King of the Sky

I stood, that day, before the deep closet in the front hall, taking off my coat. The small domestic view gave me modest satisfaction: an orderly row of neat shoulders, our various selves. There was Gilbert’s sleek and dressy herringbone tweed, his grimy tan trenchcoat, my velvet-collared Chesterfield. No bright colors, nothing exciting, but everything was well made, clean, looked-after. Among the others I hung my everyday self, the dull green loden coat that I wear all winter—to the supermarket, to the small local museum where I volunteer three days a week, and on the twice-daily trips I make from Gramercy Park, where we live, to Jock’s school, four blocks south.

“Come on, Jocko, take off your things,” I said, turning back to the hall.

Jock, who is nine, didn’t answer. He was in the middle of something private. His red boots still on, his jacket flung open down the front, he was kneeling next to a needlepoint-covered chair and aiming his gun-shaped hand at something in the distance. His eyes were focused, not on our meekly flowered wallpaper, but on a muddy battleground somewhere. He was talking urgently under his breath, and between the bursts of hissed and whispered words were periodic explosion noises.

In third grade, boys’ fantasies are almost entirely violent. Mayhem and death lie at their cores, and all require the powerful and satisfying sound of an explosion. This noise is something all boys—and few girls—can do properly. It begins at the moment of detonation: the cheeks balloon slightly, and a deep gargle at the back of the throat produces a muted rumble. The lips part slightly to allow the sound loose into the world, and the vibrating root of the tongue and the arched roof of the palate produce a series of slow reverberations. The echoes continue deep in the throat, distant and sinister. Their majestic pace, their diminishing volume, their final lapsing into an elegiac silence, all suggest the end of everything. Nine-year-old boys need to suggest—particularly to their mothers—their dangerous capacity to end everything.

I knelt on the rug next to Jock’s small, supple body. Ignoring me, he leaned on the chair seat and sighted along his extended finger, one eye closed for accuracy. I faced the pale clear skin of his cheek, the faint purple delta of veins at his temple, the fragile translucent whorl of his ear. Jock has Gilbert’s high forehead and pointed chin, and his own silky gold-brown hair, which lies flat and fine against his skull.

I began easing his boots off. Jock allowed this, stretching out each leg in turn for me to grasp, but he continued to ignore me and what I was doing. It is as though the least hint of connection or cooperation with this large domestic female would destroy the secret, other, real life that Jock has so carefully created. I don’t insist on recognition. I don’t care. As long as Jock allows our worlds to function peaceably side by side, and occasionally to interlock, I don’t complain. I have other parts to my life besides the part that contains him—why shouldn’t Jock? And for him, it is a desperate matter, his independence.

When our things were off we got back on the elevator. We were going to the ninth floor, to visit Willie, who is one of Jock’s best friends, and Willie’s mother, Margaret, who is one of mine. We all live in an old building on the north side of Gramercy Park. It’s a quiet neighborhood; the avenue stops there, and there’s not much traffic. The park itself is small and elegant, and merely the sight of it—always a pastoral surprise among all that urban geometry—seems to slow the tempo. It’s a peaceful, old-fashioned place, and our building is peaceful and old-fashioned as well. Our doormen are hushed and attentive, the lobby and halls are clean and well-ordered. It’s safe, and we don’t lock in the daytime. On nine I pushed open our friends’ heavy front door and called out hello.

“Come in,” Margaret called back. “We’re in the kitchen.”

Jock set off at a run. Margaret’s apartment is bigger than ours, a duplex, with a terrace over the park outside the living room. Margaret has a great eye and has wonderful things; I ambled slowly down the long, book-lined hall, through the big square dining room with its modern mahogany table. I was admiring, as I always do, her style: the enigmatic nineteenth-century paintings, the complicated Oriental patterns underfoot. Margaret thinks of things that would never occur to me: she’d found a sculptor who worked in iron and commissioned him to make wonderful ornamental bars for the windows. The new ones were just being installed, and I could see fanciful baroque designs across every view.

