The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

THE ALTERATION OF PLANS

8

On a hot windy day that tore the clouds apart, Joan and Martin brought Eric home. The pink roses out front had died while she and the baby were in the hospital, and carrying him up the brick walk, through that dead arbor, seemed like a funeral procession.

Framed by the opened front door, Daniel clutched Fancy’s hand, still dressed in his camp clothes, his face peeking out from behind her wide flowered skirt.

He had a sweet, confused look on his face, a tremulousness about what was happening. He looked at his mother’s belly, no longer as enormous as it had been when he felt a leg, a hand, the kicks, squealing when the skin rippled, like waves on a lake, when the baby somersaulted around. Joan and Martin and Fancy had each explained the concept, that what was inside of Joan would eventually come out, that Daniel would have a brother, and now the baby was here, at the doorstep, about to enter their home, changing the nature of their threesome, their foursome, forever.

Fancy’s face was all lit up, her big front teeth shining, that gap between them like a secret.

Joan settled on the couch, and Fancy said, “A cause for celebration. Mr. Martin bought a nice bottle for a toast, and there’s ale in the fridge for your milk.” Fancy did not know yet that Joan’s milk was of no use.

Daniel clung to Fancy’s hand until she said, “Master Daniel, climb up and take your first look.” When Fancy was nervous, formal appellations preceded their names.

He let Fancy go, kicked off his small tennis shoes, and climbed up on the couch.

“So Daniel, this is Eric,” Martin said, and Daniel stared up at his father, then back to the baby.

“Can I?” he said, and Joan said, “Of course,” and when Daniel gently touched the baby’s face, his confusion fell away.

“He’s so soft.” Joan laughed. “Just like you, my love, when you were his age. The way you still are.”

Daniel looked out the window at his playground. “When can I show him the sandbox and the swings and the jungle gym? When can he hang from his knees, like me?” Martin lifted Daniel into his lap. “A few years, buddy. Then he’ll want to do everything with you.”

The next day, Daniel insisted on feeding his baby brother, this infant he was already imagining as his friend, eager, even, to boss around; not knowing that someday Eric would neither heed nor follow, would leave Daniel in a silent, stormy race for dominance that Eric would know nothing about.

It was difficult to pry Daniel away from the baby. His new life in kindergarten could not compare. He did not want to leave with Fancy each morning, came running in at noon, insisting on knowing everything that happened in his absence before he would agree to eat his lunch. “Tell me the whole story of this morning,” he would say to Joan, “and don’t leave anything out.” And she described it all—the feedings, the diaper changes, the naps, the drools, the songs Fancy had sung, what part Joan was up to in the book she was reading to Eric. During her late, heavily pregnant months, Daniel’s favorite bedtime tale was hearing how Joan read to him when he was a tadpole, making her recite the names of those books he heard from inside her belly.

When Eric had been home for several weeks, Daniel said, “Mom, I’m going to make a list and you have to read those books again to Eric. I’ll listen too, if I have time.”

His seriousness made her realize she had not read to Eric in utero, as she had with him, and that whatever Eric heard during those nine pregnant months when she read to Daniel tucked up in his bed, was unintentional, secondhand, an afterthought.

Daniel included the Palliser and Trollope series; Balzac’s Lost Illusions; Maugham’s The Painted Veil; all the Dawn Powells, and so many more, but her Rare Baby stories weren’t on his meticulous list. Those stories were in the past and she wasn’t going to read them to Eric, but Daniel had heard them until he was four and, childishly, Joan wanted to know why he had left them off.

One afternoon, when Joan was in the recliner, Eric in her arms sucking hard at a bottle, Daniel ran in. “Where are you?” he demanded. “We’re starting the chapter called ‘The Two Dukes’ in Trollope’s Phineas Redux.” “I remember that chapter, it’s a good one,” he said, and Joan thought he had to be pretending, wanting to impress her, as he liked to do, by demonstrating his smarts. He often joined her in the nursery, sitting on the stool while she read to Eric, frequently telling her he remembered that scene or that character, when so-and-so did this or that, but it was always a recollection after the fact. Still, if Daniel was telling the truth, then he remembered everything, which had to include her Rare Baby stories, and Joan wondered why he never mentioned them.

The weekend after they celebrated Eric’s first birthday, Joan was on her knees in one of the gardens, her hands thrust deep into the rich earth, packing in mail-order tulip bulbs, thinking about whether she owed her parents a note. They had sent an unexpected birthday card to Eric, with a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill inside. The card had been devoid of preprinted sweetness, just Eleanor Ashby’s truncated “Good Luck” in English, rather than in the professed French of her soul. And Joan couldn’t figure out whether her mother meant the sentiment sarcastically. And if she did, whether it was directed at Joan, or at one-year-old Eric, who was another grandson her parents had no interest in meeting. But all that internal debating ceased when Fancy ran toward her, calling out, “You’ve got to come quick. Nothing’s wrong, but hurry.”

