The Laws of Our Fathers Read online

  He has tried, it seems, to strike the tone of historical distance we maintained about our lives a day ago. But the edges of his voice do not hold up. I stop at once while he flies on another twenty paces, so completely unable to look at me that it's that long before he notices I'm not beside him. We've reached the tarred oval and he trudges back to me, against the backdrop of the tortured amputee elms, his posture withered by the questions he knows are coming next.

  How long ago? I ask. Almost two years, he answers.

  'My God. Was he sick? Was he chronic?'

  'He was just a little boy. Seven years old. I mean, kind of a difficult little boy if I'm completely honest. He died in a traffic accident.' He waits a moment and searches the pewter sky for the sun, where the dark accumulation of clouds has temporarily milked the daylight of everything vital. ‘I was driving.' 'Oh God.'

  'It wasn't my fault. That's what everybody says. This guy was drunk - just out of his mind, four times the legal limit, and he ran a light. He hit a curb and came careening right at us. I saw him, you know, maybe out of the corner of my eye, I was trying to move the car forward, it had started forward, but he had the angle on us. It like sheared the car in half. One second I'm sitting there telling Isaac to mind his fingers in his nose, and - Afterwards, the one thing I was grateful for was that I didn't have to hear him scream, and yet, Jesus, how can your child die without even making a sound?'

  By now, my arms have closed around my sides to cope with the rampant pain. I try a few words of consolation, but his palm rises at once, and I realize this must be one of the worst parts, listening to people grope for words, in hopes of expressing an agony so much his, not theirs. Even then, I can't help saying the same thing again and again. I'm sorry. So sorry.

  ‘I had no idea, Seth. Your life seems so exposed in your column. There hasn't been a word, has there?'

  ‘I hate talking about it. I'm rotten with self-pity, as it is. You see it. Everybody sees it. I'm just a running sore.'

  I find I have taken his hand. Sweat has trailed down beneath his watchband and the sleeve of his dress shirt. His other hand is against the bridge of his nose, in an effort at self-control.

  'And the guy who hit you? Is he in prison?' Dumb question, I think at once, stupid, trying to press the whole thing within my own horizons, because the thought of what he's been through so frightens me.

  'Oh, sure. He got fifteen years. He had a record, a big record. Some poor fucked-up black guy. Stolen car. The whole shot. He pled guilty. I never even had to look at him again. Lucy went to court for the sentencing. I guess she cried and carried on. I just -

  I mean, what's the point? I never think about him, the guy. I think, you know, if I'd moved faster, if I'd pressed the accelerator harder. If, if, if.' He scans the park. A thirteen-year-old, hat on backwards and smoking a cigarette, whizzes by us on roller blades. 'We're going to freeze out here,' he says. He starts to jog then and I follow, walking fast. He slows to keep my pace.

  'And Lucy? Is Lucy crazy with it? Is she -'

  'She's crazy. Not that I'm in any position to talk. We're both out of our minds. But in different ways.' This is what's between Lucy and him, I realize. It must be. We travel half the oval without words, but he can tell what I've been thinking. 'It's not like she blames me,' he says. 'At least, not the way I blame myself. But like this? Running? Six months ago, we started jogging together before dinner. We'd take the dog. We bought these lights you wear on your elbows? We had matching suits. But how can you enjoy it? You can't. You think this is not how our life is supposed to be. We're supposed to be at home. We're supposed to be tied down. We're supposed to be yelling at Isaac to turn off the TV, to start on his homework. It's not bitter with us. We just can't find a way to move on.'

  'I wouldn't imagine Lucy knows how to be bitter.'

  'Not a clue.'

  'Still incredibly good-natured?' 'Incredibly.'

  'I assume she found a career beyond astrology?'

  'Yeah. But she still believes in it. And reincarnation. And ethical shopping. And the music of the spheres. You'd call her New Age.' He marvels at her with a toss of his head. For the past year, he says, Lucy has been the director of a local soup kitchen in Seattle. He draws an ironic picture of her, on a first-name basis with all the losers, junkies, drunks, and nuts to whom she extends a helping hand. Lucy is a person of boundless generosity, a collector of strays, mother to anyone in need, whether it's a bird with a crippled wing, her beautician who needed English lessons, or their cleaning lady, for whose eldest daughter Lucy, by dint of an eight-month crusade, won admission to Bellingham Country Day, where Seth's own children were not accepted.

