The Laws of our Fathers

DECEMBER 9, 1995

Sonny

The home in which Nikki and I live is a narrow, rehabbed greystone in University Park. The contractor carved a garage out of the cellar and laid a downsloping drive that floods in the winter thaw. Beneath the limestone ledges of the tall double-hung windows of the upper floors, wrought-iron flower boxes hold fall geraniums, now withered in their terra-cotta pots. Charlie and I paid too much for this place and I will never get what I need if we sell, a step I often contemplate. The suburbs on the East Bank, with their stable, well-funded public schools, and quiet tree-lined streets, seem tempting. At least a quarter of the families of the children who started in Nikki's nursery-school program are gone to that safer world, but whenever I contemplate the move, I hear Zora. "The suburbs!' she used to exclaim. 'Better a lobotomy.'

This morning, Saturday, is crowded. Nikki demands a pancake breakfast and then time with her cartoons. I have to get the car into the shop; it's leaking oil again, a shimmering, gunmetal puddle on the garage floor. Walking home from Boyce's Repair, both of us are grumpy. I fret about how to handle the working woman's travail of Saturday grocery shopping without a car, while Nikki fears we'll miss Sam, Charlie's son by his first marriage, who is coming by to take his little sister to the Drees Center for a production of The Princess and the Pea.

I often say that I had more anxiety about parting from Sam than Charlie. From infancy, Sam was with us every weekend. He is a special kid, even more so to me, because he proved to be the one human being on earth who finally reassured me I would check out okay as a mother. Sam's own mom, Rebecca, is high-strung and still scorns me a decade later as a homewrecker. Once Charlie left, I was positive she'd never allow Sam back into my home. But Sam tolerated no change. He calls Nikki at least once each week and bikes over from his mother's house, a few blocks away, most Saturday afternoons. He lets himself in, sits while I run errands. He makes them snacks. They play at the computer. I find them, both agape before the screen, Nikki seated on one of his knees.

It's all a mystery. How could a crabbed soul like Rebecca have raised a boy like this? He is funny and brilliant, with the heart of a hero. He plays the piano with passion. He acts in plays. At twelve, he is full of feeling and, not so incidentally, pain. After all, he is Rebecca's son, she of the shrewish moods and damaging tongue. Worse, he's been deserted by Charlie. He seems to cling to Nikki because they are joined, not merely by blood, but by circumstance, not just the gene load Charlie left behind, but the longing. Sam, I often think, has decided to heal himself by being a better man to Nikki than his father has been to both of them.

Today, he arrives in a winter parka he can no longer comfortably close. Charlie, a former wrestler, is huge – not so much tall as broad – and Sam is already headed for size. He's an athletic boy, far less awkward than many his age, although he has that stretched-out look of early adolescence. He is dark and very handsome and innocently pleased by his fine looks. He has begun to carry a comb, to look for himself in any mirror we pass.

I open the door to see them off and amazingly encounter Seth Weissman across the threshold, just lifting his hand to the bell. Like me, he's dressed in jeans and wears a fur-collared leather bombardier's jacket and a broad-brimmed Australian hat. He seems to be one of those bald-headed men with a lot of snappy headgear. A mistake, if you ask me, since it's just more shocking when they remove the cap.

'Nikki, this is a friend of mine, Mr Weissman. And this is Nikki's brother, Sam.' I loosen the furry hood so Seth can appreciate her in full glory. Seth praises her beauty and is careful also to give a moment to Sam. Wordstruck, the two of us watch the children go. Rapt in conversation, they pass the row of rehabbed town homes, many handsomely trimmed out with Christmas lights. Nikki, as usual, picks up a stick and drags it musically along the line of wrought-iron fences.

'They say you just teach them to leave you,' I finally remark. 'From the first step.'

'But you never leave them,' he replies. His eyes shoot downward and I spend a moment damning my tongue, then step inside to grab my loden coat. Although I invite him into the entry, he will not cross the threshold.

'I've accomplished my mission,' he says. 'She's gorgeous. Besides, I have to go to my father's. Deal with the crisis of the day. His car was stolen. All these years, I ragged him for driving around in a 1973 Caprice, and now apparently the damn thing's a vintage item.'

I confess I wouldn't mind if somebody stole my minivan and left me with the insurance money to buy a car that didn't require a standing appointment at the mechanic's.

'Do you need a ride anywhere?' he asks.

'I'm just going to the Green Earth.' As a stopgap, I'll buy what

I can carry. One night this week, I'll find a sitter so I can do the mammoth shopping trip even a family of two requires. These days, I'm always amazed how many people are in the store at n p.m.

'Up Fourth? Isn't that on the way to my father's? Come on.' He's politely insistent and I don't know whether to say no. In his car, a rented Camry, Seth talks nervously, filling airtime, as if I might not notice that my resolve keeps breaking down. He points out sights around U. Park: Phillips Playground, where he learned to play basketball and tennis; St Bernard's, Hobie's grade school, an uninspired graystone hulk occupying a quarter of a block.

The parking lot at the store is thronged. There is a line seven or eight cars long waiting to enter, and a melee of shoppers weaving with their stainless-steel carts across the asphalt. We are stuck on U. Ave as first one, then half a dozen horns bray behind us. Seth holds up a hand as I'm about to get out.

