Schroder: A Novel Page 10

  “Well?” the bartender barked at Meadow. “Did I cheat you?”

  “Did he give you six cherries?” I prompted her. “Did he steal any?”

  “Not that kind of cherry,” said the bartender. “You only get one of those.”

  “Ha.” I nudged her with my elbow. “What do you say, Butterscotch?”

  Meadow now stared into her drink, stirring it with a straw.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  “She speaks!” said the bartender.

  “She’s shy at first,” I said.

  “No, she’s smart. She knows she shouldn’t trust a guy like me. Here. I’ve got something that’ll make her smile.” The man reached under the bar and brought out a small windup frog with a silver key in its back. He turned the key and placed the toy on the bar. The frog flipped backwards and landed on its feet. Meadow watched it.

  “You like it?”

  “Answer the man, sweetheart,” I said, taking a draught.

  “Do you? Here, it’s yours,” said the bartender. “My kids are all grown up and refuse to crack a fucking smile. Let me tell you, you’ve got about six more years and then she’ll barely talk to you. So. You folks staying here in North Hero?”

  “Sadly, no. We’re just passing through. We’re on our way to Mount Washington.”

  “Now, there’s a place worth seeing.”

  “We’re making a road trip out of it. Stopping here and there. A father-and-daughter road trip.”

  “No wife?”

  “Sure I’ve got a wife,” I said. “For our last wedding anniversary she gave me a restraining order.”

  The bartender snorted.

  Grinning, I waved my hand. “But I don’t like to talk about it in front of the kid.”

  The bartender shook his head, his laughter dwindling. He was looking ruefully at Meadow, who had finally picked up the frog and was turning its key.

  “Kids,” the man said. “They ruin your life. Then they’re the best thing about what you have left.”

  “That”—I raised my empty glass to him—“is the truth.”

  We fell into a melancholy silence.

  I looked down the bar toward where the old man sat. Hands around a can of Pabst, he studied the muted television. I looked up at the screen. The local news was beginning. I felt a pang of homesickness. For a moment, I missed Albany, its brutal winters, its amateurish politicians. The lead story out of St. Albans appeared to involve a bear attack.

  “Funny,” I said.

  The bartender raised his head. “What is?”

  “Pabst beer. ‘Pabst’ means ‘pope’ in German. I just thought of it.”

  “No shit. Pope beer?”

  “Pope beer!”

  “Maybe the pope blesses it. Holy beer.”

  “It’s like kosher beer, but for Catholics.”

  “Ha!”

  “Ha-ha!”

  “Ha! That’s the damnedest.” Chuckling, the bartender pointed to my glass. “Get you another?”

  “You’d better.”

  “You want a chaser of holy beer with that?”

  “Let me think. What would Jesus do?”

  The bartender bellowed. I felt a pluck at my arm.

  Meadow look up at me. “Können wir Mommy anrufen?”

  I swallowed. In my stupidity, I thought she had forgotten. No, I hoped she had forgotten.

  “Sure. Sure, sweetheart. We can call Mommy.”

  “I told you she was smart,” said the bartender. “What is that, German?”

  Just then, someone hollered behind the swinging doors and the bartender went out and then came back with Meadow’s hot dogs in a red basket. Meadow perked up at the sight of food. She crawled onto the next stool and got a bottle of ketchup from where it sat with a caddy of miniature jellies between the old man and us. She opened the ketchup bottle and turned it over the basket, thumping the bottom until half the basket was filled with ketchup. I watched her eat. She was completely absorbed. I sipped my fresh drink. The first one had relaxed me, but the second was making me philosophical.

  “You’re a good daughter,” I said. “You know that? You’re a good kid, and very responsible.”

  She looked at me, cramming the end of her hot dog in her mouth.

  I lifted my chin toward the bartender. “All right,” I said. “I promised the kid I’d call her mother. You’ve got a phone?”

  “Right there next to the lavatory. But maybe you should finish your drink first.”

  “Ha, right. Hey, throw some water on me if I burst into flames.”

