A Woman of Intelligence Read online

  “I don’t think the dinosaurs are awake today,” I told Gerrit, even though we were on the Upper West Side and not too far from the Museum of Natural History. My head was pounding again. Tom was right, I might not make it out alive if I went inside the museum.

  Keeping a tight hold on Gerrit, we moved on past the Tavern. Just eight streets north was the San Remo, where Tom’s parents still lived. They could have helped with the boys, but the only day they they’d ever taken Gerrit was when I was in labor with Peter. At this hour on a Saturday, they were most likely getting ready for their weekend engagements. I imagined Amelia reading off the day’s agenda to William while he ignored her and perused the paper, maybe flipping to the social pages with their photographs of the rich, pretty young women he cultivated. “Lunch with the Wilders,” Amelia would say, “leaving time for a vigorous walk through the park, or billiards for you men. Then cocktails at “21” and dinner at Harry Constantine’s.” Later, someone would want to drag them to a little nightclub show at the Stork Club and Amelia would protest, saying, “A woman of my age and position really can’t be seen at such a place,” but no one would listen because everyone knew she really wanted to go. Then she’d start drinking Campari and telling the waitstaff she’d “just recovered from throat cancer and these really do help quite a bit, so please keep them coming,” though her throat cancer was nothing but a bout of strep throat last December and even that was dubious, we’d been told. Her husband was convinced she’d just eaten a few cocktail peanuts with the shell on because she was too many drinks in to remember how to open them.

  My own parents would have helped me with the boys, or I liked to think they would, but they were in Switzerland, having moved to Geneva for my father’s job right after the war. My two older brothers and their wives had followed suit. Now all I saw of them was their handwriting.

  “Zoo!” Gerrit shouted. I took the boys there once a week since we lived so close, but if I had to put my nose in that stink today I would be sick all over the children.

  “Not the zoo, darling.”

  “Dinosaur!” Gerrit shouted again, trying to shake his hand free from mine. I crouched down, looked into his big brown eyes, and smiled. Around us, families strolled, tourists took photographs, and couples walked arm in arm as close as politeness allowed. Gerrit quieted a bit. I kissed his angry little face, enjoying the soft sponginess of his cheek, and said, “I’m sorry, darling, but let’s do it tomorrow. Mommy isn’t feeling very well this morning.” He looked straight at me, the muscles in his face relaxing. I smiled again, he smiled, and then he got an odd look on his face and started sucking in his cheeks. His little rosebud lips opened, he moved his tongue to the roof of his mouth, moved it back down and spat onto my face. A wad of saliva hit just under my left eye, paused, as if as stunned as I was, then slid down my cheek.

  I bit the inside of my mouth to keep it closed, kept my body still, and for a brief second, considered what it would feel like to slap my child. My desire to do so was overwhelming, and terrifying. I closed my eyes and let the thought die, gripping the stroller harder. I wiped off the spit, dried my hand on my dress and put my hands behind my back.

  “Did you just spit on me?” I asked Gerrit, truly the stupidest question in the world, under the circumstances. “Why did you do that?” I tried again.

  “Dinosaur!” he repeated mechanically.

  “Fine!” I shouted into the air. Instead of hitting my child, I would give in to his demands.

  I grabbed him much too forcefully and dragged him toward Central Park West. Before I could hail a cab, I had to pull the baby out of his stroller and set about folding it. “It’s like a Rolls-Royce for mothers,” Tom had said proudly when he’d brought it home. I’d wanted to mention that one sat in a Rolls-Royce, one didn’t have to push it, but instead I’d just marveled at the contraption as if it were a spaceship and thanked him.

  As I bent down to give the thing a kick, Peter tucked on my hip, I felt an ominously familiar sensation on my hand. Peter’s diaper had just failed him, and the result was all over me.

  “Goddammit,” I said into the air. “God damn this awful, awful day.”

  An older woman looked at me, stunned, and then stepped into a taxi, as if to get away from my children and me as quickly as possible.

  I didn’t blame her.

