THERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH of me, which I look at from time to time because it reminds me of those days when Annie and I first began to make a life together. The snapshot was taken as I was standing in a crowd of people watching runners pass by in the first annual Pittsburgh Marathon. A few of the runners are visible within the frame, with shorts and tank tops and large white placards with their registration numbers pinned to their shirts. You can sense the holiday atmosphere. The sun is shining, spectators are smiling, cheering, holding out paper cups of Gatorade, couples stand together arm in arm, some have baby strollers nearby, others have dogs on leashes. If you could see just outside the frame of the picture you’d see Mellon Park, green and fragrant, enclosed in a high iron fence. You’d see big hardwoods with new greenery, the last of the late tulips. You’d see children playing on a green hillside, you’d see dogs chasing Frisbees, picnickers opening lunches on the marble remains of the old Mellon estate. Farther outside the frame, you’d see a circling news helicopter, and graceful, elegant hot-air balloons floating far above the crowd in many colors and stripes and shapes. One balloon looks like a gigantic can of I.C. Light beer. Police motorcycles are also parked nearby. If you used your imagination you could hear the crackle of their two-way radios, you could hear the cheers of the crowd, the blast of the hot-air torches beneath the balloons, a car engine revving up, the barking of a dog. Far away from the frame, the Kenyans are winning the marathon, taking first and second. No one can see them, they are so far ahead of the pack.
Though my image is at the center of the photograph, I am the one thing in the scene that does not seem to fit—it looks like I’ve been cut out and pasted into a second picture as a joke. I am a glum figure, the only person dressed in a jacket and tie. I seem to be watching the race, but with no pleasure. Perhaps I am only waiting to cross the street. Or more likely I belong in some other picture altogether and am looking at something else entirely. Actually, the camera had captured me walking home from church on the only day that year I was in attendance. At church I had been praying, as well as I knew how, for my son Robin, who had not been seen for three days. Elizabeth had called from Arkansas to give me the bad news that he had dropped out of sight.
The photograph cannot hold the days that follow. The time went by so slowly it seemed as if an entire summer were passing, though it was less than this. The loan came through for the house Annie and I wanted to buy. We went to the closing, we signed the papers. The house was old and in bad shape, so we borrowed a few more dollars and had a guy put up some drywall. He was a jack-of-all-trades, so we had him install a small bathroom upstairs as well. We went on living in a rented house in the same neighborhood while the remodeling was being done. Annie’s children didn’t want to move, they told us. They said they wouldn’t go, they would live full-time with their father. She and I got into fights about money. We got into fights with each other and with the children about many things. We stuffed clothes into bags and stored them in the new house. The same with a few pieces of furniture. Everything we owned looked tawdry. The roof sagged, we now noticed. We didn’t have enough money for new carpeting, so we borrowed more money at 22 percent interest. Annie lost her job and went on unemployment. I talked to Robin’s mother and brother daily. We used phrases like “Missing Persons Reports” and “All Points Bulletins.” Rumors emerged about Robin’s whereabouts. Somebody thought they’d seen him riding in a blue car. His own car was a silver Prelude. Silver might be called blue, so maybe it really was Robin. I felt hopeful.
One day the mailman rang the doorbell and told us there was water running out the front door of the house we had just bought three blocks away. It was true. Water was flooding out the door. A pipe in the new second floor jury-rigged bathroom had broken. The ceiling had collapsed onto the new drywall downstairs. The furniture and clothing we had stored there were drenched. The carpeting that we couldn’t afford was ruined, along with the electrical fixtures. Nothing was insured. I found the water cutoff. We swept water out the door. We sopped up water with towels, turned fans on the soggy carpeting. We went back to our rented house. We worried about money. The phone rang. It was Elizabeth, down in Arkansas. Robin’s body had been found by hikers in the deep woods. A green plastic garden hose ran from the exhaust pipe of his car, in through the window. The crack in the window was sealed with a coat that he had stuffed there. A note had decomposed along with the body. Dental records were used in the identification. That’s what happened.
BEFORE ROBIN WAS BORN Elizabeth and I moved into a spanking new subdivision in Indian River, Florida, where we had taken jobs right out of college. The house was built of concrete blocks, there were oleander bushes in the front yard and a little lemon tree behind the kitchen. The house across the street was a mirror image of our own.
The main thing was, the house had a small bedroom on the front that would be perfect for a nursery. The plans we had begun making in college were still our favorite avocation. A crib would fit there on this wall, we agreed, a small chest of drawers on an adjacent wall, a changing table and Bathinette here and here. We would get a rug, a rocking chair, a diaper pail.
The room was well furnished in our minds long before we bought a single piece of furniture, or for that matter long before Elizabeth was pregnant. The room was airy and light, the windows were on the west side of the house, so the morning sun would not wake the baby rudely or too early. Curtains, of course. Elizabeth would make curtains for the room herself. We would pick out the fabric together. This would be perfect for the baby, who, of course, we had already named Robin. Should we buy a camera? We made plans with this degree of certainty. The romance of marriage and children that we had begun in college had encountered its bumps, its imperfections, since our drive to Livingston, Alabama, in the Lincoln Town Car that day in April, but reality had not as yet made the slightest inroads on that romance.
Sometimes when I think of the two of us then, Elizabeth and me, I almost forget to grieve for Robin, and think only of those two kids that we were, so hopeful in love. We lived then in our dreams, only there. The scraggly little lemon tree in our backyard, the new-sodded yard, the white-washed concrete block. Good lord, my old heart breaks for us. If this sounds like retroactive self-pity, well, so be it. I love those kids we were.
The room I was describing—the baby’s room, we already called it—was our life then. No other space in the house interested us so much as this. Indeed no other part of the house interested us at all. Not once when we were looking to buy did we consider the size of the rooms, the convenience or inconvenience of the kitchen arrangement, the completely stupid placement of the “bath and a half” right next to each other. Not when we walked through the “model home,” not when we drew out of the bank the five hundred dollars we had borrowed from Elizabeth’s father, not when we signed the mortgage papers. Having a baby—living up to the terms of the romance on which we had made the most important decisions of our lives—that was all we were thinking of.
I want to divert their tragedy, these hopeful kids, the erosion of their dream, the loss of illusion, the devices of habitual love that will break their romantic backs. They believed that by dreaming beautifully, they were safe. They didn’t know yet that dreaming well, and even living well, are insufficient protection. I wish I could take them aside and tell them. They would do nothing differently, I know. Even if they could see the future, I suspect they would go on with their hopes intact. Who could have believed a vision of a future world that did not include their happiness and the beauty and health of their child?
I can’t imagine the world without Robin—or rather, I can well imagine the world without him, since he is not here and will never be here, but I cannot imagine a world that never held him, heard his silver laugh, beheld his pickerel smile.