In the big white kitchen Margaret was sitting on the tiled floor with Willie, wrestling with one of his boots. Margaret is tallish, long-boned, long-waisted, precise in her movements. Her hair is glossy blond and perfectly straight. She wears it blunt-cut, just below her jawline, and parted exactly in the middle. A small tortoise-shell barrette on either side holds it neatly in place. Margaret works nearly full-time as a lobbyist for an environmental group, and she was still dressed for the office. She was in a dark green long-sleeved buttoned-up blouse and black pants: very elegant. Margaret always looks elegant, in a quiet way. It’s all in the details: black suede shoes, a high silk collar, a dull gold chain. Margaret likes details, and she’s good at them. I’m told she’s brilliant at work; lobbying means taking charge, planning strategy, changing people’s minds. She’s assertive and effective: I admire her for that; they’re things I’m not.

Willie is Margaret’s only child; she always said she couldn’t manage with any more. He looks just like her, with the same pale skin, the narrow, brilliant blue eyes, and the sleek cap of blond hair. Temperamentally, however, they are fiercely opposed: Margaret demands order, Willie chaos.

Willie was lying on his side, propped up on one elbow. He was using his hand as a fighter plane and making jet-engine noises. Jock ran over to him with a nine-year-old’s eccentric gait, haphazard and lurching. As he reached Willie, Jock knelt and skidded to a stop on his knees, his hands on his thighs. Willie gave him a sidelong glance and went on with the air war. Neither spoke.

“Hi, Margaret,” I said. “Hi, Willie.”

Willie ignored me, his puffed-out cheeks full of sound.

I would have ignored his ignoring, but at once Margaret said, “Willie, say hello to Mrs. Jamieson.”

Willie did not look at her. He made more powerful jet-engine noises and set his plane on a dangerous course past his shoulder.

“Willie,” Margaret said again. Willie ignored her. His eyes were fixed on his hand: this was aerodynamically flattened, and his fingers were split into wings. His engines revved, reaching a higher and higher whine.

“Willie,” Margaret said ominously.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, wishing I hadn’t said hello to Willie in the first place. But now Margaret ignored me.

“Willie!” Margaret said again, her voice peremptory. Willie heard in it the end of the negotiating period. He looked up at me for a split second.

“Hi,” he said, not quite insolent, his eyes flicking off my face at once. His voice returned to combustion engines.

“Hello, Mrs. Jamieson,” Margaret said.

“Mrs. Jamieson,” Willie added airily to his flying hand.

Margaret shook her head, her lips tight. She looked at me grimly. “We’ve been having a wonderful time today. We’re in such a good mood,” she said.

Margaret’s views about boys are different from mine. Willie’s resistance drives her crazy. Of course, Willie’s resistance might drive me crazy, too. There’s something manic about Willie, something locked and frantic and driven. He lunges toward crazy, and then so does Margaret. They goad each other on. The more one insists, the more resistant the other turns, and though their goals are different, their methods are the same. They seem sometimes like two halves of the same fierce and indomitable personality, trapped in the same skin, battling for control.

I always thought it was just a phase. I think people are better parents at some ages than at others. I’m probably at my best right now, with a nine-year-old. Though I adore him, though I know he adores me, with Jock I can sleepwalk through my days, each of us in our own world. When Jock is a teenager, and I have to pay attention and get into the real issues, I’ll probably be terrible. But I always thought that when Willie became an adolescent, Margaret would come into her own. Once she was freer to work, once she could return to her own world, she’d encourage Willie to inhabit his. She’d admire his independence, she’d support his originality. She’d pull back and he’d relax. That’s what I thought. All this conflict seemed temporary; they would just have to live through it.

Now Margaret yanked at Willie’s second boot. Willie, loose-limbed, uninvolved, came along with his foot, and was pulled smoothly toward her on his back. Strands of his sleek pale hair lifted magically from his head, as though he were freefalling through space. Jock had joined him on the floor, and at Willie’s involuntary slither they both began to laugh, the low irresistible belly laugh of the supine. It made me laugh too, that loose, jellyish gurgle, but Margaret didn’t even smile. She ignored them, sliding her hand inside the boot and finally worming out the foot. Her face was dark and her mouth set, as though the resistance of the boot, the tactile cling between rubber and leather, was Willie’s fault, part of his stubbornness.

She pulled the boot off at last and shook her head. “God!” she said, and put the boots side by side next to the wall. She stood up, wiped her hands on her black pants, and smiled at me. “Okay,” she said briskly, and moved over to the big gas range.

