Making Toast Read online

  Harris usually spends half the night in Bubbies’s little bed. When I go upstairs, around 6 a.m., Bubbies hesitates, but I give him a knowing look and he opens his arms to me. “Toast?” he says. I take him from his father, change him, and carry him downstairs to allow Harris another twenty minutes’ sleep.

  Sammy remains matter-of-fact. One late afternoon, we watch television together. A mother appears on the show. “No mom for me,” he says. In the beginning, we tried explaining that Amy continued to live in our thoughts and memories. “Mommy is still with us,” I said. Sammy asked where, exactly. He indicated a point in the air. “Is Mommy there?” I said yes. He indicated another point. “There?” I said yes. I said, “She’s always with us, everywhere. We can’t see her, but we can feel her spirit.” He said, “There?”

  While Ligaya and Ginny look after Bubbies and Sammy, I take Jessie to the bus stop. On a damp gray morning we stand together at the corner of our street. One by one, down the hill come the mothers of the neighborhood, their kids running beside them. An impromptu soccer game develops. Jessie joins in. The scene passes for pleasant and ordinary, unless one notes the odd presence of the lone grandfather.

  With luck, Ginny and I will live to see all three children grow into adults, and Jessie will become a teenager and throw fits about boyfriends and stamp her feet and yell that we don’t understand a thing, not a thing. But today I help her with her oversize pink backpack, and her little umbrella with pink butterflies before she boards the school bus. And I stand looking as the bus drives off, and tell the mothers to have a good day.

  The house Amy and Harris bought in 2004 was a sand-yellow Colonial, built in the 1960s, and it had substance—a family home for a lifetime. The walls were thick, the hardwood floors level, the oak, black walnut, and poplar trees in the backyard, old. Though reared in cities, Amy had always wanted a house in the suburbs. Harris grew up in Bethesda, and went to Burning Tree and to Walt Whitman High School, which is less than a quarter of a mile from the house. His affection for his hometown suited Amy well. Whenever Ginny and I drove down, we phoned her from the car when we were a few minutes away. She would stand framed by the dark-red doorway, holding a child or two. Everyone smiled.

  She practiced medicine only two days a week, to be with the children. Her household was like her—full of play, but careful. In the storage area downstairs, there was always a surplus of bandages, paper napkins, cups, coffee filters, paper towels, and Kleenex, as well as batteries of every size. To this day, we have not run out of Advil.

  She had a gift for custom and ceremony—the qualities Yeats wished for in “A Prayer for My Daughter.” She chronicled the children’s first years by taking pictures of them in each of their first twelve months, and framing them for the walls of their rooms. The details of birthdays and holidays were important to her—a Dora the Explorer party for Jessie, for which Amy made a treasure map; a Bob the Builder party for Sammy, for which she got hard hats. On the Thanksgiving before she died, seventeen family members arrived, including Harris’s parents, Dee and Howard, and his older sister Beth, and Wendy’s parents, Rose and Bob Huber. There were many cooks, not too many, all toiling under Amy’s supervision. Harris, Howard, Bob, Carl, John, and I watched as much football as we were permitted. The hand surgeon carved the turkey, his skill with a knife impressive and creepy. We took our seats at the table. We clasped our glasses. During the previous year, Howard had had a heart valve repaired, and I was treated successfully for prostate cancer and melanoma. Harris raised a toast to the family’s renewed health.

  Harris’s stoicism is undemonstrative. A strong man, built wide and powerful, he easily carries all three children at once in his arms up the stairs. The sight of his back makes me sad. He performs surgery two days a week and heads orthopedics at Holy Cross Hospital. At home, his few remaining hours are devoted to working out the children’s schedules with Ginny and Ligaya, and playing games and watching Sponge Bob with the kids. He bathes them and tucks them in.

  On the day Amy died, he had sat beside her body in the hospital—an hour, maybe more. Now, he rarely speaks about his feelings. He and I talk about sports and politics, agreeing over half the time on both. We talk a lot about the children. Ginny tells me that when I am away, and she and Harris sit down to their late dinner in the kitchen, her heart breaks for him. “This should be his wife sitting across the table,” she says.

