But I drew the line when you despaired that Celia was “clingy.” It’s an ugly word, isn’t it, that describes the honey of the heart as a sticky, pestersome substance that won’t brush off. And to whatever degree clinginess is not simply a mean appellation for the most precious thing on earth, it involves an unacceptably incessant demand for attention, approbation, ardor in return. But Celia beseeched us for nothing. She didn’t nag us to come see what she’d built in the playroom or paw and tug at us while we tried to read. Whenever I hugged her unbidden, she returned my embrace with a thankful ferocity that implied unworthiness. After I went back to working at AWAP, she never complained at my absence, though her face would turn ashen with grief when I dropped her at preschool and would light like Christmas when I came home.
Celia was not
clingy.
She was simply affectionate. She did sometimes wrap her arms around my leg in the kitchen, press her cheek to my knee, and exclaim with amazement, “You’re my friend!” Yet whatever difficulty you may have had with her arrival, you were never so hard a man as to find such demonstrations anything but touching. Indeed, confirmation that we were her
friends
seemed to entrance her far more than broad, rather abstract protestations of parental love. Although I know you thought Kevin the far smarter of the two, Kevin entered this world utterly stymied by what it was for and what to do with it, where Celia arrived with unshakable certainty about what she wanted and what made life worth living: that goo that wouldn’t brush off. Surely that constitutes intelligence of a kind.
All right, she didn’t do well in school. But that’s because she tried too hard. She became so caught up in wanting to get things right, so seized by the prospect of failing her parents and teachers, that she couldn’t get down to the task itself. At least she didn’t hold everything they tried to teach her in contempt.
I tried to drill into her: You just memorize that the capital of Florida is Tallahassee, period. As great a believer in mystery as her namesake, Celia couldn’t imagine it was that simple, that there wasn’t a magic trick, and she doubted herself, so that taking the state capitals test she would immediately question “Tallahassee” for the very reason that it popped into her head. Kevin never had any trouble with mystery. He ascribed to the whole world the same terrifying plainness, and the question was never whether he was able to learn something, but whether to bother. Celia’s faith, as emphatic in relation to others as it was deficient in relation to herself, assured her that no one would ever insist that she study the manifestly useless. Kevin’s cynicism equally assured him that a malign, sadistic pedagogy would pitch him nothing but chaff.
I don’t mean that Celia couldn’t exasperate me as well. Like Kevin, she was impossible to punish, though there was rarely reason to punish her aside for something that, as it turned out, she didn’t actually do. Still, she took the least admonition to heart, so that any remonstrance was like killing a fly with a sledgehammer. At the least suggestion that she had disappointed us, she was inconsolable, pouring out apologies before she was quite sure what we’d like her to regret. A single sharp word would send her into a tailspin, and I admit it would have been a relief once in a while to be able to bark out, “Celia, I told you to set the table!” (she was rarely disobedient, but she was absent-minded) and not have my daughter melt into a time-consuming puddle of remorse.
But my primary exasperation was otherwise. Judiciously applied, fear is a useful tool of self-protection. While the drain would hardly leap out and bite her, Celia was sufficiently replete with dread to have plenty left over for dangers that could. There was one thing in our house of which she might have been justifiably afraid, and she adored him.
On this point I’m brooking no argument, and I intend to take ruthless advantage of the fact that this is my account, to whose perspective you have no choice but to submit. I don’t pretend to know the whole story, because I don’t think that’s a story that you or I will ever fully know. I remember uneasily from my own childhood that on Enderby Avenue, where the alliance between my brother and me was far more fickle, Giles and I conducted the main of our lives below our mother’s line of sight. One of us might run to her to argue our side (frowned upon as cheating), but for the most part our collusions, battles, and mutually inflicted tortures took place, if not out of view, in code. So total was my own immersion in the world of other short people that my memories before about the age of twelve are largely depopulated of adults. Maybe it was different for you and Valerie, since you didn’t like each other much. But many, perhaps most siblings share a private universe tropical with benevolence, betrayal, vendetta, reconciliation, and the use and abuse of power of which their parents know practically nothing.
