Waxwings Read online

  “If your bed goes here,” Beth was saying, “you’ll be able to sit up and look out the window in the mornings. And we can go buy some really cool posters to put up on the walls.”

  “Can Daddy come, too?”

  “Well, of course he can—if he wants to.” Over Finn’s head, she said to Tom: “You see why I had to have it?”

  Her smile was cloudless, unforced, and Tom realized with a pang that it had been months since she’d last smiled at him like that.

  “Yes, it’s nice.”

  “The light,” she said, prompting him, “and that view.”

  View? What view?

  He found himself instinctively hunching his shoulders beneath the too-low ceiling. Cramped, sterile, and anonymous, the condo looked more like a fate than a choice.

  “I thought I’d look for a big mirror to go on the long wall in the living room,” Beth said, still smiling absentmindedly.

  A mirror would only multiply the horrors. Tom thought of the generous amplitude of the house on Queen Anne: what must it say about her feelings towards him that Beth could scorn that for this?

  Down in the lobby, Finn begged for more coins and tossed them in the fountain.

  As they were leaving, the uniformed doorman said, “See you, Beth. Have a great afternoon—”

  Tom bristled slightly, for the man’s easy, accustomed use of her name gave this other life of hers an unwelcome solidity. In the bathroom, Tom had spotted a toothmug, a hair-dryer, and some lipstick and stuff, already in residence on the faux-marble countertop; in the kitchen, two bottles of some herbal power drink, one of them empty. He’d noted these objects without any definable emotion, but the memory of them now provoked a sudden apprehensive stab of discomfort, like the first, exploratory burring of the dentist’s drill.

  When they were back in the Audi, with Finn up front in the passenger seat, Tom said from the back, “Why all those things from Ikea? There’s plenty of furniture in the house that you could take.”

  “I wanted a fresh start,” Beth said.

  Finn stayed oddly silent until they were halfway up the Counterbalance, then he said, “You know what?”

  “What, sweetie?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “What idea, Finbow?” Tom said, playing along with Finn’s irksome habit of demanding to be put through an F.B.I.-style interrogation in order to disclose the simplest piece of information.

  “Well . . .”

  “Spit it out, pumpkin.”

  “I really like the condo—and the fountain. But.”

  “But what?”

  “It’s a two-person condo, and what we need is a three-person condo. Can’t we get a three-person condo? Please?”

  Tom, trying to glimpse his expression in the rearview mirror, could see only his frizzy black bird’s-nest of hair.

  They were on Galer and Seventh when Finn said, “Are you having a divorce?”

  Dr. Eusebio’s office was on the fourteenth floor of the Medical and Dental Building on First Hill.

  The waiting room, furnished like a nursery with bean bags, puzzles, unpainted wooden toys, old typewriters and adding machines, was drenched in astral New Age Muzak. The bookshelves held the usual kids’ books, many of them beaten half to pulp, along with such adult titles as The Indigo Child, When Children Grieve, Families Are Forever, Positive Discipline, Beyond Ritalin, The Life of the Bipolar Child, and Straight Parents, Gay Children.

  Beth had been waiting here for fifteen minutes while Finn was in with Dr. Eusebio. Her exclusion from the interview had come as an unpleasant surprise, as had the doctor. Beth had expected someone older, to whom she could naturally defer, not the elfin blonde in a bold forsythia pantsuit who met her new patient with the words “Hi! I’m Karen,” then barely acknowledged Beth’s existence before whisking Finn off into the consulting room. The Muzak clearly had a purpose: over the sobbing noises of the synthesizers, you’d never hear your own child cry. The whole set-up had a sinister aura about it, as if Dr. Eusebio’s suite of rooms was infected by the anger and unhappiness of all the disturbed children who’d passed through.

  Beth leafed through an antique copy of Vogue, too on-edge to look at the pictures with any comprehension, listening through the Muzak for any noises from the far side of the wall. When she checked her watch, two minutes had gone by

  Finn was comfortably sprawled on a scarlet bean bag, while the psychiatrist sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, scribbling notes on a pad of lined yellow paper.

