The Children's Crusade (43 page)

About a mile after I’d driven through town, I left the main road
and headed toward the mountains. A few minutes later I arrived at a big barnlike structure fronted by a parking lot one car shy of empty. By the time I’d gotten out of the car, my mom was standing at the entrance, an angular, leathery old woman in silver-tipped cowboy boots. But she also looked like the Mom I remembered, with the same air of perturbation.

“Well, this is certainly strange,” she said by way of greeting.

By way of response I said nothing.

She led me into a large, bright studio with giant square windows and a ceiling two stories high. Along one wall were long tables made of plywood and sawhorses, each holding dozens of spools of wire, from yo-yo size on up. The wire was steel and copper, bare and insulated. The biggest spools were the size of hubcaps, holding heavy cable. Scattered on other tables and on the floor were dozens of sculptures made of these wires, ranging in size from something you might put on a shelf in your living room to giant structures suitable for a sculpture garden or the lobby of an office building.

“That’s a lot of wire,” I said.

“Go ahead, take a look.”

I was tired and overwhelmed by the weirdness of having spent eight hours traveling to see my estranged mother, whose last words to me, spoken eleven years earlier, had been “It’s now or never, James. Are you going to get your life together or not?” At which point I’d walked out of Robert and Jen’s post-wedding brunch and hitchhiked to Humboldt County, where a buddy of mine had grown a particularly excellent batch of weed.

“Maybe in a minute,” I said now.

She smiled. “Not what you expected, right? Believe it or not, this whole thing started with clothespin dolls. You know those old-fashioned wooden clothespins, with tiny faces painted on the ends
and scraps of fabric glued on for a dress? I bought a box of them at a yard sale. I wrapped them with twenty-four-gauge wire, and it was thrilling, instead of being inert they were entrapped. After that I started using the wire on its own and combining different wires.” She picked up a small piece. “Take a look. Have you seen the article about me in
Southwest Art
? They said I’d become ‘both more playful and more profound.’ Have you seen it?”

I said, “I’ve been traveling for eight hours. Do you think maybe I could have a glass of water?”

She set the sculpture down. “Sorry.” In a corner of the studio were two chairs and a small table, and just beyond them a foot-deep steel sink with a paint-spattered tap. She filled a smudged glass with water and brought it to me, not quite smiling but without her old irritated expression.

“So,” she said.

“So,” I said. “What is it you want from me?”

A look of surprise passed over her face. She fingered the collar of her shirt and then slid her hand to her throat, where she wore a slim silver necklace punctuated every inch or so by a chunk of turquoise. Her fingers found the center stone and rubbed it. I recognized this—both the necklace and the gesture—from Ryan and Marielle’s wedding. I’d made my dad very unhappy that weekend, refusing to talk to her.

She dropped her hand. “I don’t want anything
from
you. I just wanted to see you. It’s been a long time.”

“Well, here I am.”

“Here you are. Overnight. I had no idea you’d come so fast. Why are you in such a hurry to sell the house?”

“I need the money.”

“You’re living in Oregon?”

Out the great windows, the sun sat on the horizon. A sign facing
the road had listed Penny Greenway Blair along with three other names. I said, “Who else works here?”

“Other artists. They mostly quit around three. Rebecca said Eugene?”

“She’s a smart one, that Rebecca. She usually knows what she’s talking about.”

“If you’re going to do this,” she said, “I might as well get back to work!”

I left the studio. It was cold out, and I hurried to my rental car. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check the time and saw that I’d received a text from Ryan. “R says u should b there by now. Good luck.”

R says. He meant Rebecca, of course, but oh, how it had always bothered me, the three R’s and me left out. I started the car and turned on the heater. I wasn’t about to leave without securing my mom’s agreement on the house, but I wasn’t going right back into the studio, either. For the past fifteen years Taos had
been
my mom to me, of no interest and vaguely offensive, and as I sat in the parking lot and felt the mountains behind me, rising dark and abrupt from the desert, I knew I couldn’t see it clearly, though I understood it was beautiful. When I told Celia about South America and how restless I’d been there, how indifferent to the place, she said, “We’ll go together someday and it’ll be different because you’ll be different.” Maybe that would be true of Taos, too. I couldn’t wait to see her.

