I had not come to look at the mountains. This was more like a pilgrimage. My own personal Lourdes. Because this was the place where Meadow and I had spent so many days during my year at home with her. The year she was three. The year in which she learned to read. The year she learned to play the recorder, waltz, read the periodic table, and speak passable German. During that long northern winter, we’d gone to the library almost every day. I’d bring my research (sorry, as it turns out, I still don’t feel like talking about my research), and she would settle on the carpet nearby with crayons or a fan of books, and we’d spend companionable hours like that. At some point she would tug my pant leg and I would know it was time for a visit to the carousel.
What carousel? The one made a gift to the people of Albany by the people of our sister city, Ypres, in 1935. All its mirrors still intact, as well as the original, somewhat deafening organ, the carousel found its way into the New York State Museum in the 1970s. Boasting thirty-six horses, two deer, two donkeys, and one monkey, it’s worth a visit, if you’re in town.
The day I went to see the carousel alone, I noticed that the assortment of people waiting in line was the same as when Meadow and I had been among them — young parents absentmindedly bouncing babies, toddlers with their foreheads wedged between the railings. I thought about how the children were too young to understand the value of what was happening to them, which was that their minds were being imprinted by every scent, every touch, every sound, and that it was from this template they would draw for the rest of their lives. This is how the world would forever hit their nerves.
“How old?” I asked the young mother standing beside me.
The mother looked up from her baby. “Eight months,” she said.
“Very cute.” I pointed. “Is that a tooth?”
The young woman put her finger in the child’s mouth and swiped it. The baby’s eyes widened. “Nah. I don’t know what that is.” She fixed his tiny sweater.
“Well,” I said. “He’s a cute little guy.”
“I know he is.” She beamed, looking unaccountably beautiful.
Meadow’s favorite horse on the carousel was a black one with a golden saddle — the outside horse. I had stood beside it countless times. When she had first ridden the carousel, her waist was thick, a baby’s bubble of milk. But each time we returned to the carousel, her body was different. Her waist thinned, seemingly in my hands, and her legs lengthened and her shoes began to scrape me as they rose and fell, shod with hard plastic flats and ruffled socks. When she was little, she barely noticed me, so entranced was she by the lights and mirrors of the carousel. But as she grew older, even after she could safely ride the carousel by herself, she would ask me to stand beside her anyway, and I would whistle, and compliment her stallion, and she would look down at me, and I don’t think I ever felt gladder of anything, that a daughter of mine might be in the midst of a happy childhood — that elusive gold standard, a goddamned miracle.
The carousel. Who doesn’t have one in his childhood, that universal symbol around which all cravings, fulfilled and unfulfilled, seem to circle magnetically forever? They even had one, if you can believe it, in the middle of Treptower Park in East Berlin, circa 1974. And even though life in Berlin was unique, the children weren’t. That is, a child in Berlin tallied the same pleasures as you did: how many rides he was permitted, who was watching and with what expressions, what to call this feeling of going up and down and around simultaneously and whether or not to enjoy it, what the child beside him was doing or not doing, who was crying and how sincerely, how the music sounded, sad or happy, or too tightly wound, maniacal; he tallied it all, especially what was done post-carousel, everything made special and weird by the motion, by a sense of having traveled. Like any child, the child in East Berlin thought about the carousel late that night in bed. His musings were double-edged; by remembering the carousel he felt he “kept” or “possessed” the carousel, and yet he understood that the carousel was not a thing, like a balloon or a toy, and could not be possessed. He noted preciously that the next time he rode the carousel — if he was so lucky, if his Mutter would take him there again — would not be like the time he rode it today. Also, he was starting to see that there was a difference between secrets and mysteries, and life was — unluckily for him — a mystery, not a secret, which meant nobody owned it, and therefore nobody could make it transparent for him, and nobody’s death would yield the answer to it, and maybe he even understood that from there on in, whenever he looked at a carousel, no matter how old he’d grown, no matter how gray, he would never be able to comprehend the riddle of how it made him feel.
Around and around the carousel went, the frozen horses jumping.
Grief is a carousel.
Guilt is a carousel.
Life is a carousel.
No — history is a carousel.
No, no. Memory.
Memory is a carousel.
FORGETTING
One of the pieces of advice offered to parents in extremely contentious custody cases is confiscation of the children’s passports. If there is any worry on the part of one spouse that the other spouse is at risk for flight with a child — that is, kidnapping (there, I said it) — the concerned spouse should request that the courts hold that child’s passport. However, parents should understand a) that the United States has no exit controls — in other words, any of us can shamble in or out at any time we take a fit, and b) that there is no way to track or revoke a passport once it has been issued.
This is where things get murky.
I mean, where the unconscious mind enters. Mine.
Emboldened, I guess, by the damning child custody evaluation, your side appealed the custody arrangement with new allegations that I was a danger to my own daughter, stipulating that these charges would not be dropped until I submitted to psychological testing. In the meantime, your lawyer informed Thron that she was making a motion to restructure the custody agreement to be less, not more, collaborative. Their proposal, The Opposition warned us, was that I be forbidden under any circumstance to spend unsupervised time with Meadow. Visits between us would be monitored by a state-appointed chaperone. Never again, the lawyer vowed, would I be allowed to endanger the girl with my bizarre, neglectful parenting. Nor would I be allowed to speak with her privately. If I wanted to be with Meadow, I would have to do so under the supervision of someone from Child Services.
I responded to this development by imbibing such a quantity of Canadian Club that I woke up the following morning shirtless on the carpet, my face hot with midday sun. I looked around the bedroom in which I lay. Everything that was not nailed into the floor had been pushed over — I could only assume by me — the secondhand bedside table, the bookshelf, and even the old, gothic wardrobe that I had taken from our Pine Hills apartment, claiming it as a Kennedy heirloom. As I tried to lift this wardrobe back onto its feet, something slipped out from between the wardrobe and its pasteboard backing and fell to the floor at my feet.
Now, even though I had erased any sort of paper trail of my life before I became a Kennedy, I had not, by necessity, destroyed my German passport. I was not an American citizen, so the German passport would have to do in the event of emergency international travel, which I’d easily avoided. I’d hidden the booklet inside this wardrobe who knows how many years ago. Now it lay open suggestively on the floor. I rubbed my eyes and leaned down to peer at it. There I was, a decade younger, an unmarried man of twenty-eight. My skin was taut, my stare a little icy. I barely recognized the face.