HANDICAPPED

Mother calls me twice a year, once before Thanksgiving and once before Easter.

“Hello, James? It’s your mother.” This was the before-Easter call. She is not, of course, my mother, but I am used to the word: it’s what I have called her since I was five.

“Hello, Mother,” I said.

“How are you, dear, and Cynthia?” she asked. This is form.

“We’re fine; how are you and Dad?”

“We’re just fine. Though I’m a little worried about your father. He’s been a little short of breath lately.”

I don’t know my father very well, so I ask about him as though he were a relative of hers, as though my primary concern is her anxiety. How long has this been going on, I asked, has he seen a doctor, what does the doctor say?

“About a month, I think. He first mentioned it to me in the beginning of February. A kind of tightness, he said, a compression in his chest. When he mentioned it a second time I took him right away to the doctor. Our nice Dr. McCormack thought we should see a specialist.”

“And what did the specialist say?”

“They told your father to eat more fresh vegetables and less salt, and not to run upstairs two steps at a time.” Mother gives a little bark of laughter. She talks quickly and intensely; she is an energetic woman.

“What does Daddy say?” My father never runs anywhere. His exercise is golf.

“He’s offended. He says he’s not a handicapped person, and he won’t be treated like one. He says he doesn’t want me putting in ramps all over the house!” She waited for me to laugh, which I did. By making my father sound crusty and independent, Mother made herself sound twinkly, softhearted, and ineffectual.

“Well, Mother, it sounds as though you’ve done everything that could be done. Keep me posted, though.”

She ignored the last. “I hope I have,” she says, “I hope I have.” She turned brisker. “Now: Easter. I’m expecting you at quarter to one, is that all right? We’ll have the egg hunt before lunch, and we’ll sit down at one-fifteen.”

At Thanksgiving my stepbrothers come, John and Hugh, and my stepsister, Angela, and their spouses and children. Usually some of them turn up at Easter, but this year it was just Cynthia, me, and our two children. My father and Mother still live in the big stone house in Greenwich where I grew up, though they have been talking, recently, about selling the main house and moving into the gate house. John, Hugh, and Angela are against this, but it wouldn’t bother me at all. Stone houses are always cold. Step inside that big, square front hall, even in the summer, and the chill enters right into you.

My daughters, Kate and Annie, call the house a castle. It does look like one: high, slate-roofed, with a round turret at one end, and the huge topiary flanking the driveway. They think it’s like the castle in Cinderella, and in a way it is. They wish we went there more often, but we go only twice a year, though it’s only half an hour from where we live.

My mother left my father and me when I was five years old. I don’t remember her leaving, but I remember first arriving at the stone house.

My father stopped the car in the portico and we got out, crunching loudly on the gravel. The house seemed very large and gloomy, and as we walked into the cold front hall it felt like a cave. There were no rugs in it yet, and it was dark. I looked around, and the woman my father had married leaned over to unbutton my coat for me.

I stood still and looked straight up over my head, at the plaster ceiling with its dim complicated patterns. For some reason this frightened me: I had never seen a ceiling with designs on it. Walls had decorations on them, ceilings were plain. I felt disoriented. With my head tilted back, staring up at the patterns, I felt as though the floor might tip up at any minute, the world might be entirely dislocated.

“Now, James,” said the woman. She had knelt down in front of me, and I could smell her—her skin, the faint sharpness of her breath, her strange perfume. I could see the separate eyelashes, coming out of reddish openings, I could see the tiny duct in the inner corner of her eye, the taut, polished skin on her nose. She was smiling, and seemed to have too many teeth.

“James, dear, you know you have come to live here with us, now. You are going to stay here in this house, with your father and me, and John and Hugh and Angela. From now on you are only going to see your mother for a month, each summer. I am going to be your real mother now, so I want you to call me Mother. You are to call her Aunt Emily.”

She was kneeling in front of me, and had both her hands on the lapels of my coat; my small chest was rising and falling beneath her palms. I was five years old. I gazed at her. I had been told about the visit to my mother, one month a year. I didn’t understand it; it didn’t seem possible to me. I didn’t think in terms of months or years, only in terms of days. But each day passed and she was not in it. I could see that everything would be strange from now on.

