A Likely Story

Friday, August 19th

Yesterday was Gretchen’s ninth birthday, and when I was leaving the office to go uptown Mary handed me a shopping bag containing two gift-wrapped packages, saying, “Would you give these to Gretchen with my love?”

“Hey, that’s nice,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I wanted to.”

“Okay. Well, I—”

“Tom,” she said. “Could we talk for a minute?”

I looked at her warily. I’ve been working down here all week now, and so far Mary had not tried to make any capital out of the situation. She hadn’t pushed domesticity, she hadn’t created conversations out of the children’s emotional needs, and — best of all — she had given me no more examples of the world engaging in foreplay with her. Was all that about to change?

Not exactly. We sat together in the living room, and she astounded me completely by saying, “I want to talk to you about Gretchen.”

“Gretchen!”

“She’s a very nice girl,” Mary said.

“Sure she is.”

“She’s three years younger than Jennifer, so naturally she isn’t as advanced, but she’s very bright and sweet, and she has a very good artistic eye.”

What on Earth was this about? I snuck a look at my watch, and was about to say something about not wanting to be late for the kid’s birthday party, when Mary said, “I don’t think you have the slightest idea what you’re doing to that child.”

“Doing — I’m not doing anything to that child.”

“You’re rejecting her,” Mary said.

“Oh, for Pete’s— In the first place,” I said, “I’m not rejecting her at all, I was just this minute thinking I didn’t want to be late for her birthday dinner. And in the second place, I get all the Gretchen commercials I need from Ginger, so don’t you start.”

Mary smiled, in that infuriating way she has. “I didn’t think Ginger would sit by and take it quietly,” she said.

“Take what quietly?” I demanded, then hurried on, saying, “There’s nothing to take!”

“When you and I separated,” she said, “you had what seemed to you good reasons.”

“They were good reasons.”

“Whether they were or not,” she said, “you never intended to leave the children.”

“I didn’t lea— Well, I did, but— Of course not.”

“You’ve been very good with them, Tom,” she assured me. “You’re around them as much as you can, you care about them, you let them see you love them and want the best for them.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Bryan and Joshua get along wonderfully well,” she said, “and that makes it easier for you, you can treat them almost as twins, do things together with both of them, take them to that baseball game.”

“I enjoyed it.”

“Of course you did. But with Jennifer and Gretchen it’s harder. There’s three years between them, they aren’t natural pals, and of course a girl’s relationship with her father is more complicated than a boy’s anyway.”

“I don’t get the point,” I said.

“Sometimes,” she said, “you’re not sure the children really understand you didn’t mean to leave them when you left me. So you try too hard sometimes.”

“I know I do. It’s the Divorced Daddy Syndrome, everybody knows about that.”

“One of the ways,” she said, “that you assure Jennifer you still love her is to assure everybody you don’t love Gretchen.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Love Gretchen? What has that got to do with anything?”

“You’re in the role of father there,” she said. “You’re living with her mother, you’re the one who’s there all the time.”

“Lance is around,” I said bitterly. “Don’t worry about him, he’s around.”

“But that’s only recently. For a year and a half, you’ve been more Gretchen’s father than Lance, and you’ve been very cold to her all that time. And it isn’t necessary, Tom. Gretchen’s a nice little girl, and Jennifer won’t mind if you treat her kindly.”

I wanted to defend myself, but was Mary wrong? Generally, I felt Gretchen was a little pest, a minor annoyance, something I had to put up with if I was going to live with Ginger. Was that being unfair? I said, “Mary, I don’t know if you’re right or not. Maybe you are, but maybe the truth is Gretchen really isn’t very likable. Maybe there’s a little bit of both there; I want Jennifer to know I prefer her, and one of the reasons I prefer her is that she’s a nicer kid.”

“Think about it,” Mary said. “‘All right?”

“Do I have much choice?”

