Luke, despite the miraculous cure of his colic, had never become an easy child. He remained serious and careful, even his best moods diluted by a wary distrust. But he was a sweet two-year-old, very loving, and very smart — sometimes it seemed like a terrible intelligence to Nina, that it was the intelligence which made him difficult. Luke slept through the night, he didn’t fuss about his food, or going places, he could be taken anywhere, restaurants, movies, trips, he showed no signs of the terrible twos, and yet he was completely dependent on Nina — or Eric. He almost never played by himself. He asked constant questions. He wanted to know the name of every object. He noticed every street horror. He feared the crowd of other children at the playground. He let his pail and shovel be taken from him without a protest, preferring to be stripped of his possessions rather than fight for them. He seemed to want and need a limitless supply of love, not things, not showy attention, but real contact, conversation, reading, play, intimacy, and patience. He could detect even a subsonic whine of irritation in response to a request and would then refuse to accept the giving, like the Jesus of her childhood sermons, wanting only pure love, not grudging duty. But granted generous love and ungrudging devotion, he was a miracle of happiness: easy, laughing, witty, and kind.
Most maddening of all, Luke never showed his good side to others. Adults expecting the usual performance by a baby — gurgling laughs at funny faces, easy clowning at his own infant clumsiness, automatic pleasure at their friendliness — were shocked by Luke’s obvious suspicion of them, his unforgiving self-critical attitude at his own failures, his anger at being teased, his obvious desire to be their equal.
“Do you remember me? Give me a kiss. I brought you a present. Would you like me to play with you?” All those offers (always made, Nina noticed, with every expectation by the adults that their generosity was special, impossible to refuse), offers made by grandparents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, friends, were answered by Luke ducking his head and mumbling: “No.” He would give them nothing, no matter how high the bribe. It almost frightened her; his lofty lack of self-interest sometimes seemed inhuman.
To have found Pearl, someone whom he did like, someone who gave to children without vanity, without expectation of reward— that was Pearl all right, a woman of apparently limitless self-sacrifice and patience — to have found her and for Luke to already know and like her … it was a miracle. Surely Eric would understand that.
So — nervous — Nina told Eric about her conversation with Pearl. Eric had begun to watch a videotape of a cable show about the stock market and he asked her to wait until it was over. She sat patiently while Eric shouted answers to the people on the program, applauding or booing as if the opinions were base hits or errors. Finally he listened to Nina. Eric nodded, said great, and that he would arrange to be home early any day that Pearl could come by. But Eric’s legs jiggled up and down, his eyes became solemn (like Luke’s thoughtful, worried look before nap time), and it was obvious to Nina that Eric was scared by the prospect of leaving his son in the care of a stranger.
She finally understood, after two years, that Luke was a possession of Eric’s. Not one of many, but the possession. Eric loved only through ownership, so for him the emotion wasn’t false, it was real love. Nevertheless, it required performance, that Luke, like some stock, gain in value and popularity. Eric ended every night with a prayerful litany: “Luke remembered such and such Luke can say such and such, he listens when I read, he’s so handsome—” and so on. All of that was true, but this wasn’t pleasure, it was pride.
She almost hated Eric for the way he loved Luke. She felt jealous of the admiration, fearful of its hubris, and worried by the implication of pressure in the future. Eric had already begun to fuss about Luke’s education, clipping articles about the IQ test used for admittance to private nursery schools. He assessed the motor and language skills of other children in the park, noting that Luke was taller than others his age, and had a much larger vocabulary. He bragged about Luke’s remarkable memory to their friends, and worst of all, Eric’s conversations with Nina were always about Luke. Eric laughed about Luke; he hugged Luke as if he were clutching a life preserver; he taped the financial TV shows to have more time to play with Luke and watched them during the few hours she and Eric were alone. All of Eric’s energies were directed at the stock market and at Luke; there was nothing for her.
“He’s just like me,” Eric would say about anything Luke did well.
“That’s the Wasp in him,” Eric would say about Luke’s shyness or his passivity in fighting off other children in the sandbox.
And Luke adored his daddy. Daddy came home with toys, freed Luke from gravity, carried him into the atmosphere, high above the world on his broad, thick shoulders. Daddy never yelled. Daddy never said no.
But Nina had to say no. Nina was always there. Nina yelled. She was vain enough to think that her parenting was better, her love more genuine. But did Luke know that? Did he seem happier with his father because he really was or because Luke knew that Daddy couldn’t take anything else? When Luke crashed into something and cried, the look on Eric’s face was more pathetic. When Luke lost a pail to a marauding toddler, he seemed even more humiliated than usual if Eric was around. Luke would burst into tears, not at the loss of the object but at Eric’s painfully slow method of recovery or, even worse, Eric’s monologues of advice to Luke about how to handle the next confrontation. Luke would listen, head bowed, his chin tight, hating himself, hating his father’s supposedly reassuring tone, eyes darkened in their pain. In dreadful pain, she knew. She knew. She knew how much the kindly advice of a disappointed father can bruise and bruise and then bleed later.
But how could she tell Eric? Eric would never believe her conviction that if he blew up at Luke and yelled with all his might, told Luke to bash the next grasping two-year-old in the face, that Eric’s rage, for all its apparent brutality, would be better for Luke than Eric’s labored critique, delivered in a compassionate tone.
Luke had taken to refusing to go to the park on weekends, something Eric encouraged, it seemed to Nina, and she believed their twisted relations with each other about the other kids was the cause. She wanted to correct Eric, to get him to behave like a father, to push Luke, out into the world, to open his big arms and let go.
But every attempt to introduce her observations provoked immediate defensiveness: “I said that to him! But he gets too upset. I can’t. I think — I mean, he’s two years old, he’s got plenty of time to learn how to defend his things. I mean, I think he’s kind of noble — not worrying about his possessions, but worrying over the other kid’s feelings.”
Eric’s attitude, his casual acceptance of Luke’s lack of aggression, seemed bizarre and self-contradictory. All Eric cared about, in his own life, was money. The gathering and growing of money. How could he accept Luke’s passivity?
And her own disgust with Luke’s meek, selfless manner, Luke’s horror of argument or disapproval, his total absence of competitiveness — wasn’t that like herself? Nina never cared when one of their friends bought a new car, got a house in the Hamptons; she was never provoked by others bragging or teasing, by their accomplishments, honors, possessions. Like Luke, she preferred to sit with nothing, to have herself and the universe, rather than squeeze into the squashed planet of things. Why shouldn’t her son, with her blood, her bones, her eyes, be the same?
She knew the answer. Because he was a man. She hated the answer. But the answer was in her heart, not her head. He was a man and they would take things from him if he didn’t fight. Maybe feminism had changed things for women (she doubted it, but she hoped so), but for the men? No. They still slaughtered their own.