I looked at my father. His back was to me and he was hanging up his coat. I waited to see if he would turn and say something about this, but he didn’t. When he had put his coat away he walked away from both of us—me and this strange, too close woman who had fixed me with her eyes, her hands gripping my coat. When he had gone into the living room, out of earshot, she spoke again.

“I want you to say it, James,” she said, not releasing my coat. “Call me ‘Mother.’”

I waited, still, but my father didn’t come back, and my mother had somehow been taken out of my life. I seemed to have no choice. I answered her. “Mother,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said, and she smiled into my face. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, beneath her big hands.

On the drive over, at Easter, Kate and Annie were full of excitement. They were dressed up in freshly ironed, puffy-skirted Easter dresses, with those flat-soled shiny black shoes, and flimsy, short white socks. Their clean, silky hair was flyaway, and Cynthia took out her hairbrush just before we turned into the driveway.

“Now remember,” Cynthia said, smoothing Annie’s head, “remember that when you shake hands hello, you look people straight in the eye. And you can give Grandfather and Grandmother a kiss if you like. And remember to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ and not to interrupt when grownups are having a conversation.” The girls’ faces turned up to her like flowers, absorbed, as though she were teaching them a new language.

When we arrived, Mother came out into the big dark hall, her heels clicking on the stone flags, silent on the heavy carpets. Mother is a small, neat woman, with wiry, lusterless blond hair, a short, straight nose and faded blue eyes. She is slightly stooped, at sixty-eight, but trim. She was wearing two beige cashmere sweaters, one on top of the other, the way women do, and gold earrings and her pearls.

“Hello, dears!” she said.

“Hello, Mother.” I leaned over and she gave me a strong little hug and an air kiss right next to my cheek. She has been kissing me like that for thirty-five years.

“Hello, Cynthia, dear!” She gave Cynthia the same. Kate and Annie waited, suddenly bashful in their fancy clothes, trying to remember, exactly, what it was they were meant to do.

“And hello, Annie. Hello, Kate.” Mother leaned down and held out her hand. Annie, who is four, stepped forward, boldly seized Mother’s hand in both of hers, and kissed it. Cynthia and I both laughed, and then Cynthia said gently, “Not on her hand, sweetie. You can give Grandmother a kiss on her cheek.” Stricken, Annie looked up, paralyzed with shame.

Mother’s face did not change. She waited, bent over, hand outstretched, for Annie to recover. When Annie didn’t move, Mother blinked impatiently and turned to Kate.

“Hello, dear,” Mother said to Kate.

Annie’s eyes began to fill, and Cynthia held out her hand. Annie took it and buried her face in Cynthia’s skirt, mortified. Kate stepped forward and took Mother’s hand politely, shook it, and reached up to give Mother a soft little kiss on the cheek.

“Why thank you, Kate,” Mother said. “How nice. Now let’s go in and see your grandfather.” With Kate’s hand still in hers, Mother turned her back on Annie, who gave a huge sob against Cynthia’s thigh. Cynthia picked Annie up and began to whisper in her ear.

My father was sitting in the living room, his drink on the table beside him. The living room is formal, with French furniture, Belgian tapestries on the wall, and tall French windows giving out onto the lawn. The library, which is mostly English, is cozier. But it was Easter, so we were in the living room. My father didn’t stand, but he raised his hand in greeting.

“Well, well, well,” he said, smiling his party smile, swinging his foot gaily. “Look who’s here.”

“Here’s Kate,” said Mother, leading Kate over to him. Kate held Mother’s hand, docilely waiting to be presented. Her silky hair looked polished, and her short skirt hovered over her silvery-pink legs. The fresh bloom of her skin was astonishing against the faded colors and the heavy quiet of the room.

“Hello, Grandfather,” Kate said politely, holding out her hand. My father held out his hand. He is seventy-two, quite hale, with a long face and pink cheeks. He still has all his hair, though it is tame now, and slopes meekly against his skull. His eyebrows, in contrast, are vigorous: bristly and wild. He wears colorless glasses, tweed jackets, and pants in luscious shades. That day he was dressed up for Easter, in a blue blazer and sober gray flannel pants.

