never felt guilty about her lack of maternal zeal. Hers was the sane response to motherhood, she thought. The shiny-eyed parenting maniacs she encountered when she dropped her daughters off at school--the grinning supermoms and -dads who hung around after the bell rang, hankering for "more access" to their children's classrooms and fretting over the PTA's efforts to fund a language lab for the kinder-gartners--
they
were the crazy ones. There was something infantile, it seemed to her, about their passionate identification with their children. Clearly, they were compensating for a terrible lack or inadequacy elsewhere in their lives.

But something had changed on the night that she found Lenny in the Harlem apartment. Gazing down at his owl-eyed face--noticing the chalky mustache of Yoo-hoo on his upper lip, the glistening scribble of dog drool on his pants--she felt a tiny aperture clicking open, a pilot light being lit somewhere deep within. Her temples throbbed. She had a panicked sense of onrush, of internal torrent. She wanted to pick the boy up and--she didn't know what--squeeze him, kiss him, swallow him whole.

The next morning, she tried to describe this bizarre physiological drama to Joel. "It was like I was having an anxiety attack, or something," she told him.

"Yeah, well, it's a big thing, taking on another person's kid," Joel had muttered. He was pulling on his pants at the time, hurrying to get to the police station to see Susan. He glanced at Lenny, who was lying next to Audrey in their bed, still asleep. "Don't worry. It'll only be for a couple of days."

But he had misunderstood. It was not the burden of her responsibility for Lenny that had threatened to overwhelm her; it was the long-awaited appearance of maternal instinct.

In the years since then, Audrey's attachment to Lenny had been a frequent source of tension in their marriage. Joel, for all his talk of communal childrearing and tribes, deeply resented the idea that Lenny should have succeeded in evoking Audrey's passion where her "real" children had failed. "Karla and Rosa are your flesh and blood," he would chide her. But these appeals to sanguine loyalty missed the point, she felt. If anything, the fact that Lenny was not hers made it easier to love him. As the coauthor of Karla and Rosa, she could not help but look upon them with the dissatisfied eye of an artist assessing her own flawed handiwork. Lenny, on the other hand, was an unsolicited donation: she was free to enjoy the gift of him without any burden of genetic responsibility for his imperfections. She had
chosen
to love him. The disparity in her feelings toward her daughters and her son was regrettable, but it was not something that was in her gift to correct.

The gates were still closed when Audrey and Lenny arrived at the correctional facility. After Lenny had stuffed the contents of his pockets into the car door, they joined the visitors who were milling around outside the bunkerlike building. At the bottom of the driveway, a bus drew up, and a group of passengers, mostly women and children, got off. A little boy had just thrown up and his grandmother--a weary-looking woman in hot-pink stretch pants--was wiping his face roughly with a paper towel. "Be still!" she shouted at him as he squirmed. "You want to smell bad when you see your mommy?"

Audrey glanced at Lenny. As a boy, he had always been carsick on the journey to Bedford. At least once and often twice on every trip, she would have to pull into a rest stop, swab him down, and change him into a new set of clothes. He had never been sick on other car journeys; it was the stress of visiting his mother that had made him puke. Later on, in the visiting room, he would crouch in his chair, smelling of bile, asking Susan to explain, one more time, how she had got caught, what crucial planning error had led to her capture. When the bell sounded at the end of the hour, he would cling to her, sobbing for her to come home with him. "Why don't you escape?" he had asked once. "You could climb out a window. If you ran fast enough, they wouldn't be able to catch you."

Audrey had found these visits almost unbearably wounding. It had enraged her that Susan should enjoy the privilege of Lenny's devotion when it was she, Audrey, who was down in the maternal salt mines, reading him stories and singing him lullabies and cleaning up his vomit. What had Susan ever done for the boy, except abandon him to inadequate childcare while she buggered off to play urban guerrillas?

The gates were open now, and the line had begun to shuffle into the visitors' processing area. There was a window with a counter where you could drop off food and clothes for the prisoners. A handwritten sign stuck on the glass instructed, NO THONG, FISHNET, G-STRING, OR BIKINI PANTIES. NO LACE OR SHEER BRAS. Audrey and Lenny passed through the metal detectors and walked down a corridor into a large cafeteria-like room with vending machines along one wall. Susan was sitting at one of the tables. Her face broke into a wide smile when she saw them enter. "Hey," she said softly, elongating the syllable. She stood up and wrapped Lenny in a tight embrace, rocking him back and forth for several long seconds. Lenny, Audrey was pleased to note, looked highly mortified.

They sat down now, with Susan on one side of the table and Lenny and Audrey on the other. "It's good to see you, man," Susan said, taking Lenny's hand and gazing solemnly into his eyes. During her days in the Underground, Susan had been a notoriously intimidating figure. She had worn men's overalls and styled her hair in a fearsome Plantagenet bob. She had carried a knife "for killing pigs" in the sole of her shoe. Shortly after the arrest of Charles Manson and his followers, she had composed an infamous Cong communique, praising Manson as "a brother in the struggle against bourgeois America." But incarceration, or age--or both--had had an emollient effect on her. Her hair was long and white now, and she wore it loose about her shoulders in the prophetess style favored by veteran women folksingers. The pig-killing rhetoric of yore had long since subsided into a dreamy singsong of healing and conciliation. Over the years at Bedford, she had founded several educational programs for her fellow inmates, including one on AIDS awareness and another--much to Audrey's secret derision--on "parenting skills." Her literacy program, in which inmates were encouraged to write and perform plays about their lives, was so well regarded that pilot programs based on her blueprint had now been set up in several prisons around the country.

"So, what's up, man?" she asked. "What's going on with your band, Lenny? You been playing recently?"

Lenny shook his head. "Not much."

"Hey, Lenny, man, don't neglect your music."

Audrey turned away to hide her smile. Lenny's band wasn't really a
band
: it was a couple of stoner guys with guitars who got together once a month or so to ad-lib tuneless, ironic songs on miniature domestic themes. Their signature number--their anthem, more or less--was a mock-heroic tribute to the drummer's cat: