Your Child Has Been Towed

WHEN I WAS A BOY growing up in Brooklyn during the years after the Second World War, my favorite place was our local library. On Saturday mornings while my parents slept late, I’d sneak out the door, then run the three blocks from our apartment house until I came to the squat white stone building. The children’s room was on the right side, a large rectangle with enormous windows that ran along its three outside walls. The windows were high up above the shelves of books, and when I sat inside the room, I used to look up and imagine there were machine gun nests perched just outside the glass, machine gunners in camouflaged helmets firing down on me and the other children—spraying us with pellets of brilliant sunlight.

I loved going to the library on Saturday mornings because that was when Mrs. Kachulis, my fourth-grade teacher, was there. Each Saturday morning she came with her daughter Demeter. Mrs. Kachulis always called her daughter, who was in the third grade, by her full name of Demeter. At school, Demeter’s girlfriends called her Demmy and sometimes, if no teachers were around, boys would circle around her and call her Dummy. The first time I met Mrs. Kachulis at the library was by chance. I’d gone to synagogue with my father, a block from the library, because he had to say Kaddish for his father. Otherwise, since my father was proud to be what he called a godless Jew, he never went. On the way home we stopped at the library so I could get some books to read over the weekend. He had taken me with him to synagogue because I was, he said, his kaddishel, the person who would say Kaddish for him all the years after he died.

My favorite writer during those years was John R. Tunis. I knew the names of the ballplayers on his imaginary teams as well as I knew the names of the players on the Brooklyn Dodgers. I’d read all his books several times each and I was looking through The Kid from Tomkinsville again when Mrs. Kachulis found me. She grabbed me by the arms, helped me up from the floor, smiled at me as if I were the one human being in the world she had most hoped to meet. This is what she said:

How wonderful to see you here, Jason! I come here every Saturday morning with Demeter. We’ll meet again. You know Demeter, of course. Demeter, come here, please, and meet Jason Klein. Demeter, this is Jason Klein, the most brilliant and generous student I’ve ever had.

A blast of air entered my mouth and shot down my throat. It breathed heat into a bundle of dry twigs that lay waiting just below my chest. The twigs burst into flame.

Hello, Mrs. Kachulis. I’m pleased to meet you, Demeter.

Mrs. Kachulis asked to see what I was reading. I offered the book to her and I wondered if she would know what I loved most about holding the book: that the straw-colored binding made me imagine what the sun felt like on the Kid from Tomkinsville’s back when he was out on the ballfield somewhere in Florida, far from home, on his first day of spring training.

My father came to get me. You must be proud to have a son like Jason, Mrs. Kachulis said. I’ll tell you a secret—he makes my days worthwhile.

Jason’s a good boy mostly, my father said. Especially when he sleeps. Look at the books he’s reading, a boy his age.

Sports books. Always sports books, my father said. Athletes and horses and grown men chasing little balls. When I was his age, I read books by Ralph Henry Barbour, but I read other things too. On Saturday afternoons I studied Talmud with my father. Jason should be interested in the world, in history, and in how things work. He should read about President Roosevelt and the Depression and the internal combustion engine and why we won the war.

Ah, but he does—he reads everything. He devours books, Mrs. Kachulis said. I’ve never met a boy more curious.

He’s a strange one, my father said. That’s true enough. You never know what goes on in that beautiful head of his, behind those golden curls. He certainly doesn’t think like you and me.

For our history project, he did a report on lend-lease, Mrs. Kachulis continued. He made marvelous drawings of battleships and destroyers and fighter-bombers. He made a meticulous chart showing how u.s. industry mobilized miraculously for the war effort. I put his work on display for the entire school to see.

He’s no slouch, my father said. His hand moved toward my head as if to ruffle the curls. Then, without touching me, his hand retreated to the back of his own head, to the spot where all the hair began, and he scratched himself there. We have to get home, he said. Your mother will be waiting for lunch.

Demeter was the goddess of agriculture and fruitfulness, the protectress of marriage, the mother of Bacchus. I liked the name Bacchus because it had two c’s in it. I liked the name Demeter because it was the name of a rookie outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers—Don Demeter—I’d been following since he came up from Fort Worth in the Minor Leagues. Despite his frail gifts, I hoped Demeter might someday become the heir to Duke Snider’s centerfield kingdom. In his first at bat in the Majors, pinch hitting against Don Liddle, and the very first time he swung a bat, Demeter blasted a home run.

Each week when we met in the children’s room of the library, Mrs. Kachulis asked me what I was reading. Each time she found me there, sitting at one of the low blond wood tables, or on the wine-colored carpeting near the far wall, she seemed as surprised and delighted as she was the first time. On the third Saturday we met, she told me to come with her to where the grown-up books were.

And after that first time, she took me with her to the stacks every week. The stacks were positioned directly behind the squared-off area where you checked your books in and out, there for you as you entered or left the library. The stacks were dark—you could switch lights on yourself for whichever aisle you were using, and Mrs. Kachulis would walk along, singing to herself in Italian—she loved opera, would sometimes stop class, clap her hands, and proceed to tell us the story of one—taking down books and handing them to me even while she kept walking and singing. Try this one and tell me what you think of it, she’d say, and pass the book backwards to me as she moved forward.

I had often become attached to ballplayers simply because of the way their names sounded or were spelled: Ramazotti, Lavagetto, Med-wick, Jorgenson, Loes, Mikses, Cimoli, Roebuck. Now it was the same

with names of authors: Shellabarger, Undset, Fuchs, Yerby, Zugsmith, Slaughter, Ullman, Wouk, Buck, Brace, Cather, Saroyan, Baasch, Jewett, Bemelmans, Lagerkvist…

In class, when I’d finished my work before others had, I’d tell her about the books—not about them really, for what I did was simply to retell the stories. When I was done, or when we had to stop so the class could continue, she’d smile at me and say, Oh you’re such a careful reader, Jason. I love having you tell me stories.

I never thought Mrs. Kachulis was a beautiful woman, but I loved her smile more than any smile in the world, since when she offered it to me I felt that no least part of it was meant for anyone else. Some of the students called her Mrs. Horseface because of how large her teeth were and the way her long jaw quivered slightly when she laughed. I loved her more because they mocked her. Had I been strong enough to defend her with my fists, I would have, but knowing that I could not defeat all the boys who made fun of her, and that, therefore, when the fight was over they would only mock us both, I did nothing. Except to imagine a time when my mother might die, when my father might, in his grief, despair, and when I would be put up for adoption. Then Mrs. Kachulis would put out her arms and embrace me. Of course I’ll take you as mine, she said.

Mrs. Kachulis never told me what she herself thought of books or which ones she liked more than others and I never asked. This was so partly because I was afraid I might discover we disagreed, and partly because what she preferred to do was to tell me about the lives of authors, of what they did when they were not writing. Most writers, even if they were doctors or statesmen, explorers, gamblers, or scientists, had had ordinary and lonely childhoods, she said. What made them different was how much time they had spent living inside their imaginations. That was why she thought I might be a writer someday, for despite all the words and energy I summoned up to retell the stories of others, she seemed to know what I dimly perceived—that I had worlds of my own inside me I’d never told anyone about, and that they were as terrifying as they were beautiful.

So I said I would write a book for her. At night, after my parents and sisters were asleep, I sat up in my bed and, writing by flashlight, I began. When I wrote, I felt as exhilarated as I did when I read my favorite books, except that when I was done writing I felt both happier and more exhausted. My story was about a young baseball player who contracts an incurable disease, leaves the Major Leagues after one glorious season in which he’s both Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player—and journeys around the world on a boat he builds himself, having dangerous and splendid adventures at various islands, and in exotic ports in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, and Greenland. Pursued by envious enemies, his great desire is to meet as many worthy people as he can and to tell them the story of his life—of all he’s learning in the time left to him before he must die.

Each Monday morning I brought in a new chapter and each Monday morning, after the Pledge of Allegiance, Mrs. Kachulis said: And now it’s time to hear Jason read to us from his book. Then I’d rise from my seat and walk to the front of the room and read. When I was done my classmates applauded—some even whistled—and afterward, when we had conversation time, or at lunch, or recess, or after school, they’d come up to me, always wanting to know the same thing: what happens next?

Some promised to be my best friend if I told them—Tell me, tell me, they’d implore—but the truth was that until I sat up in bed by myself, picked up my pencil, watched the scenes begin to take place in my mind and began to translate what I saw into words, I myself never really knew the answer.

Now I am a grown man. I still live in Brooklyn, within walking distance of my childhood home and library. I am forty-eight years old, divorced twice, a full-time single parent. My one child, Carolyn, is nine years old. I am presently involved with a woman, Lynne Douglas. She is thirty-seven years old, also divorced twice, the full-time single parent of a seven-year-old boy named Timothy.