My father was leaning away from Kate, his spine set firmly against the chair’s back, his legs crossed at the knee. A kiss would have been difficult; he and Kate shook hands.

“Hello, Miss Kate,” he said, “Happy Easter.”

Mother turned around. “Where has Annie got to?” she asked. Cynthia had followed us, and was standing serenely behind us. Annie was in her arms, mostly recovered.

“Here’s Annie,” Cynthia said, and my father waved at her.

“Hello, Annie,” he said, “Happy Easter.”

Later there would be Easter baskets, but for now the children’s time was over. We sat down in the handsome French chairs, and the maid brought us drinks. The girls got their favorites—ginger ale with cherries in them—and they sipped these as they leaned against our legs, bored, languid, half-listening to our conversation.

“Well, John called last night,” Mother said.

“How is he?” I asked.

So we heard all about John and Ellen: whether or not John should have been offered a partnership, whether Ellen sends the children to play groups too early, whether their apartment in Chicago is big enough for them. They live very comfortably. After he married Mother, my father very generously arranged things so that my step-siblings have inherited his father’s money, at least the part that he controlled. My father explained to me once that he had done this in order to be fair. I was meant to inherit money from my mother’s side of the family, to make up for the loss to me. As it turned out, though, this never did happen; there was a problem with the trusts, and all of it went to my two sisters, who lived with my real mother.

When we had finished with John, my father cleared his throat and looked at me. “You know, that Alex Wagner gave me the most amazing stock to buy,” he said, giving his broad social smile and shaking his head in admiration. “The guy just doesn’t seem to make a false move.”

“Oh, really?” I said. “What did he give you?” I manage money myself.

“He called me up—and you know he rarely does that, it’s only if it’s really important—and told me about a company that he said I just shouldn’t miss. He really insisted that I buy it. So I did. Now, that was six months ago, and I’ll be doggoned if it hasn’t doubled.” My father smiled and shook his head, pleased and admiring, swinging his foot, in its polished loafer, up and down.

“What was the stock?” I asked again.

Now my father’s tone changed, his voice turned loud and professional. “A little company called Radco,” my father said, frowning faintly. “I doubt if you’d even have heard of it. Just a little company he got hold of, and—” he shook his head again—“I don’t know how he does it.” He brightened, and his voice turned social again. “But I’m glad he does—now your Mother and I are rich!” He laughed: a joke.

“Radco,” I said, “is the company I told you to buy a year ago.”

My father looked at his glass and took a drink from it. He gave a faint, residual shake of his head.

“I told you to buy that company a year ago,” I repeated. “It was at three when I told you about it.”

My father looked at Mother and smiled. “Couldn’t have been the same company.”

“There is only one company called Radco,” I said, “and that’s the one I told you to buy.”

My father, still looking at Mother, waved his hand. “You have so many different stocks, I can’t keep them all straight.” He looked at me and smiled engagingly, ingenuously. “And I’m never sure exactly what it is you do with them. I mean what it is exactly that you do.”

I went to Harvard Law, as my father did, and afterward I practiced as a lawyer, as he did, but only for four years. It has been nine years since I left the law to manage mutual funds, which I have done ever since. What it is, exactly, that I do, is manage people’s money, though not my father’s.

“I manage people’s money,” I said. “I’ve been doing it for nine years.”

My father smiled at Mother and shook his head. “Always chopping and changing, I can’t keep track.” He laughed.

“Nine years,” I said.

My father waved his hand in the air toward me. “Oh, all right,” he said dismissively. “Anyway,” he went on, changing his tone, and using the word as if it were an explanation, or a reply, or the start of a new conversation, “an-y-way …” My father smiled at Kate.

There was a pause, and then Mother turned to the girls. “Well, now, Kate and Annie. What about the Easter bunny? Shall we go and see if he’s been here? In the library? I have a feeling we should look in the library.”

