But—when she thought of Nathan, when she considered her sweet son, his puff-chested na?veté, his ebullience, his grin, she felt that something essential had been stolen from him that he had simply been too innocent to guard. Gwen, predatory and conniving beyond her years, had entrapped him. Some women did, we were not all passive, not all united in benign and supportive sisterhood, after all. Seeking revenge upon her mother, or a means to get her claws irretractably into Nathan (for he was manifestly out of her league, only available because of this accident of circumstance; of this Pamela felt quite certain), or perhaps just wanting a warm, responsive living dolly to cuddle, she had attacked—mugged was the best word—had mugged Pamela’s little boy. It was almost as if— She toyed with the word that had risen spontaneously to the surface. No, all right, she conceded, defensive against herself, it wasn’t quite like that. But something like it. Certainly a violation.
She had not gone wrong. She found her exit and after leaving the slip road redialed James, who answered immediately and said, “Look, maybe he should be around but you can’t imagine how godawful it’s been in the house with Julia and that girl at each other’s throats; I just wanted him out of it. The boy deserves some peace and quiet to study now.”
Pamela whistled through her teeth. Ahead she saw a drive-thru Dunkin’ Donuts and realized with a flash of grateful recognition that a large iced coffee would elevate this journey from tedious to transcendent. She slowed and turned, her mood already transformed. “What a trip. Do you remember when he begged for that Japanese fighting fish? And then he forgot to clean it out and it suffocated. I retract what I said, I actually think it’s a gift that he’s away during the week and he can breathe. Charlie came into his room while we were on the phone and he sounded so happy to be with his friends again. They’re good boys, with all their high fives and weird Masonic handshakes.”
“I asked the other day if he’d told Charlie about the baby and he looked at me like I’d lost my mind and I thought, you know what? Let him have his denial. If we can’t change her mind in the next few weeks, he won’t have much longer to be a kid.”
“Oh, Jamesy,” Pamela breathed, back in the seductive tone she assumed when she felt he was no longer opposing her. He could picture her quite clearly leaning forward, steepling her fingers and offering beyond them the musky darkness of a substantial cleavage, and an outrageous pout of her lips. In fact, she was idling at the mouth of the Dunkin’ Donuts takeout lane, reading the menu with greedy pleasure. “He’d still be a baby. He’d just be a baby with a baby. Which is precisely why you cannot let it happen. We’re depending on you now; all these random people are your bloody responsibility. Please give your son a kick up the arse and get him to fucking deal with it.”
29.
Philip had been disappointed in Julia before, saddened that in her guilty indulgence she succumbed to Gwendolen’s rages. Gwen had been sent to a progressive school at which the delayed gratifications of discipline and academic success were sacrificed in favor of immediate comfort and coziness, and which placed primary emphasis on the value of imaginative self-expression, time that elsewhere might have been devoted to the studying of parts of speech or long division. Even so, Gwen had never been made to go to lessons, nor to do what little homework she had, nor to help her mother around the house. She had not been taught, or helped, to see her mother as a differentiated individual, for both Julia and Gwen found pleasure in the obsessive and intricate fulfilling of Gwen’s needs, and this shared interest bound them. She had never been told, “no.” Ever since Daniel’s final diagnosis, Julia had devoted her life to smoothing away tiny quotidian discomforts like the ultimate, inexhaustible celebrity fixer, toiling to compensate for that one, huge, unrelenting sorrow. But giving Gwen what she wanted did not mean it was what she needed. “Babies protest if one confiscates the steak knife they’ve grabbed,” Iris had observed, during one of their lengthy analyses, “it doesn’t mean one lets them play with weapons.” Philip agreed and had always agreed—Julia ought to have confiscated the knife long ago, and had the foresight and strength and conviction to withstand the howls. To parent well, sometimes one makes one’s children unhappy, yet Julia had never had any ambition for her daughter’s future besides a nonspecific “happiness.” She doesn’t have to be an astrophysicist; all I want is for her to be happy. She spoke of it as though such a state somehow precluded hard work, or discipline, or focus. He and Iris discussed it interminably. Weren’t there happy astrophysicists? But Philip had always dissuaded Iris when she announced her intentions of wading in, and for that he, too, now felt complicit. They should have spoken. He should have braved Julia’s unhappiness by speaking out—he himself was guilty of the same indulgence.
? ? ?
IT WAS PASSOVER and Passover was somehow unavoidable, even for so lax and assimilated a family. James’s suggestion that they “pass on Passover” this year was tempting but was as unrealistic as canceling Christmas. And so they were assembling at Iris’s house for the first time, aping normality, just a fortnight after the bombshell. Iris would almost be choked by the commands she wished to issue, by the speeches she longed to give, and Philip alone would hear them all, over and over on a loop inside his head. Julia had already warned them both—it’s not the place to attack her, if we want her to see sense, then ganging up will backfire; if this really has to happen, then let’s just have a nice family evening—but restraint was not Iris’s forte. She would need an outlet, and there was no such edict in place against attacking Philip.
“You can spare me the sanctimony,” Iris told him sharply when he arrived, though he hadn’t spoken. She signaled toward the kitchen with the paper-wrapped bunch of crimson tulips he’d presented. “Go through. If you hush me again, I shall go wild. I’ll be shtum; as instructed, just don’t repeat it. Don’t even think it.”
It would not help for him to say, “I didn’t say anything.” She had heard his thoughts. Together, they had exhausted every iteration of every argument. So much of their map was covered in this old terrain—familiar pitfalls and ravines into which they fell and then revolved together, uselessly. They were trapped in their old roles and their own selves.
Gwen appeared behind her grandmother holding a bowl of cashews, which she was posting into her mouth with the regular swipe of a metronome. Her lovely hazel eyes were blackened with too much makeup, her freckles partially erased with something powdery and pale. “Grandpa,” she said, smiling uncertainly from beneath her lashes, and wiped a salty hand on her jeans before coming forward to embrace him with her free arm. “Cashew?”
“Not just yet, thank you. How are you, maidele?”
“Fine. A bit . . . have to keep eating or I feel sick.” She colored.
Philip watched Iris drift upstairs without obvious purpose, repelled away from their granddaughter like a slow, elegant magnet. Keeping Iris silent would be impossible if Gwen kept referring to her pregnancy, even obliquely. Gwen barely seemed abashed. She seemed almost jaunty. He felt an urgent longing to go home.
In the kitchen he found James laying the table. As they exchanged greetings Philip held out his hand for a bunch of cutlery, to help.