Ordinary Love and Good Will (3 page)

“Well, I’m sure he needs one.”

He closes the book. “I’m not getting through this very fast. I was intending to have it read by this morning.”

“Maybe we should send him back to India. I found the abundance at the grocery store awfully embarrassing.” We look at each other and smile. Joe has a pleasant face. Most mothers of identical twins assert that they have never mistaken one for the other. I assert it, too. But, inevitably, one twin is the theme and one is the variation. Michael was “aggressive,” “cheery,” “sturdy,” “harum-scarum.” Michael was himself. Joe, second-born, was nearly a pound lighter than Michael at birth, and Joe was somehow always more or less—even when Michael wasn’t around, Joe was “more frustrated,” “quieter,” “thinner,” “more studious,” “better organized.” The comparative belonged to Joe even if the terms weren’t at all the same. Then, when Joe was living with me and Michael with Pat, it was Joe who talked of himself this way, as if continual comparison and contrast would call up Michael’s ghostly presence. After this summer, though, I am so used to Joe and we have talked about so many things that I’ve forgotten, every so often, about Michael. I am sure this is a good sign, a sign that maybe Joe, too, has let him go a time or two. Now I say, and even as I say it I recognize and enjoy the intimacy of it, “Do you think you’re afraid of having him back? Of the closeness, I mean?”

He turns the book over once, looking at it rather than at me. “No. I was afraid he would go away as my twin and come back as my brother. I don’t want that.” He sighs. “He doesn’t either.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t.”

“There are a lot of things that are unspoken between us, you know.”

“That’s always been true.” I sit at the table, groping for the most delicate kind of tact. This is an argument we have been tending toward all summer, and I don’t want to have it now. “I think it’s important that we don’t seem clinging. He went far away. He must have known he would come back different from you as well as from his old self. Maybe he intended it.”

“I think he thought it was a price he might have to pay for getting away from everything else.” He says this in a detached but definite tone, as if he isn’t going to listen to any more on the subject. We smile again, a truce, and he says, “I might have fixed the lawnmower.” He puts his hand in his pocket. “There are just these few leftover items.” He pulls out two screws of different sizes, a washer, and a bolt that will fit neither screw. “Think they’re important, or can we ignore them?” I laugh, then Joe laughs. I say, “I think you’d better go back and try again. But the leftover parts are getting smaller, at least.”

“Just promise me you won’t sneak it out of the garage and over to the repair shop.”

“Not on a bet. I want to see you rise to the challenge.”

“Haven’t thrown anything yet. Only rammed my head into the wall of the garage once.”

Now there is a shout from the living room, and Ellen appears, framed by the living room doorway, but standing back, suspicious. Joe pushes his chair back and says, “He’s asleep.” Relieved, Ellen steps into the kitchen. She doesn’t speak. She never does, right at first. She picks up Joe’s book
and looks at it, then turns and looks into one of the cupboards by the sink. She takes out a glass and runs herself a drink of water. “Well?” she says.

“Thin,” I say. “Amebic dysentery.”

“Ugh. Right in the house here, huh?”

“It’s not like that,” snaps Joe.

“I was only making a joke.”

“Not funny.” They look at each other. He is glaring. She is considering. I say, “I thought you weren’t coming over.”

She throws up her hands.

I can hear Tracy and Diane in the front yard. Joe put up a tire swing for them in June, and they have been all over it, having fun, I say. “Building poignant memories,” Joe says. His nostalgia is militant, almost hard, almost a reproach.

“So how are you?” says Ellen to Joe, and he stops glaring. He says, “I don’t know.” Then he says, annoyed, “What’s the big deal? I mean, he went away and he came back. He told us he was going away, and how long he was going to be gone, and he came back when he said he would. I’m pissed off.”

“At whom?” says Ellen.

“At myself, of course,” says Joe. And he goes over to the coffeemaker and pours himself a cup of coffee and drinks it down. Then he slams out the back door, saying, “I’m going to start over on the lawnmower now.”

Ellen says, “Is he still fixing the lawnmower?”

“Fixing it again.”

“Would you just borrow ours and cut the grass? The police are going to cite you pretty soon.”

“Let them.” But before I’ve even finished speaking, she has picked up Joe’s book and started reading it. She can’t resist. She even says, “Hmm!” in a surprised and interested voice. I know the rudeness she treats me with is a habit, but is calculated, too, as a test of how much familiarity I
will allow. Our conversation must always seem as if it has no breaks, is uninterrupted by formal greetings or farewells, is beyond routine civilities, is as close to mind-reading as possible.

Now Ellen puts the book down and looks at me expectantly. I say, “Smooth enough so far.”

“Curiosity got the better of me. I can’t wait to see him. Are you sure he’s asleep?”

“No. Actually, he’s probably hiding out like the rest of us. I’d like to let him come back in his own time. What’s Jerry doing today?”

“Soloing, can you believe it?” She makes a face. Jerry has been taking flying lessons. “I was trying to forget about it. This morning I sent the girls up to wake him. I sent them up in their underpants, so he could see their defenseless little bodies and have some second thoughts. But all he did was get them all excited about when they can go flying with Daddy.” She eyes me, then goes to the doorway, where she can see the girls. “Speaking of daddies, Daddy sent me a check for five hundred dollars. The network had the news to him about our car being vandalized within twenty-four hours. Does he think we don’t have insurance or something?”

“I don’t know what he thinks.”

She spins toward me. “He thinks that just because Jerry owns a bookstore we can’t afford those little amenities like collision insurance.”

“Send it back.”

“Then he would call up and want to talk about it. He watches his bank statement, too. If you don’t cash the check right away, he thinks you’re resisting.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Does he know Michael is coming home this weekend?”

“I’m sure the network phoned him the moment the plane
touched down. Now he’s counting the minutes until he gets his call. It would be almost easier to have him living in town.” The way Pat seems always to know what’s going on with his children is, admittedly, uncanny. The children used to call him “the fourth man,” after Daniel read some books about Kim Philby. When Anthony Blunt revealed himself, Pat became “the controversial fifth man,” and Joe and Ellen still sometimes refer to him as “Five.”

“Anyway, I hate him having insights into me.”

I shrug. Ellen and I have talked about this, a little, but she, too, seems to drift away when I begin to allude to my life with her father. She always interrupts with a question about how I managed to get five children into snowsuits, or were there really three potty chairs in a row in the downstairs bathroom.

“Especially since they aren’t matched by any into himself.” She goes into the living room and calls out the front door after Tracy and Diane. I open the dishwasher and put some cups into it. Maybe because Michael has returned, it suddenly seems rich and luxurious to have Ellen and Joe and the girls around, a mother’s feeling that I resented when my mother thought it of me, her only child. Those days I thought nothing would stop me from going to Alaska. Or Singapore. Or New Zealand. That, even if I were to have children when I grew up, they wouldn’t really notice my absence. Unlike a daughter, a mother might slip away without saying when she would be back. But Ellen and Joe are as exacting in this regard as any parent. Ellen won’t even let me leave my car at the airport. She insists on seeing me off and meeting my plane, and Joe always has me send him a copy of my itinerary. For a long time, the first thing I did when I arrived at any hotel was ask for my mail, knowing that there would be a postcard waiting from Joe, saying something like, “Dear Mom, Here you are, sitting right across the table. You just gave me my orange-juice-egg-and-brewer’s-yeast
breakfast. Now I am about to shock you by drinking it. Well, Mom, I just wanted to say hi, and enjoy your trip.” Annie and Daniel are less attentive, but they keep tabs, all the same. From all of this I know that their father must have told them I left them, and that this became knowledge for them that transcended information. When I’ve asked what their father did tell them, they can’t remember. “Something good, I’m sure,” says Joe. “Dad’s never at a loss for a theory.” From their point of view, I deserved this reputation of being ready for anything, untrustworthy, liable to slip the traces. I suppose this is my penance—always to be reminded by their care that I got away from them once.