'You think you could stand my father for a minute? I wouldn't mind stopping here myself. I'm pretty sick of room service. Then I could drive you home. You won't need to schlep the bags.'

I can shop for the week this way, saving a later trip, hours that will be precious. And I'm somewhat intrigued to see old Mr Weissman, the iron lion of our youth.

'This is bribery,' I tell Seth, as we drive off. We laugh, but I'm not fully at ease. I set the limits for my own comfort, so what's the difference? But I know the best judges seldom change their rulings. If they're wrong, a higher court can tell them. There's a lesson in that.

Seth's father lives in what I've always referred to in my own mind as a 'Kindle County bungalow.' I've never seen similar houses anywhere else, a one-story toadstool of a structure, brown brick, with a hip roof and the stained glass and deco features characteristic of the twenties, when literally thousands of these homes were built throughout the Tri-Cities, blocks of them radiating about a central neighborhood core of churches, schools, shops. They were the Kindle equivalent of row houses, places where working folks with steady jobs could raise their families. The heavy oak front door, darkly varnished, sporting a wrought-iron knocker and a small barred window, opens to reveal a tall young woman. She's dressed in the with-it fashions that inevitably make me feel old: an unstructured vest, a flowing print skirt of autumnal colors, black anklets folded over combat-style boots, revealing the visible down of her unshaved legs. Seth clutches her at once.

'I didn't think we'd catch you,' he says.

‘I was just on my way. I'm meeting Phil at the museum.'

'Stay a minute to say hi.' Seth introduces his daughter, Sarah, a senior at Easton.

'Judge Klonsky,' Seth says, which I instantly correct to 'Sonny.'

Sarah is tall, with the glowing fresh-wrapped beauty of the young. Her spare form gives the impression that she's not long past the coltish phase taller girls endure, a distressing period when you're not sure how far your hand is from your shoulder, when you've got four inches on all the boys. Her brownish hair, full of tones, is worn loose to her shoulders. Behind her, the living room of the old house is dim. There are worn Oriental, heavy raw-silk drapes of a long-dated greenish hue, and older, threadbare furnishings in Chippendale style. I was here once or twice twenty-five years ago, and although I have little memory for such things, I'm relatively certain not a detail has been altered. Sarah has thrown her coat on and her backpack.

'He heard the bell. He's expecting you. He wants you to call the police again.'

'Christ,' says Seth and glumly asks how his father is doing.

'Etzi-ketzi,' she answers. ‘I got groceries. And I put the bills together.'

'You're great. This child is a saint,' Seth tells me. 'He doesn't deserve you.'

'Why do you always say that?'

'Truth is a defense. Isn't that right?' he asks me. 'That's what they say in the newsroom.'

'It depends on the charges,' I answer.

Sarah's narrow mouth purses. 'He's an old man.' She kisses her father. 'Be nice,' Sarah warns him, and is gone, with a backward flick of her long hair over the shoulder of her parka. When the thought strikes me, I can't contain a smile.

'What?' he asks. I shake my head, but Seth persists until I answer.

'She has your hair,' I say.

'Whoa! Talk about "Be nice." '

We're still laughing when the front clapper knocks. Sarah has returned to say that a police car just pulled up. Seth asks Sarah to keep me company. I urge her to go on, but Sarah is a first kid, at ease with the gestures of adulthood, and seems happy to remain. As Seth heads out, she asks about our plans.

'Plans?' I explain how I ended up on this roundabout path to the grocery store.

'Oh.' She bites her lip cutely. ‘I think I got the wrong idea. I think I misunderstood something my Uncle Hobie said the other night.' Sarah circles a finger in the dark air of the old house. 'You guys aren't an item, right?'

'Your father and I?' I laugh out loud, but see how the confusion arose. 'We dated,' I put it demurely, 'years and years ago, before your parents got together.'

'Oh,' says Sarah once more, a faint smile this time. 'I think I'm just basically stressed-out about my parents. It's way weird,' says Sarah, 'when you have to think of your parents like your friends.'

I assume at first she means that Seth and Lucy are somehow too familiar with her. Nikki is only six, but I worry already that I'll be like many of my contemporaries, Peter Pans, so fully defined, in the generational mode, as opponents of authority that they have been utterly unable to play a firm role with their kids. I grew up with that. Even when I was eight or nine, Zora treated me like a pal. I thought it was wonderful – to call her by her first name, to hear about her troubles. Yet in my twenties, I began to feel cheated. There was a turn in the road others were making that I couldn't manage. But it dawns on me eventually that Sarah is speaking of something different: Seth and Lucy regretfully face the same indeterminacy as people in their twenties.

'Do you know my mom?' she asks.

Years ago, I explain.

‘I bet she was the same. She's very earnest, you know, incredibly sincere. And my dad's always there saying funny things under his breath. They're very cool together. It's so, so strange to think of them apart.' She looks off to a middling distance, trying to measure her own confusion about these facts, the ripples of misery and dislocation that have imponderably followed her brother's death.