  I got up and went to the pay phone that hung from the wall. I searched the pocket of my khakis for quarters.

  And that’s right about when I experienced one of my life’s greatest reversals.10 Because there, in the television over the bar, was my face.

  My face. A snapshot taken just before the separation. And because this was an era of significantly better grooming, of my being a hell of a lot more together, my hair was cut cleanly, and I looked, to my eye, pretty decent and responsible. I squinted upward at the television. There was my name, my age, race, eye color, etc.

  The dial tone roared in my ear.

  I scanned the bar. The bartender was leaning against the bar with one elbow, staring out the window. Meadow was busy with her hot dogs. But the old barfly in the corner was staring straight at the television, where Meadow’s face now appeared, with her trademark red glasses, her hair nicely brushed—her kindergarten portrait, taken the previous fall. The receiver of the telephone slipped from my grip, crashing against the wall’s wood paneling.

  The bartender turned to look. “She give you a hell of a time?”

  “Jesus H.,” I said, smiling. “Did she ever. A hell of a time.”

  I stooped to retrieve the swinging phone, not taking my eyes off the bartender.

  “But everything’s fine now,” I said. “With her, it’s all dry lightning.”

  Walking straight up to the bar, I willed myself not to look up at the television. Meadow watched me closely.

  “How does this crazy thing work?” I said, picking up the frog.

  “You turn the key,” Meadow said, tamping her second hot dog in the ketchup.

  “Like this?” I placed the wound-up frog on his feet. I glanced up at the television. Meadow’s face and mine were now sharing a split screen, a tip-line telephone number scrolling across us, and I noticed with a flash of remorse that there was no recent photograph of the two of us together, that separate ones had to be used, and that the reason there was no recent photograph of the two of us together was because in the scant time we had together, there was no third person to take such a picture anyway, no picture taker, just our banished lives, cruelly subpar to the life we’d shared before.

  Cut to commercial. Laundry detergent. A talking teddy bear.

  “Welp,” I said, releasing the frog, which immediately malfunctioned, falling to the side and kicking at the air. “Enough shit shooting. We’ve got to hit the road.”

  The bartender raised his eyebrows. “So soon?”

  “I’m not done with my hot dog,” said Meadow.

  “No problem. We’ll just bring it in the car.”

  I tossed a pile of money on the bar and grabbed Meadow’s arm, firmly. The butt of her hot dog in her hand, she looked up at me with alarm.

  “You folks have a good trip,” the bartender said. “Come on back.”

  “We will. We definitely will.”

  As I backed out of the door, my eyes could not resist being drawn to the profile of the old man at the end of the bar. He stared forward into the glittering liquor bottles before him—a horizon of alcohol—his grizzled neck swallowing the melt from the ice cube he chewed. And with the jangle of the bell tied to the door, the man turned his head with awful slowness, as if just coming awake, and I tried to divine my fate in his buried eyes.

  JOHN TORONTO

  Butterscotch?” I said in the darkness. “Yo
u still awake?”

  Meadow shifted beneath her sheets. “Yep. I’m awake.”

  I propped myself up on one elbow and looked across at Meadow’s bed. “Are you having a nice trip?”

  “Oh, yes. I liked playing Merman and I like our new car and I like having so much junk food. And I’m glad Mommy said yes to our vacation. I was worried she’d say no. She must be changing her mind about you. I’ve told her and I’ve told her. I guess it’s not hopeless.”

  I winced in the dark. “No. It’s never hopeless.”

  “But it is funny.”

  “Yes, it is funny,” I said. “Life just gets funnier and funnier the longer you live it.”

  I stared up at the ceiling of our cabin. The night was moonless. As if hearing my guilty misgivings, Meadow clicked on her flashlight. The beam roved across the ceiling, illuminating the cobwebs.

  “Hey, Meadow,” I said. “How about, if you don’t mind, we play pretend while we’re on vacation? You can be some other girl you want to be, and I will still be your father but I’ll have a different name, you know, like John. You can pick your own name. Some name you’ve always liked. And I’ll call you that and we’ll make up stories about our life. Like, you can have the little sister you always wanted—”

  “Oh, I don’t want one of those anymore.”

