Authors: Richard Russo
B
EFORE GOING
to Ikey’s we drop Gabriel off at Berman Court. En route he tells Kayla how slow witted I was as a child, how I’d insisted that if you climbed
up
a ladder to the moon, you’d still be looking
up
at the earth when you got there. Naturally, Kayla took my side, making the same argument I’d made so many years ago that
up
was determined by gravity, not direction, but Gabriel was still having none of it, though he winked at me in the mirror to indicate how much fun he was having with all this.
“This is where you used to live when you were a boy,” Kayla says after I’ve helped Gabriel step out of the van and up the walk to the apartment house, and she’s pointing up to where our apartment was, as well as the one where Bobby and his family lived.
“Maybe you’ll be our family historian,” I joke, putting the van in gear and heading for Ikey’s.
Kayla, though, takes this possibility seriously. “Maybe,” she says. In case she isn’t a painter or an Olympic sprinter or any of the myriad possibilities we’ve discussed of late. Then, once we pull up in front, “Sarah’s here,” she says excitedly. “Mama, I mean,” she quickly corrects herself.
Referring to Sarah as Mama isn’t something we’ve particularly encouraged, since her real mother’s still alive and it’s possible, if unlikely, she’ll one day enter the picture again. But Kayla has a mind of her own and announced shortly after arriving in Thomaston that Sarah would henceforth be “Mama,” and she has been, except when things happen unexpectedly or just too fast for Kayla to handle.
Owen’s at the register, chatting with a couple of the guys from the Elite Coffee Club, which still gathers at Ikey’s in the morning, the sons and even grandsons of the original gang, most of them. This morning I mentioned there’d be an unveiling of a new work of art in the afternoon, and they all promised to be here, and a couple of them actually remembered. Sarah’s new piece, draped, has been hung just to the right of her old drawing of Ikey’s, a place of honor in the store.
“Kayla,” my son says when she skips around the counter to give him a kiss and a hug. “What’s shakin’, sugar?”
“I found the cave!” she tells him. “Mr. Mock says I don’t know up from down and neither does Lou-Lou, but he’s the one that’s confused, not us.” Owen chuckles and shoots me a glance. Kayla’s enthusiasm seldom allows for niceties of transition. We’ve been trying to get her to slow down by asking, “What belongs between those two sentences?” and offering various suggestions: “because,” “nevertheless,” “still,” “also.”
On the other side of the wall I hear the whirring vibration of my mother’s mechanical chair. That she, too, is to be present for the unveiling testifies to how historic an event this has become. I have to admit I’m puzzled, because Sarah usually refuses any hint of fanfare about her work, which means that this has to be more about us than the object itself. Kayla, who’s already seen what lies under the drape, has been excited about showing me all day long and apparently feels she’s waited long enough. She hops up onto a stool and is about to do the unveiling herself until Owen says, “Hold on, sugar,” and loops his arm around her waist and gently lowers her back to the floor, her long legs churning in the air. “We’re supposed to wait for Mom and Grandma Tessa.”
But Kayla doesn’t want to wait, and she hops right back up on the stool, determined to uncover what’s hidden from view right this second. Again Owen prevents her, and this time her eyes flash with anger that’s real and bright as he sets her back down. We don’t see this often, though when Kayla’s overexcited or unexpectedly thwarted she can lose control. “Let me
go,
” she says to Owen, who’s now standing between her and the stool, and she tries again to dart around him.
“Hey,” he says, his expression serious now. “Who’s bigger, you or me?”
And for a moment it seems as if Kayla will push or strike him, anything it takes to remove this obstacle to her will. Since she’s decided what she wants to do before Sarah and my mother appear, nothing will make her happy but doing so, and time is running out. We hear the mechanical chair come to rest, and Kayla turns to me, her face a mask of rage. “
Tell
him!” she says.
“Kayla,” I say, and we stand in just this attitude until the bell rings over the front door, and this releases the spell. Kayla’s fury vanishes without a trace as my mother and Sarah step inside. I meet Sarah’s eye, and she takes in at a glance that we’ve just experienced what she and I refer to as a Kayla moment.
