“Please!” Barry said. “Their rich fathers give them jobs. They couldn’t get anything on their own.”
“Sure, sure,” Miriam said sarcastically about her husband’s remarks, although she kept her eyes on Nina and Luke. “Even if we had made the money to move to the suburbs, we wouldn’t have done it. For Eric’s sake! So much better for him to grow up playing in between cars, being chased by the blacks in the park.”
“There were no blacks chasing us in the park, Mom,” Eric said quickly, hoping to cut off his father’s angry response.
He failed. “Money had nothing to do with it! We could have moved to the suburbs on our income.”
Miriam smiled at Nina. She shook her head and closed her eyes sadly. Then she brought a hand to her lips, kissed it, and put the hand on her husband’s cheek. “No excitement! We have our baby grandson in the car.”
They’re kooks, Nina thought, not for the first time, but without a shudder of revulsion. They were gutted fish on a dock; their innards quivered in public for all the world to see. She looked down at Luke, asleep, his face a mask: the bridge of his nose fiat, the beautiful lips sealed, lying in state like a sculpture on a bishop’s tomb, the occupant done in cool marble, making him perfect and timeless. But he was a Jew, this baby, this son, this person from her and yet not from her.
Nina had told Eric not to let his parents come upstairs, just as she had prevented her parents (or her mother at any rate) from being there. She didn’t know why she had felt that she and Eric being alone with Luke the first time was important — until now. She didn’t want Luke to know anything of the world but them, the two of them, so different, her interior hidden, his exploded; she wanted Luke to make himself out of their incompatible materials, to fashion himself new, created by none of the old forms.
“Will you raise the baby Jewish?” Nina’s mother had once asked.
“Do you even know what that means?” she had answered.
“You know what I mean.”
“He will be raised by us,” Nina had said.
Her mother had frowned and said, “These things have to be thought about. I don’t care what you decide. But confusion isn’t good for children.”
“You think being raised Jewish isn’t confusing?”
“Being nothing is more confusing,” her mother had said.
“My baby won’t be nothing,” she had answered, furious.
The car pulled up in front of their building. Ramon, the afternoon doorman, rushed out to open the door, the cheeks on his fat, round face puffing up with his broad smile. “¡Hola!” he shouted at Luke.
“He’s asleep!” Nina snapped.
“You don’t want us to park and come up?” Barry asked.
Nina froze in position, her legs out of the car, her torso inside, thinking: I swear, I’ll never forgive you, Eric, if you let them.
“We can be a big help,” Barry sold himself. “We raised a kid, you know.”
“Uh … ” came out of Eric.
“Let them be,” Miriam said. “They need to rest. We’ll visit tomorrow.”
While negotiating the lobby — Nina moved slowly, giving an impression of protective motherhood, although it was her sore wound that needed the care — Nina reflected that Eric was incapable of saying no to his father. That task always fell to Miriam. Father and son were overpowering men, not only physically and vocally, but in their vibrant, expressive faces. Refusing them was to hurt a bear: a huge, warm, gentle creature shocked by cruelty, his pain and fear made more pathetic by the size of the suffering. Eric feared disappointing his father’s expectations and love as much as Nina feared failing Eric.
She thought of this as a problem not in relation to herself. She didn’t mind. After all, she had no desire to let Eric down. He demanded only affection and attention; there was nothing brutal in his wants. She thought of it for Luke. Sons have to say no to their fathers, she argued to herself in the elevator, the tower of Eric beside her, Luke unconscious in her arms. The shadow of this man could forever block the sun from her child, obliterate from Luke’s sight much that was not in Eric’s vision but existed in hers. The world, for Eric, was composed of things: gadgets, money, luxuries, ways of doing. For her the planet had life: in its changing sky, in the aging of faces, in the dirt of buildings, in the brisk efficiency of winter and the languorous sex of summer.
Eric believed people and the things they did were important; sometimes Nina could contemplate the end of humanity not only with calm but with a kind of relief. She didn’t bleed at every horror on the news; she didn’t weep while passing the homeless, covered, like forgotten cars, with grime; she didn’t rage at all the bloodthirsty bigotry of the international world, black against white, Jew against Arab; she didn’t despair at the great listless heads of the starving. Instead, she felt hopelessness keenly in all the world’s activities.
Nina stood in the hallway while Eric fumbled with the keys. He was nervous; his body moved ahead of his intentions and left him uncoordinated. He had stumbled in the lobby when he simultaneously moved ahead to the elevator and then reversed direction to help her. He had raced to press the buttons inside, mistakenly holding the door open button until she pointed it out. Now, in his haste to get the right key in the lock, he had dropped the ring. There was silence throughout the building. Everything he did echoed in the stairwell near their door.
She felt dread at this waiting. In the hospital her intimacy with Luke seemed apart from the world and its ghastliness. When they crossed the doorsill to their apartment, the struggle to raise Luke in the mad world would begin. She wanted Luke to know, really know, there was a place of beauty for him, not the decorated prettiness of an apartment, but the warm, messy love of home, as she had felt with her brothers and sisters in that rambling house in Brookline, Massachusetts. The noise of dinner, the soft fabric of nightclothes, the games of Christmas, the excitement of Saturday morning, the regret of Sunday night — all the joys of her childhood she wanted to be Luke’s. She suddenly felt this life for Luke, here, shelved horizontally in the storehouse of New York, reared by a huge father obsessed by possessions, was pregnant with disaster.
They entered.
The apartment was still. An open window in their bedroom lifted a white curtain, billowing like a sail on Blue Hill Bay. “We’re home, baby,” she said to Luke, and moved the hand she had supporting his bottom. The diaper felt softer than usual. She pressed it again. There was something slippery underneath. “I think he’s taken a crap,” she said to Eric.
“You’re kidding!” he said as though an astounding and disastrous turn of events had occurred.
“They do that, you know.”
“The changing table’s all set up,” Eric said, again in a rush to do things his body wasn’t ready for. He tried to put her bag down and motion her toward the baby’s room in one gesture and nearly toppled himself as a result. He had to put out one hand on the floor to prevent a complete spill.
She found herself laughing uncontrollably, her body quaking from it, shaking Luke. Luke moaned. “Shhh,” Nina said to Eric, but she meant it for herself. “Don’t make me laugh.”
“I’m not trying to!”
“Relax.”
“Okay. I’m fine. It’s in here. I’ve set everything up.” Eric pointed to Luke’s room. She moved to have a view of it. The crib was badly placed, against the far wall between the windows. The changing table, which was really an antique dresser inherited from her grandmother, was in the middle against a wall. All quite wrong: the arrangement lacked any sense of flow; the objects were merely plunked down. She regretted again that she hadn’t redone the whole apartment while pregnant. “We’ll have to move the changing table by the window and put the crib here.” She gestured to indicate the wall farthest from the windows, where he had put the inexpensive white shelves, intended for the toys Luke would inevitably acquire.