  He says he doubts that he’ll remarry. Self-sufficient, he tends to be a world within himself. He fixes things like lamps and toilets. He sews. He solves problems with electrical wires and fuses. He makes the hands of others work again. And he has done everything one can do in his situation—encouraging the children to talk about Amy whenever they feel like it, and not to hold back tears. Whenever necessary, he and the children visit a psychotherapist who specializes in grief counseling. He keeps in close contact with Jessie’s and Sammy’s teachers. But he also deserves a life.

  He embraces the demands put upon him with a gusto that dispenses cheer, and in the lulls we try to keep one another afloat. One night in February, Jessie and Sammy had a meltdown as they were going to bed. Ginny and I sat in the living room, listening to Harris’s steady voice in the intermissions of the children’s wailing. Eventually, they were quieted. He came downstairs and sat staring vacantly at his laptop. “Look,” I said, going over to him. “We’re never going to get over this. That’s a given. But the children will be all right. I promise you. I’ve seen it elsewhere.”

  “I’m a scientist,” he said. “It’s hard for me to deal with things that aren’t facts.”

  Amy used to say, “Harris makes do,” twisting his ability to adjust to uncomfortable or difficult circumstances into a failing. He retaliated by ribbing her about her perfectionism. Once, when Carl asked him how Amy liked their new cable TV and Internet system, Harris said, “Amy hates everything.” He told me she had set the North American record for excessively particular coffee orders at Starbucks. The orders varied according to the seasons. Her winter order was triple grande, skim gingerbread latte. Her summer order was iced venti Americano with room, and four pumps of sugar-free vanilla.

  It figured. When Amy was no more than three years old, and we would stop at McDonald’s on a trip, she would order her hamburger plain. Since orders for a plain hamburger were not anticipated in the billion hamburgers prepared by McDonald’s daily all over America, it took as long as twenty-five minutes for the fast food restaurant to dish one up.

  “You know, Amy, when I was a little girl…”

  “Oh, Daddy!”—tired of the joke.

  On one occasion, we were driving to New York from Cambridge, where I was teaching at Harvard. It was the day before Thanksgiving so the trip took hours longer than usual. After our interminable wait for Amy’s hamburger, she decided she would also like a piece of McDonald’s apple pie. She was taking her sweet time with that, too. I told her, “Hurry up, A.” (We called her A.) She tossed her pie in the trash. When we arrived at my parents’ apartment, my younger brother Peter asked Amy how she’d enjoyed the trip. She said, “Daddy didn’t let me finish my pie.”

  Amy and Harris could kid each other without risk because their marriage was like a solid tennis doubles team. Neither one had to look to see where the other was standing on the court. A few years ago, on a Saturday night, Ginny and I baby-sat while they went to a medical benefit dinner. They almost never had the time or energy to go out, or dress up, though, like most young parents, they seemed indefatigable. Before leaving, they stood together in the hallway. They looked stunning. Another time, we drove down from Quogue to take care of the three children. Bubbies was eleven months old. Amy and Harris went off to Bermuda with Liz and James Hale, longtime friends from medical school. When they returned after four days, Ginny and I were flopped on the sectional, barely sentient. We greeted them with a popular song of that year, altering the lyrics: “They tried to make us go to rehab. We said yes, yes, yes!”

  Ginny taught kindergarten and fir
st grade in Cambridge and in Washington, D.C., during the early years of our marriage. Now she volunteers in the children’s schools, as Amy did. She helps Jessie with her homework. I watch them at the kitchen table, bent over a book, and overhear their soft talking. Ginny asks, “How does the chrysalis protect itself against predators?” Jessie says, “It shakes to scare them off.”

  I do puzzle books with Jessie, and Sammy peppers me with questions about animals and the stars and planets. I can’t answer most of his questions. “What are afternoons like on Jupiter?” he asks me. I have to look that up.