  'Do I sound like I resent this?' Seth asks.

  'Maybe,' I answer.

  'Then I'm striking the wrong note. I'm amazed - that her heart goes out so fully to people she barely knows, while I'm always in this muddle, trying to find a way to feel enough for the people I'm supposed to care about.'

  ‘I hope it works out for you, Seth.'

  ‘I do, too. It's a mess now. You've been through it. The friends. The house. I mean, all of a sudden nothing belongs to you anymore. Stuff that was yours forever. People see you coming and they have this look on their face like you goosed them. I'm glad to be out of there for a while.'

  Charlie's pals were at the U. Ray Napue was acerbic, terribly funny about everyone but himself. Carter Melk, another poet, was gentle but wordless. I miss both of them, but not the university, with its intense, secret rivalries, reminiscent of a medieval court.

  'So what did your chump do?' he asks.

  'Charlie? Why's he a "chump"?'

  'He let you go, didn't he?'

  'I left him. Finally. We took turns over the years. But I got the last curtain.'

  Charlie! something within me shrieks. The thought of him remains impossible. It's like some trauma I can never fully recall - a bad fall, a beating. With Charlie, what I can't recollect is what I ever saw in him. I remember as a fact, like the capitals of the fifty states, that for many years I felt under his spell. But he was a cad. Autocratic. Self-absorbed. I reestablish that point a hundred times each day. This morning, waking up, I had a clear memory of how often I was scratched by his toenails in bed at night. No matter how reasoned my appeal, he refused to cut them.

  'And what did he do?'

  'You mean to irritate me?'

  'No. That's a short list, right? Guys are so predictable: he didn't love you enough, he didn't pay enough attention, he got hung up on someone else.'

  'Right, right, and right,' I say.

  'No, how'd he make money? Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief?' 'A poet.' 'No way.'

  'It's true. He didn't make much money. He's got a teaching appointment at a university near Cincinnati now. But there was a long period while we were together when he refused to teach. He had a feud at the English department. He was a mailman then.' We've made a full circuit of the walk. Three blocks from the courthouse and the depleted south rim of the Center City, the lower shapes of a struggling residential area rise up: mercados, taverns, shingle-sided frame houses, the wonderful gilded church spire of the Serbian church, notched like a key to the gates of heaven.

  'So he hooked up with a rich lawyer, huh?'

  I laugh at the idea. 'No, Charlie never approved of my legal career. Rules. Forms. Those are the kinds of particulars he always thought were trivial. "The detritus of living." That's from one of his poems. Even when I was a prosecutor, he didn't see the point of what I was doing.'

  'He wanted the guilty to go free?'

  ‘I think he just would have preferred to banish them. Ship them all elsewhere. Make it go away. That was Charlie's usual approach to a problem.'

  I had always thought I saw life more or less Charlie's way and was shocked to discover that the law was the sort of thing for which I had some gift. A few times in my last term of law school, I went to court. I was working with the State Defenders Office, allowed under local procedure to stand up in court on little
misdemeanor cases. Once, afterwards, I went to the food store from the courthouse, and there as I was looking at the shining clustered heads of a pint of blackberries, I realized that what I had been doing a few minutes before, my ease in addressing a judge, begging mercy for the wretched and the weak, was quite beyond Charlie, who was anguished with words, not merely in his poems, but even in contemplating what might be spoken in his classroom to eighteen-year-olds who for the most part wanted no more wisdom from him than some surefire way to get through English I. Somehow this thought of our relative abilities had never come to me in precisely that fashion. I was accustomed, in fact, to thinking of Charlie as possessed of something empyrean and magical, the stuff, if not of genius, at least of art, but now, in the grocery, I suddenly took heart from my moment at the rostrum, from my exchange of sharp words with the grubby prosecutor and the dutiful wag of the judge's head, granting my forlorn client a generous sentence of ninety days' probation. And the thought had followed then, part of an inevitable sequence, that in a certain worldly way I was stronger than Charlie, I was hardier, the better survivor. And all that seemed remarkable was how unsurprising it was; I had known this always, and none of it, I recognized, had occurred unwillingly.