When Seth returns, he says the police are guessing it's some joyriding kid and the car will turn up. Sarah hugs her father and, on the strength of a moment's intimacies, hugs me, too, before departing. After disappearing briefly, Seth leads me to a small room right off the living room, where old Mr Weissman is seated before an immense rolltop of antique vintage, covered with teetering ramparts of yellowed papers. He appears to have summoned himself to the task of greeting a stranger, his old face raised alertly. His age-hoared hair is sparse and his eyes are dulled and somewhat out of focus, but he has maintained the same rigid, judgmental look I recollect. He is dressed in clothing forty years old if a day, a thin-lapeled grey worsted suit snowed at the shoulders with dandruff, worn over a yellow cardigan. A skinny old tie is knotted askew and his shirt has grown far too large for him at the collar.

'Do you remember Sonny, Pa?' Seth tries. California. Long ago. The old man cannot sort through it. He thinks Seth is referring to a recent trip and, in any event, I clearly made too little impact to be recalled.

'And where is Hobie?' the old man asks. It is a strong Viennese accent: Und vere is Hobie?

'He'll come again, Pa. He was here the other day, remember? He's got his hands full. He's trying a case. Sarah's set the bills out here for you. You can look through them, pay them if you like. I wanted to talk to you about the car. The police are looking for it.'

'The police? You spoke with the police?' 'They were just here. I talked to the cop. Very nice guy. He's got it under control.'

'You talked? Why didn't I talk?' ‘I took care of it.'

'No, no. This is my automobile. I should be speaking with the police.' Wiss ze police. 'I took care of it.'

'Uh-huh,' says the old man unpleasantly. He spins a bit in an old oak swivel chair and looks about for something. In a corner, on a metal card table, a black-and-white TV with rabbit ears blinks with shadowy figures. The room, with curtains drawn, is unaired, vaguely unpleasant. There are lingering stale scents, boiled foods, the kind of Middle European odors I smelled in my aunt's Polish home. A frail, spotted hand has risen and the old man smiles bitterly. 'You think I am so stupid?'

'Stupid?'

'You think I don't understand? I want the car.' 'They're looking, Pa.'

'Oh yes, looking.' He snorts. A single elderly finger remains cocked at his son. ‘I want the car.' I vont ze car.

The light of some recognition suddenly pales Seth. 'You think I have the car?' He turns briefly, helplessly, to me. He's still bent at the waist, addressing his father.

'Ahhhhh. Very innocent. It was you, no, saying I shouldn't drife?'

'Pa. That's everyone. I said it. Lucy said it. Sarah said it. Christ, Pa, the cops have said it. Ninety-three-year-old people are a hazard behind the wheel'

'No, no,' he says, 'this is you who took the car. There was no policeman. This is you.'

'Pa, I wish I were that clever.'

'Oh yes. This is a trick. You are always playing tricks. You want my things.' 'Oh, Pa.'

'Always you want my things. You think I don't know? You think I am stupid. I am not stupid. I want this car.' The old man pivots away, his mouth and hands move in aimless, elderly agitation.

'Pa.'

'Go.'

'Pa.'

'Go vay, go.' His papery hand flutters. 'Right now, I want the car. Right now! Right now!' His cracked voice mounts, and Seth finds my sleeve and pulls me through the house. At the end of the front walk, he stands in the sharp air, wobbling his head in disbelief. Huge elderly trees, bare in winter, rise in the parkway above the line of cars at the curb.

'It's funny, right?' he asks. 'It's like a sitcom.'

'Not quite.'

He lifts his face to the sky, eternity, and breathes. 'God,' he says. ‘I never stay more than ten minutes. It's always something.'

I rest a hand lightly on his back. 'Your daughter is lovely.' It is, as I hoped, the right note, the proper salve.

'The greatest,' he answers. 'I'm weak with pride whenever I'm with her. It's sinful.'

'That's hardly a sin.'

'She's the best. She's perfect.' When he glances up, a broken look still rides across his eyes. ‘I get no credit. Everything sane and decent in her comes from Lucy.'

'I'm sure that's not the case.'

'Right, she has my hair.'

'Oh, come on.'

'Maybe. Mother's compassion, father's intensity. Child as the crucible of each parent's neuroses. Did you read that book?' 'Pathways to Madness? She hardly seems crazy.' 'I probably have the wrong book. Isaac was crazy. He was my child.' Seth shakes his head miserably and, only now feeling the chill, closes his coat. Heaving a final sigh, he mentions the store.

We drive a block or two in silence. On University, the neighborhood's main artery, the Saturday traffic is clotted. Seth swings wide to avoid a man in a yellow tie, who is frantically waving at a taxi. With Christmas nearing, the streets teem with shoppers -students, teachers, the neighborhood denizens – all feeling buoyed by U. Park's cosmopolitan air and the upbeat atmosphere of the onrushing holidays. They are visiting the small, bright stores which are adorned with green fringes of Christmas frippery or blinking lights. Behind the wheel, Seth, in his broad hat, studies the road pensively. Eventually, he apologizes again for making me witness that scene.

'Oh come on, Seth. Who better than an old friend?' I try to sound lighthearted, but I'm shaken myself. Parents and children. It never ends.

'Did you lose friends when you got sick?' he asks.

