Maybe Byron and I want too much.
“Daddy,” Byron said.
“Yes?”
“Would you play with me?”
Peter felt trapped. He didn’t want to be with Byron. He wanted to pursue Diane, to correct her, reengage her attention on Byron. She seemed ready to resign from her role as a mother. That had to be prevented. Peter couldn’t substitute for her, that would be even worse for Byron. “Show me the violin,” Peter said.
“No!”
“Maybe it can be fixed.”
Byron opened his eyes wide. He looked normal. Active, his body ready to perform, full of hope. “Okay.” He pulled Peter into his room. The violin must have been left where Byron had thrown it. Diane must have been too upset to do anything about it.
It was finished, all right. The neck had been severed, its back thoroughly cracked, and a strip about an inch wide had caved in.
“We could tape it,” Byron said, excited now. A project, a repair, an erasure of his wrong and Mommy’s anger: attention, correction, and forgiveness all in one package. Peter had given him hope. That was stupid of me, Peter realized, holding the dismembered instrument in his hands.
“I’m sorry, but it’s too broken.”
Byron stared at the corpse for a moment, then his cheeks puffed, his mouth got tight, and he cried. “I wanna play it,” he wailed in harmony with the sobs.
“We’ll get you another one,” Peter said, hugging him, hugging him hard.
“Mommy said no,” Byron blubbered.
“We’ll get another,” Peter said, and felt much better. Forgive all this. He had his motive right at last. Forgive it all, his mischief, her rage. “We’ll get another. You’ll play.”
“No, we won’t.” Diane was there, like a ghost, appearing whole, from silence to full volume. “You can’t fix everything with your money for him. He broke it. That’s it. He has to learn that what he does has consequences.”
Byron shivered in Peter’s arms. He pressed himself against Peter’s chest, an animal hiding in a cave.
“You can’t just appear and make everything magically perfect,” she said to Peter. Her eyes burned black in the ringed hollows of her dark face.
Peter clutched Byron and made no answer.
She’s declared war on us, he thought, and his throat dried up again.
“YOU’D BETTER get me something to read about being Jewish,” Nina said, watching the streaming lights of the West Side. The car bucked and slid on the patchwork repairs of the decaying highway. Their roughness had done nothing to prevent an exhausted Luke from immediately passing out in his car seat. His head lolled to one side as if partially severed.
“Huh?” Eric said. He glanced away from the road to show her, in the glowing half-light, an incredulous face.
“Or you’ll have to explain to Luke what the stories are.”
“What stories? The ovens? How Woody Allen became a sex symbol? What are we talking about?”
“God, Eric. I mean, Passover”—she hesitated before pronouncing the word—“Hanukkah. The stories of the holidays.”
Eric didn’t answer. He nodded to himself, with a sneer on his lips. “Okay,” he said after a bit.
“I’m going to tell him about Jesus.”
“You are?”
“Yes. So you’d better give Judaism equal time.”
“Why the hell are you gonna tell him about Jesus? You don’t go to church.”
“It’s part of who he is. He’s half Jewish and he’s half Christian—”
“This is ’cause of fucking Sadie! I could kill that woman!” Eric lurched forward in his seat. He took his hands off the steering wheel and made as if to strangle the windshield. The car weaved slightly out of their lane.
“Eric!” Nina reached for the wheel.
He grabbed it back. “Calm down. I’m not gonna kill us. God, that woman is a walking migraine. She’s just trying to get under your skin with all that crap about whether—”
“It’s got nothing to do with Sadie. I’ve thought—”
“Of course it does! She’s the Howard Cosell of Passover. She goes to aggravate people!”
Nina laughed. “Eric, you know Luke. He heard all that talk. Tomorrow he’ll start asking questions. I have to answer them. And even if Sadie hadn’t done it, sooner or later it would come up. You can postpone it for a while, but eventually you have to tell him who he is and what it means.”
“He’s our son!” Eric shouted as he wildly switched from one lane to another to pass a sluggish car. “He’s not a kike or a goy. He’s our goddamn son.”
“Eric, you can’t teach Luke to hate himself because he’s Jewish.”
“What?” Eric looked hurt, not that surface turbulence of irritation at Sadie, but the deeper worry, the look of self-doubt, that he often brought home from the office.
“Sometimes, from the way you act with your family, it makes me think you married me because I’m not Jewish.”
“That is one of the reasons I married you.”
Nina let this hang in the air for a moment, sniffing it for malodorousness.
Eric glanced at her. “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t one of the reasons you married me because I’m not a Wasp?”
“I didn’t think about it,” Nina answered.
“Oh, come on, you must’ve.”
“Did you also marry me because of my money?” Nina felt brave asking this; she felt reckless.
Eric sat up and straightened his usually hunched shoulders. He didn’t look at her and his tone was clipped and formal. “What money? You didn’t have any. And you still don’t.”
This evasion disappointed Nina. Made her angry. “You know what I mean. My family money.”
“When I met your family, I thought they had to be broke. They wore crappy clothes, they complained about every nickel, they bragged about how cheaply they got things—”
“You’re not being honest, Eric.” She got that out, but then turned away to look out her window at the bouncing city, long and dark, secret and shining.
“I’ve made more money for your family in the last year than any of them have for two generations,” Eric said, in a rage. The rage of the guilty, Nina thought. “They never gave us a nickel! We’re the only one of their children who remember their anniversary, who’ve given them a grandchild, and the only money we get is a percentage, a tip, a gratuity, for making them millions. My parents, who have nothing, nothing, gave us twice as much money when we got married—”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Nina said, still watching the city, dark and glowing on the water—
“I see. You insult me and then the discussion’s over. Great.”
She wanted to cry. This wasn’t the funny, excited boy she married. He was as ugly as these concrete streets, dirty and unchanging, lit up for show, but dark and lonely, the welcoming glow nothing more than a lie.
“All right,” Eric suddenly said as if answering a question, although they had been silent for a while. “The truth is I married you because you were completely different from all the girls I had ever met. I didn’t marry you for your money, but I knew money and you were connected, that one way or another it would come along.”
Of course, he knew I would one day inherit, he knew that Father’s cheapness only meant there was lots of money, he must have known, and that’s why he wanted a child, an heir, the only grandchild so far, the firstborn.
MOMMY. MOMMY. Warm in the cool, whispering, “Shhh, we’re almost home.”
“Do you want the stroller?” Daddy’s strong voice asked.
“Shhh,” Mommy said, and Daddy sang to her.
In the great green room there was a telephone, and a red balloon—
Way, way up, in the slice between the buildings, floating on the sky, was the moon.