The Son

Chapter Thirty-eight. Jeannie McCullough

She was sitting on the couch, watching Susan suck her blanket and Thomas, with his cowlick and overalls and fat little arms, his red bandanna, she wanted to eat him up. He was trying to make a tower from blocks. The sun was on him and she continued to watch and after the tower collapsed for the twentieth or fiftieth (or hundredth) time, she winked out. Later she came to. Thomas was arranging the blocks; Susan had fallen asleep. It seemed that the rest of her life, before she’d had children, had been a dream. Did she even have a mind at all? She was like an animal chewing its cud.

Now she was awake. She was bored but there was something else, a restlessness so intense that she could not physically sit still any longer, she got up and paced the room and then, glancing behind her quickly — the children still in place — she went out the glass door to the backyard and walked a lap around the high wooden fence. The grass was thick; it was humid under the trees. She could make a drink.

She returned to the patio and watched her children from the other side of the glass. Of course she loved them, but there were times, she did not want to say it, there were times when she wondered what would happen if they simply stopped existing. There is something wrong with you, she thought. There is something very wrong. She’d tried to broach the subject with Hank, but it had not gone anywhere; he’d had no idea what she was talking about, and she’d ended the conversation before indicting herself any further. Hank spent only fifteen or twenty minutes a day with them alone. Though in his own mind, he looked after them from the time he got home until the kids went to sleep: his idea of looking after them was simply being in the same house. She spent as much time with the kids in one day as Hank spent in an entire month. She could not help doing the calculations.

She’d been low since the birth of Thomas, their first. She’d gotten lower when the doctor insisted, six months into the pregnancy with Susan, that she stay home as much as possible. She had begun to wonder about the point. The same as when her father died. Something was wrong with her, here she was surrounded by her growing family, her beautiful healthy children, asking about the point of being alive.

It was beautiful, it was natural, but of course it was something else, something you could never say or they would lock you away forever, it was another creature taking the blood right out of you. She was there in the hospital and then it was as if some malevolent spirit had settled inside her, something had risen and taken hold, one minute she was herself, the next she’d been snatched and pulled under, she had no say, she had never understood how small she was. It was not something you could explain to other people. She had survived.

A feeling of being tricked came to her constantly, betrayed by her own body, she had thought it existed for her own enjoyment and she was angry and jealous of Hank, who had paid no cost, who, as she lay in the hospital bed, held her hand and looked lovingly into her face and told her to breathe, breathe; meanwhile she was on a plane that had lost its engine, plummeting toward open water, toward annihilation, breathing was the last thing on her mind. She had not stopped being angry about that, either. His sure advice on matters he knew nothing about.

She was being unreasonable. There was no point thinking about it. She stood on the patio, watched her children through the window a few moments longer, wondered what she would say if a neighbor saw her or the nanny came downstairs or Hank came home. She went back inside. She called the nanny on the intercom and asked her to pack a bag for Susan. Thomas was old enough to be looked after; Susan she would take to the office. She still went in a few times a week to visit her old life. You are being a baby, she thought.

She put Susan in the front seat of the Cadillac and felt an immediate relief, even before she left the driveway. Susan began to cry. Jeannie lifted her and held her in her lap as she drove. Twenty minutes later they were in front of the office, and after a long elevator ride she handed Susan off to the secretaries, who were happy to have her, happy to hold a child, happy to avoid work, she didn’t know and didn’t care, she only wanted to be alone.

She went into her office and shut the door. It was hot, pleasantly so — it was all windows. It was a green view over the city, which was growing, growing, the East Texas country was lush and wet, it was the Deep South. Hell in the summer. She loved her children. She had expected something different. She had expected them to be like her brothers, or like foals or calves, helpless at first, but quickly capable of looking out for themselves.

What she had not expected was so much need. They said it was love but it was not love at all, if she was honest, they had taken far more than they could ever give. Perhaps they had taken everything. “That is wrong,” she said out loud. “I am wrong for thinking that.” She sat there, not daring to breathe, looking out over the skyscrapers, filled with people, she could see them bustling, sitting in their offices. There was no one like her. You are pathetic, she thought, think about your own mother.

In the other room, she heard Susan begin to cry; the sound brought her out of the chair, she was moving toward the door before she even knew what was happening. But of course the girls could handle it. She went back to her desk — stacks and stacks of papers — it was ridiculous, she had no context for any of it, she began to read at random. A landman’s report, a geologist’s report, a deal long gone bad. It was hot. The questions were pointless. She’d known what she was getting into (except I did not, she insisted, I did not know), her life was ruled by the needs of others; the only need she could not indulge was the one she felt nearly every day, to get into the car and begin driving and never stop.

Sometime later she woke up sweating. The sun was still coming in. She wondered if the air-conditioning was on. She shuffled the papers, throwing out the old ones, but it was pointless, it would take her months to catch up. She went to the divan and fell asleep again. Then it was past five. Nothing had been done.