'Some. I probably had fewer to start than I'd have liked. But there were a couple of people who made me wonder if they thought cancer was contagious.'

'Yeah,' he says and ponders. 'That's how it is. It turns out there's only so much of your shit some of your friends can take. Damaged, you're no use to them. I can name six guys who never were the same with me again because I cried in front of them after Isaac' He glances my way. 'What happens to us as we get older?'

I can't answer that.

'I'm sorry I wasn't around,' he says. 'When you got sick? I'm loyal.'

I recognize this as a substantial truth, part of what has pulled on me. Seth is loyal. Reliable. No question of that.

'That's me and Hobie,' he says. 'That's one thing we've finally mastered. Loyalty. Hanging in. I've seen him through three divorces and fourteen religions, and he's seen me through Isaac. All my shit.'

'You're lucky,' I say, and he is quick to agree. 'Crazy as he is, I'm lucky to have him.' 'Is he still as big a lunatic in private?' 'Holy smokes,' answers Seth and lets his head reel at the notion. 'He doesn't bring it to court. I'll bet he's got a marvelous practice.'

‘I guess. But you look at his ability, his education – he should be on track to become Chief Justice of the United States. And instead, he's just bumping along. He's literally been through six law partnerships. Large, small. There's always somebody big-time who's pissed and blackballing him from some honor. You know,' he says, 'I look around, at this age, I keep seeing the same thing. There were all these brilliant, talented people I knew in my twenties and thirties who were going to do amazing things in the world when they got the right break. And thank God, a lot of them have. But there are other people who got the chance but couldn't get over themselves. You know what I mean? They can't project whatever they've got into the world, because they're forty-eight years old and still dealing with their own shit.'

'That's me,' I say. My frankness for a moment startles us both. 'It is,' I repeat.

'How's that you? You're a judge. You're a big macher.'

'Not in the law world. I'm a public employee. I'm an upper-middle-level bureaucrat. I'm not making $300,000 a year. I'm not a factor to deal with politically. I'm not even sure the powers that be won't maneuver me out of this job. There are lawyers who'd tell you I've dead-ended, that I've settled for less.'

‘I don't believe that,' he says.

Nonetheless, that's my view of myself: not a power, not a star, no more than halfway to what might have been my destiny if I didn't need to spend so much time coping with myself. When I was younger, I believed that the middle ground was a deadly morass. That you had to reach. Not to the greatest heights. But to some slight elevation, beyond the doomed grey middle. Maybe Zora inspired that. But I quit believing that somewhere, probably in the midst of illness, and surely with motherhood, when I made a commitment to the female sector of the yin and the yang. I point Seth toward the store, a block away, and try to remind myself that once we've parted, I'll be harrowed by doubt if I continue these candid reflections on my judicial career.

'And why's Hobie so crazy?' I ask. 'Was it his family?'

'Hobie? It's DSM 3.004.'

'What's that?'

'A shitty personality.' As always, he absorbs my laughter appreciatively. 'No, I thought his family was great. His father, man – I'd lie in bed at night and just die wishing his father could have been mine.'

'What about all the dope he took? Is that part of it?'

'I think I wouldn't be so quick to use the past tense. And I think in Hobie's case, it's a symptom, not a cause. No, whenever I ask myself what gives with him, I come back to the obvious: being a black man in America. I think Hobie feels like a person without a country. He doesn't fully belong to anybody. I think he's honest enough to see himself as elite. Super education. Big income. But there's still the black thing of not being fully accepted, and dealing with how vulnerable that makes you.

‘I always remember the same incident. When we were in eighth grade, we played touch football with some big jerk named Kirk Truhane, who, one day, sort of out of the blue, called Hobie a nigger. You know, Hobie was big, he was rough, and he knocked Truhane down on the gravel. And Truhane gets up and comes out with this word. And I mean, I remember thinking, God, this can't have happened, what do I do now? He was my best friend by then. At first I kept playing, even after Hobie left, but finally my conscience got to me, and I walked off too, and I found him around the school building bawling his eyes out. And he just kept repeating the same thing: 'It hurts my feelings.' In any other circumstance, Hobie probably would have beat the snot out of Kirk Truhane. But that one word sapped his strength. It destroyed him – to know he couldn't get beyond that label.

'And I really think that's how it is. Family? Sure. First and foremost. But history changes people, too. Doesn't it? I mean historical forces – your place, your society, its rules, its institutions. That's what politics is about, isn't it? Trying to get the foot of history off the throat of people? Let them be what they can. I know, as a concept, it can be a crutch. That's why so many people want to be victims today. So they don't have to accept the burden of being raised without historical calamity -without war or famine. They want an excuse for the fact they're still not happy. But there's a reality, too. Your time and its circumstances can thwart you. They can make you crazy -subtly, the way they've crazed Hobie. Or big-time, the way history crazed my father. Maybe Zora, too. I mean, I've always thought,' he says, as he slides the car into a space in the grocery lot and faces me with a look of measured daring, 'I've always thought history was one of the things that came between us.'