  “All right.”

  “I would prefer a hermit crab. But I want a real one, not a pretend one.”

  “Well, what kind of pretend pet would you like to have?”

  Meadow thought. “A Portuguese water dog? Like Sasha Obama got?”

  “OK, OK. That’s great. You’ll have a Portuguese water dog back at home. And we’ll be from Toronto. And my name will be John, and your name will be—”

  “I think you should be mayor.”

  “Of Toronto?”

  “Yes. Mayor John Toronto. And on the Fourth of July, you get to launch the fireworks.”

  “OK. And your name? What should I call you?”

  Meadow considered the ceiling. “Chrissy.”

  “Chrissy? Really?”

  Her eyes flashed angrily in the dark.

  “OK,” I said. “Chrissy is good. In case we need a code name.”

  “And I have blondish goldenish hair. Like Rapunzel.” Meadow sighed. “I’m wide-awake, Daddy. I’m absolutely wired.”

  “Me too. Would you like me to read aloud from Birds Come and Gone? Maybe that’ll put us to sleep.”

  Wedged next to the le Carré novels of our cabin’s small bookshelf, we had discovered an ancient pamphlet of poetry by a dead society lady named Kitty Tinkerton Bridge, who wrote rhyming poetry about birds. Lacking other appropriate bedtime books, we had read from Birds Come and Gone and had both come to appreciate Bridge’s amateurish but somewhat musical verse, and it had become a kind of ritual to read from it.

  “All right,” sighed Meadow. “Read to me.”

  As I opened the book, I heard the slap of the screen door across the path. Given the otherwise dead silence in our remote cove, I could only assume that the resident of Cabin One was home.

  MY FIRST LIE

  Technically, fraud is defined not by the act of lying but by the intent to benefit from lying. If you lie for fun, or for the various other reasons that we lie (e.g., to avoid physical pain or recrimination, or to perpetuate heartbreaking self-delusion), that is not necessarily fraud. I suppose my first fraudulent lie was told in a distant wing of the West Berlin Rathaus, in 1975. It also happens to be one of my few clear early memories. My father was speaking with a West German man in civilian clothing. The man had fuzzy hair that he wore in a kind of blond atmosphere around his head, as well as a shirt whose top two or three buttons I assumed had come undone accidentally, because this sort of experimentation with male décolletage had not yet arrived in East Berlin, from whence we had just emigrated hours before. The man and my father had been arguing most of that time. My father’s brother-in-law, the man who was to let us live in his garage apartment, had left hours ago, leaving us with his address and assurances that we’d be processed soon. But the blond West German seemed to be losing patience with my father.

  “But I need some sort of confirmation, you see.”

  “You have confirmation,” said my father. “You have two exit visas.”

  “But you are married. There is no certificate of divorce, which you are instructed to produce, not just there, but here. You have nothing—”

  “I had one hour to report to Friedrichstrasse. Did you want me to dig up the body?”

  My father’s voice was rising in pitch, as it did whenever he felt persecuted by other people’s stupidity. Finally the sponge-haired man looked at me and called out into the hallway. A pretty brunette came to the door. The blond man whispered something to her, and she smiled at me.

  “Well, hello,” she said.

  She disappeared for a moment, only to return with a small silver canister, which she held out to me. I remember this clearly: The can was aluminum, with a pear-shaped hole for drinking, which was still preserved, until the woman peeled it off, by a tacky silver sticker. The canister was beautiful, a tiny powder keg. I vowed to keep it.

  “Thanks!” I exclaimed.

  “Drink it. It’s juice,” said the woman, lingering prettily in the office. “How old are you, sweetie pie?”

  I held up one spread hand.

  “Five? My, my.”

  My father glanced down at me in the folding chair beside him, with a look I could only describe as aggrieved, and despite the fact that my cuteness was overshadowing his entreaties, I guzzled my juice with relish.

