They rode a gypsy cab home from the stadium. The driver, a rumpled looking Irishman with bumblebee glasses, was listening to the ballgame on the radio. While the taxi inched along the West Side Highway, the outraged Yankees broadcasters took turns denouncing Arnold. You gotta wonder what’s going through a guy’s head, said one. Another, an old-time Hall of Famer, explained what his navy buddies would have done to a loser like that during World War II. The third broadcaster, a woman with a heavy Bronx accent, offered a slightly different take: He’s clearly a nutcase. I say give him medication or shock-therapy or something. The cabbie turned to Arnold and said: “Some wiseass wouldn’t stand during God Bless America. I say we turn guys like that over to Al Qaeda,” continued the cabbie. “If they like the terrorists so much, they can go live with them.” The driver then offered several thoughts on “camel-jockeys” and people who wiped their asses with their bare hands. Arnold threatened Ray with a stern glare, but the child wasn’t going to say anything. He looked frightened, a bit shell-shocked. Arnold patted the boy’s bare knee.
The Brinkmans lived in a Greenwich Village brownstone they’d purchased on the same day that President Ford had told New York City to drop dead. The property included a small side yard surrounded by a stockade fence. Raised beds for flowers and a lilac-canopied arbour gave their modest eighth of an acre the feel of an English vicarage. There was also a birdhouse occupied by a pair of downy woodpeckers and, for Judith, an elevated artist’s studio built into a linden tree. It was the perfect home for an urban botanist and a painter of cityscapes. “He chose me and he chose this building,” Judith often told guests, winking, “so he hasn’t had to make any good decisions since.” But the truth was that they’d evolved alongside the neighbourhood. Judith now taught art part-time at St. Gregory’s. He’d traded in academic botany for a rather lucrative plant nursery. They were just as bourgeois, Judith quipped, as any other civil servants or small businesspeople. She usually qualified this by adding in the West Village.
That afternoon—in the coming days they would call it the afternoon—Judith was waiting for them in the kitchen. She sat cradling a porcelain tea cup in both hands; blotches of crimson paint stained her fingers. For the kid, she’d set out a mug of chocolate milk and a platter of baked goods: Oreos, chocolate chip cookies, sugar wafers, but also miniature éclairs, napoleons, cream puffs. They had Ray for only two weeks, she’d argued. Weren’t they entitled to ruin him?
“How was the roller coaster?” asked Arnold.
Judith had gone to Coney Island to paint. She was quite acclaimed in a “below the radar screen” sort of way for her “reversal of role” canvases: armoured natives greeting loin-clothed European explorers, female sailors catcalling male pedestrians. Her latest project placed senior citizens on amusement park rides.
“How was the roller coaster?” Arnold asked again.
“It had its ups and downs.”
Arnold poured himself a glass of pink lemonade.
“You’re mighty quiet,” he said.
Judith rested her teacup on the table top. She looked from Arnold to Ray, then back to Arnold.
“Did something happen at the game?” she asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Dammit, Arnold. I knew it was you. As soon as I heard on the radio about what happened, I knew you were behind it.”
“You were listening to the game?”
“I was listening to the news.”
The kid looked up from his plate; he wore a moustache of milk. “I tried to get him to stand up, Aunt Judith.”
“I know you did, darling,” she said.
She crossed into the dining room and began setting the table for the Cards. “I know it’s a ridiculous ritual,” she said. “I understand that as well as anyone. But why just once couldn’t you go along with it anyway?”
Arnold helped her lay out the cutlery. “It’s about the principle.”
“Do you see me going around the city topless on principle?”
Arnold knew the situations weren’t analogous, but he also knew not to suggest that the situations weren’t analogous. “What about freedom of conscience?” demanded Arnold. “What if I were a Jehovah’s Witness?”
“But you’re not a Jehovah’s Witness.”
“That’s what they said in Nazi Germany, Judith. You know how that thing damn goes: First they came for the trade unionists….”
“Great. Now you’re comparing Yankee Stadium to Nazi Germany.”
“It felt like Nuremberg.”
“Good God, Arnold. What world do you live in? We were in Nuremberg. Remember? Even Nuremberg doesn’t feel like Nuremberg anymore.”
They faced each other, separated by the marble table. The shadow of the unlit chandelier swayed in the soft afternoon light. “Do you put the fork to the right of the plate or to the left of the plate?” asked Arnold.