Green Earth is a health-food superstore, a virtual supermarket, baking beneath the usual blast of high-powered light. Banners and signs, adorned at the corners with silver Christmas bells, stretch aloft, noting freshness and nutrition data. Seth, never without his pointed observations, the trait that gives him something to say in print three times a week, characterizes Green Earth as a tumorous version of the little macrobiotic places on Campus Boul in Damon where we'd argue about Adelle Davis and the health effects of refined sugar. This is another column he's written too many times, he says: the selling of the revolution. Music went commercial first. But capitalism has sucked up every element, clothing, language, absorbing the style but not the message. Now everyone can be hip, for a price.

The store is in the usual weekend turmoil. We have to queue just to get the featured items off the shelves. In their cold-weather wear, the students and grandpas and city moms trail through the aisles. Seth and I separate to shop. He returns with apples, dried fruit, spring water, peanut butter, little treats for the life of the man in the hotel suite. Surveying what's in my basket, he correctly guesses that I'm a vegetarian. Since my illness, I explain. Nikki occasionally asks for meat, which I willingly provide – it's not a fetish – but the two of us generally subsist on pastas. God has never made a six-year-old who didn't enjoy noodles. He briefly recalls some of Sarah's dietary obsessions fifteen years ago. Noodles and baked beans.

‘I never asked what she's doing in school.'

'Sarah? You ready?' he asks. 'Jewish studies.' Another of those moments: I've let my jaw drop. 'She's doing an honors thesis on feminist reworkings of the liturgy. Whether we ought to say "God of our fathers" or "of our fathers and mothers" or "parents" or "ancestors." Tradition, authority, and gender in a religious context. Interesting,' he adds.

'Did you become observant, Seth?'

'It's Lucy,' he answers. At the time of their marriage, Lucy promised Seth's mother she would make a Jewish home. She converted and by now has been president of their congregation, not once but twice. Four years ago, he says, she had a bat mitzvah.

'And how do you handle that?' I ask.

'With ambivalence. You know, you get older. You're more aware of the people before you, acknowledging them and what they cared about – and died for. The Holocaust is bigger to me every year, especially now that my mom is gone. I actually raised funds for the museum. But the ritual leaves me cold. They don't even catch glimpses of me in the synagogue. Lucy and Sarah always say they're praying for me. Sometimes I feel like one of those sixteeth-century Catholics who lined up other people to do their time in Purgatory. But I'm proud of Sarah. I'm glad she's serious about important things.' We nudge the carts along. Seth circles his jaw as his face mobilizes beneath some transitory discomfort. 'I'm not sure I've got her approval at the moment, but she knows she has mine.'

'I'm sure she approves, Seth. Of both of you. She just sounds concerned. It's a hard situation for her, too.'

He cranes about to eyeball me. 'How did that come up?'

'Oh.' I shovel the items from my cart onto the moving belt. The checker is a young Asian man. Off-duty, he wears rings through his nose and eyebrows. Nikki cannot control herself and squeals whenever we see him on the street. 'Basically, when she asked if we were involved.'

'Us? Oh Lord. This is the child whose maturity I've been bragging about?' He grimaces and looks away to a shelf beside the cash register, crammed with the same dumb trash tabloids and ladies' mags I see in the poison supermarket.

'She seemed to have misunderstood something Hobie said.'

'Oh. I know what that was. He was giving me gas the other night when we had dinner with Sarah. Guy stuff. Hobie said every time he looks around the courtroom, he wonders if I'm here to watch the trial or the judge.' His eyes cross mine bashfully, meaningfully, and then, as shyly as if it were actual contact, he looks away – a rabbit darting back into its hole. It's reminiscent of the moment we had pulling in here when he spoke of history.

We pay separately and wheel one cart through the small lot, back into the winter air, which is sharpening as the hour of darkness nears. The sun is a pale disk in the soiled white sky. Between us a deliberative silence has persisted, more uncomfortable as the seconds mount.

'Can I ask Seth?' I say suddenly. 'Why are you here?'

He is slinging packages into the trunk and gives me a brief sidewise look.

'Acute psychological need,' he answers. He smiles to put me off, then thinks better of it and turns my way. 'Look, I'm here for lots of reasons. This trial – it's like the star over Bethlehem. It's a weird conjunction of the planets. I'm concerned or interested in every person involved – Nile, Hobie, Eddgar, and, God knows, you. I mean, if that's what you're asking, yes, Hobie's right. I've thought about you a lot, Sonny. I always have. If that doesn't sound too drippy.'

We've reached a Rubicon. I see it and feel something frantic swimming through my eyes. Seth takes this in, his pale face rummaged by dashed feelings, then moves off toward the driver's side door. We ride halfway to my house without a word spoken.

'Say something,' he finally tells me.

‘I would, if I could think of anything to say.'

'Is it bad that I'm still hung up on you?' he asks.

'Not "bad."'

'Shocking?'

'Probably. Surprising, anyway.'

'Because you're not still hung up on me?'

'Because life goes on, Seth. It's the past. Before the dinosaurs. I have more recent mistakes to dwell on.'

