The Laments (24 page)

MARCUS WOULD BE THE FIRST
to accept his new condition; it would take everyone else forever. That’s the way it is with children. They get up and carry on.

Not so for Julia; she had brought America a healthy boy and, in return, America had deformed him. There was no consolation, even in sleep. In one dream she found herself searching through an enormous department store, going aisle to aisle, opening box after box, believing that she was getting closer and closer to finding Marcus’s missing hand. When she finally reached the top floor and opened the last box, she found not a hand but her lost baby, grinning that ear-to-ear smile from long ago.

Howard gave Julia comfort when she cried; but his own sorrow was expressed in a desperate smile that always seemed moments shy of collapse. This expression settled permanently over his face.

Marcus’s prosthetic hand was a flesh-colored plastic device with two hooks that could pinch together. He operated it by clenching the muscles in his forearm. Over time, with mounting facility, he managed to do everything from flipping quarters to opening soda bottles. Julius began to envy him, and said he wanted his own prosthetic hand, which elicited dark stares from his parents.

Julia put off looking for a job while Marcus recuperated. During the first weeks of school, which he missed, Julia coached him with his brother’s homework.

“Will I be stupid when I go to school?” he worried.

“You’ll be smarter,” replied Howard, “because your mother is teaching you.”

Julia became most disappointed in the neighbors, who kept their distance from the Laments over these weeks. Nobody called, or offered a sympathetic word, until Rusty Torino showed up at the door one afternoon.

“Just thinking of you folks,” he said. Rusty was dressed in his most somber outfit, a black Hawaiian shirt with tastefully small golden palm trees. He produced a box of chocolates for Marcus, and white irises for Julia.

“How thoughtful of you,” said Julia, shooting a fierce glance at the houses behind him. “You’re the only one, you know!”

“The only one?”

“To express any bloody concern! Honestly, the people around here are unspeakably callous.”

“Maybe they’re just shocked,” suggested Rusty. “What happened to you guys is any family’s worst nightmare.”

“Unforgivable,” Julia continued. “It’s television that’s to blame! Everybody’s too used to changing channels when they see something upsetting!”

Rusty looked bewildered by Julia’s fury. “Well, I can’t speak for them, I just . . .”

Suddenly Julia felt remorse for lashing out at Rusty. “Of
course
you can’t—please forgive me,” she cried. “And do tell me, how’s . . . that little dog of yours?”

“Fine,” Rusty sighed. “Thanks for asking.”

As the man retreated, Julia decided to ring Madge.

“Thought you might be wondering how we’re doing,” she began, her rage barely concealed.

“Julia, how . . .
is
everybody?” asked Madge with obvious discomfort.

“Thank you for asking,” Julia said. “Everybody’s all right except Marcus, of course. He’s learning to write with the other hand.”

“Oh my,” said Madge. “We’re just devastated. Frank will
never
have another barbecue. And poor Wally will
never
. . . I mean, it happened in his
own backyard
.”

“Poor Wally?”

“Devastated. He’ll never eat meat again,” explained Madge.

“You have my sympathy.” Julia slammed down the phone.

WORD GOT AROUND
that Marcus had been given a claw to replace his hand, and there always seemed to be one or two children near the house, angling for a sideshow glimpse. Marcus, at Julius’s urging, stuck a ghastly rubber eyeball to one of his eyelids and, waving a twisted garden fork with his prosthesis, ran out with a bloodcurdling cry to execute Julius in the front yard. Julius dribbled ketchup from his lips, wailing for Christ and the Virgin Mary before assuming rigor mortis, his eyeballs frozen on his audience (he then repeated this performance three times for newcomers).

This time the Laments received
lots
of phone calls for traumatizing the neighbors’ children.

“Perhaps they shouldn’t
be
outside. Perhaps the little darlings should have been watching
television
instead!” Julia replied.

AS DR. UNDERBERG HAD ONCE TOLD HOWARD
, life deals tragedy and opportunity in equal measures. It was because of the garden party that Will finally met Marina Himmel, and though she was nothing like Sally Byrd, she was just what he needed. When she whispered over his shoulder, Will got goose bumps. Perhaps it was her voice, with its familiarity, its intimate murmur:
You’re a spy
. She spoke the truth. He
was
a spy. She knew him in this secret way, for she was an outsider too.

