The Portable Veblen

24 DOOMED TO WONDER

Year upon year in Garberville, in the spring near noon, the sun will pour through the front windows of the Vreelands’ house and illuminate the bookshelf, where sits a portrait of Bill Vreeland’s brother Richard. Not the portrait of the marine in his dress blues who stood at attention on the mantel at Bill and Richard’s parents’ house in San Diego from 1966 until their residue was boxed up in the nineties, but one of Rich skateboarding in a striped T-shirt and cut-offs down a hill near the high school. This year, Justin was studying it intently when all at once he began to wail, “He’s gone! He’s goooooone!” and pound on his skull. Bill could normally talk him out of his outbursts, but this one went out of control. As Justin howled, Marion, who had only just returned from a week taking care of Paul, rushed to embrace him, but he pushed her back against the bookcase, and her wrist was not broken but deeply bruised.

Bill had to bind Justin’s arms with a canvas strap that he didn’t like using at all, and gave him some sedation, which he also didn’t like to do, and then they had to decide if they should take him to his day group or not, and since the car ride to town usually soothed him, they thought they’d give it a try despite the tumult, and by the time they reached town he was docile, and after he went in without a hitch they sat outside on a redwood bench and Marion cried.

“I want to take care of him as long as I can,” she said, rubbing her twisted wrist.

Bill watched a dragonfly land on his leg in the sun. “We need to have a plan. Someday we won’t be here for him. And before that, there’s going to be a day when we’re not up to it anymore. It kills me to say that, you know that, don’t you?”

She sniffed. “Who would fly his Banana-57 into the room every morning? Who would make his cinnamon toast the way he loves it? Who would help him get all the threads away from his toes in his socks? Who would pull up the tongue in his shoes? Who will care enough? No one will care as much as we do!”

“I think we need to decide where.” Bill rubbed his beard with the back of his hand, then bounced his hand on its spring action. “That’s all I’m saying.”

They remained on the bench in stillness, as if catching their breath for whatever came next.

Bill thought about the blood he’d noticed a few times in his urine, wondering if he should tell his doctor, and then he thought about his mother’s death ten years ago, and of wrestling her rings off her cold knuckles in that eerie, silent room.

Marion thought about the day Justin was born. After all her pot smoking, trying to find herself in movement and music, the world lurched in a new direction, and she’d never looked back.

In a while the members of Justin’s group came outside for their walk. Justin was paired with a woman named Alice who had Down syndrome, and he and Alice were holding hands.

They rested in the sun. Marion believed in lightness. For his part, Bill considered this a time for atonement, and never scheduled a thing but an hour on the bench.

Buried in the folds of the past was a candlelit room in the communal dome where they’d all lived, with Caddie Fladeboe and Cool Breeze and the rest of them, all young and sure, waiting as Marion withstood labor, dabbing her with sponges and proclaiming her beautiful, and she bearing up like all earth mothers had done before the modern medical system denatured the birthing process beyond recognition. They massaged and coached her to push and push and push and push and push, and Justin arrived after forty-two hours with a cord around his neck, blue.

Some said it was meant to be, that all the moments of their lives that led to the decision to have him at home were part of his legacy, and that they mustn’t blame themselves, but Bill struggled. He relied on modernity in other ways. By now he had a cell phone, he had a car, he loved the Internet, he wasn’t thoroughly medieval. Why had he insisted on being medieval at the birth of his child?

“Marion?” he said abruptly. “We need to tell Paul what happened. It’s time he knows. We’ve screwed him up.”

“What happened when?”

He felt a flash of anger, for there was nothing else that had happened compared to this.

“When Justin was born, Marion.”

She opened her purse and looked into it, as if trying to locate a secret passageway to escape through.

“Why?” she cried. “What good would it do? Can’t you leave it alone?”

“Marion,” he said. “We feel so guilty over Justin’s birth we can’t even talk about it. That’s what Paul grew up with, the feeling something wasn’t right. We were always so busy with Justin, trying to make up for our mistakes that we hung him out to dry.”

“We didn’t make a mistake,” Marion said. “We did everything exactly right.”

“We’ll never know, and that’s why we’re doomed to wonder.”

“That’s all we need is for Paul to know.”

“Marion, he’s more capable of forgiveness and understanding than we’ve given him credit for. We’re not giving him the chance to grow.”

“I stopped trusting myself,” Marion said quietly. “I didn’t want to decide anything anymore. Here’s one more thing to decide.”

“Let me decide,” Bill said.