Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,259

she knew who I was anymore. She didn’t seem flustered or disoriented; as a matter of fact, she appeared to have made her way back to safety. This was nothing new, I realized, and here lay the riddle of her chill—she was incalculably depressed. Of course Jack would have wanted to save her. Of course he would have tried. And, of course, his every effort would have been undermined. Yes, this is where he’d gotten lost. How sad. In his little-boy mind, he’d been her failure. Rourke had felt this way too, except that Jack had felt a companion disgust unknown to Rourke—Jack’s father was no hero as Rourke’s had been.

And the riddle of Jack was the riddle of us. Him not wanting to smother me as his father had his mother, but him not being able to stop. Him psychologically resorting to the tools and terms that had given his father power over others. Him holding me, teaching me, coming whole to my need with his need, and in the end, him leaving as he came, carrying away his pain as if in a suitcase, because I’d done nothing to relieve his burden.

“Look at this one,” Mrs. Fleming said, tapping a page we’d passed at least twice before. I opened my eyes wide.

It was a picture of the two of them, Jack as a baby. In it his hair was white and hers was white. They looked lovely, mother and son, and hopeful with the new bond between them. He was no more than twenty pounds with his symphony-shell ribs poking over his diaper and his ankles like twigs. And his eyes, searing blue as though the color had been branded onto his face, as though he’d been awakened already to the nonsense of inequity.

“Never side with your husband over your children,” she confided in a hiss. I turned to find her eyes. There was something eerie about the vacancy there, the hollow helplessness, the pathological refusal to invest in anything beyond the sphere of her own unhappiness. Looking at her, I felt the way others must have felt when they looked at me. She looked as if she were suffering from vertigo. “They’ll tell you to do that. Never do that. Men are disposable. Children are not.”

We were interrupted by a crash from the floor above. My hand jerked, and coffee spilled narrowly onto the saucer. The china shook unevenly, and I carefully lowered my cup to the table. The house had been so quiet, I’d presumed we were alone.

Mr. Fleming shouted, “Susan! Where did you put my cuff links?”

More unnerving than the sound he made was the fact that she had invoked him only seconds before the sound. She had detected him before he’d become detectable. Just as she’d been seducing me into doubting her connection to him, she demonstrated the strength of the bond.

“I didn’t put them anywhere,” she replied to the banister. “They’re on your dresser.”

She waited in case he was going to yell some more, then she returned to me with a joyless smile. “Jack loathed him. I loathe him too. I stayed married because I had no alternative. I had to consider their college, their future,” she said. “What would I have done? Aging, with two children. Who would have hired me? Who would have loved me?” She took back the book. “At least my son had the courage to die. His father will cling to life until the bitter end. Unless I kill him first. I’d like to kill him first.”

A procession of somber guests passes the row of Jack’s belongings that Elizabeth and I arranged on the garden wall before the service. There’s the stuffed mouse I made, the harmonica my mother had given him, his drawings, his skateboard, his surfboard, his books, his mother’s photo album.

Jewel is still next to me. “Did you love him, Jewel?” I get the feeling she did.

She hunts through her tapestry purse and nods.

“From when?”

“December 1980,” she whispers, withdrawing a tissue. “Dan and I ran into him at the John Lennon vigil. Jack was high. He hardly recognized us. He hadn’t seen me in years, but Dan, well—We took Jack back to my parents’ apartment on West End Avenue and we hid him in my room. He didn’t talk for two days. The third morning he was gone. I didn’t hear from him until he showed up at my apartment at Yale two months later. He was in bad shape again, so I cleaned him