“I’m sorry. I was kidding.”
James paused. His son had been, he felt, consistently mature and accommodating in the face of seismic family change. The divorce had been hard on both children, and Pamela moving back the following year had been a second loss. Now their little threesome had been disrupted: Saskia was back in America, they’d sold their flat in Kilburn, and moved in with two relative strangers. His own low-level guilt reminded him that his kids had not had it easy, either. They were beautifully mannered, which hid their sadness, but the squeaky wheel shouldn’t always get the grease.
“I think you’re doing a fantastic job. I’m so proud of you and your sister. This hasn’t been straightforward, and you’ve both made it so easy for me.”
“Unlike some people?” Nathan prompted.
“It’s not a competition.”
“But if it was,” said Nathan, putting Pamela’s thermos cup on the floor between his feet where James resisted the urge to kick it, “we would win, right?”
There was no one to hear him; it was a relief, in that moment, to admit aloud that he preferred his own children. Of course he did, who wouldn’t? It was tiring to pretend otherwise, the only lie he’d told or would ever tell Julia. She was the first woman with whom he could be entirely honest and with whom he felt entirely himself. Yet it had not been honest to say—your daughter is a bonus! He wanted it to be true and tried to make it true by saying it, but Nathan, too, deserved some rare time alone with his father. “I mean it, though. No one asks for a new sibling and a stepmother at seventeen. Let’s walk, I can’t sit here anymore. We were meant to be doing all the Cambridge sights this morning; will you come with your old dad for a nostalgic walk around Harvard Yard? And then let’s go down to Eliot House, I’ll give you the James Fuller undergrad tour. First, I’ll show you where I never managed to make out with girls in the stacks.”
“Dad, no.”
“No?”
“Just no.”
? ? ?
THEY ENTERED THE YARD beneath the Porcellian’s carved stone boar head, hoisted blank-eyed and openmouthed above McKean Gate. The freshman dorms on either side seemed empty, with most of their inmates home for the first time since their arrival at Harvard, returned for Thanksgiving to condescend to younger siblings, to have clothes laundered and stomachs filled, to oversleep in crisp new Harvard-branded sweatshirts and pajama bottoms and H-logoed nonslip bed socks, and to be bad-tempered with the parents they instantly resented for behaving as if nothing about them had changed.
Stripped of undergraduates, only tourists remained in Harvard Yard. The centers of the segmented lawns were still green but their edges were balding and muddied, roped off to recover from heavy rain and heavy footfall. James and Nathan rounded the looming gray flank of Widener, down a path slippery with a mulch of oak and elm leaves and then farther on, around the corner to the statue of a man who was not John Harvard, despite his label, slouched huge and complaisant beneath a vast flag that snapped and wavered in the wind like a mainsail. They waited, watching while a family from Germany took pictures of one another reaching up to rub the statue’s polished bronze toe. Three blonde daughters, small, medium, and large, in matching green-and-pink–flowered anoraks and new Red Sox baseball caps took turns to strain upward for the top of the plinth. James offered to take their photograph together and they thanked him, handed him a huge-lensed camera, and posed, smiling and squinting only slightly in the sharp bright chill. After they’d gone, Nathan put an arm around his father’s waist, tenderly protective.
“You and Mom are obsessed with talking to randoms.”
“I know, our existence is excruciating. If you come here to college, I promise not to hang out and talk to students. Go rub his toe, it’s good luck for applying.”
“Dad. That last worked when I was about eight. So anyway, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Nathan changed the subject, casually, “before, you said ‘stepmother,’ but are you actually going to get married again?” He and Saskia did not agree, neither could they agree whether it mattered. Nathan refused to admit that a legal contract endowed a relationship with permanence, using their own parents’ marriage as an example. But still, he felt, there would be an ineluctable shift. At present, whatever his father might believe, Nathan had neither stepmother nor stepsister.
“I don’t think so,” James admitted. “Julia doesn’t want to, she’s worried about Gwen. I think we’re fine as we are. Come, let’s walk to Longfellow’s house.”
“I’ve been a million times.”
“Just to walk a bit.”
“But you think of her as our stepmother now in any case.”
“I can’t think of alternative, unmarried terminology. We’re in it for the long haul, marriage or not.”
“’Cause you’re happy,” Nathan observed. In Harvard Square, a busker in a Santa hat and mauve-and-yellow-striped fingerless gloves was playing “Feliz Navidad” on the accordion. The wind picked up, and without thinking Nathan handed Pamela’s travel mug to his father and thrust his hands into his pockets, happily unencumbered. James was reminded of his son as a much smaller child, absentmindedly passing him the smeared wrapper of a candy bar or the fuchsia-stained stick of a Popsicle, or even his chewing gum, plopped into an open palm without thought so Nathan could race off ahead. No running with gum had been one of James’s few rules. Pamela, for ecological reasons, had vetoed gum under all circumstances.
“Yes. I’m happy. Is that okay?”
“I suppose we can overcome our childish amazement that parents are people and allow you to have, shock horror, a life of your own. You can pay for our therapy later, if you like. Even Mom said you seem good together. She said you need someone unchallenging at this stage in your life.”
“Did she. Come on,” said James, firmly. “We’re going this way.”
They passed the Coop, where the Harvard insignia crept like a pox across towels and bed linen and cufflinks and jewelry and soft toys and toothbrushes and commemorative pewter and glassware. There were Harvard bottle openers and Ping-Pong balls, baby bibs and pencil cases. They stopped to admire these wares, James offered to buy his son an Ivy League chocolate bar and tried, and failed, to imagine his own father in such a place. “’S’tempting fate,” Nathan told him solemnly. “Buy me one when I get in.”