R says. How hard would it have been to come up with another R? I could have been Roger, Randolph, Ralph. Imagining wishing you’d been named Ralph!

“We really liked James,” my dad always said when I raised the R issue, and when I was little he would follow this statement with a recitation of the A. A. Milne rhyme “Disobedience,” which I loved, especially the ending.

James James

Said to his Mother,

“Mother,” he said, said he;

“You must never go down

to the end of the town

if you don’t go down with me.”

I was easily distracted, and this usually worked. “Say it again,” I’d cry, “say it again!” At three or four years old I believed I could take great care of my mother. I wondered where the end of the town was and asked her every time we went out. “Is this the end of the town? Is this?” There were a couple years when she and I were alone together for hours every day. We spent a lot of time in the car. This was before car seats, and I had the vast backseat all to myself. I pretended to be a dog and scampered around barking or sat on my hind legs with my tongue hanging out the window.

Once she left me in a store. I was carrying on about something and after we’d faced off for several minutes she turned and walked away. When she didn’t come back I began racing up and down the aisles screaming and looking for her. I attracted the attention of the store manager, who lured me to his office with a promise of candy. He sat me down in his desk chair with a handful of jelly beans and announced over the loudspeaker that there was a lost little boy waiting to be claimed. I always remembered that phrase: “waiting to be claimed.” I hoped she would come faster than anyone else who might want me.

But she didn’t come fast. It was a full ten minutes before she came back. That phrase stuck with me, too: “a full ten minutes,” spoken by the manager. She told him I needed to learn my lesson, and for years afterward the whole concept of lessons, and therefore school, upset me.

“She made a mistake,” my dad said repeatedly over the next few days. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

I looked out across the New Mexico desert. In just a few minutes the sun had flattened completely, and now it sank below the horizon. I went back into the studio.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Whatever.”

“No, I am. I am. We got off on the wrong foot. I did. And now I’m stuck—you don’t want to tell me about your life, and if I tell you about mine I’m just like old times, completely selfish.”

I shrugged, unwilling to take the bait.

“I guess we can talk about everyone else. What’s Walt like?”

“Nice enough guy. A little stiff.”

“She told me they didn’t have a real wedding.”

“They didn’t. Or at least she told me the same thing.”

“I would have gone.”

Just before I’d gotten out of the car at the San Francisco airport that morning, Rebecca had said, “Leaving the house out of it, don’t you think it’s good that you’re getting this done?” I said, “You make it sound like a necessary step before some inevitable future event can happen.” And she said, “Well, some things in life
are
inevitable.”

“I don’t know what you want,” I said to my mom now, “but so help me, if you’re secretly dying and wanted me to come so you could—”

She smiled. “I’ve never been better. A little creaky in the mornings, but I’m the picture of health. I walk, you know. Five miles a day. Let’s go out to dinner. Honestly, that’s all I want. Just time to talk. Rebecca said you aren’t spending the night?”

Rebecca had made my travel arrangements: reserved the car, bought the plane tickets. I’d flown from San Francisco to Phoenix to Albuquerque, and the next day I’d fly from Albuquerque to Salt
Lake City to Eugene. She’d also given me five hundred dollars. “This is really costing you,” I said, and she said, “The money’s the least of it. I’m also going to have to spend hours in my analysis talking about what I’m trying to do. Or undo.”

“I have an early flight,” I told my mom.

“Do you have anything warmer to wear? It’ll be below freezing tonight.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

It was the off-season and the restaurant was only half-full, of people she said were mostly locals. The proprietor knew her, and she waved at one or two groups as we were shown to our table. We talked about Taos and how much it had changed in the eighteen years since she first visited. She asked about Sammy and Luke and Katya, and I told her a few stories from my two weeks in Portola Valley. As time passed, the hard edges and lines in her face seemed to soften. I asked if working with heavy-gauge wire was difficult, and she laughed and held out her hands. She had cuts and scars all over the backs of her fingers, and calluses on her palms.

