III
I CAN TELL YOU: Last weekend Andrew decided to see his child.
Really!
As you know I’ve been holding back, holding back, and the fact that you’ve never brought up the subject, never once urging me to go see her or even asking oh so casually if it had ever occurred to me—
This is something you had to come to out of yourself, your own thinking, your own feeling.
Fine.
After all, you’ve never even told me her name.
Willa. Her name is Willa. I had left her birth certificate with Martha so there would be no mistake about that. Briony chose the name to honor her father. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Willa.
Quite lovely.
But think of the difficulties. What would I say? Why would I have come, for what purpose? I didn’t know. Did I want her back? And if I did, would that be best for her? And if she was with me, would Andrew the Pretender kick in and somehow put her in harm’s way? His child? And if he had just come for a visit, what would she think, could she relate to him in any way, think of him as her father who hadn’t seen her since she was an infant in a car seat? A man who would say Hi and leave again? To say nothing of Martha, who was as likely as not to slam the door in my face.
There are certain legalities it seems to me you could rely on. I’m not a lawyer, but the blood relation always prevails. Parenthood rules unless it can be proven that you’re not fit. A drunkard, a homeless man, a criminal, that sort of thing.
That sort of thing?
You just don’t give children away in this country as if we were back in the medieval world. When you left Willa, was there anything written? Did you consult a lawyer, sign anything, you and Martha?
I was in despair. I needed help. I had considered suicide.
Oh? That’s new.
I was at the point where I talked to Briony as if she was alive. Taking her instructions — how to heat the formula, I would read these things but ask her if I had understood them correctly. She would tell me. Put the little thing over your shoulder to burp her after feeding. She will need something warmer for the coming winter. And when it’s time for her shots, off to the pediatrician she goes. She’d laugh, my Briony, to see me in my domesticity, I’d have hallucinations where she’d appear beside me, as in life, and then a moment later be a tiny figure doing cartwheels and handstands and somersaults on the kitchen table. Oh, God. And you want me to consult a lawyer?
You didn’t hire anyone to help you?
I had no help, I couldn’t think of hiring anyone, I had Briony. I took a leave of absence from my job — an unpaid paternity leave. And then the madness dissolved, and I did go to get help. I was desperate for help. I went to Martha.
Actually it was an impulsive decision on Andrew’s part, coming upon him as a kind of blown fuse of the endless thinking as to whether or not he should see his child. He was in his study reading yet another paper theorizing on how the brain becomes the mind. Here the proposition was offered that a brain-emulating artifact might someday be constructed whose neural activity could produce consciousness. This assertion, coming not from a pulp science fiction story of the kind he had read as a teenager but from an esteemed neuroscientist in a professional journal, so startled Andrew that he snapped back in his chair as if from an electric shock, and realized that his radio was tuned to the Saturday afternoon broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera. He now listened and understood that the Boris, of Boris Godunov, was dying. The czar calling out, singing out his lament, his prayer, and at last dying with the whispered word in Russian that sounded like rascheechev, ras-chee-chev, and then the thump indicating that he had hit the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. Then this beautifully plaintive leitmotif to indicate yes, Boris the czar was kaput.
Later, Andrew didn’t remember if he heard the bells of Moscow in celebration of the tyrant’s death, because he was out of there, slipping into his jacket as he ran and catching a cab to Union Station and getting on a Metro-liner.
In New York, he walked crosstown to Grand Central and in a shop there bought a toy animal for his Willa, a funny, eye-rolling mechanical puppy who could be wound up and set down to wobble along on his little legs. He thought an animal was the safest thing to give his daughter, who would be three years old by now. Any child from one to ten would enjoy a toy animal.
You see, Doc, it all came back to me in a rush — Martha’s house, Martha’s large husband — not that I thought he was the Boris who had died that afternoon — I had the impression that he was no longer top-drawer in the opera world — but the house, the scene, Martha walking up the staircase with my baby in her arms. It was as if not a moment had passed and I was still at their front door rubbing the snow from my glasses. And as the commuter train rocked its way to New Rochelle I was no longer afraid how my visit would turn out, no longer adrift in indecision, creating ominous scenarios in my mind. I was going to see my daughter! I felt love for Martha and for Martha’s husband, I was overflowing with gratitude to these people who had taken my baby with Briony under their wing. And I found I was even happy with the rickety train ride.
You’re going to tell me this didn’t end well.
Of course.
When Andrew arrived at Martha’s house he knew immediately something was wrong. The snow had been cleared from all the other driveways and front walks on her street, but Martha’s property had not been touched. Andrew paid the cabbie and stood with his feet in six inches of snow. The thing about Martha, one of the definitive things, was her impeccable home management. If something didn’t work, no matter how incidental, she must have it fixed instantly. She brought forth gardeners, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, roofers, tilers, cleaners, glaziers, and repairmen with esoteric specialties. She tended with solemnity to such details as brass door keyhole covers. It was now eight in the evening of a grim November day. Lights were on in the neighborhood, but the house in front of him was dimly lit as if some sort of séance was going on. I don’t know why Andrew thought that. He trudged up the path to the front door and found it ajar. [thinking]
Yes, go on.
He called me The Pretender.
Who?
Martha’s large husband. That was his greeting. Ah, he said, here’s The Pretender. That was the name he’d devised for me when we’d had that drink the day I brought the baby to their door. That I only pretended to be a nice human being generously disposed to my fellow man when in fact I was a dangerously fake person, congenitally insincere and a killer — that’s how he characterized me. Andrew the Pretender. And, as I told you, he was not far from the truth. But now when he called me The Pretender I realized whose portrait was up there over the mantel of the living room. It was Martha’s husband in his greatest role when he was still active — Boris Godunov. Now, you of course know the story of Boris Godunov.
I’m ashamed to say—
Boris is a kind of Russian Richard the Third. Kills the rightful heir to the throne, the czarevich Dmitry. Slits the kid’s throat and declares himself czar. Thereafter, he’s tormented by what he has done. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
OK.
So the years pass and an opportunistic monk, Grigoriy, seeing that he’s about the same age as the dead czarevich would have been, goes off to put together an army on the Polish-Lithuanian border. He will advance on Moscow announcing himself as the czarevich Dmitry, the rightful heir to the throne. Boris Godunov is assured that the man is a pretender — that the real czarevich is still dead. But afflicted with guilt, and riddled with religious superstition, Boris can’t convince himself that this is so, and he dies. That’s the story.