“Left. Spoons on the right.”
He circled around the table, rearranging flatware. She adjusted the hyacinths and jonquils in the vase.
“Okay, maybe I didn’t need to stick out my tongue,” he said.
“Maybe not,” agreed Judith.
And then they were both laughing. The sort of mutual, tension-relieving laughter one can experience only after twenty-nine years of marriage. It took Arnold half a minute to regain his breath—and then he was laughing again.
“So much for your bourgeois husband,” he jibed.
“I can’t let you out of my sight,” said Judith. “Even for a second.”
“I wouldn’t want you to.”
He wrapped his hands around his wife’s delicate waist, drew her face to his. Three decades had gone by since she’d first knocked on the door of his greenhouse at Barnard—she’d wanted to borrow a carnivorous plant for an art project—and she still had the most stunning features he’d ever set eyes upon. Also the most inscrutable. Often, he still couldn’t tell whether she was pleased or upset.
Arnold rubbed her nose with the end of his. Laughter rapidly melted into longing.
“Control yourself, lover-boy,” she warned. “The kid….”
On cue, Ray entered the room, and asked: “What’s so funny?”
Arnold devoted the remainder of the afternoon to his flowers. He’d once feared he’d find an eighth of an acre confining, that maybe they should have chosen a larger plot in Queens or in the suburbs, but over the years he’d come to realize that an eighth of an acre was the maximum amount of soil one man could tend effectively—unless one resorted to artificial herbicides; that was unthinkable. But natural gardening meant daily weeding and pruning. Every morning, before he walked across the square to open the nursery, Arnold spent several hours on his knees with a spade. In most aspects of his life, the botanist was a gentle man—probably too gentle for the world of business. But in his own garden, the kid gloves came off. His neighbours might be content to decapitate their weeds, to let the offending stalks desiccate under the afternoon sun, but not Arnold. He dug up each trespasser by the roots, scooping liberally like a surgeon excising a tumour, and then hacked apart the condemned plant to shake free every last clod of pilfered soil. The scraps of betony and nutsedge and wild radish were carted off, trussed in biodegradable bags, and ultimately composted in a bin behind the tool shed. In the evenings, he did his trimming and separated his perennials. Since it was April, he also set aside at least an hour after work for breeding day lilies.
Everybody asked Arnold the same question: How can you spend all day growing plants for strangers and still want to work in a garden at home? But it was because all of the plants that he raised at the nursery were carted off to other people’s apartments, presumably to be starved of light or choked on tap water, that he savoured the chance to cultivate for himself. He frequently compared his experience to that of a celebrated chef cooking his own meals, but he actually felt more like an off-duty prostitute taking pleasure in a lover. In his own garden, Arnold might do as he wished. No need to raise hundreds of identical begonias and petunias and geraniums. Besides, he didn’t spend that much time at the nursery anymore. Ever since his books had started selling—first Please Do Eat the Day lilies, then The Flower Power Diet—most of his workday was consumed by lecturing, and writing his weekly horticulture column, and leading foliage-eating walking tours for the Department of Parks & Recreation. He was also finishing a manuscript on the role of plants in classic novels—or plants and fungi, to be precise, because he had given over a full chapter to the pivotal mushroom-picking scene in Anna Karenina—so his manager, Guillermo, more or less ran the nursery on his own. Guillermo was a flamboyantly gay Venezuelan in his sixties. He had two dozen employees to assist him.
When Arnold squatted down that afternoon to replant day lilies—carefully labelled stems he’d sorted out the previous summer—the sun had already dipped behind the jagged red wall of the opposite building. That four-story structure had once been an egg candling facility, but now it housed office space and a sex toy museum. A faded advertisement for Goldstein’s Packaged Meats still discoloured the brick. While the wall reduced Arnold’s daylight growing time by nearly an hour, it also shaded his plants on torrid summer afternoons. That kept the hydrangeas from wilting, the rhododendrons from shedding petals. Arnold worked carefully, but quickly. He was tamping down the earth around the final set of day lilies when Gilbert Card wandered through the kitchen door. The bearded immigration lawyer carried a highball garnished with a cocktail umbrella.
“You’re certainly earning your keep,” said Gilbert.
“Just thinking,” Arnold answered.