The girl wasn’t with us very long before we realized the dark recesses in her personality contained the glowing embers of some past experience, embers that under the right conditions could ignite into a conflagration, only to disappear again so completely that you’re not exactly sure what you just witnessed. At first these flare-ups seemed to happen when she hadn’t gotten her way, but that explanation doesn’t square with all the other times when her will is thwarted without consequence. Rather, the infrequent episodes seem to occur when for some reason Kayla decides she isn’t loved, or that someone else is loved more.
Whatever the cause, they have alarmed us sufficiently to discuss them with a social worker from Albany who specializes in children, and she alarmed us further by asking just how determined we were to proceed with Kayla’s legal adoption. “You don’t know what this child has suffered,” she said. “And you may never know the extent of the damage done.” Sarah doubts that Kayla has been sexually or otherwise physically abused, though there’s no doubt that the love she craved desperately has been withheld, until now. “People get broken,” the social worker concluded. “Sometimes they can be repaired, sometimes not. You might do everything right and this could still end badly.”
“How will it end if no one does anything?” Sarah asked. She wasn’t trying to be confrontational or to deny anything the woman had said, but I’d heard that determination in her voice before and knew what it meant. The social worker herself seemed to suspect, because she then turned to me. “What do you think, Mr. Lynch? Because I can tell you this much for a certainty. You and your wife had better be on the same page.”
What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His kindness and interest weren’t feigned, nor did they derive, I’m convinced, from any perceived sense of duty. His behavior was merely an extension of who he was. But here’s the thing about my father that I’ve come to understand only reluctantly and very recently. If he wasn’t the cause of what ailed his fellow man, neither was he the solution. He believed in “Do unto Others.” It was a good, indeed golden, rule to live by, and it never occurred to him that perhaps it wasn’t enough. “You ain’t gotta
love
people,” I remember him proclaiming to the Elite Coffee Club guys at Ikey’s back in the early days. Confused by mean-spirited behavior, he was forever explaining how little it cost to be polite, to be nice to people. Make them feel good when they’re down because maybe tomorrow you’ll be down. Such a small thing. Love, he seemed to understand, was a very big thing indeed, its cost enormous and maybe more than you could afford if you were spendthrift. Nobody expected
that
of you, any more than they expected you to hand out hundred-dollar bills on the street corner. And I remember my mother’s response when he repeated over dinner what he’d told the men at the store. “Really, Lou? Isn’t that exactly what we’re supposed to do? Love people? Isn’t that what the Bible says?”
So when the social worker asked if Sarah and I were in agreement about Kayla, I surprised myself by siding with my mother and saying we’re very much on the same page, that we were determined to love this child, that there’d be no half measures.
Which may be why my mother and I have been doing better of late. At first I thought maybe my stroke had softened her, because for the entire time that Sarah was gone she could barely contain her anger and disappointment at what I’d allowed to happen. Perhaps the stroke raised in her mind the possibility that she might, despite her advanced age, outlive me. But more likely her softening toward me reflects my own softening toward her. I go over and give her a hug now, and she clings a beat longer than she used to, and when we release each other she looks me over almost fearfully, as if wanting to make sure I’m okay. I give her a smile to suggest that I am, realizing too late that my crooked smile isn’t necessarily my most reassuring feature, though this time it seems to do the trick.
Kayla’s now pleading with Sarah to let her undrape this new work. “Please!” she begs, and Sarah says of course she can,
now that we’re all here,
letting her know she’d been wrong before, though Kayla’s far too happy to absorb that particular lesson. Again she hops up onto the stool, and with a flourish that would make a game-show hostess blush she announces, “Tada!” and off comes the cloth.