But there was a complication.

When Marcus fell from the Finches’ tire, Will felt an awful sense of guilt. If not for Marina, and her slate-colored eyes and delicate mouth, he might have saved his brother. But the more shame he felt, the more he thought about her. These two emotions, guilt and infatuation, were thus entwined. And the more guilt there was, the more desire.

Desire for what? Even if he was a romantic, he was only thirteen. A kiss was his precipice. Any further arousal would have been sweet death for him.

Miss Bayonard

When he knocked at the classroom door, a jolt of Eau de Fleurs pinched his nostrils. The classroom was foggy with the stuff, enough to overwhelm the musty odor of old textbooks. By the time Will came to his senses, he was seated, eyes fixed on the vertex of his teacher’s thighs and the hemline of her apricot minidress as she walked back to her desk.

“Class, this is Will Lament. Will is from England. I’m sure we can all learn a lot from him,” said his new math teacher, Francine Bayonard.

When she smiled at Will, his pulse throbbed like a Harley. Her auburn hair was parted down the center; twenty times an hour she cleared a stray hair with a long, lacquered fingernail. When she enunciated “multiplicative inverses,” her frosted lips beckoned to him. And it didn’t help that it was a steamy room. He became feverish as Miss Bayonard multiplied fractions. Then Marina turned up in the seat behind him.

“I’m watching you, Lament,” she murmured.

With Marina whispering her taunts behind his ear and Miss Bayonard stirring his loins, Will was in torment.

“Are you all right, Will?” asked the teacher.

“Hmm?”

“I know this must be a lot to absorb—a new country, new classmates.”

“Yes, Miss Bayonard,” he gasped. “It’s a lot.”

At the end of the day, Miss Bayonard took him aside to suggest that he stay after school for a few weeks to catch up on his math.

“With you?” he choked.

“Yes. With me.”

TWO MONTHS HAD PASSED
since Howard had reported to work, and Chapman Fay was still absent. There had been a radio report from Indonesia, but the details were sketchy. His boat needed repairs. He wired for money. Apparently he planned to continue around the world before returning to Fay/Bernhardt. It would be another month or two.

“Howard, your job is safe,” promised Dick Bernhardt, who had grown a goatee since Howard last saw him. “Consider this time an opportunity to build up your portfolio of ideas! When Chapman gets back, you’ll be ready.”

With that in mind, Howard laid out his theories for irrigating the southern Sahara. He then put together a design for a mechanical heart with a series of valves that required the tiniest power source. He had been toying with this idea ever since the death of his father, when hearts were irreplaceable. Howard found an engineer in the basement of Fay/Bernhardt to build a plastic mock-up for him; it was a wondrous-looking device, made of translucent plastic and stainless steel. But Dick Bernhardt refused to examine it.

“Look, I run the company, I don’t deal with new projects. Just wait for Chapman to get back.”

Howard was beginning to worry that Chapman Fay was a phantom, a taunting illusion encouraging his youthful idealism. He made an extra effort during dinner to keep the conversation off the subject of his work.

“So what’s your teacher like?” he asked Will.

“Fine,” replied Will, using a tone that made Julia think of Howard’s miserable replies to her questions about Pan-Europa. She might have pursued the matter if she hadn’t also been worrying about Marcus, who was trying to serve himself peas with his prosthetic hand. Every time he spilled, she would flinch, desperately wanting to help though she’d been cautioned by the doctor not to fuss too much over him. Dinnertime was exhausting; between the cooking, Marcus’s half-baked attempts to feed himself, and Julius’s jealousy, she felt unappreciated and spent.

“Whoops!” Marcus cast a spoonful of peas across the table at Julius.

“That was on
purpos
e
!” shouted Julius. “He’s shooting at me on purpose!
He’s shooting at me on purpos
e
!
”

“Julius, stop!” warned Julia, glaring at Marcus.

“I’m innocent,” Marcus insisted, with a beatific smile.

“What’s the teacher’s name?” continued Howard.

“Bayonard. Miss Bayonard,” answered Will.

“Is she nice?” Julia asked.

