Don't Worry About the Kids Read online

  “Sure,” Michael said, and he smiled for the first time. “The devil made me do it, right?”

  “They talked about that too—her and the kids—the way you get sarcastic whenever you can’t face up to taking the blame. I learned from them, Mike. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why they were willing to talk about the marriage and you weren’t.”

  “But the marriage is over,” Michael said. “It’s been over for two years. I didn’t think it was important to talk about it. I thought that what was important was putting all the old battles to rest so we could get on with our lives.” Michael stopped, aware that the words were coming out automatically, that he himself hardly believed in them. “All right. If you want to talk about the marriage, let’s talk. What do you want to know?”

  “Too late.” Langiello tapped the envelope. “I’ve already put more time into your case than I usually do.”

  Michael hesitated, shook his head sideways, spoke: “You’re not giving me a fair shake.”

  “Could be.” Langiello gestured, palms up. “You and your lawyer are always free to ask for another investigator.”

  “No.” Michael saw himself wandering around an empty court, looking up at the game clock, at championship banners, at ducts and wiring and fans of bright lights. Was the game over already? He supposed he could do it—that he could compromise his values in order to save his kids, to win for all of them—that he could humble himself if he had to, even if he and Langiello knew he was only putting on an act. “I just want to put all this behind me, but I suppose that as long as she can stay involved with me, one way or the other, she’s gratified.”

  “But the two of you are still involved, Mike. You’re still mother and father to these kids. She showed me letters—the way you tried to persuade her to come back into the marriage when you found out she was having affairs. But what else could she do? The men she loved didn’t run her down the way you did, Mike. They were kind and gentle. They—”

  “They were married and they had kids, damn it!” Michael felt his heart blaze. He stood. “I really don’t have to listen to this. I don’t have to sit here and—”

  Langiello was smiling. Michael stopped in midsentence. Had he, by accident, given the man what he was looking for?

  “You’re angry, Mike. You’re a very angry guy, aren’t you?”

  Michael sat. He looked into Langiello’s eyes and he imagined himself making small incisions in the corneas. When the corneas were deprived of oxygen they drew blood vessels from surrounding territory. Michael imagined Langiello’s eyes laced with spider webs of pale red threads. He imagined himself lifting the corneas—peeling them off-freezing them so they would be ready for the lathe. He shivered. Refractive surgery—flattening the corneas to correct nearsightedness—was the one new surgical procedure that, in his imagination, could give him chills. He saw diamond blades cut into his own eyes, into the eyes of his children, into Jerry’s eyes.

  “I’m upset,” Michael said. He tried to be ready for what was coming. He tried to prepare himself for asking Langiello how much money he wanted, and how and when he wanted it. “I mean, you’re telling me I may lose my children.”

  “That’s right.”

  Michael smelled sausage, onions. He felt nauseated. “I love my children,” Michael said. “I mean, how can I not be upset?”

  “But when you don’t get your way you also get a little crazy.”

  “No.”

  “Your kids say different. They say you’re like your brother sometimes.”

  “But my kids hardly know my brother.”

  “I wondered about that too—why you didn’t want me to meet your brother last time, us going right past his place. Your wife says that after visiting him you throw fits sometimes, you hurl things around the house.”

  “It’s not so.”

  “The kids say it is. Your wife says that you used to wake her in the middle of the night to go on crazy tirades.”

  “It’s not so.” Michael looked down, head in hands, hoping Langiello would think he was fighting back tears.

  “Are you ashamed of him?”

  “Of who?”

  “Of your brother.”

  “No.” Michael looked up. “Did she say that too?”

  “You should see your face, Mike. You should go look in a mirror. I have to say I agree with her, that there’s something off-center there when you get angry. And you did have a breakdown once.”

  “It’s not so.”

  “But you told me you had once put yourself under psychiatric care.”