I am not the first to vanish, though they don’t know it. My mother had a cousin. She’d be over a hundred now, but when I was about ten and she was sixty, and I suppose everyone thought her emotional life had run its course, she fled to Denver. All of the men in the family went after her, four farmers in overalls leaving their land in the middle of the summer and, what was more shocking, spending money on the train fare. She was married to her second cousin, Uncle Karl, who was prosperous and sober, and didn’t beat her, so it was obvious to everyone that she must be insane for leaving him. They brought her back and put her in a state mental hospital. My father and uncles were kindly men, and got her out of the asylum after about a year. She stayed home, cured, and died in her nineties. I never talked to her about it. In fact, I hardly ever talked to her throughout my teens, because I didn’t want the men to make the criminal connection that I thought was there. But I know one thing about her. She was never left alone again. One relative or another was always assigned to her, for her own good.

I was born in 1934, into an extended family that was so hardworking and so closely knit that they survived the Depression with their farms intact, paid for, and, in some
cases, improved. Scandinavian tenacity, Scandinavian silence. Pat, whose background was Chicago Irish, had a lot of insights into my family, too. Because of us, he got interested in genetics, and did an important comparative longitudinal study of recurring allergic reactions among Irish families in Chicago and Norwegian families in northwestern Iowa. He also read all the major Icelandic sagas, and conceived a fondness for Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset.

Everyone called him a genius, though Joe would say that he was too quick for that. Joe is a little dismissive of Pat’s “brilliance.” Joe has worked out a system, a rainbow of intelligence that runs from stupid, obvious red to subtle, mysterious violet. He envies Pat’s “brilliance” (a pure, direct blue) from the vantage point of his own just-above-average green (“bright”), and although I discourage his envy and find these rankings absurd, secretly I know better than Joe does that once there was something to envy, in those years when Pat was discovering his powers.

Though he practices medicine still, I suspect that Pat never really recovered from the accident, and of all the lost things, maybe Pat’s intelligence is the most unusual. It might have been genius, the spectrum bending, red meeting violet one impossible time. To me, it was more like a vocal timbre, movingly distinct, undefinable, fleeting. Ellen did spectacularly in school, but really none of the children have just what Pat had. It could have something to do with how inbred his Irish relatives in Chicago were—his aunts still spoke with a brogue, though two generations removed from Ireland. When he married me, Norwegian got in, another pure strain, but dogged, never scintillating, always cautious yellow, Joe would say, yellow the color of sunflowers and late-summer fields.

“Where would it get you?” I say. “Where has it gotten him?” Joe knows better than to allude to Pat’s accomplishments as a researcher, which are nice, but not the point, or
even to his accomplishments as a diagnostician, which are nicer, because more humane, but still not the point. He always shrugs. Pat is not happy, not at peace, not possessed of much self-knowledge, not even rich, for a specialist. He has what he could have had with only average intelligence—two wives, nine children, a sense that there is something missing. Well, I have another image of the mind, any mind, no special mind. It is a wheel, like a paddlewheel, turning slowly, with a kind of ordered vastness, bigger than it seems to be, going deeper, and bringing up more unrecognizable wealth than anyone thought possible. Brilliance is like little round red reflectors nailed to the crosspieces, eye-catching, lovely, in certain lights dazzling, but little even so, pure decoration. Joe doesn’t listen to me. He has spent his whole life in school, where brilliance is prized, and anyway, I am only his mom.

Behind me, the screen door slams. Joe comes in, dripping with sweat, and followed by Tracy, who is carrying the Crescent wrench. I can see Diane through the screen, watching him. They are eight and six, his girls. He is patient with his nieces as he never is with himself, and they have been helping him, in a manner of speaking, with the lawnmower project. If one of them makes a suggestion, he will take the time to try it out, rather than declaring that it couldn’t possibly work. In return, they worry about him. Diane leaves him notes with coins folded into them, because she can see that he doesn’t have a job.

“Tracy and Diane want to come with me to the hardware store. I need to find something to loosen the flywheel.”

Ellen comes in from the living room. “Which one are you going to? That one by the liquor store?”

“That one is fine.” And so they all go out together, companionable, Ellen and Joe bumping into one another, Diane slipping her hand into her mother’s hand and Ellen squeezing
it without hesitating in what she is saying to Joe. Their coming seems to have soothed him a bit.

As Joe’s car turns into the street, Michael comes down the back stairs and says, “Hey, Mom.”