We met in the children’s room of the library. Things happened quickly, with great heat. On Saturday mornings we came, regularly, to leave Carolyn and Timothy in the library and to adjourn to her apartment or mine, for this was the only time all week when our apartments were available to us—the only time when our children were not at home while we were not at work.

The first time we went to her apartment and she mounted me, this is what she said: We can do anything we want, Jason—anything we can imagine—anything at all.

Lynne is a lawyer specializing in property law. She teaches at Brooklyn Law School, is a consultant to a public television series about citizens’ legal rights. I am a science writer, executive editor of the textbook division of a large publishing house. In addition to the writing I myself do, I oversee a staff of nine writers. We write of recent discoveries about why and how things are: about plate tectonics, neurobiology, black holes, the origin of the universe, punctuated equilibrium, frozen stars, the structure of matter, neural plasticity, the chemistry of the brain. My own special interest, about which I have written a short and well-received book, is grand unification theory, a theory that gathers into its ken all the phenomena of physics, excepting gravity: from the squealing of tires to the shining of the stars, from radioactivity to the blazing of the sun, the fuel-injected engine, the compass needle, the magnetic cartridge, the microchip, and nuclear fission.

After the first time we made love, when Lynne said to me that she had but ten percent of her brain left, I found myself talking to her of the major prediction of grand unification theory—that the proton, a subatomic particle out of which all matter is created, will decay, and its consequence: that all substance dissolves into light.

I’ll say, Lynne said. She glowed. The brain, I told her, contrary to popular belief, was not at all like a computer. It was anything but binary. A given neuron may have several thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. And if, as we believe, it has 10¹¹ neurons, then it has at least 10¹⁴ synapses. The number of possible synaptic connections among nerve cells in any human brain, therefore, is virtually without end. The number of possible interconnections between the cells in a single human brain is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

Are you done? she asked, and when I said that I was, we went at each other again, on the carpeting beside her bed, until she whispered that what was left of her brain had melted to pure heat and light, to the beginning of time.

While she slept I lay awake, my fingertips caressing her forehead, circling the bones around her eyes. I thought, with pleasure, of quarks, which make up the proton, of how they combine into a new particle, survive briefly, and decay, either into original elements or into something else: an anti-electron. And here the strange and wonderful thing occurs, and that it does had never occurred to me in precisely this way before.

The process of decay allows the proton to transform itself into two elements—a pi meson and an anti-electron—that race away from each other, and decay into light itself. It is the remarkable prediction of grand unification theory, then, that since all things are made of protons, and all things decay, then all things glisten.

When Lynne woke I spoke the words that had come to me, words that named both what I felt and what I thought: We are composed, I said, of incipient radiance.

You’re a wonderful man, she said.

We met at the library for eleven consecutive weeks. We did not see each other at any other time. We did not go out for dinner or to the movies together, or to the park or to museums with our children. We did not call each other, at home or at work. I did not send her flowers or playful notes, and she did not send me frivolous gifts and clever cards. Did we miss each other, during the six days we were apart? I couldn’t tell. Neither of us ever addressed the subject.

When we talked, we talked about our work and about our children. We shared the problems of single parenting—the frustrations and joys, the emotional burdens and logistical complexities of doing it all ourselves: chauffeuring, car pools, music lessons, athletic teams, medical and dental appointments, emotional burnout, housekeeping chores—and we shared, too, a firm belief that, to our surprise—since we had previously been so invested in family life—we thought it better for children to be brought up by a single parent than by a couple. Because our children were aware that while they were left in the library we were elsewhere, and because they asked about the future—would they become brother and sister?—Lynne bought us T-shirts to wear in our apartments that she’d had imprinted with two words: Separate Households.

Three Saturdays ago, when we returned to the library shortly before noon, our children were gone. Notes were tacked to the corkboard next to the checkout desk in the children’s room, each with our name on it, along with the simple declarative sentence: Your child has been towed.

We laughed. We asked the librarian if she had seen our children. She had—during morning story hour—but not since then. We looked around. We walked through the library and searched all rooms, stacks, bathrooms, closets. We went outside and walked, in opposite directions, around the block, returning to the library entrance. We went back inside and searched again. We spoke to the head librarian. She telephoned the police station and told us that the officer on duty advised us to come down.