We arrive home at just the right moment. Nikki and her brother are coming down the block. I stand on the stoop in my green coat waving, and both kids rush to join me. Sam and Nikki re-enact a number of scenes from the play, repeating the lines perfectly; it's clear they have been doing this all the way home. Then Sam kisses his sister and me and grabs his bike, which has been locked to one of the iron gate posts. Seth, in the meantime, comes up the walk with the last of my groceries in his arms. Waking to him again, I am deeply struck by his presence. I find myself thinking he has aged well, although that makes no sense. His eyes are lively and deep, there is strength across the brow, but time has thickened his skin, taken something from his looks. In ten more years, his face will be waddled and lumpy. But it's substance, I feel, some sense of the weight of the life he's lived. A good person. Again, a strong sensation of his pain grips me, and with it something regretful and self-accusatory. I was unkind just now. At the store.

'Look, Seth. Why don't you stay and let me make some of these groceries into dinner?'

'No, no,' he says. ‘I have some stuff to write.'

'I mean it. I promise it's healthy and it won't be room service.' 'Don't take pity on me, Sonny. You warned us both about that the other day.'

'No, Seth, no. I want to know you. I do. We're going past each other. And we shouldn't. Stay. Tell Nikki what a newspaper is like.' I step down off the stoop to take the last packages from him. 'Let's be at peace, Seth.'

He flaps his arms. Fine, peace. Whatever that means.

My house has the crisp look of newer construction, everything painted white to expand the rooms. The entry and living area rise to a cathedral ceiling and skylights that spill, even in this dim season, the welcome tonic of interior light; it glistens on the peachy-colored floors of bleached birch. The furnishings are spare – Charlie got the couch, for instance – but the shelves and walls are crowded with art collected over our years. African masks, Native American pots, posters by abstractionists and moderns. Laughing, Seth steps over the blocks and bright toys that litter the living room. He remembers this phase, he says, when some lost plastic piece of something was always turning up underfoot.

Now that Sam has departed, Nikki suddenly turns shy. In the kitchen, as I shelve the groceries, she clings to my thigh and flirts from that zone of safety. She has a somewhat old-fashioned hairdo, a ponytail and bangs. Seth remarks on her eyes – brilliant and intelligent, he says, like her mother's.

'Can you make a beard?' Nikki asks.

'Make a beard?' asks Seth.

'Charlie has a beard.'

'Ah.' He kneels and lets her stroke his shaved cheek. She accepts him quickly after that. He lifts her to the top shelves to put the canned goods in the dark, oak cabinets. Eventually tired of this, Nikki tries to lure me into a game of checkers.

'Nikki, I need to start dinner.'

'I'll start,' says Seth. 'Give me an assignment.'

'Nikki, what if you play checkers with Seth?'

Seth cajoles. He's a veteran. He'll teach her secret moves. They lay the board out on the living-room floor. Nikki is voluble, enthusiastic, and like all six-year-olds plays to win. I hear them as I run the tap.

'Don't go there,' Seth counsels. He shows her his moves in advance. Even so, Nikki must take a number of moves back before Seth is defeated. They play Topple next, a game Seth does not know, which involves balancing plastic pieces on a stand.

'Know what?' she asks. ‘I have a loose tooth.'

'No! So early?'

'Feel. That one. Isn't it loose?'

'Maybe.' I come out of the kitchen to warn Seth with a roll of my eyes. Nikki and I repeat this exercise each night. Six wants to be seven and fifty wants to be forty. When are we happy as we are?

'Next to it,' she says. 'Try that.' He has the same lack of success.

'No!' Nikki shrieks and throws herself down on the floor and rolls back to him like a puppy, more or less propelling herself into his arms. She grabs both his cheeks, something she does to Charlie.

I return to the kitchen, trying not to find this performance alarming. My little girl, shy and generally collected, is rocketed into hilarity by the attentions of an adult male, exhibiting all the charm she can muster. When I come into the living room to announce dinner, Nikki has seated Seth on the ledge of the hearth and is singing the numbers from the Holiday Festival, humming through the words she has forgotten. He applauds wildly.

'Dinner. Dinner. Wash up.'

In the bathroom, from the toilet, Nikki eyes me. 'Do boys have to wipe?'

' Sometimes yes, sometimes no.' Yet again, I outline the circumstances. 'Some things are important,' I tell Seth, when I find him waiting mirthfully outside the door.

My Aunt Henrietta, Zora's sister, insists that Nikki is the image of me. She means to praise both of us, but the observation concerns me. When her will-of-the-wisp father phones on Mondays or Tuesdays to apologize for missing the call he is supposed to make Sunday at noon, Nikki consoles him. 'That's okay, Daddy,' she will say, 'you didn't mean to.' But within, beneath, what is occurring? I played the cheerful child into adolescence – amusing, even, able to adapt to everybody else. It was only in my thirties, while I was in law school, that I began to wonder about the savage part of me, so often kindled in debate. I worry now that Nikki rages too in ways yet to reach the surface.

In the kitchen, removing the cannelloni from the Pyrex dish in a sudden rush of steam, I stave off familiar guilt. There was no choice. With Charlie. And I grew up, didn't I? I muddled through, a little nuts about men, especially in my teens, but I'm centered, I'm normal. And Nikki has a father. Something. A picture. A phone call. And yet a sense of failure always freezes me to absolute zero at the center when I realize that my daughter dwells with the same pain that burned through my childhood. For years, I went through spells in which I persuaded myself that my mother's account of Jack Klonsky's death on the Kewahnee docks was one of those well-intended lies about provenance told in fairy tales -like what they said to Sleeping Beauty to keep her from knowing she was really a princess. I, too, was secretly some other man's daughter. These fantasies took me on strange internal journeys. For many months, I suspected my father was a labor leader named Mike Mercer, a congenial potbellied black man, a friend of Zora's. He had five children of his own, but I believed my parentage was hidden so no one knew I was a Negro.

