The Children's Hospital

38

When I was about eight I learned how to make drinks for my mother and father.

It was always very much the same every time: the same kind of gin, the same glass, the same number of big ice cubes. I would stand at the sink in the upstairs kitchen, carefully measuring out gin into a shot glass. I poured twice, just to the red line, and emptied the little glass twice into a larger one. I liked the way the gin fell down over the four cubes I stacked, one by one, in the glass. I rubbed the rim of the glass with the open end of a cut lime, then took a special tool — one of my favorite objects in the house — to cut an inch-long twist out of the rind. It contracted as it fell, bouncing off the highest cube to fall into the gin and then wedge in the space between cubes number two and three. I always thought of a little green Eskimo falling to his death among icebergs.

Then I would lean down to bring my eye level with the drink, giving it a final check. Two shots, four cubes, the highest cube raised half out of the gin, a piece of lime pulp stuck here and there along the rim, a rind twist that was neither too long nor too short: all was in order. I picked it up and brought it to my mother. Let’s say it was the December before my seventh birthday, a cold day in Severna Forest in a month without snow.

Thank you, said my mother.

You’re welcome, I said, watching as she stirred it once with her pinkie. The same hand held her cigarette, and she made a circle of smoke over the glass before she raised it to her mouth to take a tiny sip. It seemed like the most elegant thing in the world.

It’s perfect, she said. Like always. Why can’t your father learn to do this?

It’s a science, I said. A scientific process.

Edward Kent would have learned. He practically knew already. Did I ever tell you about him?

I said yes. Edward Kent was the man who could have been your grandfather, the man my mother had almost married before she married my actual father. She called off the wedding just days before, on account of his bad attitude, or because he was too good-looking, or too gay, or because he beat her once with his terribly expensive shoes — the tale was told a hundred times and more, and always there was a different reason.

Did I really? I don’t think I did.

I think, I said.

Well not about how he was waiting for us when we got home from our honeymoon. He had a gun. That’s how bad his attitude was. That’s how crazy he was. He was crazy for me, and just crazy, anyway. He had a very sensitive soul, I think. It’s probably for the best that I came to my senses and called the whole thing off. But sometimes I think it would have been better than what I got. He would have been a good father. He would have been crazy for you, too, in a good way. How would you like to have had him for your father?

I guess it would be okay, I said. I could never quite understand how this other man could be my father, and I might remain myself, as I was then.

Oh, better than okay. He had a sensitive soul and he played tennis, so he had those legs. We would be living in DC and all the news people would come over for dinner, or for parties. He was Edward R. Murrow’s godson, you know, and already a producer at CBS and we were only twenty-five. He wasn’t going anywhere but up. We didn’t tell on him, waiting for us with the gun. He had climbed up the balcony and pried open the sliding-glass door to your father’s apartment and he was sitting on the couch having a drink and resting the gun in his lap. Did you have a good trip? he asked us, and your father said, The best ever. Then he looked at us both — a weird, sad look, and stood up, and put the gun in his pants, and walked out. How about that?

Pretty scary, I said.

If I had married him then it would have been your father on the couch. Then he would have asked me, Aren’t we suppose to be married? And I would have said to him, Buddy, if you only knew.

My stomach hurts, I said. I’m staying home from school tomorrow.

Sure, honey. We’ll have a pajama day. Did you have a nice trip? he asked, like he’d just run into us at the supermarket. Is that a gun in your pants, Edward, or are you just happy to see my husband?

If he was my father, would I still have brown eyes?

Oh no. He had the most beautiful watery blue eyes. You could just drown in them. I had a weakness for blue eyes and brown hair, and big forearms.

But would I still be me?

Of course. You’d be you, but with gorgeous blue eyes.

How? I don’t understand.

Genetics, honey. Genetics. It’s complicated. She put out her cigarette, then held out another for me to light. Oh, what a life we could have had together. You and me and Edward Kent.

What about Jemma? I asked.

Yes, her too. Those Kent genes would shape her up.

So for years and years I would look at myself and think, if only Edward Kent were my father, then I would not be who I am, then I would never had been so angry all the time, or so sad, or had to know from the cradle that I was ruined. But I realized, of course, that Edward Kent was my father. He came to my mother, along with a host of other regrets, a host of lost opportunities, a disembodied god who rained down upon her and said, I am everything you have ever done and regretted — let us make a child together. And my father had a similar visitation, and so I was conceived.

It all comes out from me — circles and circles of corruption and regret and depravity, but before it was in me it was in them — my mother and my father. And before it was in them it was in their parents. And I say — and everyone says — I will not put it in my child, and yet everybody does. I make promises, I keep lists: this and this and this I will surely never do, because I never want to uncover in my child the sort of hatred my parents uncover in me with even the most innocent and benevolent action. But as surely as the moon rises and the sun sets, depravity passes down through the ages, because there is always a gap between who we are and who we should be, and our parents, molested by regret, conceive us under the false hope that we will be better than them, and everything they do, every hug and blow, only makes certain that we never will be.