Daniel was in the baby’s blue-walled nursery, the color suggested by Fancy. “Blue is the color of the mind,” she had told Joan and Martin. “Blue is soothing and will foster the new one’s intelligence, communication skills, serenity, logic, coolness, reflection, and calm. Pick a strong blue to stimulate clear though. The flip side of blue, or choosing the wrong blue, is a child who is cold, aloof, lacks emotions, or is unfriendly.” Martin had laughed, but Joan thought the buttercup yellow they had chosen for Daniel’s room was, perhaps, responsible for his wonderfully balanced nature, his early ability to read, his voracious love of books, his easy laughter, his ease falling instantly to sleep at bedtime; and at Olinsky’s Paint & Hardware, Joan and Martin had selected Imperial Blue, like the velvety background of a star-laden night.

Daniel had dragged the nursing recliner over to the crib, in which Eric sat holding the stuffed giraffe Fancy had given him as a birthday present. His brown eyes were so round as he stared at his big brother. Daniel was holding the blank notebook he’d asked Joan for a week earlier. From where she stood, she could see that at least two pages were covered in words he had written himself.

Joan put a finger to her lips and Fancy nodded, the two of them staring into the room through the jamb of the open door.

“Henry is a very small squirrel with ocean-blue eyes. His fur is gray and so is his bushy tail. He lives in a park that has lots of trees. One of those trees is a weeping willow and that is his home, in a hole in that tree, where he lives all alone. Sometimes that makes him very, very sad. Sometimes he cries at night when he remembers he once had a mother and a father and a baby brother, all of them gone one day, leaving him behind. He gets mad, too, when he remembers they didn’t even leave him a note, just left him to try and do his best by himself. On his sixth birthday, he woke up wondering how to make the day special, when he wouldn’t have any presents or balloons. He scrambled out of his hole, his bushy tail waving, and he looked all around the park. In the pond in the middle, he saw a baby duck swimming around, and he ran straight there. The duck was so little with feathers that looked like snow. ‘Hi, Duck,’ Henry said. ‘It’s my birthday and I want to know if you want to play with me.’ Duck said, ‘Okay. Come swimming with me.’ Henry said, ‘I don’t know how to swim. But wait. I’ve got a great tail, and my feet are sort of like flippers, and maybe they’ll keep me from sinking. So here I go.’ And then Henry was in the pond with the duck and they splashed and played together for hours.

“The End,” Daniel said, and it was silent in the nursery for two or three seconds, and then Eric began to laugh his baby laugh, a gurgle more than anything else, but the sound he was making, the emotion he was conveying, was obvious, and Daniel said, “I don’t see what’s so funny. It’s a good story.”

Joan and Fancy smiled at each other and tiptoed down the hall into the kitchen. It was a Saturday, Martin was at the hospital making rounds, and Fancy pulled out a bowl and cans of tuna fish, then opened the fridge for the mayonnaise. “Daniel’s five years and seven months old and he’s writing. How about you?” Fancy said.

“How about me, what?” said Joan.

“You know,” Fancy said, and Joan did know.

The month Eric was due, Joan had done what she intended, told Martin she was taking a break from writing. “You know me,” she had said to him, “I need a room with a door to work and my study is the baby’s nursery now.” Martin had nodded. “Whatever you want to do. Whatever makes you happy.” It was so easy to get the lie past him, that would permit her to write without his knowledge, to keep him and their family far away from the precious part of herself. Still, she had been surprised he did not question her ability to cut herself off from her work, for whatever period of time, and disappointed to know he wouldn’t think of scaling the stone walls of her imaginary castle. Where did he store all the knowledge he had gleaned about her during their eight years together, or had he cleared his mind entirely, simplified his life, patients and research coming first, good and loving fathering in the off hours. Regardless, the lie was not supposed to come true, and more than a year had passed since Joan had written a word, those rare babies still figuring into her dreams. She had no satisfactory answer to Fancy’s unstated question, and it caused the usual sharp pain in her heart. For the past year, she had kept small notebooks and pens in her nightstand, in the nursery dresser, in her bag, but the pages remained blank, all that hostile white space, and she wondered if it was her fault, that the small notebooks made her think of journals, of diaries, repositories of dated lies and half-truths.

“I’ve seen Daniel so intent at his desk, but I didn’t know he was writing a story,” Joan said to Fancy instead. To celebrate his coming advancement into first grade, Joan and Martin had bought him a small white desk. Daniel had known what he wanted. “Something,” he said, “that makes everything I do look good.”