“It’s all airplanes here this week, we’re all pilots. Willie’s King of the Sky,” Margaret said, turning on the flame beneath the kettle. “I don’t know why. Before that we had police shootouts and drug runners, but suddenly it’s all airplanes. Do you have airplanes, or is it only us?”

“We’re a mix,” I said. “We have some comic book heroes, airplanes, and a lot of space ships.”

“I’m glad we’re not Exterminators anymore, anyway,” said Margaret.

“Terminator,” Willie said loudly, from flat on his back, still not looking at her. “Terminator.”

“Terminator,” said Margaret. She looked at me and quoted wryly from an imaginary report. “Mrs. Welch can’t seem to keep track of her son’s interests. She belittles him by forgetting the names of his favorite toys.”

“What a name, anyway, Terminator.” I said. “Why don’t they just come right out and name them Death, or Hatred?”

“The kids would love it,” said Margaret. “They’d all want one.”

She fixed tea for us, and soup and crackers for the boys, and we all sat at the butcher-block table. The boys were on stools across from each other. They were involved in something, staring intently and mirthfully into each other’s eyes as they ate. Pasita, Margaret’s Colombian housekeeper, was doing the laundry. We could hear the steady lunging drone of the washing machine, and the faster, ringing sound of the drier. Pasita sat behind us at the ironing board, her arm moving smoothly back and forth over the clean cotton. Next to her was a pile of ironed clothes, white and crisp. Outside it was cold and windy, and the bare-limbed park trees showed light dustings of snow, but in there the air was steamy and warm. It felt entirely safe.

I grew up in New York, on East Seventieth Street. When I was little, in the afternoons, it seemed that all of Park Avenue was full of children walking home from school. The girls walked with their mothers, their hair in messy braids, their socks drooping around their ankles. The little boys, noisy, daring, walked without parents, dressed in blue blazers, carrying knapsacks. The doormen kept a watchful eye on them. The doormen had authority and would call out sternly to a group of rowdy boys, “That’s enough, now! Settle down,” as they passed noisily by on the sidewalk. And the boys eyed the doormen and did not answer. They did, for the moment, settle down. They knew that they were part of a neighborhood, that their parents had friends in those buildings, that they were part of a watchful, strict, benevolent network that commanded and protected its children.

But things have changed, though doormen still call out to rowdy boys, on upper Park Avenue and here in Gramercy Park. The world outside that network is more threatening now, and our children are at risk in a way I was not.

When I was little, accidents were the gravest danger to children. There was, at that time, a tacit agreement among grownups that children were to be cherished. Strangers risked their lives to save other people’s children, pulling them heroically from burning houses, out of rivers and wells. That has changed. Now a stranger approaching a child is an enemy; children are targets. Now there are grown-ups and teenagers who harm children, deliberately. That fact is always, always, at the back of my mind, of all parents’ minds.

When Jock was five, he and I had a fight. He stood in the hall outside his room and yelled up at me, a small fiery figure in brown corduroy pants and a striped cotton jersey, his slipping-off socks dragging beyond his toes. He shouted that he hated me, and I shouted back that I didn’t care: these were loud, angry, pulse-pounding moments. I was outraged that he should challenge me, and I towered angrily over him. Compared with him I was immense, giantesque. My huge hands on my wide and powerful hips mimicked and ridiculed his own, his small hands set bravely on his narrow hips.

“I don’t care that you don’t care,” he finished shrilly, and whirled away from me. He stalked angrily into his room and slammed the door. He stamped his feet with each step, but in socks, on the carpet, his small feet made only faint thuds.

I went into the kitchen to calm down, and a few minutes later Jock appeared in the doorway. He was wearing shoes, and his yellow slicker. The peaked hood was pulled up over his head, casting a deep, glowing shadow over his face.

“I’m running away,” he announced.

I was no longer angry; I was ready to make up. I looked at him, this small defiant golden figure, and I was struck by how powerless he was. Children have control over nothing in their lives; everything is determined by us, who claim to have their best interests at heart. But who’s to say we do? We have our own best interests at heart, as always: self-esteem, authority, convenience. It seems so unfair to these tiny people, who stand up to us so bravely, who struggle so hard to be real, to make us know that they are real.

I said, “All right.”

Jock stood still, uncertain.

“Forever,” he warned.

He had thought I would argue. He watched me carefully, for a trick, for a second thought.