We hurried. The officer at the desk, a handsome young man named Galen Kelly, took the information from us and asked if we could supply him with photos. Lynne took a photo from her purse and I took one from my wallet: head and shoulder shots against blue pastel backgrounds, taken by school photographers. Officer Kelly advised us to check our apartments, to notify friends, relatives, and neighbors, to inform the schools. He made several phone calls, but came up with no information about children resembling Timothy or Carolyn. He suggested we go to our homes and check there, and then check the library again. He asked if he could keep the notes and run them through the police laboratory.

Although he would, of course, send all data about our children to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, he added that, in his experience, the Missing Children problem was overblown by the media. Most missing children were not missing at all: they merely crossed state or city lines, after separations and divorces, to return to one or another parent. The greater problem, about which nobody was talking, he said, was missing parents.

We thanked him and left. I went to my apartment but Carolyn was not there. I checked in her closet, under her bed, on the fire escape. I checked the refrigerator, the freezer, the hallway incinerator, our storage area in the building’s cellar. I telephoned the library. I telephoned Lynne.

Maybe we’re being punished, she said.

Oh Lynne, I said. Come on. What did we do except to have a good time—?

You don’t understand anything, do you? she said. I’m not talking about right and wrong. What scares me is precisely that this seems to have happened so arbitrarily—without any discernible reference to who we are or what we’ve been doing. I just don’t get it, Jason. That’s all I mean.

I thought of Schrodinger’s Cat. I said so to Lynne—that perhaps our children were actually in their rooms while we were talking on the phone, but that each time we looked in their rooms, they disappeared.

She found no humor in my remark. I had thought Lynne a woman who knew what she wanted from life and went after it, who was not subject to panic when she didn’t immediately get what she was after. When she spoke now, however, her voice reeked of desperation. What if they never return? she said. I’ve already fantasized the abuse Timothy might suffer, the feelings I’ll have when I see his picture on milk cartons, cereal boxes, movie screens. I’ve imagined his death and mutilation nine ways till Sunday. I can deal with facts, Jason. But what if we simply never know what happens? What if this waiting for the news never ends?

I recalled a joke my father loved to tell, about the Jew who sits at the train station, tearing his hair and wailing. What’s the matter, his friend asks. I missed my train, the Jew replies, and recommences his wailing. When did it leave? Three minutes ago, the Jew says. Ach, his friend replies, waving away the Jew’s suffering. From the way you were carrying on I thought you’d missed it by an hour!

Given Lynne’s mood, I kept the joke to myself, and asked instead if she wanted me to come to her apartment. I left a message on my door for Carolyn, spoke to the doorman, to neighbors, and to the parents of some of Carolyn’s friends. I informed them of what had happened. Everybody looked at me with a terrible mixture of sympathy and admiration—I was, after all, an anomaly: a single hard-working man who was parenting a single child full-time—and assured me that Carolyn was a good and sensible girl, that she had probably wandered off for a while along Flatbush Avenue, or to Prospect Park, or to a friend’s house, and that she would soon come home.

Carolyn did not return that day, or the next. Lynne and I took turns staying in each other’s apartments. We drank heavily, watched movies on our VCRs, and slept. We neither talked nor touched.

On Monday we returned to our jobs. On Monday evening Officer Kelly visited me at home. He took fingerprints, hair samples, the pajamas from under Carolyn’s pillow. He sat with me in the kitchen and wrote down a family history. I told him about Carolyn’s birth, about Carolyn’s mother, about Carolyn’s early years, about my first divorce, and about my divorce from Carolyn’s mother. I gave him the names, addresses, and phone numbers of my two ex-wives. I spoke of Carolyn’s schooling, her habits, her hobbies, her idiosyncracies, her favorite books and television shows. I talked about how wonderful it felt, in the simplest way, when, in traffic or in a crowded store, she took my hand, or when she looked up at me in an elevator, say, and asked me a question to which I knew the answer. I told Officer Kelly about how hurt I’d been when Carolyn’s mother left us, about my drinking problem, about the arrangement Lynne and I had been developing. I left nothing out, yet I sensed that he found my account cold, that he did not believe I truly loved my daughter.

When he left, to visit Lynne and secure data from her, I telephoned and told her he was on his way. She asked if I would stay with her after he left. I arrived at her apartment near midnight. She took some tranquilizers and a glass of bourbon. We sat in her living room and had nothing to say to each other. I felt depleted. I didn’t ask her about her day at work and she didn’t ask me about mine. I didn’t ask her about her interview with Officer Kelly and she didn’t ask me about mine. I had no desire to touch her and I wondered about all those hours when, for eleven mornings, I’d been transported physically into a rapture beyond any I’d previously known. Where was it now? Where were the feelings that had, for a time, seemed to comprise the universe?