He’d actually been doing the opposite: actively not-thinking, working off steam. He kept replaying the afternoon’s events—altering his own behaviour every time. He didn’t regret remaining seated. Not for a moment. But he wished he’d done something more symbolic, more dignified, than sticking out his tongue. If he had prepared in advance, he would have brought along a political placard. Something like: “The Earth Is Full—Go Home” or “Ignore Our Forests and They Will Go Away.” But if grandmother had testicles, as the saying went, she’d be grandfather.
Gilbert settled onto the arm of a wrought-iron bench. “We heard you had quite an adventure this afternoon,” he said. The attorney spoke with a syrupy tidewater accent that made him sound folksy, despite his Ivy League credentials, and that had lulled the suspicions of many a credulous juror. Because he was a southerner, the direct descendent of slave-owning planters, people often assumed the litigator shared their own “down home” values. He didn’t. “What got into you?” asked Gilbert. “I’m supposed to be the radical one.”
Arnold dusted off his overalls. “I figured our lives were growing a bit too comfortable….”
“I hear you. Whenever I feel complacency setting in, I make a point of thumbing my nose at the entire country.”
“Get your facts straight, Mr. Big-Shot Attorney. I just stuck out my tongue. No noses involved.”
Arnold peeled off his heavy leather gloves. He rinsed his hands under the spigot and stepped behind a wooden divider to change out of his gardening clothes. Storing his overalls and boots in the tool shed had been one of the first concessions that Arnold had offered his bride in the spirit of domestic tranquillity: Judith went through the roof if he tracked up the carpets. “To tell you the truth, Gil,” said Arnold, “I was stunned. I thought the days of groupthink were gone with Joe McCarthy.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you for years,” answered Gilbert. “You delude yourself that you live in a free country because you never test the boundaries of that freedom.”
“Have I earned another lecture on open borders again?”
“I’m just saying….”
Judith completed his sentence from the top of the back stairs. “He’s just saying that it’s all about borders. That all the ills of the world are derived from immigration restrictions.” Judith grinned. “What’s that you said last time? ‘Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.’”
“I didn’t say it,” retorted Gilbert. “George Bernard Shaw said it.”
“Well I doubt he said it on an empty stomach,” said Judith. “You can tell us all about open borders over vichyssoise. And bring Johnny Appleseed with you.”
Bonnie and Gilbert Card were their closest friends. Judith and Bonnie had first met when they’d shared a hospital room during the blackout of 77. They later belonged to the same support group for young women who’d undergone hysterectomies. Perpetual childlessness permanently allied the Cards and the Brinkmans. As the other couples they knew were sucked, one-by-one, into that unrelenting world of pre-schools and play-dates—even most of the women from their support group acquired children through adoption and surrogates—they found solidarity in their ongoing independence. Bonnie, an eminent professor of bioethics, wrote extensively on the subject of childbearing. She opposed it. Adamantly. In fact, maybe as a personal coping mechanism, she’d made a name for herself by denouncing motherhood as immoral under present social conditions. Arnold was grateful for Bonnie’s views, as radical as they were, because he had no desire to raise offspring himself—and, if Judith harboured any latent regrets, her friend’s withering attacks on parenthood took the edge off.
Judith had opened the bay windows in the dining room and the breeze carried with it the sweet green scent of blossoming peonies. For supper, Judith had poached wild salmon on a signature bed of edible flowers: yucca petals, chive blossoms, violets. The wine was a cabernet handpicked by the blind Greek merchant on the corner.
“So where is your little terror?” asked Bonnie. “It isn’t bedtime, is it?”
She said the word “bedtime” with unmistakable condescension.
“He went to sleep an hour early,” answered Judith. “We bribed him.”
“I hope with something good,” offered Gilbert. “Like a nine year old girl.”
“Or another baseball game,” suggested Bonnie.
“I promised him a trip to the aquarium,” said Judith.
“I hear they have a flag there,” said Bonnie. “Maybe Arnold can set it on fire.”
“Okay, have your laughs. But the whole episode was pretty damn terrifying.”
“Do you mean you were afraid for your physical safety?” asked Bonnie.
“Yes, that too. But there was much more to it.”
Bonnie removed her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her long nose. “What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s something unnerving about armchair patriotism. If I’d been at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, it would have been different. And I probably would have stood up too—just to show respect. But what does standing up at a baseball game have to do with loving my country?”
“Here, here,” echoed Gilbert. “What’s that Chesterton one-liner? ‘My country, right or wrong’ is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”
“In Arnold’s case,” Judith interjected, “it was mostly drunk.”