Will paused, and nodded, thinking of Miss Bayonard climbing into her little gray Karmann Ghia. She had to hike up her minidress a few inches and wriggle sideways into the low bucket seat. This took considerable effort, her feet kicking at the curb for leverage, a glimpse of her peach underwear, the car rocking excitedly on its wheels. Some boys enjoyed watching a backhoe dig a trench in the street; Will would happily have watched Miss Bayonard squeeze into her sports car for an eternity.

But his reverie was interrupted by another storm of peas flying across the dinner table.

“It’s the claw—I can’t control it!” exclaimed Marcus.

“Marcus, that’s enough!” Howard warned him.

“How come
he
gets away with stuff I can’t get away with?” Julius complained, shaking the peas out of his shirt collar.

“Because I’m pitiful,” Marcus gloated.

“Eat your food,” said Howard.

“Hey!” roared Julius, as Marcus steered his prosthetic hand toward Julius’s crotch, clenching it firmly on a bulge.

“Can’t control it”—Marcus smiled helplessly—“it’s got a mind of its own.”

“Can’t we just have dinner like a normal family?” shouted Howard as the doorbell rang.

JULIA FOUND A STRANGER
at the door—a young woman, her hair in a bun, with a spark of warmth in her eyes, holding a wad of flyers and a clipboard.

“Hi, I’m Martha. I’m collecting for battered women.”

“Sorry. I’m not . . .” began Julia.

“Oh, you have nothing to be sorry for,” replied Martha brightly, “unless you’re a battered woman yourself, in which case you should be feeling
very
sorry for yourself!”

“I certainly am
not
a battered woman,” replied Julia, smoothing her blouse and thinking that she did feel sorry for herself, which made her sorrier still.

Martha caught a glimpse of Marcus and Julius trying to bite each other’s shins beneath the dining room table.

“Not battered, just frayed around the edges, perhaps?”

“Perhaps,” admitted Julia. She looked at the eager face in the doorway, wondering whether her visitor was demented, naive, or perhaps, by some generous act of God, a kindred spirit, just when she needed one.

Martha explained that she was fund-raising for a group called the Women’s Congress, which helped battered women find accommodations when they were trying to escape from an unhealthy relationship, and that she also belonged to a group of women who met once a week to talk about women’s issues.

“I’m not furious enough to be a women’s libber,” Julia replied.

“Neither are we,” said Martha with amusement. “We talk, debate, and encourage each other. Why don’t you drop in one time?” Martha gave Julia her phone number, and walked down the drive, casting Julia a last, gentle smile. “We meet on Thursdays,” she added.

“You were gone a long time,” said Howard when Julia found him emerging from the bathroom, where the twins were having their bath.

“Trouble with the boys?” she asked.

“Darling, I can certainly handle them for a few minutes.” Howard laughed. “After all, you cope with them all afternoon!” At that moment, Julia heard the sound of a colossal wave of water striking the bathroom floor.

“Of course you can,” said Julia, watching the circle of wet carpeting expand beneath Howard’s feet. “Actually, Howard, I was wondering how you’d feel about my taking a night off once a week to join a women’s group. Just to talk?”

“Good idea,” Howard insisted, not realizing that his Thursday evenings would never be the same again.

MARTHA WAS A POTTER
; her small clapboard house was adorned with delicate vases and splashy paintings by her five-year-old son, Lennon. She had met her husband, Jake, on a commune in Penobscot Bay.

All the women in Martha’s group welcomed Julia in turn. Phyllis Minetti, compact and tightly strung, explained that she was childless. “But my husband is a successful cosmetic surgeon in New York and my life is complete,” she added with a tidy smile.

This provoked a smirk from Avé Brown, a big woman with a topknot, and eyeliner like the early Supremes. Avé, the mother of four boys, was a high school dropout. “Tell her about your degrees, Phyllis!” she said.

“I don’t like to brag, Avé,” replied Phyllis.

Avé whispered to Julia, “Watch her, she’s going to work it into the conversation anyway.”

The last woman in the group was Frieda Grecco; she had a timid, pretty face framed by ringlets of glossy black hair and large black-rimmed glasses. She said nothing, but laughed at the exchanges between Avé and Phyllis to the point of tears. Julia noticed that when Frieda pulled her ringlets back behind one ear, she revealed a bruise by her temple. It made Julia think of Trixie’s black eye. But when Frieda sensed Julia’s scrutiny, she hastily pulled her hair down.