“No more egg noodle bags, huh?”

“You know, it’s funny. I did those assemblages for years. Then when I got here and learned how to make them smaller and they started to sell—well, I got tired of them. Wire talks back. I have a dialogue with it. Broken teacups don’t have a lot to say. Why are you smiling?”

“If your wire is talking to you, you might want to call Rebecca. They may have a pill for that.”

She smiled. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

Midway through our meal, two older men stopped at our table to chat with my mom, and she invited them to join us. They were a couple, transplants from Boston, one a painter and the other a retired CPA. I felt like an idiot deflecting their questions, so I began
talking about Eugene. I even made a reference to the Barn, and the men asked me to explain.

“Wait,” the CPA said. “What’s to stop someone from taking advantage? He’s happy to have everyone come work in his backyard, but somehow he’s always busy when the work is elsewhere?”

The painter said, “Ignore him, he’s airing his issues.” His name was Todd; the CPA was Carver. “So is it all families?”

“Except me.”

“You’re single?”

“Guilty.”

“Wait,” Carver said, turning to my mom. “Is this your youngest? The one who . . . travels a lot?”

“I guess my reputation precedes me.”

“What could I have told them?” she said. “I know nothing.”

“You’ve heard about the doctors and the teacher?” I said. “I’m the other one.”

We’d moved on to dessert, and the men ordered drinks. Carver told us he was flying to Boston the next day for a funeral. Not someone close—his ex-wife’s second husband.

“He’s just going to support her,” Todd said.

“I’m a classic caretaker,” Carver told me. “My ex-wife is very needy. Horrible to be married to her, not to mention the obvious, but we’re great friends now, except when she drives me crazy.”

I thought of Celia and David and whether they might be great friends one day. They weren’t great friends now, but maybe that wasn’t a good predictor. Would I want them to be?

“Did you hear what happened at Benjamin’s opening?” Todd asked my mom. “Benjamin came up and said to me, ‘Would you like to meet Carol Fishman? She’s letting me bring a few people over to say hello.’ ”

My mom laughed, and Todd rolled his eyes.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“It was a put-down,” she told me.

“A one-up,” Carver said. “Unintentional.” He explained that Carol Fishman was a locally famous sculptor whose work was sold in one of Santa Fe’s most exclusive galleries. “The thing is, Todd already knows Carol. Quite well. He introduced her to her dealer.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Benjamin thought he was extending this
largesse
to me,” Todd said. “That he was doing me a big favor. It demonstrated his perception of me as lowly and striving.”

“And made you
feel
lowly and striving,” Carver said. “It was a narcissistic blow.”

“I’ve recovered,” Todd said. “Barely.”

“You’re very strong,” my mom said.

“Wait,” I said. “What’s a narcissistic blow?” They all looked at me and I felt stupid, the little kid who knows nothing. “I guess I shouldn’t be so ignorant, having a shrink for a sister.”

“It’s a wound,” Carver said. “An assault to your self-esteem. Something that makes you feel bad about yourself.”

“So what’s something that makes you feel good about yourself?” I said. “A narcissistic blow job?”

Carver and Todd laughed, and my mom gave me such a warm, fond smile that I felt a lurch of affection for her.

But somehow that made me think about what a bitch she’d always been. Completely selfish, as she’d said back at her studio. Worse, though. Cold. Hateful. “She’s changed a lot,” Ryan told me right after my dad died. “She’s gotten mellow.” “So mellow,” Robert said, “that she didn’t even feel the need to come to her husband’s funeral.” This was maybe two weeks after the service, a week after we spread the ashes. We were all at the house, where we kept gathering for dinners. We never ate at Robert’s, never at Rebecca’s. Obviously
never at Ryan’s. Every day, one of them showed up with groceries at around six and began cooking. I was the only one sleeping there and the only one never to cook. On that particular evening, Marielle and Katya had stayed at the shed and Jen had fed the boys early and taken them home. It was only us Blairs. We were in the living room, looking through photo albums.

“She
couldn’t
come to the funeral,” Rebecca said.