At first glance it looks like Sarah has simply copied her old drawing of Ikey’s, this time using colored pens. The reds, greens, blues and purples of the new work, compared with the black and white of the old, give the impression of a color photograph placed for contrast next to a version done in black and white. But then I begin to notice the differences. Despite the welcome familiarity, the man by the cash register isn’t my father, it’s me, and the woman at his side is Sarah, not my mother. Over at the meat counter, where Dec stood in the old drawing, there’s Owen. I notice Sarah’s left enough space next to him to add Brindy later, if she returns, or someone else, if she doesn’t. Seated in a thronelike chair in front of the meat case that contains current, updated salads is my mother, looking more like the woman in the first drawing than she does in real life, a kindness she seems to appreciate. In this drawing, too, there’s someone on the threshold, about to enter, but instead of Bobby it’s Kayla, who in the next instant will complete our lives. There’s little to suggest her race, or how else she might differ from us Lynches. We are each of us drawn with a few deft lines that are more suggestive than descriptive. A stranger wouldn’t necessarily recognize me in the man at the register or my mother in that chair. We alone know who we are.
Just so there’s no confusion, Kayla, continuing her role as hostess, gives us a tour of the drawing. “Ikey Lubin’s,” she proclaims with another sweeping gesture, before becoming specific. “Lou-Lou, Mama, Uncle Owen, Grandma Tessa.” She pauses here for dramatic effect, then identifies herself with an index finger and says, “Me.” She’s proud, and also challenging any rival interpretation. It’s she and no one else who’s about to enter our lives. Anyone who sees this differently need speak up now or forever hold his peace. No one does. A quiet group, we’ve come together in the present to recall the past and share a vision of the future.
“Dear God,” my mother finally says, mock-disgusted, because of course tears are rolling down my cheeks and I’m sniffling audibly.
A
N HOUR LATER
I have Ikey’s to myself. Owen has left to meet Brindy and the couples’ therapist they’ve been seeing once a week for the last few months in the hopes of ironing out their differences before giving in to the impending divorce. Why my son would submit to this particular counseling is beyond me. Brindy has freely admitted to the affair she’s been having with the West End man and shown no inclination to give him up. According to Owen, the woman who’s counseling them seems more concerned with his reluctance to show anger or even resentment than with Brindy’s behavior, as if to suggest that Owen has driven her to whatever she’s done. “Do you understand how hurtful your silences can be?” she asked at their last session. “Do you understand that stubborn silence can be a form of aggression? That you dehumanize Brindy by refusing to enter into the discourse, to articulate what you want from her? That your silences are a serious obstacle to true reconciliation? Brindy hasn’t given up on your marriage, Owen, but your silences tell her that you have. There’s another man in Brindy’s life now, Owen. Do you realize you haven’t even told her you want her to break it off with him? Do you realize how hurtful such coldness can be? If you
want
Brindy to be faithful to you and your marriage, you have to verbalize your feelings.”
I study my son, or rather the man in Sarah’s new drawing, and something about it conveys his genetic ambivalence. No doubt this marriage counselor reminds Owen of every well-intentioned teacher who ever tried to draw him out. His strategy was always to wait them out, and I doubt very much that it’s changed. Eventually, all those teachers gave up and went away, and I’m sure he thinks this counselor will, too. In their last session it was Brindy, not Owen, who snapped under her relentless questioning. “
Look
at him,” she told the therapist. “He’s not going to talk. Can’t you
see
that?”
I can’t help wondering if the space Sarah’s left next to our son may one day be occupied by the therapist herself, because after that last brutal meeting, she’d asked Owen to remain behind, and surprised him by taking his hand and apologizing for being so rough on him. She was just doing her job, she said, trying, for his sake as much as Brindy’s, to achieve a breakthrough, to get him to at least acknowledge what he wanted. Surely he must want
some
thing, she added, giving his hand a squeeze. “I’d figured her for a lesbian,” he told us sadly, later that evening. “But I guess not.”
What I suppose I like most about my wife’s new drawing is that its purpose, across the decades, is the same as her earlier drawing. She drew us—her and me—together in that one, which was how I’d known we were. Now she’s telling me that we’re still together, that she’s returned for good. I’m no longer on probation and probably never was. She has restated her vows, in a sense. In my darkest hour I imagined myself lost in Sarah’s Bridge of Sighs, and now she’s given me a work of art I can truly live in. This is no Ghost Ikey’s, no parallel world. It
is
our lives.