The Laments (42 page)

Authors: George Hagen

BOOK: The Laments

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WILL GOT HIS LEARNER’S PERMIT
in February, and Minna, who had passed her driver’s exam a few months before, took him for a few spins in Frieda’s old Gremlin to improve his parallel parking. The Queenstown Jumbo Market lot was the ideal place for this, and it lay across the road from Roper Realty.

From the office windows, Julia observed Minna’s hand on the nape of Will’s neck as he drove.

“What’s so interesting out there?” asked Brautigan.

“My son is growing up and I still have so much to tell him,” Julia replied.

Julia deeply feared the impact of such revelations, and so she let the weeks pass until the sun returned, inspiring Howard to finish rebuilding the porch. He raised a new roof, and pillars, and he shingled the structure without mistake or mishap. The other Laments were astonished. After work each day, Julia looked forward to seeing his progress. She sensed that Howard was rebuilding himself—proving, in this reconstruction, that he was no less capable of reform than 33 Oak Street was. His last task was the hanging of a porch swing.

“For the two of us,” he explained.

“How sentimental,” replied Julia skeptically.

“C’mon, darling,” he coaxed. “Sit with me!”

Julia took her place beside Howard, and they rocked on the porch until the sun went down. Howard insisted they do this every evening, as long as the weather was mild.

“It’s so silly,” remarked Julia.

“Yes, we haven’t been this silly in a long time,” said Howard. “Do us bloody good to be silly for a change.”

Even Rose was impressed with Howard’s handiwork, and when she paid him a compliment, Howard looked visibly stunned. She took advantage of this goodwill to speak to him about the matter that seemed to have become everybody’s burden these days.

“Why won’t you tell Will the truth about his birth?”

“Well, that’s up to Julia,” Howard replied.

“Don’t you feel some responsibility, too?”

“Yes, but she feels most strongly . . .”

“Well, she’s confused,” declared Rose. “You owe it to your son to send him into the world knowing the truth. Good heavens—he graduates in three months! What will you do when he leaves home? Send him a telegram? You may never have this chance again. And he may never forgive you if you don’t do it now.”

HOWARD WAS SURPRISED
when Julia agreed that it was time to tell Will.

“I’ve been thinking about it a great deal,” she said. “I just don’t know how.”

“Do you want me to tell him?” he offered.

“No, it was my decision to keep it a secret; I should be the one,” Julia replied.

But she lacked the resolve, and more weeks passed.

One day late in March, the winter sun filled the house with a cool, unfamiliar brightness. When Julia saw Marcus’s room lit up, she peered inside, expecting a light to be on. Howard had tidied things up; the clothes had been sent to the thrift store, the comics thrown away. But the poster of Ganesh remained; Howard refused to throw it out, because Ganesh was the remover of obstacles, and the Laments had faced enough obstacles as it was. Julia studied the potbellied god, with his broken tusk, raised trunk, and wise and forgiving eyes.

She considered her own obstacles, and found only one—the truth she owed her son.

Below the poster was Marcus’s bedside table. His copy of the collected works of Shakespeare lay open. She noticed that several lines had been underscored. As she flipped through the pages, she found many passages that had been marked. Most of them were monologues that Marcus had spoken aloud for girls: Hamlet’s soliloquy, Mark Antony’s speech after the death of Caesar, Richard III’s introduction. But then, in
Henry IV,
Julia noticed a small passage in the first scene that took her breath away.

When Will returned from work that evening, he immediately noticed his mother’s anxious expression and the book facing her. “That was Marcus’s, wasn’t it?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Julia. “I wanted to show you something he found.” She tried to smile as she turned the book around for him to see. A small passage was underlined with a red pen.

“It’s from
Henry IV
,
” said Julia. “He’s disappointed in his son because he spends all his time in taverns, and Henry wishes his heir were Hotspur, Lord Northumberland’s son, who is a terrific warrior. So he imagines the babies being switched at birth.”

Will read the passage. “‘O that it could be proved/That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged/In cradle-clothes our children where they lay . . .’” Will looked at her. “Funny, Marcus used to imagine he was adopted. I suppose we all did.”

