“I can understand,” Mr. Challait was saying, “if you don’t want to be a part of this. I can understand a young couple preferring to be more, ah, more in the world.”
To make it seem as if I was thinking it over, I gave Erin the look she’d wanted. One long moment of eye contact and mysterious choices already made.
Most people aren’t married at our age. That was all we had to offer. In our case, the dogwood of high school graduation and the magnolia of marriage had scattered on consecutive weekends. Not even my mother had had much to say about any trouble we might run into afterwards. Our parents — hers are divorced; my father is dead — made the arrangements but kept out of the way. Though Erin’s mother did make some trouble at the wedding reception. Her mother really got on us, for a couple minutes there. “Bright boy,” I remember her screeching at me, “oh you’re much too cool to let it show, but I know what’s going on inside.” The only drink at the reception was a champagne punch, yet her mouth had reeked of whiskey. “My daughter,” she’d shouted, looking suddenly very much like Erin as her face came at me, “she is so stubborn, she is so stubborn—” and then Erin’s father had stepped in. The rest of the way both families bent over backwards to make sure things went smoothly. I can’t count the number of times we were told we’d made the right decision, not going to college. As if there’d been any decision about it, any conclusions first weighed and then assented to, about college or about any of the rest.
Our eye contact, at Mr. Challait’s table, had grown to something larger. Erin has such bony cheeks, such intelligent lines at the eyebrows and the lips. Between that face and my own we had been the Bobbsey Twins of Cool. Yes long before her mother’s eruption over the wedding cake, I had learned how uncomfortable an adult was made if anyone under twenty kept his mouth shut and his face relaxed. Much too cool to let it show: I may have baited the woman. At our school, in fact, Erin and I had made a private game of our looks. We would paint our faces white and walk around the quad in ponderous hand-me-down Chesterfield coats. Like two ghosts, “incapable of human feeling,” we’d glide in our padding and speak to no one. Then late on one such painted night, Erin had taken my hand conclusively and led me into a closet off the main kitchen, a walk-in closet where the extra mattresses were kept. Without taking time even to clean off the whiteface, I’d fallen beside her in that airless hold. And Erin also had been the one to think of what we could do for a job. She’d found out soon enough how the riptide murk of my days and hours since my father died had floated me far beyond the reach of any college application. She’s like most girls who keep a journal, snooping, snooping. So Erin had let her own notification deadlines pass (I think Columbia was one place that had accepted her), and instead took some of the wedding money to run an ad in the better magazines. YOUNG RESPONSIBLE MARRIED COUPLE will cook clean house babysit… We received Mr. Challait’s appointment card before June was half over.
The rich man rustled his napkin. A genteel noise, but one plainly meant to be heard. Like that, as if with this napkin Mr. Challait had yanked loose my backbone, all my feelings turned to panic. My stare went out of focus. I was no longer pretending, no longer merely making it seem I didn’t know about his offer. The man could pay for any doctor in the world, and he was throwing his son at two kids. His full-grown madman son. In that one glimpse earlier, I’d seen Robbie weighed more than Erin and I put together. And worse yet, I myself…with the insurance coming I could pay any tuition in the country and I was…my fists, below the table, pressed knuckle to knuckle painfully. I blinked my eyes into focus again, looked to Erin again. Nothing? Her mouth was shut, her face relaxed. Nothing there?
“Ah,” Mr. Challait said, “if you’d like to discuss this privately—” Erin lifted her chin; nothing was about to speak for me once more.
“We’ll take it,” I said roughly. “We’ll take the job.”
Our goods filled two shopping bags and a trunk that had belonged to my father. Mr. Challait’s two homes were on a spread of a couple hundred acres stowed away beyond the reach of highways but nonetheless not far from the train to New York. We drove, however, a secondhand Duster, yet another gift. A wedding’s presents shape what you do as stubbornly as the ring squeezes your finger. We drove, up shoulderless roads where the heavy branches of June pines came down after the car passed, like the paws of a hungry creature who couldn’t quite gauge when we’d be in reach.
That very afternoon, for the first time, we learned the full ruin of Robbie’s character. We were carrying the trunk through the front door, the shopping bags still in the car, when the madman took off out the back. He was in pyjamas. On queerly stiff legs he ran to a chainlink fence Mr. Challait had put up around three sides of the house. Robbie ran, in fact, as if he wanted to reach the fence rather than the open side. Erin dropped her end of the trunk first. By the time I got there Robbie was lying face-down in the dirt, the twisted bottom of the fence-chain clutched tightly in his hand. I mean that he had his naked palm closed, tightly, around two of those jagged steel tips which poke down all along the bottom of fences like that. Blood was seeping between his fingers. And as I came closer — slowly, wanting to put my arms around Erin, not wanting the first touch to betray any fright — I could hear Robbie counting by fours.
Our next step seems to have come naturally. At the time, at least, it felt natural as our asking Mr. Challait to fence off the remaining open side of the yard. Erin and I decided we could analyze and classify Robbie’s sickness. We have since managed to forgive ourselves. The man did, in fact, eventually recover.
At the time, anyway, it seemed it could be done. Analyzing Robbie, those early weeks, seemed as likely as our being there in the first place. So: what are the usual questions asked? From the maid, in bits and pieces, we learned that Robbie had been a good enough boy. He wasn’t so tough and out-of-doors as you’d like a boy to be, the Irish maid said, but he had a touch of the artist in him. Not once had he so much as harmed the hair on a fly until he was sent away to college. Mr. Challait himself explained the rest. “His mother had passed away only a few months before, you know.” Heart attack, the father said, a simple heart attack. “Well, six weeks after school started I had to go up there and find him in the university police station, and he was banging on the walls of his cell with a camera she’d given him.” The ringing of the lens guard against the sheet metal still came to him in dreams, the father admitted. “And there was a boy in the infirmary with a broken leg that Robbie, ah, had given him. That afternoon, that very afternoon, my son was in Boston talking to a man with so many degrees on the walls of his office you wondered what he was trying to prove. I should have known right then that route would get me nowhere.” But for more than ten years Robbie had lived at the mercy of those degrees, doped up and slipped aboard jet after jet, nodding among uneasy crowds of executives. But always the oh-so-impressive degree crumbled before Robbie’s madness. “Nothing,” Mr. Challait said. “Every time, there was nothing there for him.” By the time he reached the last institution, Robbie’s pants size was a full foot larger than it had been when he’d left for college.
At Christmastime, when Mr. Challait had come for a visit with an armful of presents, his son had started to run away from him. This happened in the parking lot. Robbie had run from his father, and also from the nurse who’d brought him outside. He’d run towards the gate. Then after maybe twenty steps the aging boy had collapsed, bewildered and gasping for breath. That afternoon, “that very afternoon,” Mr. Challait had his son back where he would feel like a member of the family.