  'Was your breakup bitter?' Seth asks.

  I just make a sound at the recollection. Across the oval, I recognize another runner, Linda Larsen, Judge Bailey's clerk, and I wave.

  'I'm bitter about Charlie. But not my marriage. I'm actually beginning to see it as a useful phase for both of us. It got Charlie away from Rebecca. His first wife. No one should be stuck with Rebecca. And it got me through my illness. He proposed to me when I had no hair from the radiation.'

  'You had no hair and he had a wife?'

  'Exactly.'

  'Modern,' he says.

  'Post-modern,' I answer. 'Sometimes, when I'm in the dumps about it, I wonder of course.' 'About what?'

  'About whether I meant to leave Charlie all along. You know, did I always know my marriage was doomed?'

  He appears confused.

  'I mean my mother,' I say. 'Okay? I was raised by this woman alone. And here I am doing the same thing. And I wonder if I didn't feel a certain destiny there. The older I get, the more like her I'm afraid I am.'

  'You're nothing like her, Sonny. Nothing.' Even as we continue moving, he reaches across and grips my wrist urgently, much as I gripped his. His green eyes are enlarged. 'She was cra-zy.'

  As if pierced by an airborne spear, I am suddenly revisited by the pain of that - remembering how weird everybody thought Zora was. I could never stand to say it to myself, that Zora was not ordinary, not right. Tiny, walleyed from a childhood accident with firecrackers, she spoke with urgency and volume, always regaling me with memorized quotations from writers of leftist spirit, Walt Whitman through Maud Gonne, and free-association gossip about figures from the labor movement. She was on a thousand obscure quests. She prowled junk shops and used-book stores seeking treasures - apothecary bottles, button boxes, squared-off paperclips with little wire curlicues, writings that were lost: a rare translation of Ruben Dado's Songs of Life and Spirit; George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical. She always addressed me in lavishly endearing terms - 'my precious darling,' 'my treasure' - and at the best moments - often! - it was true. To be the object of all of Zora's galvanic passion was to stand at the center of the world. But there were other times when she was, in the perfect phrase, carried away.

  She once lost me in the maelstrom she provoked at a local P ‘I A meeting, where she had appeared to rail against the inclusion of the words 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance. In that era, when men didn't baby-sit and working women were not expected to spend their earnings on child care, I was often in tow, at organizing meetings, steering-committee debates. I played with dolls beneath the dining-room tables and was comforted with nickel Cokes, while my mother and the others furiously argued doctrine and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. But on this night Zora

  was not among friends. Instead, alone but for me, she confronted the neighborhood of lunch-pail tradesmen in which she'd been raised in Kewahnee. I was a thin, dark child in my cousin's cast-off cardigan and skirt, clutching a rag doll and some hem of my mother's apparel. Zora gestured wildly, her unraveled voice emerging with expectorant pops at ear-splitting volume as she screamed into a microphone. Ultimately, she was hated from the room: 'Get out, you little Polack nut. You godless Commie bitch. Go back to Moscow.' Amid the brandished fists, the agitated throng, I was suddenly alone, pushed along, but uncertain Zora had even noticed I was missing. The moment went on and on. I stood there shrieking, Mommy! Then I was retrieved, almost absentmindedly, snatched up by Zora as she turned heel to reply to someone with foul-mouthed invective.

  That's what Seth and I saw in each other, though neither of us knew it then. We both had come of age with parents who weren't in the swing, exiles from the mainstream.

  'Tell me about your daughter,' he says eventually. That is always pure pleasure. We talk at length. Her costumes. Her moods. The glories of kindergarten. Heading back, we cross the arc of the concrete overpass above the highway and jog through the little Italian neighborhood, where there are still bakeries with dark awnings and sub shops with a crucifix or Sacred Heart over the tables. At this hour, the row of restaurants - Jenna's, Mama Sesta's - are full of a bustling pack of lawyers and courthouse employees. A few tables will remain occupied by men and women who, by whatever whim of fortune, can drink the afternoon away. A grey-haired man, wearing a short-sleeve shirt despite the cold, stands on the walk before his tiny home, suspiciously eyeing everyone and enjoying a cigarette.