“First one I’ve heard,” Fancy said. “But that cherub’s got a first-rate imagination, just like yours. See how well the yellow walls worked out.”

Joan wanted to tell Daniel she heard him reading his story to Eric, praise and encourage him, express her thrill that he was her miraculous son, a writer just like she was. She nearly said something, until she thought back to the Joan in the story she was actually living, and knew that Joan would not interfere prematurely in the creative life of her firstborn.

“Daniel wrote a story,” Joan told Martin in bed that night. She felt the mattress depressing as his long body rolled over, felt his breath on her cheek. She stared up at the white ceiling. Why hadn’t they painted their bedroom a color specially chosen to increase or decrease the particular characteristics of its inhabitants, as they had done with the rooms their children lived in? Fancy had never presumed to suggest they paint their room, but what did she make of their white box? What did white signify, aside from purity, cleanliness, simplicity? Hostility, Joan thought, considering the pages of those notebooks stashed and unmarked. But why not white, and why bother now, when no paint color in their bedroom could alter their own long-formed personalities.

“I know,” Martin said. “He’s been showing them to me.”

“Them?” Joan said, and sat up. “He’s written more than the one Fancy and I overheard today?”

“Maybe three or four,” Martin said. “He finds me and hands me a story and waits until I read it, then wants to talk about it with me, asks me what I think. I’ve told him he’s inherited your talent.”

Joan twisted her hair up in a bun, found a pin on the nightstand, and stabbed it in. “Why wouldn’t he bring me his stories instead of you?”

Martin pulled Joan back down. “Maybe it’s a father-son thing, who knows.” She let him stroke her face, her neck, but when he reached to kiss her, she said, “I’m wiped. I’ve got to sleep.”

But he was asleep before her, and in the dark, the moon through the open drapes highlighted the whiteness of their room. Joan thought of Daniel writing away and debated how long the duration could be, without writing, before a writer was no longer considered a writer.

It took Daniel several months before he told Joan he was writing stories. She didn’t ask why he had chosen his father first, kept all that to herself, just said, “I think that’s absolutely wonderful, I can’t wait to read them,” and Daniel dashed away into his room and came back with three one-pagers. Then the stories grew longer, to two pages, then three, then more, and Daniel brought Joan every new one first, and every single one featured Henry the Squirrel.

She marveled how Daniel made him a Cub Scout, an animal tracker, a hiker, a surfer, a sailor, a long-distance swimmer making his way from Miami to Cuba, finding the particulars of the ocean’s currents from the set of encyclopedias kept on the bottom shelf of the living-room bookcase. Daniel put Henry into risky situations, ascribed to him a catalogue of fears, and then forced the squirrel to use his wily imagination to overcome the challenges he faced. What would Henry do now that he was stranded at the Everest base camp; how might he tame the shark following him in the ocean; how could he pull a teenager drowning in a pool to safety?

In the stories Joan wrote when she was Daniel’s age, she had murdered her characters, while Daniel had his one character facing down dangers and searching for answers. The genesis of the stories was clear to her: because Daniel felt loved and safe within his family, he could imagine himself taking risks, venturing out onto figurative limbs. He was lucky, Joan thought. She had only felt loved and safe within the worlds she created.

Joan encouraged his writing, praised him honestly, offered him help when he said a passage wasn’t coming out right. He would return to her again, saying, “I think I got it now,” and Joan would find he had not changed a word, or he had changed words, but not as she suggested. At first she was taken aback, reacting, she realized, as a writer, as her own editor, as the editor she had been for other novelists at Gravida, and not as a mother of a little boy finding his own storytelling path. The way Daniel threw away her suggestions—her editorial advice actually—stung, but she had done the same thing with her own editors. When Malcolm West was assigned to Other Small Spaces, he was just a few years older than Joan, his youth and inexperience turning him dictatorial, forcing her to attend their meetings with a false piety, calling him a few days later to report that her attempts to execute his suggestions had all failed. My fault, not yours, she always said, and her first collection was published as she wanted, unspoiled by a heavy hand. With Fictional Family Life, a senior editor named Philip Krauss took Joan under his wing, her accolades making her worthy of his attention, but even against him Joan had won every battle.

When she stopped feeling hurt, she applauded Daniel for his resolve, his firmness, his inability to be swayed by the suggestions of another. To keep him excited about what he was doing, she bound every one of his stories, even those that were a single paragraph, between cardboard covers that she ornately decorated and titled, with By Daniel Manning in huge letters on the front cover.