At two o’clock the next morning I slowly discovered myself awake in the dark. There I found myself: lying beside Cynthia and staring at the black ceiling. There was a noise in the silence of our bedroom, and I thought that was what had woken me up. It was a while before I could identify it. The room was completely black, and it was soundless except for this slow, even, granite rumble. It seemed like something from inside the earth, distant, inexorable. I lay there for what seemed a long time listening and wondering before I recognized it: my teeth, grinding away on their own.

It seemed they were grinding to a slow rhythm of words, like wheels on a train. What-it-is-exactly-that-you-do, they were saying. It took a while for me to realize this, and as I did I discovered that my whole body was suffused with rage. My hands were clenched, my chin was raised and tight. For a long while I lay there, bathed in rage. I felt helpless in its grip. Driving home in the car I had angrily asked Cynthia, “Why does he do it? Why does he act like that?” I meant the question to be rhetorical, but she answered. “Your father can’t help it. Think of him as handicapped.”

I didn’t like hearing that. I snapped at Cynthia and the conversation had ended. I refused to think of my father that way. But lying in the dark in the middle of the night there is nothing else to do besides think, and I began to wonder why I was so determined not to see my father that way. Part of me wanted to lie there, clenched, for the rest of my life. But there was something else, some other emotion which I couldn’t identify, quite strong, that wanted me to move, to change. Part of my brain seemed quite disinterested, and floating free from the anxiety and anger that held my body. And though I didn’t want to risk any change, which was frightening, in the dark, alone, it seemed safe at least to explore these things, slowly, carefully. It was all private, I wouldn’t have to admit to anything, later.

What if I did think of my father that way—weak? And I could see that, for one thing, it would mean giving up my rage, and the disconnected part of my mind saw that I didn’t want to do that. There was something sweet and comforting about my rage: it was familiar, and it made me feel powerful and independent. And lying there, I was modestly impressed that I had all this energy at hand, this dark strength that had set my jaw into such deep and satisfying action.

I often asked myself why my father behaved the way he did toward me. Asking it made me angry and powerful, and the question itself made me important, into my father’s equal, an adversary. Now, to erase Cynthia’s response I answered it myself, to hear the answer I wanted. He does it because he hates me, was the answer, and it made me feel bold and triumphant. My rage was vindicated. I whispered it in the darkened room: “My father hates me.” I had never heard it said before, but it didn’t do what I had hoped. Hearing the spoken words made me feel somehow diminished, even ashamed. What I was saying seemed boastful and false, because I knew it wasn’t true. My father doesn’t hate me.

My real mother came once to the stone house. I was eight years old. My two younger sisters, who lived with my mother, spent a month in the summer with my father, just as I spent a month with my mother. The time my mother came was to bring my sisters for their month. They didn’t often come when I was there. Sometimes I was at camp, sometimes I was at my mother’s, but this time they came to the stone house while I was in it. And this one time, for some reason, it was my mother who brought them.

I don’t know who told me my mother was coming to the stone house—maybe Ilonia, the woman who looked after me. But I remember standing in the front hall, waiting for her. I remember staring out the leaded window beside the wide heavy front door, watching the empty driveway. I leaned against the glass and stared. I kept imagining my mother’s car appearing between the big, shaped yew trees. I told myself the car would be there when I counted to twenty, and I counted to twenty. I told myself the car would be there when I counted to fifty. I moved to the other side of the door, and I looked out of that window, my cheek pressed against the pane. I told myself the car would be there when I counted to twenty.

I heard Mother tiptap into the hall, and I shrank away from the window. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but as soon as I heard her I wished I had heard her earlier and had slid into the cloakroom, out of sight. But she had been silent on the big thick carpets, and now she had seen me. She came up behind me and put one hand on my shoulder.

“James,” she said.

“Mm,” I said.

“Answer me properly, James.”

“Yes, Mother.”

She knelt down in front of me so I could see her huge face.

“Now, James, your Aunt Emily is bringing your sisters here for their visit today, you know that.”

I nodded.