Still, I wasn’t blind, and a measure of parental innocence is stark disinterest. If I walked into a playroom to find my daughter curled on her side, ankles tied with knee socks, hands bound behind her back with her hair ribbon, mouth duct-taped shut, and my son nowhere in evidence, I could work out for myself what her whimpered explanation of “playing kidnapping” amounted to. I might not have been privy to the Masonic passwords of my children’s secretive sect, but I did know my daughter well enough to be confident that, despite her claims to the contrary, she would never hold the head of her favorite plastic horsey over the flame of the stove. And if she was alarmingly compliant about forcing down foodstuffs I hadn’t realized she couldn’t abide, she was not an outright masochist. Thus when I discovered her strapped into her booster chair at the dining table covered in vomit, I could reasonably assume that the bowl before her of mayonnaise, strawberry jam, Thai curry paste, Vaseline petroleum jelly, and
lumps
of balled up bread had not followed a recipe of her personal concoction.
You would assert, of course—since you did at the time—that older siblings traditionally torment younger ones, and Kevin’s petty persecution remained within the range of the
perfectly normal
. You might now object that I can only find incidents of typical childhood cruelty in any way forbidding with benefit of hindsight. Meanwhile, millions of children survive families rife with roughhouse bullying, often profitably the wiser about the Darwinian pecking orders they will negotiate as adults. Many of these onetime tyrants develop into sensitive husbands who remember anniversaries, while their onetime victims grow into confident young women with high-flying careers and aggressive views on a woman’s right to choose. Yet my present position offers few enough perquisites, and I
do
have the benefit of hindsight, Franklin, if
benefit
is the word.
As I shuttled to Chatham last weekend, I considered that I might also benefit from our shy, fragile daughter’s example of Christian forgiveness. But Celia’s baffling incapacity to hold a grudge from age zip seems to suggest that the ability to forgive is a gift of temperament, not necessarily a trick for old dogs. Besides, on my own account, I am not sure what “forgiving” Kevin entails. Surely it doesn’t involve sweeping
Thursday
artificially under the carpet or ceasing to hold him accountable, which couldn’t be in his larger moral interests. I can’t imagine that I’m supposed to
get over it
, like hopping a low stone wall; if
Thursday
was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense. I can’t pretend he didn’t do it, I can’t pretend I don’t wish he hadn’t, and if I have abandoned that felicitous parallel universe to which my white confederates in Claverack’s waiting room are prone to cling, the relinquishment of my private if-only derives more from a depleted imagination than any healthy reconcilement that what’s done is done. Honestly, when Carol Reeves formally “forgave” our son on CNN for murdering her boy, Jeffrey, who was already precocious enough at the classical guitar to be courted by Juilliard, I had no idea what she talking about. Had she built a box around Kevin in her head, knowing that only rage dwelled there; was our son now simply a place her mind refused to go? At best, I reasoned that she had successfully depersonalized him into a regrettable natural phenomenon that had descended on her family like a hurricane or opened a maw in their living room like an earthquake, concluding that there was nothing to be gained from railing at the likes of weather or tectonic plate shifts. Then, there is nothing to be gained by railing in virtually every circumstance, and that doesn’t stop most of us.
Celia, though. I can’t imagine that Celia successfully boxed up or demoted to cloudburst the day that Kevin, with the delicacy of a budding entomologist, removed a nest of bagworms from our white oak in the backyard and left them to hatch in her backpack. Subsequently, she reached for her spelling book in her first-grade class, withdrawing it covered in striped caterpillars—the kind that Kevin squished to green goo on our deck—several of which crawled onto her hand and up her rigored arm. Unfortunately, Celia wasn’t given to screaming, which might have brought rescue more quickly. Instead I gather she seized up—breath whiffing, nostrils flaring, pupils dilating to saucers—and her teacher kept explaining the “hard C” in
candy
on the blackboard. Finally, the girls in adjacent desks began to shriek, and pandemonium ensued.