“If you want to run away, you can. I can’t stop you,” I said docilely. “But don’t forget you aren’t allowed to cross the street.”

“I know that,” he said crossly. He still watched me, and I smiled at him.

“I love you,” I added, and at that he regained his dignity and turned proudly away. He walked to the hall door. I stood in the doorway and waved as he got into the elevator, his arms crossed on his chest, his elbows cradled in his palms, the peaked hood shading his small brave face.

What I should have done was follow him; I know that now. I should have gone down right after him in the next elevator. I should have shadowed him around the block, stepping quickly into doorways like Sherlock Holmes when Jock turned around. But I had some notion of playing fair, and I thought I should not invade his adventure.

Instead, I went to the front window and leaned recklessly out, the sidewalk below drawing me dizzyingly toward it. It was early spring, and the trees in the park were just beginning to unfold the fresh green of their leaves. There weren’t many people on the block. No one else was in a slicker: it wasn’t raining. I could easily see the small yellow figure, the pointed hood—which he had always refused to wear before—addressed upward, to me. He was walking slowly, for someone with such a fierce purpose, and I wondered if the world now seemed larger, noisier, more arbitrary, than he had remembered it upstairs in our kitchen. I watched him until he reached the corner, and I saw him turn dutifully down the next side of the block. Then I waited, watching the clock, leaning out the window over and over, until finally I saw him again, coming from the other direction. He was at the far end of our block, making his steady way up the sidewalk toward the canopy over our door.

I was standing outside it when the elevator door opened to reveal him. His face, in the golden shadow, was meditative and pleased.

“I’m back,” he announced.

He was back, unharmed, and proud. That was what I had intended. But at what risk! I still wake up in the night with the nightmare vision of someone stepping toward him on the sidewalk, taking Jock’s trusting hand and leading him away. A stranger taking possession of this child who occupies my heart. Oh, God, I think at two o’clock in the morning, my limbs locked with tension and fear, how could I have let him go?

It is a puzzle to me, this memory, a riddle about freedom and safety, independence and responsibility. I don’t know the answer to it. When I zipped up Jock’s pale yellow slicker and sent him into the world, I meant him to know he could turn from me, that he was free. But I shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have taken that terrible risk. When I think of it now, it seems as though his survival was a miracle, an extraordinary and undeserved piece of luck. It seems dangerous, that luck, something I may have to pay for later.

Now Margaret asked, “Are you going to the parents’ meeting on Tuesday?”

“I think so,” I said. “But we have tickets for the opera that night. So if we go to the parents’ meeting, Gilbert will have to give the tickets to his secretary.”

“Who likes Wagner, I’m sure. So, what will you do?”

“Negotiate,” I said.

“Who will win?” asked Margaret.

“It depends,” I said. “I always say we should go to those meetings, but I don’t even know how important they are. You know you should go, but why? At the last parents’ meeting we listened to Tommy Grimshaw’s mother tell us how sorry she felt for herself, and how difficult her ex-husband is.”

Margaret smiled. “I know what you mean,” she said. “But I think you do it for solidarity. We’re all in this together. Anyway, I go because I want to know everything the teachers know. I want to know everything they think about my kid. I want to know what their theories are and what they suggest. I may not do what they suggest, but I want to know what it is.”

Actually, Margaret did need to know what the teachers thought about Willie: he was a discipline problem, and in constant trouble at school. But she was right, too, about solidarity: that’s what mothers owe each other—support, complicity, humor. I felt ashamed that I was willing to offer so little, that I was so lazy and insular. I was chastened by Margaret’s response, the fact that she was determined to do things properly, to take part, to be involved.

“You’re much more responsible than I am,” I said. “I still have the feeling that kids grow themselves up, that it just happens.”

“But you’re probably right,” said Margaret cheerfully. “They probably do. I’m wildly overresponsible. What can I say?”

“What does Frank think?”

“Who knows what Frank thinks? I’m so crazed about taking charge of everything that he backs off. Who knows what he’d be like as a single parent?”

“Wouldn’t it be awful if our husbands brought up our children?” And we laughed at the thought, full of shared horror.