Julia’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Why would any of you think that? What have we done to make you think that?”

“Nothing,” Will assured her, “but one wonders. Well, I wondered. I don’t
look
like anybody else. I never have, have I?”

Julia shook her head. “No, you never have,” she admitted. Their eyes met, and her expression struck Will as strangely apologetic. All at once, he guessed its full meaning.

“Darling,” she said, “I never wanted you to feel different, or separate, or . . .”

“I understand, Mum,” Will replied.

But of course he didn’t know about his true mother’s rejection and abandonment, and Julia felt determined to protect her son, even now, from the damage these facts might wreak. “The truth is,” she continued, “that your parents died in a car accident shortly after you were born, and so we took you as our own. Our baby had died in an accident.” Then, wiping her eyes, she added, “As far as we were concerned, you were our son for good.”

Will nodded, then suddenly embraced Julia tightly, as if to seal the matter. “For good,” he echoed. Later, Will admitted to Minna that he felt a perverse sense of gratitude for his mother’s explanation. Though Julia had only confirmed what he had suspected for years, it was a tremendous relief to know that his feelings weren’t the fantasies of an ungrateful son.

Moments later, Howard appeared and joined the embrace, and for a brief time they felt a whisper of the early days when they were bound together as a threesome.

A Lament

Will had shown no interest in going to college yet, which troubled Julia and Howard enormously. When they brought it up, Will didn’t dismiss the idea; he simply replied that he wasn’t ready.

Then, in May, travel brochures started appearing on the kitchen table. The first time she noticed them, Julia put them in a pile under the Yellow Pages. That evening they reappeared, strewn across the table again: pictures of the Eiffel Tower, the cafés of the Left Bank, and the Seine rippling beneath the bridges of the Ile de la Cité. All visions of enticement as far as Julia was concerned.

“They’re not mine,” said Howard.

When Minna came to dinner that evening, Julia confronted her.

“I believe these are yours,” she remarked, a slight edge in her voice.

But Minna regarded the brochures and shrugged. “I wish they were mine.”

Julia turned to Rose.

“I
know
my way around Paris; why would I need these silly things?” snorted her mother.

“They’re mine,” confessed Will. “It’s where I’m going with Minna.”

Julia looked at Minna, provoking the girl to defend herself once again.

“But I’m not going
anywhere
!” Minna protested.

Now it was Will who looked betrayed.

“Didn’t you tell me that you were going to Paris after graduation?” he asked. “What about all those books? The café? The speech you gave?”

“Yes, but that was all a fantasy. I don’t have the money.”

This seemed to restore Julia’s voice. “Well”—she smiled—“we all have our fantasies. I can understand that. I had a few of my own when I was your age.”

She sat down, as if the matter were settled. But then Will spoke. “So we’ll both go.”

“What?” Julia was hoping the rumble of a passing truck had distorted Will’s words.

“I was going to buy my own ticket,” explained Will, “but I’ll get two. I have the money saved up from work. We’ll go together, eh, Minna? The two of us in Paris.”

“Why Paris, of all places?” asked Julia.

“I want to
see
it,” he said. “I want to see the paintings of Daumier, Ingres, Degas, and Matisse; I want to walk the same streets that Hemingway and Joyce and Fitzgerald walked.” He glanced at Minna with a giddy smile. “I want to hear jazz, and walk in the rain at night, and lose my way in the streets of Montmartre and the Ile St.-Louis and draw the faces I see.”

“But why now?” implored his mother. “Why must you go
now
?”

Will blinked. “Because I’ll be done with school in a month.”

“But Paris will be around for a long time,” argued Julia.

Will looked at his mother. “But I want to do it
now,
Mum. I may never have the money again. What’s wrong with going now?”

Julia had no answer to this; she just knew that she didn’t want Will to go.

SHE WAITED UP FOR HIM
after work, drove him to school on rainy days, walked with him to school some mornings. And she would talk about all things—all but Paris.

“Your father wants to build a sundeck. He was wondering if you’d help him build it over the summer.”

“Please, Mum, you know that I’ll be in France.”