  “Penthouse?” she said, her pen moving rapidly across the page.

  He was fascinated by Karen’s suit. She had big pouchlike pockets on her jacket, and more pockets down the legs of her pants. It must be great, Finn thought, to have so many pockets to keep things in.

  “And he does ‘wicked’ things.”

  “Yes,” Finn said. “Really wicked.”

  Karen had a nice face and a cloud of fluffy pale hair. There seemed to be very little of her inside her bulky suit. Her wrists were as slender as his own, and she was more like somebody’s big sister than a teacher or a parent.

  “Where does he do these wicked things, Finn?”

  “Oh . . . everywhere. Sometimes he does them in parks, like Discovery Park. He’s done lots of wicked stuff up there.”

  “And who does he do them with?”

  “Kids, mostly. Sometimes with grown-ups. And a lot with Moira. She lives on a houseboat on Lake Union. She’s a witch and flies around Seattle on her vacuum cleaner.”

  Dr. Eusebio made more notes. “You know, Finn? Don’t tell anyone, but I still love to play with my dolls. Do you like dolls?”

  “Maybe.”

  “If we keep it a secret between us, would you like to play with my dolls?”

  “Okay.”

  “Great!” She put her forefinger up against her lips. “I keep them in this cupboard here. Very few children know about my dolls.”

  From the shelf where the dolls sat in a long line, Karen selected a mommy doll, a daddy doll, and a little-boy doll. Then, from a cupboard full of doll furniture, including, Finn saw, some doll toilets, she brought out two beds, a table, and three chairs. “Here, Finn—you help.”

  All the dolls were fully clothed. But when they were undressed, they were anatomically correct in every essential detail.

  Waxwings

  5.

  At ten on Sunday morning, Tom’s mother telephoned from Romford.

  “They’re both fine,” he said. “Fine. They’re . . . out at present.”

  His mother had sent off Finn’s Christmas presents—a book, a stuffed dog, winter clothes—more than a week ago.

  “Don’t worry, Ma. The mail’s always a bit slow at this time of year. It’ll come. I’ll call you as soon as it arrives.”

  Katalin Szany (she’d never taken to Janeway) had refused Tom and Beth’s offers to fly her to Seattle, and her image of the United States was firmly rooted in the films of her girlhood. He imagined her imagining the parcel of goodies from Marks & Sparks being conveyed by stage-coach through Apache country.

  Tamás, she kept on saying. Tamás.

  It was worrying. After his father died in 1995, Tom had helped her sell the Ilford house and move into a ground-floor flat in Romford, where she could walk to the shops and was only a five-minute bus ride away from the Nagys, Judit and Andras, who’d come to England on the same Hamburg ferry as the Szanys. This move had taken Katalin just seven miles to the east of the old house, but her eastward migration had continued ever since. Each time Tom talked with her over the phone, it seemed that her accent had grown a little thicker, her grasp of English more unsteady, and she nowadays appeared to have entirely forsaken Romford, Essex, for—where? Budapest, where she’d met his dad? Or Eger, perhaps, where she’d grown up? He no longer knew where she was, only that she had ceased to live at her official mailing address.

  Her accent was disconcertingly contagious. Tom would have been hard-pressed to come up with twenty words in Hungarian
, and had never made the ritual trip to the country of his birth, yet now found himself falling into the rhythms and intonations of his mother’s broken, weirdly accented English. “Good luck with the eye-doctor, then, Ma,” he said. “Take care. Lots of love.” But when he hung up, his words lingered in the air: got lok . . . lotz off loff. It was all right, though. His mother wouldn’t have noticed, any more than she would’ve detected that things were amiss between him and Beth—a piece of news that he meant to keep permanently hidden from her.

