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“It’s always the mother’s fault, ain’t it?” she said softly, collecting her coat. “That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don’t teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean. Don’t you believe that old guff. Don’t you let them saddle you with all that killing.”
Yet little by little, led kicking and screaming, I grasp the rationality of Thursday. Mark David Chapman now gets the fan mail that John Lennon can’t; Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” may have destroyed a dozen women’s chances for connubial happiness but still receives numerous offers of marriage in prison himself. In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.
He’s old enough to carry a conversation. And since he has imprisoned me in my life every bit as much as he’s imprisoned himself in his, we suffer an equal poverty of fresh subject matter.
“Those maps,” he said. “What about them,” I said. “Why’d you keep them on the walls?” It’s only because I refused to tear those spattered maps from the study for years, or to allow you to paint over them as you were so anxious to, that Kevin “remembers” the incident at all. He was, as you observed repeatedly at the time, awfully young. “I kept them up for my sanity,” I said. “I needed to see something you’d done to me, to reach out and touch it. To prove that your malice wasn’t all in my head.”
Now how about some Frisbee? We’ve just got time to work on that bank shot of yours before dinner.” “Sure, Dad!” I remember watching Kevin streak off to the closet to fetch the Frisbee and puzzling. Hands fisted, elbows flying, he looked for all the world like a regular, rambunctious kid, exhilarated at playing in the yard with his father. Except that it was too much like a regular kid; almost studied. Even that Sure, Dad! had a rehearsed, nyeh-nyeh ring to it that I couldn’t put my finger
“Eva, every boy pulls a few pigtails.” I spared you a number of accounts, because for me to report any of our son’s misbehavior seemed like telling on him. I ended up reflecting badly not on him but on myself. If I were his sister I could see it, but could a mother be a tattletale? Apparently.
That said, I feared what lay beneath. I feared that at bottom I hated my life and hated being a mother and even in moments hated being your wife, since you had done this to me, turned my days into an unending stream of shit and piss and cookies that Kevin didn’t even like.
Mind, I’m setting the table here, but hardly excusing what happened that July. I don’t expect you to be anything but horrified. I’m not even asking your forgiveness; it’s late for that. But I badly need your understanding.
He was clearly denying me satisfaction on purpose. He was determined that I should feel useless and unneeded.
My head bobbed dumbly up and down until I stole a quick glance at Kevin, who met my eyes with the clear, sparkling gaze of perfect complicity. I owed him one. He knew I owed him one. And I would owe him one for a very long time.
took me to Doctor Goldbutt.” He was good. He was very, very good; you may not appreciate how good. He was smooth—the story was ready. None of the details were inconsistent or gratuitous; he had spurned the extravagant fantasies with which most children his age would camouflage a spilled drink or broken mirror. He had learned what all skilled liars register if they’re ever to make a career of
Now Kevin and I did look at each other, just long enough to seal the pact. I had ransomed my soul to a six-year-old.
I was mostly disappointed that you didn’t ever covet the same quality time with your wife. There’s no purpose to talking around it. I was jealous. And I was lonely.
You can call it innocence or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: She assumed that everyone else was just like her.
and I have learned to think in terms of evidence.
“Choice of weapons,” he said at last, “is half the fight.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Woodham’s weak, flabby, unpopular. Fistfight’s low percentage. A doughboy’s got way better odds with a 30 millimeter. Smart call.” “Not that smart,” I said hotly. “He’s sixteen. That’s the cutoff in most states for being tried as an adult. They’ll throw away the key.” (Indeed, Luke Woodham would be given three life sentences, and 140 extra years for good measure.) “So?” said Kevin with a distant smile. “Guy’s life is already over. Had more fun while it lasted than most of us ever will. Good for him.”
He was bright but hated school; he had few friends, and the one we knew was smarmy; there were all those ambiguous incidents, from Violetta to let-us-call-her-Alice, that set off alarm bells at a volume only I seemed able to hear.
I was free to muse with the singsong of the playground, You’re gonna get in trouble. Because I’d been so exasperated! The unending string of misadventures that trailed in Kevin’s wake never seemed, as far as you were concerned, to have anything to do with him. Finally, a tattletale besides me—the police,
Okay. We didn’t get the scooter. In fact, we didn’t buy anything. Kevin made me so self-conscious that everything I considered seemed to damn me. I looked at the scarves and hats through his eyes and they suddenly seemed stupid or unnecessary. We had scarves. We had hats. Why bother.
want to talk about?” “This was your idea. I never said I wanted to talk about a fucking thing.” We squared off over my pigeon breast and red-currant confit, and I began to saw. Kevin had a way of turning pleasures into hard work.
could feel you internally beaming. Here was your teenager trotting out his archetypal teenagery toughness, behind which he hid his confused, conflicted feelings about his sister’s tragic accident. It was an act, Franklin, a candy-coated savagery for your consumption.
Why didn’t I simply walk out? Nothing stopped me from grabbing Celia while she still had one eye left and hightailing it back to Tribeca. I could have left you with your son and that horrible house, a matched set. After all, I had all the money.
their own. It’s absurd. No guns, and those two
Kids have a well-tuned radar to detect the difference between an adult who’s interested and an adult who’s keen to seem interested. All those times I stooped to Kevin after kindergarten and asked him what he did that day—even as a five-year-old he could tell that I didn’t care.
I do not pretend any remarkable insight into Kevin’s state of mind, the one foreign country into which I have been most reluctant to set foot.
“You don’t understand,” I said, adding the most difficult claim of fealty I’d ever made, “That’s my son.”
Yet when I picture his face through that back window now, I remember something else as well. He was searching. He was looking for something in my face. He looked for it very carefully and very hard, and then he leaned back a little in his seat. Whatever he’d been searching for, he hadn’t found it, and this, too, seemed to satisfy him in some way. He didn’t smile. But he might as well have.
“Don’t you feel sorry for me?” He shrugged. “Got out of this safe and sound, didn’t you? Not a scratch.” “Did I?” I added, “And why was that, anyway?” “When you’re putting on a show, you don’t shoot the audience,”
This is all I know. That on the 11th of April, 1983, unto me a son was born, and I felt nothing. Once again, the truth is always larger than what we make of it. As that infant squirmed on my breast, from which he shrank in such distaste, I spurned him in return—he may have been a fifteenth my size, but it seemed fair at the time. Since that moment we have fought one another with an unrelenting ferocity that I can almost admire.