“Nonsense,” she replied. “You don’t even speak French.”

Will was patient with his mother. He understood that Julia had measured the Laments’ travels by their losses. Without admitting it, she was slowly preparing herself for another one.

“I’ll send you my sketches; I’ll write, too,” he promised.

“The Left Bank has enough penniless artists. You’ll starve,” she replied.

“There are worse places to starve than Paris,” he said.

ONE EVENING JULIA JOINED HOWARD
on the porch swing after work. She had important news.

“I was offered a job today,” she said.

“Darling, that’s wonderful,” Howard replied. He had come to accept Julia’s role as the breadwinner, and even looked forward to hearing about her victories and defeats.

“It’s in Roper’s Tatumville office, twenty-five miles from here,” she explained to Howard. “There’s a lot of business over there, so Carey asked me to run things.”

“When do you start?” inquired Howard.

“Start? Oh, I turned it down,” said Julia. “I need to stay close to home. Close to Will.”

“But, Julia,” said Howard carefully, “Will is
leaving
.”

“No, he’s
not
,
” said Julia.

“Darling,” Howard gently replied, “he
must
.”

Compelled to accept Will’s departure, Julia still had worries. It came down to her conviction that in telling Will about his adoption she had deprived him of his identity—as a Lament. All of his childhood had been spent seeking some vital place in his adoptive family—ever since she had embraced him as a waif with a paper-thin heart.

ON THE NIGHT BEFORE HIS FLIGHT
, Will spent most of the evening packing his things. When his bags were zipped and everything was tidy, he heard a familiar clatter in the kitchen.

“It’s only me,” said Julia when he appeared.

“I thought so.” He smiled.

“All packed, then?”

“Yes.” He sat down beside her.

“You can still change your mind,” she said.

“Mum,” he replied in mock dismay, “I followed your advice: memorized dozens of phrases—if I don’t catch the next plane, they’ll slip out of my head for good.”

“You promised to write,” Julia reminded him.

“Of course I will,” he said.

“Remember all the frightful things you wrote to Granny?”

That made both of them laugh for a moment.

“I’ll tell you everything, too,” he promised.

She seemed touched by this. “I don’t need to know
everything,
darling, just that you’re safe, and happy, and whether you need anything.”

This, Will realized, was Julia’s farewell blessing.

“I’ll miss you, Mum.” Will struggled to clear his throat, as if the red dust of Africa still hung in the air they breathed.

There was a faint wail outside, a cat perhaps, that suddenly reminded Julia of Bahrain, the dusty pink sunsets, and the mullah’s cry. And she imagined for a moment what lay ahead for her son. All she could picture were those brief moments in her own life when the future seemed a marvelous, vast, and unfathomable thing: the soaring mist of the Victoria Falls from her train compartment, the engulfing swell of the
inky black
from the railings of the
Windsor Castle,
the bustling damp of that rainy Southampton pier, and the buoyant sway of a Buick speeding down a six-lane highway. And she couldn’t help but imagine the inevitable mishaps ahead, and she feared for him.

“
Why
are you doing this, Will?” she asked.

Will looked up at his mother, caught off guard by this question. But then the reason presented itself. It was simple and irrefutable: the bane of his childhood and the rule of the family.

“I’m still a Lament, Mum. Laments travel.”

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my wife, Terri Seligman, my first and most loyal reader; David and Elizabeth Hagen for their inspirational contribution; Marisa Silver and Peter Blauner for their sound advice and support; and Kerry Madden-Lunsford, whose comment launched this novel. Many thanks are due to the fine people at Random House, including Claire Tisne, Nicole Bond, Veronica Windholz, and Robin Rolewicz, for their labors on behalf of this book. I am indebted to a remarkable editor, Ileene Smith, for her embrace of the Laments; and, finally, to Henry Dunow, who found a good home for
The Laments
and has guided me through this experience with wisdom and humor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

G
EORGE
H
AGEN
had lived on three continents by the time he was twelve.
The Laments
is his first novel. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination

or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,

locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

by Random House, an imprint of The Random House

Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,

New York, and simultaneously in Canada by

Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered

trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hagen, George.