Yet however fresh the memory of those bagworms, the recollection simply didn’t feature two weeks later when Kevin offered her a “ride” on his back as he climbed the white oak, and she clasped his neck. No doubt she was surprised when Kevin urged her off to perch tremulously on an upper branch, after which he climbed calmly to the ground. In fact, when she puled, “Kewin? Kewin, I can gedown!” she must have sincerely believed that, even after abandoning her twenty feet high and waltzing inside for a sandwich, he would return to help her out of the tree. Is that forgiveness? Like Charlie Brown taking one more running lunge at Lucy’s football, no matter how many stuffed animals he eviscerated and Tinkertoy cathedrals he felled, Celia never lost faith that deep down inside her big brother was a nice guy.
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. Evidence to the contrary found nowhere to lodge, like a book on chaos theory in a library that didn’t have a physics section. Meanwhile, she never told tales, and without a testimonial it was often impossible to pin her misfortunes on her brother. As a consequence, from the moment his sister was born, Kevin Khatchadourian, figuratively at least, got away with murder.
I confess that during Celia’s early years, Kevin receded for me, taking two giant steps backward like Simon Says. Small children are absorbing, and he had meanwhile assumed a militant independence. And you were so good about taking him to ball games and museums in your spare time that I may have handed him off a bit. That put me in your debt, which is why I feel especially awkward about observing what, from those two giant steps away, became only more striking.
Franklin, our son was developing the personality equivalent of the black-and-white cookie. It started back in kindergarten if not before, but it kept getting worse. Exasperatingly, we’re all pretty much restricted to learning what people are like with the permanent confound of our own presence, which is why those chance glimpses of someone you love just walking down the street can seem so precious. So you’ll just have to take my word for it—I know you won’t—that when you weren’t home, Kevin was sour, secretive, and sarcastic. Not just once in a while, on a bad day. Every day was a bad day. This laconic, supercilious, unforthcoming persona of his did seem real. Maybe it wasn’t the only thing that was real, but it didn’t come across as completely confected.
In contrast to—Franklin, I feel so lousy about this, as if I’m trying to take something away from you that you cherish—Kevin’s behavior around you. When you walked in, his face changed. His eyebrows shot up, his head cocked, and he put on a closed-mouth smile high up on his chin, his lips meeting at his upper gum. Altogether, his features assumed the permanent expression of startled happiness that you see on aging starlets who have had too much plastic surgery.
Hi Dad!
he’d cry.
How was work today, Dad? Did you take any pictures of some real cool stuff? Any more cows, Dad? Any more fields or big buildings or really loaded-people’s houses?
You’d light into an enthusiastic description of the sections of roadway you’d shot, and he’d enthuse,
Gosh, that’s great! Another car ad! I’m gonna tell everybody at school that my dad takes pictures for Oldsmobile!
One night you brought home a copy of the new
Atlantic Monthly,
flipping proudly to the Colgate advertisement that sponsored our very own pink-marbled master bath.
Gee, Dad!
Kevin exclaimed.
Since our bathroom is in a toothpaste ad, does that make us famous?
“Just a little famous,” you allowed, and I swear I remember wising off, “To be really famous in this country, you’ve got to kill somebody.”
Oh, you were by no means uniquely credulous; Kevin pulled the wool over his teachers’ eyes for years. I still have, thanks to you, stacks of his schoolwork. An amateur student of American history, you were the family chronicler, the photographer, the scrapbook paster, while I was more apt to regard experience itself as my souvenir. So I’m not quite sure what possessed me to rescue, from among the Stairmasters and egg slicers I abandoned en masse when I moved, the file folders of Kevin’s essays.
Did I save the files just for your tight, slanted cursive, “First Grade”? For once, I think not. I have been through two trials, if what preceded them is not to be considered a third, and I have learned to think in terms of evidence. Why, I’ve become so accustomed to abdicating ownership of my life to other people—to journalists, judges, web-site writers; to the parents of dead children and to Kevin himself—that even now I’m reluctant to fold or deface my son’s essays lest it constitute actionable tampering.