More often, I imagined my father as someone distant, barely known, some man of majestic importance who would arrive one day and care for me passionately. I envisaged this unknown man as the father on Father Knows Best. A striking, dashing, normal person. An American. Did I realize as a little girl how much Zora would have abhorred that image? But he was what I craved, a wise, gentle, omnipotent figure, whose faults all righted themselves within half an hour and whose love for his daughters, especially, was as simple and encompassing as his occasional chaste embrace. In contemplating all of this, I feel, as I often do, horribly sorry for both Nikki and myself.

Seth lavishes praise on the meal. 'Who says people can't change?' he asks puckishly. Nikki remains too excited to eat. To interest her, he shows her a trick he did with his children, turning his cannelloni into a dachshund. 'Kennel-oni,' he calls it, earning a groan from each of us.

'I want a puppy,' Nikki tells him, as she often, futilely, tells me. I explain that is one over my limit: the thought of housebreaking is impossible when I'm still celebrating the end of diapers. Seth recounts coming home one night when Isaac was little to find Lucy attempting to train their puppy. She was outside, with her skirt hiked up, squatting over the gravel of the dog run and relieving herself. The dog and Isaac, noses at the screen of the back door, both looked on bewildered. Caught in this compromising pose Lucy remained there, laughing in delight at this amazing, oddball family intimacy.

Nikki finds his story spectacularly funny. 'She was going like a dog? Mom, she was going like a dog.' She gets off her chair to play out the scene and is far too keyed up to sit down when I demand that. After several efforts to restore calm, I take her to the den and turn on a video. Better a zombie than a creature ricocheting off the walls.

‘I should have thought of that,' says Seth, when I return.

'Fortunately, it's winter. Otherwise, we'd be on our way outside for a re-enactment.' Seth follows me into the snug kitchen, where I put another helping on his plate. 'It's a great story. Lucy sounds adorable.'

'That's what everybody says: "Lucy's adorable." ' I take a beat. 'What does her husband say, Seth?' 'Oh.' He groans. 'You don't need to hear me complain about Lucy. Believe me, not every eccentricity is lovable. I mean, I never got used to living with somebody who actually cared about whether the dishes "matched" the wallpaper in the breakfast room.' He spreads his fingers to make the quotation marks in the air. 'Even the constant good cheer can seem over a couple of decades like a prolonged form of lying. But on a scale of goodness, 1 to 10, bearing in mind the kind of crumbs many human beings are, Lucy's way up there. Nine point five and rising.'

'That doesn't sound too bad, Seth. I'm not sure even Charlie's mother would give him more than a seven. On a good day.'

'Yeah, but Lucy's not the point. Not by herself. It's us together.'

'Because of your son?'

'That's part of it. A big part. What confounds me is that I know that if he hadn't died- Isaac – we'd be together. The deal, whatever it is that I made, that we made, would seem okay. But when a child passes – It's the most mysterious thing, but the love, I don't know, it can go, too. We've had wildly different ways of coping. She's become this ridiculous, fucking mystic. She's studying Kabbalah, she's into dybbuks. It's very Catholic, frankly, even though the words are Hebrew. And there's this young rabbi – I mean, I don't think anything's going on exactly, and I'm not the one to throw the first stone anyway. But we're a million miles apart. And even if we somehow get over that, I still have to face my own stuff.'

'Which is?'

'Well, why did you leave what's-his-name?'

'Charlie? Basically, I realized that growing up as Zora's daughter I had developed this way of capitulating to difficult people, allowing them to run wild while I tried to be sensible. And Charlie demonstrated that there could be too much of that, even for me. Especially once I found out there was a coed named Brandy.'

'Okay, so you said, Well, I can do better. And you showed him the door. I think that's why most people quit on a marriage. They wake up and think, I'm a better person than that. I can be more sensible. More generous. I can be less fucked up if I give myself another start. Sometimes they're kidding themselves. But sometimes, a lot of times, they're not. And that's really the issue for me. With Lucy. I dwell on what's never been right between us. I mean, Lucy and I, we've always had this' – he's looking for the word – 'game? Discussion? Usually it was comic relief during an argument. But we'd ask one another: What if you met someone who was perfect? Who was The Person. What if you met that person?'

'You still have to say everything, don't you, Seth?' 'I'm better.'

I doubt it. 'So what's the rest of the story?'

'The answers would change. Both our answers. Sometimes when we were pissed we'd say "I'd run away." We'd say we'd have an affair. That's what we said most of the time – you know, that's where there was permission, if it was that perfect. Sometimes we'd say it wasn't worth the risk to our family. But we never kidded each other enough to say, That's you, that person, that perfect person, that's you for me. Never. Not even for a minute.'