It was as if my memory were detached from my body, or, more exactly, as if, like a patient operated on for removal of the hippocampus, I was now destined to live forever in the present: to have permanently lost the ability to learn new things or to remember my own experiences. Like the patient who, distracted, has no memory of the person he has been talking to a moment before, I looked at Lynne now and wondered who she was. And if I had known her, what exactly was it I had known if I could conjure up no true memory of what it was I had felt when we’d been together?

On Saturday morning we went to the library. Carolyn and Timothy were not there. The librarian asked me about my father, whom she remembered from the years when I was a young boy. He died four years ago, I said. Had I heard that Mrs. Kachulis had passed away only two months before? Cancer of the spine. She was sixty-eight years old. What of her daughter Demeter, I asked. The librarian said that the less I knew of Demeter the better. Demeter had not turned out well. The last anyone had heard, Demeter was wandering in the West somewhere. Demeter had not come to the funeral.

Lynne sat at one of the low tables on the far side of the room, her hands clasped in front of her. Was she afraid she would forget Timothy—all they had done together, all he was? Old memories, I wanted to explain to her, are rarely lost, are impervious to anything short of brain damage. New memories, in comparison, are fragile, though about memory itself, its structure and architecture, we still knew virtually nothing. Why is it that almost all children have virtually perfect photographic memories, yet lose these at about the time they learn to read and write? Persisting photographic memory—iconic memory—is much more common in adults of preliterate cultures. Was learning to read and write, then, even as it worked to help us retain what was most beautiful, good, and true about our lives, joined in an eternal bond with the very loss of memory and feelings about those things we wished, by the act of reading and writing, to hold to?

Officer Kelly visited me each night that week. He was the only person who seemed concerned. Friends, neighbors, relatives, and school officials stopped inquiring. Officer Kelly sat in my kitchen and asked me about my day at work, about Carolyn, about my relationship with Lynne. I spoke to him of what I was working on at the office, of theories and mysteries concerning memory, evolutionary change, the origin of time, the riddle of space, the psychoneurological basis of feeling.

We watched ballgames and movies together. He talked to me of his life as a policeman, its banality and violence. I continued to tell him everything I remembered about Carolyn and our life together, but the more I told, the less I felt I knew. It was as if by remembering and naming what had been, I was losing the very things I was hoping to find. On Friday night of the second week after Carolyn’s disappearance, Officer Kelly said that it would make no difference to him—to his regard for me—if I never spoke about Carolyn again. He would not think my love for her, or my feeling of loss, any less authentic.

The following morning, when Lynne and I were sitting in the children’s room at the library, a young man dressed in jeans and a red and blue checkered sport shirt, came up to us and asked if our children had returned yet. How did you know—? I asked, and then realized that the young man was Officer Kelly, dressed in civilian clothes. He told us that he had resigned from his job as a policeman. He assured us that our cases would be followed up on a regular basis, through regular channels. He sat at our table and began to talk about himself. He had no parents, no brothers and sisters, no wife or ex-wives, no children. Until the age of twenty-one, he said, he’d had only one desire: to be a policeman. He’d fulfilled that desire, and didn’t see why, at the age of twenty-five, he should still be bound by a dream he’d had when he was five, or ten, or twenty. He needed some time to reconsider his life. I asked him if he wanted to stay with me. He thanked me and offered, in exchange, to take care of the apartment while I was at work—to do the shopping, the housekeeping, the preparation of meals. When Carolyn returned, he would, of course, leave.

Lynne had supper with us that night. We ate by candlelight and I repeated a saying of my father’s, that when you lost the most precious jewel, you searched for it with a candle that cost but a penny. Neither Lynne nor Galen reacted. Our children might be lost, I added, but our childhoods were not. We could talk to one another of all we remembered and when we were done remembering, I said, we could make up stories and give them to one another. Again, neither Lynne nor Galen showed any reaction. They ate in silence, and while they did, I tried to imagine what they were thinking or imagining or feeling. I could not. So I suggested that Lynne consider moving in with us. She could sleep in Carolyn’s room and Galen could sleep in the living room. There was no reason, until we knew what would happen next, for any of us to be alone.