  I am often confounded by something else I’d forgotten about children: they have no respect for sequential thought. Responding to one of their relentless questions, I will go as deep as I can into an explanation of, say, a solar eclipse. Sammy will ask, “What’s the biggest number in the world?” At the same time, Jessie will ask, “How tall will I be, Boppo?” Then, Sammy: “Do marlins have lips?”

  “So when the moon moves between the earth and the sun…”

  “What are you talking about, Boppo?”

  Bubbies has been attending to his own education, proceeding from one word, to several, to two-word sentences, to three and more. Some say that children learn to speak in order to tell the stories already in them. An early word of his was “back.” He wanted reassurance that when any of us left the house, or even a room, we were coming back. He has always used one-word sentences to his advantage, his vocabulary consisting mainly of references to things he favors—the mower, the stove, birds, bananas. The single words suit his despotic streak. “Outside” means “Let’s move it, Boppo!”

  Jessie’s first-grade teacher, Coleen Carone, has me visit the class at the Burning Tree School to talk about writing. Ms. Carone is young and hip, with dancing and darting eyes. She calls the kids “Baby.” Jessie introduces me to her classmates, who sit with their hands folded on their desks and give me the once-over. “This is my grandfather. We call him Boppo.” The children discuss stories they are working on. I begin to suspect I am out of my depth.

  Ms. Carone asks me, “How is character developed, Boppo?” I bumble through an answer involving matters of consistency and variation in character development. The more I temper my language, the more befuddled I sound. My discourse is greeted with polite stares. Jessie is proud of me anyway, and stands at my side. Ms. Carone looks at me brightly, as if to say, “Don’t worry. We’ll take it from here.” She asks the children to consider a main character, then list his or her qualities—loyal, jealous, rude, brave, generous. Each child stands before the class to answer questions. Arthur writes about a superhero.

  “Anything you’d like to ask Arthur?” Ms. Carone says to the others.

  One girl asks, “Does your superhero tell the truth?”

  Arthur thinks and says yes.

  “Always?” the girl asks.

  Late in February, I have a literary “conversation” with Alice McDermott as part of a series at the 92nd Street Y in New York, in which I ask writers questions about their work. Alice and I sit in chairs angled toward each other on a large stage in an auditorium. Hundreds of people look up at us. Usually, I feel comfortable at such events, more so than in less heightened social situations, because when you’re at the center of a public event, you’re alone. This being my first time in public after Amy’s death, however, I feel tense and out of place. Alice’s gentleness and thoughtfulness put me at ease.

  We talk about After This, her novel about the Keane family, whose son is killed in Vietnam. The novel centers not on the death, but rather on the family’s grief, which challenges their faith in God. I ask Alice what God has to do with it. Isn’t life just luck, good and bad? She says we have to believe in God’s overarching good will. “Even as we face unbearable sorrow,” she says, “small things happen that make us able to bear it. John and Mary Keane face the greatest tragedy that a couple could face, and yet things happen in their lives that bring them back to moments of joy.” Alice ascribes such moments to God’s benevolence. I cannot tell if she sees that I do not.

  Whenever the inspiration strikes, I launch into the “Boppo National Anthem,” which had its debut in Bethesda a couple of years ago and appeared an immediate success due to the composer’s exuberance:

  Boppo the Great!

  Boppo the Great!

  I can’t wait for Boppo the Great!

  I hope he’s not late!

  Sometimes, Sammy will change the last line to “I hope he’s not stinky,” indicating that adoption of the anthem will not be universal. When I tell him I plan to teach the anthem to his entire school, he looks terrified. “In real life? But there are five hundred kids in the school!”

  “Yes! Think of it!” I tell him. “Five hundred children, all singing ‘Boppo the Great’! You’ll be so proud. And you do love that song!”

  “I hate it!” he says. “I only sing it to make you happy.” I grab him and sing “The Laughing Drum,” another original ditty, to which I play his tummy like a tom-tom, and tickle him silly.