To absorb this, I have taken a seat on one of the dark oak spindle chairs at the tiny kitchen table where Nikki and I have most of our meals – breakfast cereals and evening noodles. I don't believe in that anymore, the perfect person. That's exactly who I thought Charlie was, dark and massive, quixotic, full of the impulsiveness I grew up thinking was rightfully a man's. He was all that stuff, The Other. It made me wet between the legs and agonized the rest of the time. I will never succumb to it again. But somehow as Seth finishes this confession something passes in his look – that timorous, exploring gaze I got a couple times at the food store – and I react at once.

'Don't, Seth.'

'Don't what?'

'Don't start. Or be difficult. Or pretend.' '"Pretend"?'

'That's exactly the right word. Don't kid yourself. Don't act as if we had the greatest thing since Troilus and Cressida, or that we had some destiny that was thwarted. That's not the way I remember it.'

He makes a face, and pushes his plate aside. 'Why are you giving me such a hard time?'

'Why? Because you're sitting around mooning. And it's disconcerting.'

'So let me have my fucked-up life and my perverted little fantasies, all right? This isn't bail. I don't need your permission.'

'Don't talk to me like that, goddamn it.'

'How do you think I should talk to you?' he asks. 'Look, you want me to be honest? This is honest: I was crazy about you. And I never thought we got to the end of where we were going, before all that historical junk intervened. Would it have been great? I don't know. Maybe we would have fought World War III. But would it have been different than what I went on to? You bet your life. And you know, just at the moment, I can't help thinking about that.'

'So?'

'So,' he says, 'in my head, I figure it'd be neat to be around you a little. See what happens. Time or not, I just don't think people change that much at the core, Sonny. That's where I'm at. But if you tell me to take a powder, I'll do it. I'll feel bad and all that shit, but I accept the risk. But you've started this twice now and somewhere along we're going to have to mention you. You keep acting like you're powerless here,' he says, 'like all the choices are mine. Where do you fit in, Sonny? What do you do, if you can't talk me out of this?'

We're back to the parking lot, although I can't for the life of me see how we got here. Staring at Seth in the still kitchen, my eyes feel childish and large. I blink.

Nikki, perfect child, arrives at that moment to save me. She holds Spark, a stuffed puppy, by a single, bedraggled paw. She is rubbing her eyes and whiny. She should have a bath, but the thrill of Seth seems to have left her weary and she mewls at the thought.

'A book and bed,' I say.

'You read.' Nikki points to Seth. Exhausted, she seems to have forgotten his name, everything but the fact that she's in love with him.

From her bedroom, their voices tumble down the stairs. In the living room, I open The Nation, but do not even see the page. To speak and be heard; to hear and understand. How much more do we want? So much of this is welcome – why then do I resist? Atop the stairs, Seth tells Nikki good night.

'You know what?' Nikki asks, delaying his departure now by any means. 'My teacher, Mrs Schultz? She's almost fifty years old and she still can't whistle.'

Seth whistles a few bars of 'Good Night, Irene,' then I'm summoned for the final rituals. We pass on the stairs with contained smiles, measuring our mutual enjoyment of my child. He says he will wait to say goodbye, and is down there, in his coat, slumped over and twirling his hat, as he waits beside the staircase on the old country bench which Nikki and I will shortly be using to pull on our boots, when the snow flies.

'You made an enormous impression,' I tell him.

'Hey,' he says, 'one out of two.'

'Seth, it's not like that.'

'How is it?'

I heave a weary breath. 'Confusing,' I answer, and know it's the most honest thing I've offered yet. He tips his head philosophically, then zips his coat. He thanks me for dinner and sings Nikki's praises again, before I finally, thankfully, move him to the door.

'I'm not trying to drive you crazy,' he says there.

'Yes, you are,' I answer. 'You always have. But it's endearing.' I extend my hand, but it's a false gesture, far too distant for where we are now. We hold in the abrupt evening quiet of the small house, the whir of the appliances rising from the kitchen, amid a sudden sense of the tender space between us dwindling.

'Do it,' he says to me.

'What?'

'Kiss me.' 'Kiss you?' I laugh out loud.

But he closes on me, as in the movies. I have offered my cheek, but he straightens my face with a single finger and puts his lips on mine. The shock of being this close to a man is one of presence and of longing. Everything kicks in, mobile with sensation – heart and breasts, hips and fingertips. An extraordinary parched ache reaches so far down into me it is all I can muster to hold back a groan. His hand in the moment of embrace has roamed to the small of my back. I step away, and we stand for just an instant with our foreheads touching. I take hold of both his hands.

'Let's sort this out after the trial.'

'Listen, that trial won't change anything.'

'It'll make this a lot easier for me. I'll see you afterwards.' I turn his shoulder toward the doorway.

When he is gone, my brow rests against the sleek varnish of the front door, chill with the cold outside. Madness, I think again. What is in my mind? Is it only because I feel so sorry for him? I hang Nikki's coat on the peg beside the threshold, I turn the bolt. It's because I know, I think suddenly. Know that whatever sentiment he nurtures, he is not really here for me. Know that he is wounded and recovering. That his life is circling. That he will be here, then gone. Know that – yes – and isn't this one of those sick truths we always know best about ourselves? – it will be safe.