Still, it was disquieting, disconcerting, to be reading her child’s stories about achievement, when she was not writing a thing, other than lists of errands, of things either she or Fancy should buy at the market, of calls she was to make to set up playdates with the mothers of the boys in Daniel’s first-grade class, with the daughters belonging to Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa, the former Pregnant Six, who each now had birthed three to Joan’s two, dental appointments for her and Martin, pediatrician appointments for the boys, the phone company when the telephone line fizzed and died.

When she buried The Sympathetic Executioners, she did not blame Daniel, then kicking around inside of her. She had been right—it wasn’t Daniel who had thinned her out, any fetus would have caused the same harm. She knew now how children were—how Daniel was—their smiles, their kisses, their tears, all the precocious methods they employed to ensure their futures mattered, came first. Would she be writing now if Daniel weren’t beautiful, loving, inquisitive, creative, good at tangling his arms around her neck, whispering, “I love you, Mommy”? At this age, as unconditional as a cat or a dog.

Glimpsing her typewriter on the shelf in Eric’s nursery, it seemed long ago that the room was her study. Somehow Eric, who could not move around furniture, alter the position of his mobiles, change the location of the books on the shelves, had made it his own. Would she end up writing about Eric one day, about a child in his infancy who already knew his own future?

No, no more rare babies.

She would do right by her real ones, but they weren’t entitled to populate whatever she might write in the future. The millions of ideas she used to have each day had disappeared. Where had they all gone?

On Fancy’s first day back with the Mannings after her father’s funeral in Canada, she joined Joan and Daniel in the kitchen for breakfast and said, “He was such a good man. He couldn’t do everything he wanted for us, but his heart was in the right place. It was a lovely ceremony. There’s nothing like the sound of dirt hitting the top of a coffin. Makes me ache, but it’s the ring of time, calling a tired soul back to the earth. The cemetery was so pretty, bushes and flowers everywhere, and I spent an hour walking around, reading what people had etched onto gravestones, so much love for those buried in the ground.”

Martin was home early, not at the hospital late, not in some distant country, and when he walked in the door, Fancy said, “We’re having steaks and baked potatoes.”

An hour later, Eric was in his high chair, already fed, with a plastic bowl of cereal to play with, and everyone took their seats as Martin came in bearing a bottle of red wine. “Fancy, let’s toast your father,” he said, and Fancy brushed a tear from her eye.

The bottle was opened, wineglasses filled, and Martin lifted his glass. “I never met your father, but you’re a treasure, and he must have been one too.” Fancy said, “He was. Thank you. This means so much to me.”

“Fancy,” Daniel said then, “what happened after they buried your father in the ground? After the dirt hit the coffin? Did flowers grow fast?”

Fancy ruffled his hair and said, “So here’s what happened. Down in the ground my father went, the coffin this big old pine thing, huge because my dad was seven feet tall, where I get my own height from. There were prayers and poems and people sniffled and cried, and when it was over, my mom said, ‘Fancy, are you coming home now, we’ve got lots of people coming to mourn.’ And I said, ‘Not yet, I’ve got to go to Dad’s favorite place,’ and my mom understood, and off I went to the bridge, where he used to cast his fishing line on Sunday mornings at dawn, and I stood there, and the hours passed, and the sun grew hotter, and I waited and waited, and then all of a sudden, one fish, then a second, then a third, came flying out of the river, arcing over me, their fins flat out, their gills flapping, until they landed back in the water and swam away.”

Daniel’s eyes were huge, and he said, “That’s a great story, Fancy.”

And Martin said, “It is. That kind of stellar experience, being a part of an experience cherished by another, is what I see when I operate on people’s eyes, their profound and genuine dreams, the wishes they have for their lives, if their sight is returned.”

Daniel stared at his father, then said to Joan, “Does everyone in the whole world tell stories?” There was a fillip of concern in his voice, a fear perhaps tied to Fancy’s father’s grave, the sound of dirt hitting the coffin.

“Lots of people do. A story requires two things: a great story to tell and the bravery to tell it,” Joan said.

Daniel cut into his meat, sawed a bit off, put it in his mouth, chewed, nodded, then said, “Oh.”

“You are brave enough,” Joan said, wanting to allay his concern, but she sensed that Daniel feared something that might be more awful than death or looking into the depths of someone’s eyes: that perhaps the world was overrun by storytellers better than he.

“Book, book, book,” Eric yelled, and Joan heard Daniel yell back, “Get away, that’s mine. Don’t be a pest.” Since turning eight, Daniel was not only writing, but also climbing what he called his ladder to literature, a plain metal ladder he dragged in from the garage, warned about using without the steadying hand of either Joan or Fancy.

That first time he climbed up, Joan found his perfect little toes gripped around the top rung like pale commas, his hands pulling down big, heavy books. “Mom, I want to read the good stuff on my own,” he said, and she understood, she had been just like him at the same age.