  Amy would make up songs for the children, too. She used to sing, or chant:

  Sammer, Sammer, you’re the one

  Sammer, Sammer, you’re so fun.

  Sammer, Sammer, you’re so sweet.

  You’ve got big toes and little feet.

  Carl used to inform her that “you’re so fun” was a poor use of English and suggested that the addition of “much” before “fun” would constitute a grammatical and literary improvement. Amy would let him know how she appreciated his constructive criticism. I thought her song cute, though, as I told her, I felt it lacked the grandeur of an anthem.

  Just before Jessie was born, Amy asked Ginny and me and Dee and Howard, what our grandparental names would be. Everyone else chose something sensible. Ginny chose “Mimi,” after her own grandmother. I chose “El Guappo”—the handsome one—the nickname of an ineffective former Red Sox relief pitcher. As a Yankee fan, I appreciated El Guappo’s ineffectiveness. Amy disapproved of the name, but let it slide. Things worked out in her favor. The babies could not pronounce El Guappo, thus Boppo. “Such a sad story,” said Amy. “He thought of himself as the handsome one, but he became a clown.”

  Yet the name has advantages. One morning Jessie had Hannah Montana’s “Nobody’s Perfect” cranked up to an obliterating level. “Turn it down, Jess,” I told her. She obliged by grudgingly diminishing the volume one-hundredth of a millimeter. I scowled. She lowered the noise even less. “Turn it down, Jess!” She stomped over to the CD player, turned it off with a dramatic flick of the hand, stormed upstairs, and would not speak to me for much of the rest of the day. She was also grumpy with a playmate. “What’s the matter with you?” I overheard Harris ask her. She said, “I’m mad at Boppo!” How long can one be mad at Boppo?

  “Won’t anyone in this family play Twister with me?” Jessie stands before the sectional in the TV room on which Ginny, Harris, and I sit. Ginny and Harris remain mute. “Won’t anyone in this family ever play Twister with me?”—her voice plaintive, her palms turned upward like an evangelical preacher’s. Not a word or gesture from Ginny or Harris. “I’ll play with you, Jess,” I say—forgetting why Twister is called Twister. Harris chuckles malevolently. “Oh thank you, Boppo!” says Jess. “You’re the only one in this whole entire family who ever plays with me!”

  Carl picks me up at the house, and we drive to the Verizon Center in downtown Washington, to watch a Georgetown basketball game. One of the bright spots of our new living arrangement is that Ginny and I get to see more of him, Wendy, and the boys. He tells me that Amy had called Wendy on the Wednesday before she died, and that she had left a long message on their answering machine. “I kept A’s message,” he says. “Would you like to hear it?” I tell him no. “I understand,” he says. “But if you change your mind, let me know. The message is so Amy. She was buying Christmas presents for Andrew and Ryan, but as she was talking, she remembered that they might overhear her message. So she was trying to
tell Wendy what the presents were without coming out with it. It’s very funny. Nothing sad. It actually makes me happy to listen to it.” I tell him thanks, but no.

  Carl, John, and I had stood together on the deck in Bethesda the day after Amy died, and wept. Arms around one another, we formed a circle, like skydivers, our garments flapping in the wind. I could not recall seeing either of them cry since they were very young. I am not sure they had ever seen me cry, except on sentimental occasions. John’s tears came to rest on his cheeks. He looks a lot like Carl, but his features are sharper. He is dryly funny, like his sister, but his wit is proactive. He has an ear for cultural bullshit, and mimics clichés in a sonorous, mock-serious voice. Ginny and I rely on him for assessments of current movies. Like Carl, he is gracious with others. Like Carl, too, he is zealous about sports and will threaten to annihilate the TV screen whenever there’s a bad call or a bonehead play. The two brothers are very close, as they were with Amy. She was nearly three years younger than Carl and nine years older than John, and her force of character seemed to civilize the two of them. The trouble with a close family is that it suffers closely, too. I stood with my two sons in the cold and put my arms around them, feeling the shoulders of men.