“Nan Wallace was on a flight home from the Caribbean last winter. It was just after she and Steve had gotten married, and her kids were with their father. The plane started bumping, which Nan hates. It got worse and worse and finally Nan grabbed the stewardess and said, ‘Could you please tell the pilot to quiet this plane down? If it crashes, there are two wonderful children in New York who will have to grow up with their father.’”

We both laughed again, and I said, “It’s a chilling thought, isn’t it? But why? It’s not that the fathers don’t love them.”

“Oh, no. Of course they love them. It’s just that they don’t know anything. They don’t know anything,” said Margaret firmly. “They have no clue. They’d get everything wrong.”

“But wouldn’t they learn?” I pictured Gilbert widowed, bravely quelling his grief, earnestly attending school meetings, soberly walking Jock to school.

“Please,” said Margaret. “Frank knows every corporate law precedent going back to 1900, but he can barely remember what Willie’s name is. The two of them living alone together would be a disaster.”

Willie and Jock were in the middle of some sort of contest. Their heads were lowered over their bowls, and they were staring intently at each other, slurping from their soup spoons, and laughing raucously. Still staring fixedly at Jock, Willie said, “Daddy knows my name.”

Margaret looked at him, irritated. “Of course Daddy knows your name. That was a figure of speech.”

“Daddy knows my name,” Willie repeated, “and I want to live with him. I’d like to live alone with Daddy.” He put a huge spoonful of soup in his mouth. At once he lapsed into a high cackle. The soup, deliberately or accidentally, it was hard to tell, came spraying out in a wild fan, all over the table and over Jock. This was a declaration of mutiny, and Jock, of course, began laughing as well, rocking dangerously on his high stool and kicking his feet.

“Oh, Willie!” said Margaret. “Look what you’ve done.” She was really cross. She stalked to the sink and got the sponge. “Get down off your stool,” she snapped, “Willie, get down. Now.”

Willie still did not look at her. He got down off the stool and then put his hands on the table. He began little springing jumps, kicking himself off against the floor, as though he were going to heave himself up and sit in the middle of the soup-sprayed surface. He was flopping his head from side to side and laughing wildly. Jock was doing the same: hysteria had set in, the last refuge of the child-about-to-be-punished.

“Willie, look at me,” Margaret said, kneeling in front of him, the sponge in her hand, trying to mop the soup off his shirt. But Willie would not look at her. He kept flopping his head from side to side, and laughing.

“Jock,” I said, “stop laughing and come over here.” Jock shook his own head wildly, closing his eyes. “Jock,” I repeated, and without looking at me, still with his eyes shut, he slid off his stool. He began making his way over to me, holding out his hands like a blind man. He wobbled and staggered, deliberately missing my stool, while Willie screamed with laughter.

I grabbed Jock by the arm and pulled him over next to me. “Jock, stop,” I said sternly, but I wasn’t really cross.

Willie was still flopping his head back and forth, and he had closed his eyes too. Like Jock, he feigned blindness, groping with his hands in front of him. He touched Margaret’s face, roughly bumping her nose, and he screamed joyfully.

“Eeeyeww! What is it?” He went into high-pitched giggles. “What weird, squishy thing is this?” He bumped Margaret’s face again, rudely.

“Willie,” Margaret said, angrily. She grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. “Stop it. I mean it.”

Willie’s hand strayed away from her face, but he did not open his eyes, and he did not stop his laughter, shrill and false.

Margaret now took hold of his shoulders, and her voice rose. “Willie, stop it. Stop it right now.”

Willie’s eyes were still pinched shut. He shrugged his shoulders violently, away from his mother’s hands, and began jumping wildly up and down, his voice in a high whine. “Eeeyew,” he said, over and over, “eeeyeww, what is it? Is it human?”

By now Willie and Margaret were deep inside the thicket that they had created and shared: thorny, isolate, barbaric. Within it, each of them struggled fiercely to destroy the authority, the reality, of the other.

Margaret grabbed Willie’s shoulders again and shook him, hard. He went limp, wobbling bonelessly. I felt sorry for both of them, both so angry, now so committed to their struggle. But Willie was being so awful, so wild, so arrogant, so contemptuous, that part of me felt just like Margaret. There was a part of me that felt mean, tyrannical, swollen. Part of me wanted that child subdued, wanted him shaken until his teeth chattered, until his will was broken and he stopped his derisive whine. I knew the feeling, all parents do, of the rage that threatens sanity. I knew why there was child abuse. We’ve all come close.

