III.
By the time Christmas Eve arrived, I was so eager for the holiday to be over that I had, the day before, accepted a last-minute invitation to a conference at Stockholm University that began on the thirty-first and lasted until the fifth of the new year.
It had been an awful week. The day before, I had had a conversation with Owen that had degenerated into a shouting match. Over the years, Owen — despite not having any children of his own — had come to determine that he was far more of an authority on them than I was, given his years of service educating undergraduates on the oeuvres of Whitman, Cavafy, and Proust. Even then, when we were old men, Owen’s naïveté continued to astound me: after his infrequent visits, he would call to tell me that he had interpreted the children’s complaints to him about the tidy and disciplined household I ran as “cries for help,” as if I were a despot running a small slave state and he were a crusading United Nations envoy who had been sent to bear witness to their lives of misery and injustice. I did not care for Owen’s behaving as an anthropologist in my own house, and I told him so. Still, he persisted, dispensing unwanted advice and even less wanted admonishments about a practice — the successful ferrying of children into adulthood — that I had been engaged in for more than thirty years and he for none.
That Christmas, however, he called, full of a degree of disapproval and self-righteousness unusual even for him, to inform me that Abby, one of the college-age students, had turned up in the lobby of his and Xerxes’s building in New York, “scared and desperate” (his portrait of her distress was near Victorian in its piteousness), claiming that I’d thrown her out of the house. Yes, I told Owen, I had been forced to ask Abby to leave the house, where she had been squatting for much of the fall, because she had insisted on smoking marijuana in her bedroom, which I had asked her repeatedly not to do. Owen, unsurprisingly, thought this appalling and inhumane on my part. I normally did not engage with Owen’s provocations, but in that moment I could not stop myself, and the fight quickly expanded in scope to cover my apparent decades’ worth of parental shortcomings. To this day I cannot account for his sudden ire. Was it born of boredom, or the elderly’s tendency to involve themselves in matters in which they are not wanted or needed? Or was it — as I sometimes thought, as much as I shrank from it — inspired by a sort of jealousy, something that I always sensed roiled just beneath Owen’s consciousness, sometimes cresting, sometimes receding, but ever-simmering, its boil growing louder and hotter with each year, with each approbation that was given me, with each child I sent sailing into the world’s slipstream? I had everything, after all, and he had only Xerxes and his thin books of poetry and a life lived mostly within New York State.
At any rate, the talk did not end well, and at its end he announced that he (along with Xerxes, whom I had been curious to meet, and Abby, whom for all I cared he could keep for as long as he wanted, if he thought he could do a better job than I) would be staying in New York for the holiday. “I’ll send the children their presents,” Owen snapped before hanging up the phone, and as dismayed and angry as I felt, I remember also registering his comment with some bitter relief: Owen could always be counted on for superior gifts, which the children awaited every year.
That night, after everyone had gone to their rooms, I ventured down to the living room with a large plastic filing box Mrs. Lansing had prepared for me shortly after Thanksgiving. Downstairs, dozens of stockings, each with a child’s name on it, hung from every surface — the children had even taken down the pictures from the walls and hung their stockings from the hooks. The room looked like the result of an insane person’s obscure and dedicated obsession.
Mrs. Lansing had written me specific instructions: each stocking was to receive from the box a ball of chocolate wrapped in foil that was stippled like an orange’s skin; a rectangle of peppermint candy; a milky round of glycerine soap, in the middle of which floated a plastic toy (a dinosaur, a butterfly, a pig, a shark); a tiny spiral notebook with a tinier, blunt-nosed pencil; and a handful of the salty honeycomb candies I so enjoyed. In addition there was a wrapped toy for each of the thirteen children still living at home; for the adults and college students, there were envelopes containing checks. All of these I distributed — in the stockings, under the tree (awesome and horrible, it towered in the corner, covered with ornaments that had been made in school with construction paper and glitter and clotty gobs of glue that looked like tatters of litter, its hard white lights winking gaudily), taking care that every stocking had been filled. When I was finished, I sat down and ate some chewy and underbaked chocolate-chip cookies the youngest children had made and left near the fireplace earlier that night and returned the cup of milk to its plastic jug. I thought suddenly of my conversation with Tallent, his sly certainty that I’d find myself with children. Had he perhaps known what my life would be before I did? I had the sensation that I was being watched, or observed, really, and I turned, thinking for a moment I might see him peering out at me from behind the highboy, his pencil gliding across the page as he stared at me, a specimen who had grown into exactly what he had expected. But there was no one there, and I was embarrassed, and relieved, and then embarrassed anew to be relieved.
I was tired but not yet ready to sleep. Indeed, I felt itchy with impatience and disappointment. I had been brooding over my recent fight with Owen and found myself wondering idly whether I should not just call him up and apologize. Listen, Owen, I’d say. I’m sorry. We oughtn’t fight. We are both old men. Five years before, I would not have dreamed of having such a conversation with him. But now our arguments, which had once seemed exciting and bracing, vibrant colorful displays of will and opinion, were enervating and tiresome. Perhaps I should simply call him and assume the blame, I thought. He would be momentarily triumphant, and it would be irritating. But, I thought, I had already written my own story for history, and it would not include the details of my spats with Owen: who began it, who ended it, who won, who lost.
Through the kitchen door I could see the moon, seeping a thin yellow light like pus. I stepped outside, and above me the sky was smeary with thin rubbings of cloud and spangled with bright white stars. I don’t know how long I stood there, watching my breath leaving my mouth in ghostly streams, still holding one of the children’s unsuccessful fat cookies in my cold fat hand. I could leave, I thought. I could pack a small bag and get into my car and drive away. I would take a plane to a European city, any city, and live there. Any university would accept me enthusiastically, with no questions. It was a perfect time; the older children were home, would take care of the younger ones, would figure out whom to call. The youngest children — little Eloise, Giselle, Jack — might, I thought, be adopted by the elders. The others, I assumed, would go into foster care, which would be regrettable. Although perhaps their association with me would find them adoptive families; I would be glad of that. But of course this plan would not do, no matter how logical it seemed to me.
It was now quite late, for the night was very dark and silent, and I was eager to return to my study. I would sleep, perhaps, for a few hours, and then the children would wake and I would find myself marching through another day. But when I turned the handle of the door to go back inside, it would not budge.