  He went back to Dr. Wortle’s School. Tom loved Trollope, not least because you could go beachcombing through out-of-print titles and discover novels as good as this one, written in just three weeks with a furious intensity of focus and concentration. He read more, perhaps, than Trollope had intended, into the scenes between Peacocke, the English clergyman and “man of letters,” and the American woman who was not quite legally his wife. In these short, dark days, time hung heavily on his hands. The university quarter was coming to an end. He felt no urge to write. Trollope was his best distraction, and he lined up The Macdermots of Ballycloran, Ayala’s Angel, Lady Anna, and Linda Tressel to read when he was done with Dr. Wortle and the bigamists.

  The small van that Beth summoned to the house had STARVING STUDENTS painted on its sides, though the two movers appeared to be neither starving nor students, and they’d left almost all the furniture behind. The most conspicuous absence was that of the hamsters, who now lived in Belltown, while the stick-insects and Orlando the goldfish stayed at Queen Anne. Wherever Tom looked, he saw things that belonged more to Beth than to him, which reinforced his instinctive conviction that she wasn’t gone but away on a visit, taking a breather in her hotel-room–like quarters at First and Lenora.

  Even so, picking up Finn from Treetops, or trawling through the shelves at Ken’s Market, Tom felt a marked man now. It was clear from their looks that the moms all knew—though what they knew, or thought they knew, was something he preferred not to think about. Spotting Amy’s mom as she crossed the far end of the aisle, he tucked his head between his shoulders and made a show of reading the fine print on the packets of chicken-flavored Ramen noodles.

  He hid himself away in the house with his books. On his first evening alone, it occurred to him that he could call someone up and go out for supper or a drink, but when he paged through his address book, he realized there was no one to call. He and Beth were on two rosters— his colleagues and hers—of flat little dinner parties. The people they met regularly on these occasions were known, for convenience’ sake, as their “friends”; but they were really no more than fellow toilers in the same vineyard, fellow parents, neighbors with little more in common than their zip codes.

  The closest that Tom had come to friendship here was with another Englishman, Ian Tatchell. A lean, sixtyish, denim-shirted alcoholic, Ian was a Marxist in the E. P. Thompson–Eric Hobsbaum line, and had been in the History Department at UW since the early Seventies; but his serene lack of ambition and his failure to complete his great book on Chartism had stalled him at the rank of Associate Professor. Tom enjoyed the skirmishing between Ian and his wife, Sarah, that usually went on well past midnight in their farmhouse-style kitchen, fuelled by three-liter bottles of booze. Beth did not, and once had labeled the Tatchells “co-dependent old farts.”

  Flipping to the T’s in his address book, he nearly dialed Ian’s number, then thought better of it. When he got together with Ian, they wrangled happily about Shelley, Thomas Hood, Hardy, Gissing, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Dick Francis, Tony Blair, but did not talk about their marriages. Their nearest approach to personal intimacy was when Ian confessed that he’d gone through a prostate-cancer scare.

  As a snatch of birdsong in a theatre defines silence, so Ian’s presence in the landscape defined Tom’s friendlessness. If he couldn’t talk to Ian, he could talk to nobody. He thought, This must change.

  He tried to take lessons in equanimity from Finn, who seemed to be taking the new regime comfortably in stride, regaling Tom with atrocious puns and double-entendres.

  “A panda bear walked into a bar . . . Ouch!”

  “Groan!” Tom said.

  “Why did the chicken cross the playground?”

  “I don’t want to know—”

  “To get to the other slide!”

  But Finn now spoke of Beth as “my mom,” as if Tom might not have made her acquaintance. At first he’d construed this as a diplomatic gesture, then decided that Finn was only laying claim to what was rightfully his own—my mom, my dad—in an attempt to glue his disintegrating family back together again. Otherwise, he seemed ebulliently cheerful, commuting between Belltown and Queen Anne, with Squashy Bear in his backpack, like a seasoned straphanger.