“Willie, listen to me,” Margaret said, talking through her teeth. “Listen to me. If you don’t stop this, right now, this minute, you are spending the rest of the afternoon in your room. Alone. Jock will have to go home. Now stop it!”

There it was, the big threat. I try not to use it, because Jock always rises to the challenge. And following through on it is always inconvenient. Now we all waited, suspensefully: everyone’s afternoon hung in the balance, Jock’s and mine and Margaret’s, to say nothing of Willie’s. But Willie never hesitated.

He yanked himself away from Margaret again and began springing up and down into the air, crouching, and then shooting up into the air. His eyes were still screwed shut, and over and over he made violent explosion noises. He was a rocket, a cannonball, a space ship, a bullet, anything but a submissive child.

“All right,” said Margaret, furious, “all right. Is this what you want?” But she didn’t move. “Is this what you’re trying to do? Stop it, Willie, I mean it,” she said.

He bounced up, landed, crouched, and launched himself again, unimpeded.

Margaret stood up now and shook her head. It was as though nothing had happened, no wildness, no threat, no feeble retreat. She cleaned the soup off the table and sat down again at the table, ignoring the boys.

“Honestly,” she said to me, “it’s like having lunch in the lion house.”

Jock watched, interested: this is not what would have happened at our house. And I watched, unhappy: Margaret’s strategy baffles me. It seems that if you don’t follow through, there’s no point in making threats at all. It seems to me you’re just teaching a child that there’s no risk to rebelling. But I said nothing to Margaret. No matter what she says about all of us being in this together, I know that you never tell another mother what to do. And besides, how do I know I’m right? Why is my instinct better than hers? What about letting Jock go off on his own, at five years old, in New York City? What kind of sage and responsible act was that? No, we all make our own mistakes; we all act crazily, indefensibly. We are saved by time passing and by miracles, not by the interference of our friends.

But Willie was not to be denied a climax. Behind Margaret, in a dazzling throwaway gesture, he upset his bowl, sending heavy split pea soup in a great floating wave onto Margaret’s back, soaking her elegant silk blouse.

“All right!” she shouted. “All right, Willie! That is enough! You come here with me.” This time she took Willie’s arm and yanked him along behind her, out of the kitchen. Again, Willie relaxed all his limbs and let himself be dragged, limp, letting gravity declare his reluctance.

When they were gone, Jock and I looked solemnly at each other.

“Poor Willie,” I said. “He doesn’t seem very happy.”

Jock shook his head, but he would not speak to me, he would not take my side against his friend. He sat silent and mournful, taking small spoonfuls of his soup, his head down. I drank my tea. When Margaret came back, she was brisk and glowing, her cheeks pink with fury. She had changed her shirt and put on a thin cashmere sweater. I wondered if you could ever get split pea soup out of silk.

“Sorry,” she said, sitting down again. “I’m sorry, Jock, but Willie forgot his manners and he forgot the rules. He’s going to stay by himself for a while and think about them.”

“When can Willie come out?” Jock asked. He seemed very small and quiet. It was now hard to imagine him laughing raucously, kicking his legs under the table.

“Willie has to stay in his room until his father comes home,” Margaret said brutally. She picked up her mug of tea in both hands and brought it to her mouth. It concealed her face except for her eyes, which were blazing. She looked wild, distraught, and I thought she was close to tears.

Jock’s face fell. His afternoon was emptied of color, and he played dejectedly with the cracker on his plate. He crumbled it messily, rubbing at its soft pale crispness until it collapsed in bits. I wanted to comfort both of them, but I could think of nothing to say to Margaret.

Finally I said, “Well, Jocko, you and I will go to the park, if you like, or we can go home and I’ll play a game with you. Whatever game you like.” He glanced up at me, weighing this offer soberly, though we both knew it didn’t make up for his afternoon with Willie.

I waited before I moved, but Margaret didn’t look at me, or answer, so I thought she was letting me know that she didn’t want to talk about whatever she was feeling.

“I think we’ll get going,” I said to her. “Sorry this happened, but don’t worry about it. I’m sure we played a part in it; it wasn’t all Willie.” I wanted to make her feel less isolated, less frantic, but she shook her head.