She checked her face in her compact: puffy, the fabric had marked her, there was a pretty girl in there somewhere, with good cheekbones and perfect skin and a nice mouth, but it was not visible in the mirror; all the color was gone except for under her eyes. Her teeth were yellow, her hair was like something dried up in the sun.

She winked out again. When she came to it was dark. She touched herself up and she went back out into the office.

Susan was asleep in the remaining secretary’s lap. Everyone else had gone home and the girl was not moving, just sitting there, looking helpless.

“I’m so sorry,” said Jeannie.

“Oh no, I love her,” said the girl, and she did. She was perfectly happy to be sitting there with an infant on her lap; she looked as angelic as the child and somehow this made Jeannie feel even worse.

“Thank you for looking after her. You have no idea what a relief it is.”

The girl just looked at her. It was true — she did not have any idea. She would be happy if she had a baby like this, happy to have a husband to go along with it.

Luckily, Hank was up in Canada again. At least she was spared him seeing this. He, along with Herman Jefferson, their geologist, and Milton Bryce, their lawyer, was always telling her she didn’t have to worry about coming in. Things had been running fine without her, running fine for two years. They were too delicate to say it, but what they meant was, You are not needed. Our world has continued without you.

Though hers had not. I might as well be dead, she thought.

WHEN HANK GOT back from Alberta, she told him it was time to add a second nanny, and maybe even a third, if they were to have another child.

“That’s silly,” he said. He buzzed about the kitchen, fixing himself a sandwich, moving with his usual efficiency, everything put back in its place.

“Why does it matter?” She thought he was talking about money.

“It matters,” he said. “I don’t want our kids being raised by people they won’t know when they get older.”

“So stay home and raise them.”

He looked at her to see if she was being serious.

“You don’t have to work,” she said. “We will never need money.”

He was annoyed. He took a bite of his sandwich and washed it down with milk.

“I can’t do this by myself anymore. I’m serious.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Then I guess I’m ridiculous.”

“No, I mean it’s ridiculous to say you’re by yourself. You have Eva all day and I am home by six every night.”

“What if I were to point out that they are half yours,” she said. “And that you might take half care of them.”

“I do my share,” he said, and by the funny way his voice broke she could tell he really believed it.

“You do,” she said, “but it is not half, or even a quarter, it is more like one percent. I appreciate that you leave your door open but that is quite different from sitting all day with them, alone.”

He didn’t say anything.

“We will get another nanny. Nothing will change for you.”

“Out of the question,” he said.

“I will not be leaving the business.”

“You already left it,” he said. “You barely know anything that is going on.”

It occurred to her then that he was no different from her father, which was maybe an exaggeration, or maybe not, maybe he just put a nicer face on it.

“I don’t feel like a person anymore,” she said.

“Well, that is nice to hear from the mother of one’s children.” Now he would not look at her.

“I feel like it’s me or them,” she said.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you.” Even through his tan she could see his neck was red. He put down his sandwich and walked out of the room, then out of the house.

She heard him start the car and pull out of the driveway.

Of course she began to cry. The truth was much too far. She should never have said it. She went out into the yard and sat in the green darkness. What he wanted, what everyone wanted, was that she stay at home and never have a meaningful thought again while they all kept doing exactly as they pleased. It was insane. Hank, Jefferson, Milton Bryce — she hated all of them, actually hated them at that moment — she didn’t care what they thought of her.

The decision was made. She was not going back. An arrangement would be figured out, she was worth fifty million dollars and it was insane, actually insane, that she should be trapped here, or anywhere else, by children, her husband, this situation, she was not sure how to properly describe it, but it was all of those things, and it was over.

She heard the car pull into the driveway. She stayed in the yard where it was dark. Inside, she watched Hank come down the steps into the living room, past all the new furniture, two hundred thousand dollars’ worth — her money — she watched him go to the bar and pour a whiskey and stare into his glass. Then he went to the window and looked out. It was too bright in the house for him to see her; he was looking only at his own reflection. His coarse sharecropper’s face and his thick hair and the lines already around his eyes, yes she loved him, but she stayed where she was. He would have to choose.

HE WAS A good man. But in the end, the money was hers, and without that, she was not sure he would have given in.

It did not seem right, having to bargain with her own husband, having to manipulate him, but maybe he’d been doing it to her the entire time, even if neither one of them had realized it.

THEY HIRED TWO more nannies, and she went back to work. They thought she was a bad mother. She overheard the secretaries, of course they were all unmarried, of course they were all jealous, of course they would have slept with Hank in a heartbeat — a wealthy, good-looking man. Women pretended sisterhood until it counted; they acted as if they cared nothing for men they were actually in love with. Naturally, she made sure that every girl they hired was so unattractive that Hank would have to be extraordinarily drunk to even consider them. We have the ugliest secretaries in the world, he always said.

Still. They thought she was a bad mother. She tried to forget it.