  “What a Süßer. What a strammer kerl,” the woman said to my father, using two phrases that were in German but beyond my ken, because although there was love in East Germany, sober, private love, for certain, there were—you’ll have to believe me—no endearments. I loved the lurid sound of them immediately.

  “Look at him,” the woman continued. “Sitting so patiently. So poised. His mother would be so proud of him. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” said my father, looking pale. “My wife—my late wife—doted upon him.”

  The man with the blond hair looked down at me in exasperation. “It’s true, then, what your father says? Your mommy has died? We need to know that she isn’t missing you.”

  My eyes went wide. I was not surprised by the news that my mother was dead—I knew that was a complete fiction, as I had just seen her that morning—I was only surprised that I was being addressed. After hours of sitting in a windowless room full of folding chairs, my father bargaining with everybody he could find, no one had yet asked a direct question of me.

  I clutched my canister. I would keep it forever and I would play with it. We did not have silver juice canisters in East Berlin. I knew that my father and I had an understanding. I would say what he needed me to say and he would protect my right to my juice canister. I could feel his large, fading heat beside me, his hands still smelling—as they would forever after—of the inkpad from the border crossing at Friedrichstrasse.

  I looked across the desk at the blond man. He inspired no feeling in me. But when I glanced toward the doorway, I saw the brunette with her soft cheek pressed against the doorjamb. And even though I knew my mother was still there—somewhere, on the other side—I slipped into a black-and-white reality in which I had lost her entirely, which was closer to the truth, anyway.

  “Little boy? Can’t you speak?”

  I burst into tears.

  “Oh, leave him alone, Gerhardt,” said the woman in the doorway. “For God’s sakes. Does it even matter anymore? What are you going to do, send them back?”

  VIERTER TAG OR DAY FOUR

  I awoke with a headache, as if I’d been drinking heavily. I sat upright on the edge of my bed for a long time, watching Meadow sleep. Dawn was a reckoning. In the daylight, it was difficult to deny that I had only one clean option. This thing about Meadow being in danger was a misunderstanding. I could clear that up by returning
her to Albany as soon as possible. I’d pay fines. Maybe I’d even be arrested. None of that caused the physical aversion I felt just as soon as I pictured myself doing the right thing. Why? Because I wasn’t ready to blow up my life. Maybe nobody else cared about it, but it was my life. My lovingly constructed American life. I wanted to keep being who I was. I wanted to keep being Eric Kennedy. If I went back now, they’d make me be Schroder. And claiming that name would be part of my punishment, a ceremonial rite. And no one would listen to me when I would tell them, But I am not Schroder, no one would understand what I meant by that. It’s your legal name, they’d say. I understand that it’s my legal name, I’d say. And they’d say, Are you really in any position to object?

  In the warped glass of the window over Meadow’s bed, I spied my face, gazing back at me plaintively. I ran my hand around my jaw. I gave that sad sack face a couple fit slaps that brought water to my eyes. Harder, I thought. You’re not even capable of hitting hard enough. I stopped to catch my breath.

  “John fucking Toronto,” I muttered, getting up to shave.

  Meadow and I headed out into a hazy morning. I couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm as I had the day before. I kept staring with preoccupation out at the lake, wondering which way they’d come from. Maybe this was just the imprinting of my childhood’s apparat, but it seemed to me that if you scratched anybody deep enough, you’d reveal some criminality, a questionable exchange or evasion, a moment where he or she bent the law at its most flexible joint. And so I had believed—right up to the moment when I saw myself on TV—that I had not “kidnapped” Meadow but that I was merely very, very late to return her from an agreed-upon visit.

  “Daddy,” Meadow said, shaking me by the wrist. “Aren’t we going to Mount Washington yet?”

  “Not today,” I said. “I just feel like kicking around here.”

  “But how many days do we have left?”

  “Plenty.”

  “How many is plenty?”

  “We’ve got plenty of time, OK? Why don’t you go play?”