“Oh, don’t you worry about it,” she said, walking us to the front door. “It wasn’t Jock’s fault. Willie has to learn what the rules are, that’s all.” Her face was stiff now, her head was up, and she had her hands deep in the pockets of her trim black pants. She looked very cool, very much in charge.

“Well, don’t let it get you down. God knows, it happens all the time,” I said, shaking my head slightly, as though Jock spent all his daytime hours shut in his room. But Margaret looked politely uncomprehending, as though she didn’t know exactly what I was talking about. I couldn’t think of any other way to reach her, and it seemed clear that she didn’t want to be reached. So we left her alone, in her apartment, with Willie on the other side of a grimly closed door.

I should have stayed with her, I see that now. She had said, We’re all in this together. What support was I giving her by leaving her alone, by letting her pretend that everything was all right?

What happened was that Willie decided to escape. The new window bars were being installed that week, and in Willie’s room the old ones had been taken out and the new ones set in place. They were only set there, they hadn’t yet been bolted into the window frames, but only the sculptor knew this. The bars looked solid, but as it turned out, a bold nine-year-old could dislodge them.

Willie opened his window wide. It was cold outside—it was December—and when he opened the window he must have paused at the damp winter wind that swept into his room. Like Jock, he bundled up dutifully before he set out, as his mother would have asked. He got a sweater from his bureau and put it on by himself, backwards, the label under his chin. His room overlooked the terrace, and when he climbed out onto his windowsill, the terrace must have looked inviting. It was diagonally beneath him, not directly below, but on the way there were window sills, ledges, cornices, safe things to grip. The climb would have looked dangerous but feasible to Willie, and it was both. There were places he could cling and balance as he clambered down and sideways through the singing air, the wind holding him against the building, until he had sidled far enough over to drop the last few feet onto the terrace.

This is the part that is hard to think about. The French doors to the living room were locked. Willie stayed on the terrace, maybe shivering, maybe hoping and not hoping to see his mother. She passed the living room several times that afternoon, but she heard nothing, she saw nothing. She tries to remember, now, if she might have heard something. If he had called, if he had knocked, would she have heard? But she heard nothing. Perhaps, when she passed, he was there. Perhaps when he saw her he hid, sobered by his climb, fearful at last of her rage. Perhaps he had been sobered by what he had done: going out into the real world, he had felt himself flattened against the cold brick side of the building, he had felt the terrible singing call of the drop, the rush of the sidewalk, nine stories down. Perhaps, after this, he had lost his nerve; perhaps the thought of facing her rage as well was too much for him. But he was there on the terrace for a while. He left a plastic superhero there, balanced on the sill outside the French door, waiting for it to open. He didn’t knock on the door, he didn’t shout out loudly for his mother to let him in. He made no demands. For some period of time he stayed alone out there, in the wind, his sweater on backwards. Maybe he played for a while with the superhero, under the lowering December sky. But it’s hard to imagine him playing, it’s hard to imagine him, by then, as anything but subdued.

At some point Willie decided to climb back up. He was trying to undo his mistake, to be good. He was trying to put himself back where Margaret wanted to find him; he had thought better of his escape. When Margaret finally knocked at his door, calm, her heart no longer closed against him, her rage no longer in charge, Willie wanted to be sitting in his room, the window shut, the sweater off.

He clambered first up onto the broad parapet. There he stood, his sneakered feet tiptoed and teetering as he stretched for the first window ledge. But climbing up is very different from climbing down, and this time the ledge was slightly too high, slightly too far, for his grip to hold his weight.

We are not in this together. The things that separate us are terrible and irreversible. What lies now between me and Margaret will lie there forever, a chasm nine stories deep.

These things should not happen. With luck, any luck at all, things would have gone differently. Margaret would have seen him, the terrace doors would have been unlocked, the window ledge would have been closer. And neither Margaret nor Willie ever wanted to be in that thicket of hostility. They love each other, mothers, children, no matter what they say, what they do. That should count. And repentance is meant to save.

Most often there are miracles; most children are saved. When a miracle doesn’t happen, when you hear that a child is lost, the terrible sound of it echoes within your mind, a series of slow reverberations. They continue, deep inside you, distant and sinister. You feel terror, the vertiginous pull downward, the drop that you escaped for no reason. And you hold your own child close to you, close, no matter how he struggles.