  A few doors down, there is a wonderful greengrocery, Molin-ari's. In this season, Jocko has beautifully pyramided the citrus. Space heaters glow, running on extension cords right out here on the street. We each buy mountain water and a gorgeous Granny Smith apple.

  'Jesus, look at me,' says Seth as we leave the store. His shirt is soaked through and even his sport coat is dampened in a semicircle beneath one arm. He'll have to return to the Hotel Gresham, he says, turn his jacket over to the concierge. We walk back toward the courthouse.

  'You sound awfully heroic about everything,' he says. 'It's got to be tough. The divorce, the cancer. Single mom. You're pretty resolute.'

  'The divorce,' I say, 'was a necessity. And Nikki is my joy. Being sick was terrible, but I think I've pretty much left it behind. Every six months or so, I have nightmares, and then there are a few hours when I'm back to scratch. But most days I'm - what did you say? Resolute? Resolved. Not heroic. What I'm gladdest of - proud of - is that I didn't become the disease. You know that starts in the hospital. They act as if you don't have a name. They identify you by the procedure. "You're a mastectomy." "You're a colostomy." It's so easy to think that this illness that's threatening your life is your life. And I got past that. I had my baby. I took this job. Eventually, you say it happened,' she says. 'Bad things happen. Cancer or divorce. They happen. You know?' I mean it, I believe it. And yet the stress of these cataclysms still rebounds. I must have learned more about myself later than most human beings. The last dozen years, the point when my friends from college seemed to have a collection of habits and chosen reflexes they called a life - for me the same period has been like a bombing run, one explosive surprise after another. Getting sick. Getting back together with Charlie. Finishing law school. A baby. Divorce. The bench. When? I wonder, considering it all, when, when will I come to rest, be in a place of comfort, or at least repose?

  'Bad things happen,' Seth repeats, and I recognize only now what was contained in his observation about being resolute. I feel unconscionably dull, even though my aching for him continues to engird me, as if my rib cage had been irradiated.

  'It takes a long time, Seth.'

  'People say.' He catches my eye. He's heard it all. I begin to apologize, but he interrupts. 'I wasn't going to mention it,' he says. ‘I really hate -'

  'Oh, Seth. I just -' It would break my heart to thi
nk that any old friend, any person who had so much of my life might isolate himself with something like this. And what is it that looms up so large? Life, I'd say. To my amazement, I find, although I'm not a teary person by nature, that I am suddenly crying. He briefly throws an arm around me and I dry my nose on the sweatshirt sleeve from which various threads are hanging. Blessedly for both of us, we are behind the courthouse again, where we started.

  'So you got your exercise,' he says for lack of anything else. I can only smile. 'Do you ever bring Nikki down here? I'd love to see her.'

  It's an innocent request, but like all else at the moment, it knocks my heart around, thinking about what the sight of friends' kids must be to him, both the torment and the reassurance.

  'Come by sometime. When you visit your father. It's 338 Grove.'

  'It would make the trip worthwhile. Almost,' he says. He looks at me. 'You better think about it.'

  'It'll be okay. You're on good behavior and so am I.' 'Maybe this weekend?' 'We're in and out both days.' 'Whenever.'

  I hug him quickly. Half a foot shorter than he is, I face him. I know now I was right when he initially stood up in the courtroom and I thought I detected depletion of some kind. Wreckage. Pain. At the Judge's Entrance, I leave him with a slogan of our foregone times.

  'You're a good man, Charlie Brown.'

  APRIL 1970

  Seth

  Eddgar's expulsion hearings before the university Senate commenced in the third week of April. Sessions ran from 4:00 in the afternoon to 10:00 at night, so faculty members could attend without interrupting their classes. After each evening's adjournment, the Eddgars and their lawyers met for a lengthy planning session, arguing about strategy, gathering information about coming witnesses. Eddgar and June seldom arrived home before 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, only a couple of hours before I had to get up to begin distributing After Dark to the coin boxes. As a result, I began putting Nile to bed on the living-room sofa in my apartment. Roiled up by my imminent flight to Canada and my breakup with Sonny, I was not sleeping soundly and usually heard one of his parents steal in to retrieve him.