  “I was in analysis for six years. When Jerry was—”

  Michael considered saying more—considered talking about the analysis: why he entered it, how difficult and rewarding the work had been. He smiled. “Can I ask you a question—a few questions?”

  “Shoot,” Langiello said.

  “I take it you’re going to recommend that my ex-wife get primary custody of the children and I assume nothing I say now will change your mind. But tell me, Mr. Langiello—is a good parent one who lies to her children about the other parent? Is a good parent one who threatens to put her children in a foster home when they don’t do what she wants? Does a good parent deny counseling for her children? Does she threaten to kill them and maim them? Does she encourage her children to lie for her, to spy on their father, to steal things for her, to join in her war against him?”

  “Who knows?” Langiello said. “Wouldn’t you tell lies to protect your kid?” Michael said nothing. “I mean, who knows what a good parent is, Mike? Who really knows?”

  At the corner, Michael went into a telephone booth, called the hospital. He spoke to a nurse who said that because of the weather the vans had not gone to Brooklyn. Would Michael be coming out to Staten Island? Michael said he had office hours midaftemoon, but he promised he would visit Jerry later in the week. The nurse said that Jerry had been telling everybody in the ward he was going to a fancy restaurant with his brother; he had spent most of the morning preparing—washing, shaving, deciding which clothes to wear. She had never seen him dressed so handsomely.

  “I’ll be there,” Michael said. “Tell him it may take me a while—I’ll go by ferry—but I’ll be there.”

  Michael called his office and arranged for one of his partners to cover for him, then took the subway to Manhattan, exited at South Ferry. When he arrived on the Staten Island side he would take a taxi to the hospital.

  The rain had stopped. Michael stayed at the back of the ferry, on deck. Despite what had happened with Langiello, he was looking forward to seeing Jerry. A group of schoolchildren were on tour, and a middle-aged ferry-boat captain was telling them that cows had once walked across the Bay, near where the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was, from Brooklyn to Manhattan; if the cows did not get back before the tide came in, they would often drown. Michael watched Manhattan grow smaller. Gulls followed the boat, the captain said, not for garbage, as most people thought, but because the warm water churned up by the boat’s propellers brought fish to the surface.

  When the schoolchildren went inside, Michael stayed on deck, looking not toward Brooklyn, but toward the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, New Jersey. The water seemed pockmarked, a murky brown spotted with filmy stars of blue and black and green. The ship rolled gently through row after row of whitecaps. Michael thought of dirty dishwater. He thought of Jerry on a stepladder, remembered teaching Jerry how to wash dishes, how to use the sponge and soap and steel wool. He saw raw spinach rising to the surface of cloudy water. Was he inventing the picture, or had Jerry once tried to wash spinach leaves as if they were dishes? He recalled his father coming home and praising Jerry, ranting at him.

  Michael walked to the port side. Brooklyn was gone, bathed in gray fog, and Michael sensed some light—the sun, behind the mist, slowly transforming the air to the color of unwashed ivory. Despite the fact that the air was now warm and moist, almost feathery in its tangible balm, Michael found that he was trembling, his teeth clicking. He sh
ould go inside, buy a cup of coffee, rest. He should forget Langiello. He should tell himself again and again that the hard thing would be to believe in his heart what he understood in his mind: that there was, literally, nothing he could do about what had happened and nothing he could have done. All he really wanted was to get to the other side of the Bay, to see Jerry, to spend time with him.

  Were Jerry to ask him about the children and were he to begin to tell Jerry the story of what had happened, he knew that Jerry would walk away, turn in circles. He wished that it wasn’t so important to him that others understand what, in fact, had truly happened. He wished he could be certain that he cared more for his children than he did about losing them, about losing his fight for them.

  Michael held to the iron railing, reminded himself to stop on the other side, to buy something to bring for Jerry—a magazine, a pipe, a box of chocolates. He smiled. Jerry would doubtless turn at once and hand the gift to another patient. Michael would tease Jerry about always giving things away and Jerry would laugh, would say something about their childhood that only he and Michael would understand. What do you think this is anyway, he would ask. Your birthday?