  Without Finn, Tom was in uncharted waters. Evening by evening, he steered a faltering course from one hour to the next. In the past, he and Beth had watched TV programs like “Jeopardy!” and he’d happily called out “What is Chile?” or “What is a manicurist?” in the arsyversy, question-for-answer style of the show—a charade that now seemed tinny and moronic. He glared unsmiling at the screen through an episode of “Seinfeld,” and switched off “NYPD Blue” when the first batch of commercials appeared. PBS was no better, with “Elton John’s Greatest Hits” and quarter-century-old reruns of “Are You Being Served?” He supposed it was preferable for the federal government to subsidize Elton John’s wigs and the faded camp of John Inman instead of nuclear missiles, but only marginally so.

  Although Tom sometimes bought books via Amazon or Bibliofind and had dickered around on the GetaShack site, he’d never spent much time on the Internet, yet every night now he crossed the Atlantic by mouse. He printed out the crosswords from the Guardian and the Times, then holed up in the kitchen, trying to figure out “In the past, you once strayed disastrously (9).” At 10 P.M. he’d go up to the study with a glass of wine to click through to the BBC and listen to tomorrow’s news, live on the “Today” programme with Sue MacGregor and John Humphrys. At eleven, he’d return to the United States downstairs, with the local news on Channel 7. Never had he been so well informed about the trivia of the moment—from the parrot in County Durham who saved a family of six from burning to death by shouting “Help!” (though the bird itself, a red Amazon, died in the blaze) to Ken Griffey Jr., the Mariners’ star center-fielder, who was standing firm on his refusal to be traded to the New York Mets, prepared to be sold only to the Cincinnati Reds.

  Around midnight, he’d go upstairs again, to sleep as best he could, sprawled diagonally across the king-size bed, waking at frequent intervals to Beth’s coldly palpable absence. For these spells of unwanted consciousness, he kept a pile of funny books on the bedside table: Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities, the collected short stories of Saki, Work Suspended and Other Stories, The Inimitable Jeeves. Surfacing with a jolt, he’d grab whichever one of these was closest to hand; at three and four in the morning, the important thing was not to surrender a minute to dangerous introspection.

  It was when he came home after teaching his last class of the quarter, and his guard was down, that he made his most upsetting discovery.

  The day was unusually bright for December. A dry and frigid wind was blowing out of continental Alaska, and through his classroom window Tom enjoyed the fifty-mile-long view of Mount Rainier with its raspberry-shadowed slopes of blinding snow. On Tenth Avenue, the sunshine was cruel to the porch, dwelling on its scabbed green paint and the holes in the planking where the wood had rotted away, and he reminded himself that sometime over the Christmas break he must go on another, most likely fruitless, hunt for a contractor.

  Inside the house, he was taken suddenly aback by its darkness, dirt, and clutter—the junky yard-sale furniture, its upholstery badly clawed by Hodge, the cat which got run over on Finn’s fourth birthday, Beth’s busted bike, the litter of newspapers and magazines. There were dead sycamore leaves and Jiffy Bag fluff on the carpet, and Finn’s tartan pyjamas on the ravaged couch.
The window, through which the low southerly sun was striving to effect an entrance, looked as if it had been smeared with lard. The house was—and here came the discovery— exactly like 127 Ladysmith Road.

  127 Ladysmith Road, Ilford, Essex, England, Great Britain, Europe, The World, The Universe, Space.

  Appalled, he watched his parents’ house take shape inside the walls of his own. He’d always thought they were binary opposites—systole and diastole, east and west, yin and yang—but now he saw they were one.

  Coming to England with nothing, the Szanys hoarded everything. Long before they moved to Ladysmith Road, they’d filled their council maisonette with silver paper, string, old newspapers, cardboard. Every emptied jam-jar was rinsed out, dried, and shelved against the day when jam-jars would be as valuable as gold. In 1959, when Tom’s dad, formerly a teacher of mathematics in Budapest, landed his job in the accountancy department at Rowntrees, the candy factory, and Harold Macmillan won the general election on the slogan “You’ve Never Had It So Good,” the Janeways (as they had now become) bought their own house on a twenty-five-year mortgage.