“But you know this isn’t your time to see your Aunt Emily.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know you see Aunt Emily in August, when you go to her house. This is just an accident, her coming here with your sisters.” She waited. I was looking past the gold fuzz of her hair, out the small leaded windowpanes. I was thinking, if the car comes now, if it comes right now. “So I want you to go upstairs and wait for your sisters up there. You’ll see them when they come. But it’s not your time to see your Aunt Emily.”

I looked back at Mother. Her eyes were right there, she was staring into me, waiting.

Here is how I had thought it would happen: I had thought I would stand next to the door until my mother’s car pulled up on the loud crackle of our driveway, her old green car in front of the stone house—not an accident, a miracle—and she would get out of the car, with her beautiful reddish hair loose on her shoulders, smiling when she saw me. I would have gone over to her, across the crunchy gravel, and she would have put her arms around me, all the way around me. She would have knelt, easily, as she always did, and put her arms around me, as she always did, so that my whole body was held against her whole body, and so that my head leaned against hers, and I could smell the warm smell of her hair.

“Do you understand, James?” Mother said, her eyes fixed on mine. “This is not your time to see her. I want you to go upstairs to your room, dear.” Then, since I didn’t move right away, she said warningly, “Right now.”

My bedroom was up on the third floor. My window looked out the back of the house, over the broad green lawn toward the sound. I sat in the chair beside my window and waited there. It was completely quiet up there. I felt a terrible tightness in my chest, a pain, and then a drawing-in noise startled me. I realized that I was crying.

Now, lying in the dark, I wondered where my father had been that day, as my beautiful mother with her reddish-brown hair approached the stone house. It had been she who had left my father, it was he who had been abandoned. I thought now of how that would be, how it would be if Cynthia left me: your connection with the rest of the world, your life, abruptly cut off. There you would be, alone on a small perilous piece of land, with swift dangerous currents rushing around you, deep water between you and the world—you would wonder if a rescue party, an explorer, might ever appear. You would have to make your life up, step by step, not knowing how to make it work. My father couldn’t manage on his own, he never had: he saw himself as helpless. And I wondered if he had been sitting in one of the upstairs rooms facing the sound, listening for the wheels on the gravel.

I thought of the three of us, my father, my stepmother, and I, arriving for the first time at the stone house, all of us anxious about this shared life. Me numb and passive, waiting only to see my real mother; my father dull and shamed, waiting to see if his new wife would leave him, too. Mother vibrating with tension, afraid she could not dispel the presence of the woman who had so unmanned both my father and me. I thought of my father standing in the front hall and hearing this new wife tell me to call her Mother. It is women who run our lives, and my father, like me, had had no choice. He had handed himself over to Mother like a prisoner, hoping she would be merciful. It was an unconditional surrender, and I was part of the settlement.

I lay in that silence, in that blackness. My own wife slept next to me, sharing the air I breathed; her generous body warmed mine. She had not left me. I was so grateful to my wife for not leaving me. I was so grateful to her for loving my children. I felt as though I would never be able to repay her for this. My whole body ached in gratitude, I wanted to wake her up and thank her.

It was by then the depths of the night, the very bottom. There was no hope of dawn, or distraction, anything but these thoughts. Finally I thought of what I could no longer avoid: of my father’s meek hair, the anxious lines around his mouth. His party smile, his nervous feet in their polished loafers. Seeing him in this way was terrible, and I could see—I must have known it all along, just as I had known that he did not hate me—that Cynthia had been right. My father was an accident victim, he radiated fear and damage. He had an invisible limp, he had that wary caution in his eyes that handicapped people have, the fear of a pain too intimate and well known ever to discuss. He had been like this always, all the time I had known him.

I didn’t want to know my father weak, I didn’t want to see him frightened. I didn’t want to hear about pains in his chest. I wasn’t ready, and it spoiled my rage. But I could feel my rage losing its comfort, it was going, somehow, dissolving in the silence and the dark, giving way to something else, the second feeling behind all this.

And I lay there in the dark, with that terrible knowledge, which was my love for my father, flooding through me, making me ache. And I wished that my father’s handicap had been physical. There are things you can do for physical handicaps. I could have been doing them for years: helping him down the stairs, lifting him from his chair. I could have put a spoon gently in his mouth, fed him. Eased the pains in his chest.