Mary laughed, and patted my arm, and released me then, and on I went to the birthday party; a perfect time and place to brood about whether I was being fair to the birthday girl. My two kids weren’t there, only Joshua and Gretchen and four of Gretchen’s friends from school and Ginger and Lance (of course) and me. And while trying to think about my relationship with Gretchen — the existence of such a thing, never mind its quality, was still astounding to me — I became aware that I was the outsider at this party.

Hey, wait a minute; I hadn’t known it was going to be like that. I live here, don’t I? Ginger and I are the basic family unit here, plus her kids, right? But all of a sudden we’re at Gretchen’s birthday party, and the guest list includes her father, her mother, her brother, her friends from school, and some man.

Me.

This made me resentful and edgy, and got in the way of my efforts to study Gretchen calmly and dispassionately, to see if she was a more likable human being than I’d thought. So I came at the problem from a different direction, observing Gretchen’s friends to see what they were like, and what my attitude toward them was, and suddenly I realized they were the same as Gretchen! And the way in which they were the same, of course, was that they were equally immature, squealing and silly and fluctuating crazily between ridiculous enthusiasm and absurd despair; acting, in other words, their age.

That was a point neither Mary nor I had considered, the fact that Gretchen is, in this postnuclear family, the youngest of four children, still going through phases the other kids have successfully grown out of. It was her babyishness, more than anything else, that had made it possible for me to reject her.

There; I’ve said it. Reject her. Mary was right, as I gloomily realized while sitting there as the fifth wheel at Gretchen’s party, pistachio chocolate-chip ice cream turning to ashes in my mouth. Gretchen was neither better nor worse than any other kid. I had without realizing it tried her and found her guilty of two great crimes: of being the youngest child, and of not being mine.

Various complaints that Ginger had made over the months returned to me, concerning my attitude toward Gretchen, and all at once I saw them in a new light. I had dismissed the kid, been cold to her, expressed my impatience around her.

Her drawings for The Christmas Book. I now saw — if I was honest, I now could see — that the idea of a child’s drawing, one original well-done child’s drawing on the subject of Christmas, would have been an excellent addition to the book, blending in very well with the theme. What if Jennifer were the one with an artistic bent, what if she had come forward with a contribution for the book, would I have dismissed the idea out of hand?

However, in my defense, I would also point out that I have not included any of Mary’s photographs. The Christmas Book is a professional piece of work, not an amateur gathering of family and friends.

On the other other hand, Mary never volunteered (being a grown-up, and therefore aware of the ground rules) and Jennifer does not have an artistic vocation, so with neither of them did the question have to be faced. Gretchen, too young to understand the difference between my work and her play, offered me an opportunity to rethink The Christmas Book just slightly, and I snubbed her, which was not only mean, but also unprofessional.

The birthday party went on. Amid the laughter and the giggling and general good cheer, I became gloomier and gloomier, guiltier and guiltier, more and more depressed. I began to feel like the strange little creature in the corner of an Edward Gorey drawing; the party going on, and the dark monster skulking behind the drapes.

Later last night I asked Ginger, “Where are all those Christmas drawings Gretchen did?”

She looked at me in some surprise. “Why?”

“I wanted to look at them again.”

“She threw them away.”

“All of them? Are you sure?”

“When you made it clear you didn’t want them, what else would she do?”

“Okay,” I said. I was thinking, It’s too late anyway. I was thinking, After the stink I made about Dewey Heffernan and Korban, I’m not sure I have the nerve to drag in some kid’s drawing at the last second, even if there’s still time. I was thinking, If I ask her to draw another one, I’ll just get her hopes up, and then something will go wrong (because something always does), and that’ll be worse. “Doesn’t matter,” I said, but this morning I went through the boxes of stuff from The Christmas Book piled in Lance’s room — I don’t think of it as my office any more — and then I took a quick look in Gretchen’s room (she’d gone off to school), and when I came down here to work I did some more searching, but without finding anything. She really did throw them all away.

I’m glad I let her intercept the football that time. Of course, the one nice thing I ever did for the kid she doesn’t know about, and it would be spoiled if she did.

Shit.