  The craziest thing of all, Michael sometimes thought, was that the two of them actually liked being together, enjoyed spending time with each other even though they both knew that their conversations made no ordinary sense.

  Jerry loved to ask Michael questions about surgery, to walk around his ward reciting the procedures to everyone he met. Jerry had an uncanny memory that made Michael believe he was not brain-damaged so much as brain-scrambled—all the pieces there, but in the wrong places. Michael considered: he could pretend that he needed Jerry to help him in surgery, that there was this guy he knew they had to operate on, so that the man would never walk again.

  Michael could imagine taking Jerry to the Italian restaurant, Jerry’s eyes bright with pleasure as he explained the procedure, repeated Michael’s words back to him: first you make an incision in the knee and put the fiber-optic light in. Then you look into the TV camera and you fill the knee with saline fluid. Then you make a cut of about five millimeters. Then you make an incision on the other side and you watch in the camera while you work with your scalpel and clamps and trocar and Army-Navy retractors. If there’s too much bleeding, you buzz the veins.

  Michael smiled. Jerry loved the idea of buzzing veins and arteries-cauterizing them with lasers—loved to use the word buzz as often as possible. The anterior or posterior cruciate ligaments would be the ones they’d cut, Michael explained, so that forever after the knees would—without warning, but regularly—give way. Or perhaps they could, Jerry offered, go into the neck and slice the carotid artery, or one of the vertebral arteries, so that, as if the guy had had a stroke, his brain would never again be able to tell his body what to do.

  The ferry slowed, turned, began backing into its spot in the harbor, foam boiling up above green scum. Michael went inside, moved quickly, pushing his way through the crowd so that he would be first off.

  Workers to Attention Please

  HE WAS A SMALL MAN standing on a large box. One percent of the population owned forty-five percent of the nation’s wealth, he cried. I held my father’s hand and we moved forward through the falling snow. Did we know about the six hundred families? The six hundred families controlled everything that controlled us: railroads, coal, gas, electrical power, movies, newspapers, radio, banks.

  Below us subway trains thundered through warm tunnels. In the Soviet Union, the man proclaimed, a new world was dawning, where men and women were not wage slaves—where men and women worked side by side and owned the means of production! The man’s hands moved through the snow as if he were already dismembered—as if pieces of him were flying here and there like clumsy pigeons.

  I have seen the future, my father said, and it is bloody. Come, darling. We moved closer, to the outer edge of the circle of listeners.

  Evening to you, Mr. Krinsky, Officer Kelly said.

  Good evening, Mike, my father said, and he tipped his hat.

  My father lifted me onto his shoulders. I could see the sign for S. Klein on the Square blinking faintly through the snow.

  The man turned to the side and I saw half his face, his eye glowing blue like the pilot light on our gas stove at home. The workers of America had to be educated to the fact that their true enemy lived in Washington! I thought of trains rumbling high above us in the heavens, knocking loose huge pieces of snow from the sky as if they were chunks of ceiling plaster. The man looked directly at me and spoke about children of nine and ten years old who worked in subhuman conditions at subhuman pay—in coal mines and paper mills, in factories and sweatshops right here in New York City.

  My father set me down and kissed me. Watch this, he said.

  Even though he walked through snow, below the level of the man’s box, my father was taller than the man. My father was taller than everyone, including Officer Kelly. My father was so large he could carry small pianos on his back. Six days a week he worked for the Santini Brothers Moving and Storage Company. On the Sabbath he rested. When I visited him, after school and on holidays, to watch him load trucks and move furniture in and out of storage, the Italians bragged that my father was the strongest man in New York.

  Sir, my father said.

  The man stopped talking.