Gilbert and Judith laughed. Arnold smiled too—although his mother, a settlement worker, had never touched even a drop of medicinal brandy. But his mother had been a temperamental woman—Judith said irrational—and she was more difficult as a teetotaller than most people are intoxicated.
“Let’s keep mothers out of this,” said Arnold.
“To keeping mothers out of this,” said Gilbert, raising his wine glass.
Bonnie’s expression remained hard and intense. She didn’t take her eyes off Arnold. “Well, do you love America?” she asked.
“What’s the supposed to mean?”
“It’s a pretty straight-forward question, Arnold. Do you love America?”
Quintessentially Bonnie Card. She had a knack for asking these sorts of questions: What was wrong with child pornography? Why was one-person one-vote a good way to organize society? How could meritocracy and inheritance co-exist simultaneously? Bonnie had nearly lost her university post several years earlier when she’d delivered a commencement speech at N.Y.U. in which she’d proposed mandatory infanticide legislation. She’d advocated a strict utilitarian standard that argued for drowning disabled babies before they experienced pain. She’d even compared parents of cystic fibrosis sufferers to child abusers. There had been protests, boycotts. But Bonnie had stuck to her guns. And she’d picked up supporters as well as detractors: The Hemlock Society had given her its public service medal; Jack Kevorkian had written to her from prison. But then the September 11th attacks occurred and the media had little room for baby-killing philosophers. The episode had done nothing to dampen Bonnie’s premise-rattling interrogations.
“I’m not going to answer that,” said Arnold.
Gilbert raised his glass. “The defendant pleads the Fifth.”
“It’s beside the point,” Arnold added.
“I don’t think so,” said Bonnie. “I think it is the point.”
“You’re badgering the witness, honey,” said Gilbert.
“You don’t love America,” Bonnie persisted. “You’re just afraid to admit it. They made you say the Pledge of Allegiance one too many times in elementary school and now you can’t see things clearly.” She forked an olive from the jar and carefully carved out the pit. “Can you honestly tell me you love your country, Arnold Brinkman?”
“I’m grateful for the privileges I have as an American,” said Arnold.
“That’s not the same thing,” she answered.
Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded—if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River—he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love.
“I like my country as much as the next man,” said Arnold.
“No offense, Arnold,” said Bonnie. “You wouldn’t know the next man if he bit you on the ass.”
Judith stood up. “That’s my prompt to serve the fish.”
“I’ll come with you,” offered Gilbert.
Card followed Arnold’s wife into the kitchen.
Arnold found himself suddenly alone with Bonnie. This always made him feel slightly nervous. It wasn’t that he didn’t both respect and trust Gilbert’s wife, but that he was never quite certain what she might say or do next. She possessed just the right irreverence to do a person serious damage.
Bonnie leaned forward. Too close. (She’d never learned to modulate personal space properly.) Although Gilbert’s wife didn’t smoke, Arnold suffered an irrational premonition that she was about to puff a cigarette into his eyes.
“Do you know what your problem is, Arnold?” asked Bonnie.
“I have friends who think too much.”
“You’re risk-averse. You create these wonderful opportunities for yourself, but then you don’t have the courage to follow through on them.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t have stuck out your tongue.”
“That’s water under the bridge,” answered Bonnie. “It’s what you do now that matters. You should call the newspapers and defend yourself. Announce that you don’t love America—that patriotism is a refuge for scoundrels and all that.”
“Talk truth to power,” said Arnold.
“Talk common sense,” said Bonnie. “But you won’t do that. I know you too well. You’ll offer some lukewarm apology, something about stress or nerves or whatnot, and you’ll go about your business.”
Gilbert entered carrying the platter of sizzling fish.
“You two still going at it?” he asked.
“I’m saying he should capitalize on his celebrity,” answered Bonnie. “He has a moral obligation to denounce the mob.”
“Celebrity,” scoffed Judy. She held a tureen of homemade couscous. “This will all blow over. In a couple of days, nobody will remember.”
“Do you think so?” asked Arnold.
“I hope so,” said Judy.
“Me too,” Arnold agreed. “I wasn’t destined to be remembered.”
“A toast,” proposed Gilbert. They all raised their wine glasses. “To not remembering.”
“Not remembering,” Judith chimed in. “The national pastime.”
And they drank.