  I held Peter out at arm’s length while trying to keep Gerrit from running into the road and looked down at my lavender dress, the one I’d bought at Henri Bendel in February because it had looked like spring to me. It was covered in soupy yellow bowel movement.

  Where could I go? There was a restroom in Tavern on the Green, but I would not be let into the restaurant looking as I did.

  I had to find a public one. I wrangled a cloth out of the bag while holding a toddler’s hand and a baby, patted my dress, and wiped down the baby and the stroller. Then I dragged us all to a bench and tried to get my bearings.

  Gerrit was howling to the point of getting me arrested, so I reached into my bag and took out a jar of crackers, hoping food would quiet him. I needed to figure out how to get us clean, and quickly. I loosened the lid, but stopped when I felt something hit my head. I touched my hair. A passing bird had emptied its bowels on my head.

  I stared at my hand and the tear that had just landed on the cracker jar. I touched it, too dazed to realize it was mine.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said to no one, wiping my eyes with my sleeve.

  I kept wiping, but the tears didn’t want to stop.

  “Let’s just go home. Right now,” I said, looking at the boys. “Who cares if we’re a spectacle.” We were still on the West Side, but no more than a mile from our apartment. I could make it that far.

  I stood up, still crying, and pulled Gerrit off the bench. I placed him on the ground, but he was like a man who’d just seen sunshine after ten years in prison. He squirmed loose and took off like a shot.

  “Gerrit!” I screamed. I shoved Peter into the stroller, clipping his leg slightly. I ignored his cries and ran after Gerrit.

  “Gerrit, please stop, please!” I shouted, trying to control the giant stroller as I navigated the lunchtime crowd.

  “Stop taking up the whole goddamn path, lady,” a man bellowed at me as I wheeled Peter around him. I didn’t even turn to look, eyes fixed on Gerrit.

  He was at least fifty feet in front of me now, and the gap was widening. I sped up, then stopped just as suddenly as I’d started. Gerrit had fallen. He’d tripped over something, or just stumbled, and was lying facedown on the ground.

  He was crying, I could tell, even though I was too far away to hear him. His body seemed to shudder with sobs. Suddenly, two women stopped to help him, one of them standing him up, the other looking around for his mother. For me.

  I was supposed to run to him. To grab him from these women, hold him in my arms, wipe his tears, kiss his cheeks, and profusely thank his guardian angels. I remembered the woman from the gala fawning over Tom. The words “You saved my child’s life!” would probably be required.

  I did none of that. I just stood there, staring. Gerrit wasn’t alone, he was safe, and I was not ready to admit that I was his mother. The one who had let him run off and fall on his face. I needed a few seconds before I fell victim to more judgment. To the comments along the lines of, “Thank goodness we were here. He could have been run over! Killed!” or the glances at my ruined dress and matted hair.

  I closed my eyes again, unable to pull myself together. But just as I felt brave enough to walk into the fire, I heard someone yell my name. And not just anyone. Tom. He was rushing toward me, clutching Gerrit and howling my name. I was confused and utterly terrified. As they got closer, I saw that Gerrit’s pant leg was pulled up and his leg was covered in blood.

  I held on to the stroller even tighter, wishing I could sink into the ground.

  “Katharina!” Tom called out again. “What are you doing? Why are you all the way over here? Didn’t you see Gerrit? What’s go
ing on?”

  “Dada!” I heard Peter squeal delightedly from his stroller. Tom had changed out of his suit. He was now in a light gray sweater, the sleeves pushed up to show his muscular forearms. His hands. “These hands are worth millions,” one thankful father had said as he shook Tom’s hand at last year’s hospital gala. Sometimes I felt the same way. But today Tom’s heroics, his life-saving hands, and his ability to swoop in to save his son when he wasn’t even supposed to be in the vicinity just scared me.

  “What the hell is this, Rina?” he said when he reached me. He tried to straighten Gerrit’s leg, but the child refused, pulling his knee to his chest as he wailed. I reached for him, but Tom swatted my arm away. Tom almost never called me Rina. Only while naked or fighting.