  Your Mr. Stalin is a gangster worse than Mussolini. Your Mr. Stalin cleans out Hitler’s ass with the undergarments of poor Jews like you and me.

  The man gaped. My father smiled. Officer Kelly moved forward, slapping his billy club against his black-gloved hand. I moved with him. We had seen my father like this before. The man reached to one side and grabbed a pole that held the American flag. He lifted the flag high above his head, but the flag did not stop the terror in his eyes. My father took the pole from the man’s hand, and set it upright. Then my father drove his fist into the middle of the man’s face so that blood spurted and spread, like a rose flowering in snow.

  My father turned, lifted me in his arms. Come, son.

  The man screamed for help, but people moved away quickly. The man shouted for Officer Kelly to arrest my father, to do something. He had a right to give speeches! He had a right not to be abused by capitalist thugs.

  Yes, my father said. Because this is a free country. But since you don’t like it here I want to help you. Since it is better in Russia, I want to help you to get there. I want to help you fly.

  My father set me down and lifted the man bodily, one hand between the man’s legs, the other around the man’s chest. The man thrashed in the air like a small boy trying to swim.

  That’s enough for now, don’t you think, Mr. Krinsky?

  My father threw the man forward as if tossing a log into a fire. The man’s head cracked against a lamppost. The man rolled over and lay on his back.

  An old woman slapped at my father with a large paper bag. The bag split open and the leaflets tumbled into the air. On the top of each page were the words WORKERS TO ATTENTION PLEASE. My father tipped his hat and smiled at the woman.

  Is he your son? my father asked.

  The woman cursed my father. She said that someday men like him would be lined up in front of firing squads.

  I already been, my father said. So what I am trying to do now is to knock some sense into people’s heads when I am given the chance. This is a wonderful country we live in, with abundant opportunities. This country has been very good to people like you and me. Here we can pray without being arrested. Here if you work hard, people pay you enough so you can feed your family.

  The woman dropped to her knees and packed snow onto the small man’s face.

  I couldn’t sleep because of how loud my mother was yelling at my father for what he had done. No, she wasn’t proud of him. No, she did not believe that might made right. I got out of bed and opened the door, to see. The angrier my mother became, the happier my father seemed.

  I love you, he declared. I love you when you yell at m
e.

  My father grabbed my mother and pulled her to him, so that she sat on his lap. He lifted her hair from the back of her neck and kissed her there.

  She shivered, then pounded against his chest. You’re a child, she said. You’re such a child.

  I’m sorry I hit the man. But he was saying very stupid things. Will you promise you won’t do it again? I promise.

  She rested her head against his chest.

  I worry about you, she said. All day I worry.

  Don’t.

  I closed the door. My brother was snoring. I lifted the board from the side of his bed and kissed his cheek. He woke up and bellowed like a cow, then rolled over and fell onto the floor. My mother rushed into the room. I moved back. My brother was as tall and strong as my father, except that he did not understand how to read or to work. Sometimes my father brought him to the warehouse, to try to teach him to use his size and strength, but my mother always ended by bringing my brother home early. Then she put my brother in his bed and sat in my room and cursed my father for making her love him.

  Get the rope, my mother said. Quickly.

  I brought the rope and while my mother talked to my brother, my father tied up his hands and legs.

  In Russia and in Germany they would have killed him, my father said. In many nations of the globe he would already be dead. Here they let him live.

  When my brother snapped his teeth sideways, so he could chew the skin from his own shoulder, my father took out his handkerchief and began to bind my brother’s mouth.

  Then blood spurted from my brother’s mouth in a quick stream, like red tobacco juice. My brother stopped howling. Between his teeth, he held onto two of my father’s fingers.

  My father closed his eyes but he didn’t scream.

  I told you, my mother said. Someday. I warned you.

  Do something, my father said. Please.

  Because you don’t want to hurt him?

  Please.

  I stared at my brother’s teeth, and listened to a sound that came from them, like wind trying to move through water.