“Do you really think Dad is the father of the Wolinski boys?” he said.
“They’re so blond; you’re all dark,” she said. She was silent for a few seconds. “Why didn’t Harry notice this? He’s a lawyer, paid to pay attention. Or Tom? Or Sam, for that matter? He’s a scientist. He should have noticed.”
“We took our lead from the Maynard lawyers. They said the photo proved nothing. Don’t you remember Gosford intoning to the Surrogate: ‘If a photo of a man and a woman standing next to each other was proof of paternity, I am the father of George W. Bush.’?”
“Harry’s going to be cross when he finds out you’ve deconstructed the photo,” Eleanor said.
“Not to worry,” Will said. “After a while, he’ll begin thinking he was the one who figured it out.”
“I don’t know what’s going on with him,” Eleanor said. “Is it turning forty?”
“It’s Dad dying,” Will said, “and the Wolinskis. It’s thrown all of us. And we didn’t expect it to.” Eleanor was silent.
“I understand why Harry got so mad at you,” Will said. “He should have behaved better, but the feeling, I understand.”
“Why?”
“Who else do you get mad at when things go wrong?” Will paused. “You seemed so untroubled by the Wolinskis.” He paused again. “Why did you clean out the apartment?”
“Are you mad at me too?” Eleanor said.
Will didn’t answer.
After a long silence, Eleanor spoke. “There was too much of the five of you. Every time I asked any of you if I could, once and for all, clean out Limbo, you howled. You were never going to be ready.” Eleanor picked up Rupert’s baby bonnet. “Finally, I just threw it all out. The only things I kept were your stuffed animals. They’re still here, sitting on the top shelf, bereft: Nins, George, Bup, Lump, Bama.” Eleanor gestured toward Limbo. “You’re the only one who gave your animal a proper name. From the beginning, you spoke in sentences. You had no baby words. Wouldn’t you like to take George, for your baby?” Eleanor paused for several seconds, weighing her words. At what point, she wondered, would her sons stop thinking their parents existed only for them? “There was too much of Dad in the apartment. I couldn’t get on with life. Can you understand?”
“We were sore,” Will said. “It seemed so soon.”
“I didn’t sell it,” Eleanor said. “I thought of it. It’s so big. There are rooms I never go into. I don’t need seven bedrooms.”
“We talked about that,” Will said. “Harry was going to buy it. Over Lea’s dead body.”
“I knew Dad was dying from the first diagnosis. You all thought he’d get better. It’s no surprise you were thrown.” Eleanor cleared her throat. “G?tterd?mmerung on West Sixty-Seventh.”
—
Rupert, once he’d settled in America, showed no interest in returning to England. It took almost twenty years for him to make his first trip back, and he went in 1975 only because Eleanor insisted. “It’s time to visit England,” she said. “You need to go back.” Rupert continued to resist. “Only if you come with me,” he said. Eleanor agreed. Tom was just five, old enough, she thought, to be left for a week without sinking into despair. He was her most dramatic child, the most emotional of them, the most responsive to suffering, his own and others’. All through high school and college, when he wasn’t playing tennis, he devoted his free time to the homeless and tempest tossed: mothers with three jobs, children with fetal alcohol syndrome, cons, ex-cons, gang members, prostitutes, drug addicts, SRO tenants. His Princeton was Trenton, where he tutored, worked in soup kitchens, registered voters, urban homesteaded, and campaigned to elect the city’s first black mayor. His heroes were the Berrigans. He cursed his ill luck for having grown up post-Selma, post-Vietnam, post-Nixon, post-Attica, with no reason to sit in at lunch counters, burn the American flag, chain himself to a prison fence, steal FBI files, go underground. “All we can do now is sue the bastards,” he told his parents. “I don’t have a sense of justice, only injustice.”
Tom wept his way through his first week away from his mother. His brothers rallied. Sam let him sleep in his room. Will took him to school on the public bus, like a big boy. Harry read to him at bedtime. Even Jack stepped up. When Tom cried at dinner or bedtime, he’d cry too. As she tucked Jack into bed her first night back, Eleanor asked, “Were you sad when we were away?”
“It’s OK, Mom,” Jack said. “I wasn’t very sad, not like Tom. I’m bigger. I didn’t want Tom to cry alone. He always cried first.” Jack’s face got serious. “I’ll tell you a secret. When I cried with him, he stopped crying sooner.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I have another secret. Harry gave me a quarter every time I cried. I did it ten times. That’s two dollars and fifty cents. It’s in a jar over there.” He turned to point to his bookshelf, then looked back at Eleanor. “Could I sleep in your bed tonight?” he said.
Eleanor found Tom in Sam’s room, begging his older brother to let him sleep there. Sam refused. “Now that Mom’s home, you have to sleep in your own room.” Tom started to whimper. “If you cry, I’ll call you a cry-baby,” Sam said. “Sam,” Eleanor said, startled by his ruthlessness. Sam threw her a look of aggravation. “We’ve all looked after him and we’re tired of it. Please put him away.” Tom turned his face to the wall.
“Time to go to bed, Tomahawk,” Eleanor said. She picked him up and threw him over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He clung to her back, laughing and shouting. In his room, she dropped him with a thump on his bed.
“Are you going to go away again?” he asked.
“Not for a while,” Eleanor said.
“Jack cried every night,” Tom said. “Harry read me Charlotte’s Web.”
Eleanor reckoned the trip a partial success; Rupert said he’d go again. Before leaving for America, Rupert had spent no more than ten days in London. He felt almost as much an alien there as Eleanor. During their visit, they stayed at Claridge’s, went to museums and the theatre, ate dark gray roast beef and pale gray Brussels sprouts, attended evensong at St. Paul’s, and explored the neighborhoods rich American tourists preferred. As always, with Eleanor, Rupert behaved well but she saw he was out of sorts, listless and tired, as if he were coming down with the flu.
“What’s wrong?” Eleanor asked the fourth day.
“It hasn’t changed enough. Or I haven’t,” he said.
“Let’s leave. Let’s go to the Cotswolds or Salisbury or Bath,” she said. She knew not to suggest Chichester or Longleat or Cambridge.