  “Didn’t you hear our son scream? What’s wrong with you?” he said, stepping closer to me. Intimidatingly close. “How long was he lying on the ground bleeding? How long?”

  “How did you know we were here?” I asked, instantly regretting it.

  “What the hell kind of question is that?” he said, grabbing the stroller with his other free hand and moving us over to the grass so we weren’t blocking the path. Tom could of course handle everything at once.

  “How did you know we were here?” I repeated, despite myself.

  “Sam told me you’d gone to the park,” he said, bending down and putting his free hand on Peter’s cheek. “I left the hospital earlier than expected. I thought I’d come try and find you. Spend the day with my boys. You always seem to wander toward Tavern on the Green when you’re here, so I went that way. But before I could get there, I saw my son lying on the ground, screaming in pain, being tended to by strangers.”

  “I was going to run to him,” I mumbled, reaching again for Gerrit. Tom again refused. “I saw that he had fallen but I also saw that he was all right.”

  “He’s bleeding and was surrounded by strangers!” he shouted. “How about you take care of your own children! The children we worked so goddamn hard for!”

  We worked so hard for? All he’d had to do was sleep with me and pray that his sperm and my egg would do more than shake hands.

  I looked at Gerrit’s fingers gripping his father’s neck. At his bleeding knee. Blood was the only bodily fluid I had not touched in the past four hours. I had dealt with vomit, urine, spit, and feces, both human and avian. But it was not worth explaining all that to Tom. “Do you know what I touch on a daily basis?” he would say. “How much blood and excrement? And the nurses? In a children’s ward? Imagine what they are up to their elbows in.” He would be right, of course. He always was.

  “It was an unusually difficult day,” I said, reaching for Gerrit’s hand, grabbing it this time. Tom turned him away from me, and Gerrit’s little fingers slipped out of mine. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “Your head was in the clouds again, as it always is. Just like that time when Gerrit was almost run over by the crosstown bus. Is it really so hard to keep two small boys alive? Is it?” He leaned down, took some sort of cloth from the bag, and wrapped it around Gerrit’s knee. “Answer me, Rina.”

  I took a step away from him. From them.

  “Sometimes it is,” I said, my heart starting to pound. “Today it is.”

  “You want to leave?” said Tom, watching me back away. “Good. Just go. In this state, you’re not helping.”

  “I know,” I said, taking another step back, the tears starting to fall.

  “Great idea. That’s what we need right now. More tears.” Tom broke his gaze and cooed over Gerrit, applying pressure to his knee.

  I looked at Peter, still reaching up for his father, so desperate for him, so in love. Suddenly, my desire to be away from them, all of them, was overwhelming. My body, without my thinking about how to move it, moved for me. I turned on my heel and started to run.

  CHAPTER 8

  In a soiled dress, I sprinted. I flew down Fifth Avenue with my eyes fixed straight ahead. I would run until I collapsed. When was the last time I had left my children with my husband? Had it ever happened? Had he ever had them without me longer than the time it took for me to bathe? I couldn’t remember an instance. But I couldn’t remember much of anything. The only parts of me that had memory were my native New York muscles.

  I reached West Fifty-ninth Street, the edge of the park, and my lungs begged me to slow down, but my legs wouldn’t listen. If I sat, if I rested, my thoughts would catch me.

  I kept moving. Past a row of wrought-iron benches with wooden backs, past a group of children I refused to look at, past the thick imposing form of the New York Athletic Club.

  I hadn’t run like this since college, when I was at Vassar sprinting up the frozen hills with my friends, knowing even then that we were experiencing something rare and fleeting. We had no idea that our adulthood would be marked by the explosion of a world war, but we understood that the freedom we had in college would be gone as soon as we gripped our diplomas.

  I stopped for a few seconds, catching my breath. I leaned against a bench and looked up at the few clouds in the sky, moving quickly, running from the sun. I found the very last of my energy and kept running until I had to grab the fence at the entrance of the Fifty-seventh Street subway station. Before I collapsed on the ground, I hailed a taxi and limped in.

  “Where to?”

  I paused a moment, then whispered, “Chinatown.”

  I had only gone there in happy times. To eat noodles, thick and comforting, with my friends after a workday at City Hall. To drink cheap beer, the bitter cold of the alcohol knocking about the spiciness in the lo mein in the most enjoyable way. Back then, it was a part of the city that still felt like a lovely, wild place, even when the war forbade us to go anywhere but the corners of our own country.

  I let myself sink into the taxi seat and rolled down my window, everything aching from my run, my hangover, my life.

  I’d had to share my body during pregnancy, and had to keep sharing it while breastfeeding. The rest of me, while not growing or sustaining life, had become a playground for my children. I hated the feeling of being constantly touched. I was desperate for my body. My self. My air.

  “Canal Street good?” the driver asked without turning around.

  “Canal Street,” I echoed, reaching into my dress pocket for money and then exiting the taxi in a daze.

  I spotted the edge of a park from Mulberry Street and headed toward it. Why had I not run to Gerrit when he’d fallen? When he’d started to cry? Clearly, I could run, and quickly, at that. What kind of monster had I become?

  I walked through the short black iron gates of Columbus Park, sat down on a bench, and put my hands in my lap. They were dry and thick, the knuckles covered in a layer of fat that hadn’t been there before I’d had the boys. They looked nothing like my youthful hands, or the hands I’d had as a graduate student. The hands that used to put pen to paper for hours at Columbia University, turning French and Italian rhythms into something beautiful for American ears. They also didn’t look like the hands that had positioned the microphone and put on earphones at the UN. Neither my hands nor my self-regard reflected that woman anymore. I had not become a monster; I’d become a stranger.

  I glanced up at the people in the park. All of them, except for me, were Chinese. Some little girls were running in circles on the grass. Some of their pants were a bit too short, but they seemed delighted to be playing on a sunny Saturday while their parents watched nearby. I had come to this part of Chinatown during my UN days, too. When Marianne and I would eat with the secretaries from the Chinese delegation and they would order for us, laughing at me when I told them I used to only order lo mein. “Didn’t they pay you at City Hall? That’s the cheapest food you can find,” they’d tease and then order the salt-and-pepper crab. I’d always loved how no matter what language one spoke, laughter sounded the same the world over.

  To the right of the girls, on squat wooden stools, was a group of men playing a game
that I recognized as mahjong. In a grassy area closer to my bench, a young woman—a mother—and her children were busying themselves kicking rocks. She had twin boys, who looked about three years old, with impish smiles and straight black hair that appeared to have been cut into shape with the aid of a soup bowl. A little girl of perhaps four was holding the woman’s hand. Secured to the woman’s back with a winding strip of blue cloth was a sleeping baby. Four children, and the woman looked thirty at most.

  She said something to the older children and they formed a circle and started kicking one of the larger rocks back and forth like a ball. She pointed to the door of the public restroom, and then they all tried to kick it inside—a goal without a goalie. When her daughter sent the rock flying through the door, the mother was chided by an old woman on a bench not far from mine. The mother just waved at her, smiling, and shook her head. She said something in Chinese that seemed to appease the onlooker.

  I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them. They all looked so happy. Jubilant, even. Especially the mother. How could a woman, alone in a public park with four children, be that radiant?

  Her daughter had the rock again, and a clear shot of the bathroom door, but she kicked it instead to one of her brothers, who punted it right through. As they all celebrated, the baby woke up and began to howl. I heard a phrase shouted in Chinese. It was the older woman on the bench. She took the baby from the young woman’s back, folding the tiny bundle into her body as if she were its grandmother, although I could tell by the polite way the mother had interacted with her that she was not. I thought of myself earlier in the park and the older woman who had seen me struggling and cursing. She certainly hadn’t offered to help.

  Without the baby tied to her, the woman looked even younger. The mother. The beautiful, happy mother, laughing with her children. It was true. One really did look prettier when one laughed.